The Lady Imperative

On the gender of anger

It's obvious that young people want candidates to perform angry catharsis for them.

I personally love it every time Bernie Sanders gets mad. And it is cathartic in the sense that it actually, physically releases my pain.

I know this sensation well, because this is why I so dutifully tuned into Jon Stewart every night of the George W. Bush administration. I needed it. I needed Jon Stewart to perform my anger for me. It’s almost like as a teenager, I hadn’t yet the capacity to express my anger. I knew I felt angry, but I couldn’t articulate it. Nor was I really at liberty in talking about my anger with other people since I was an antiwar teenager in red state America and all my of political opinions were on the wrong side of patriotism.

But watching Jon Stewart every night gave me that cathartic release I needed. In my isolation, Jon Stewart felt my feelings for me. He was angry. He was snarky. He was mean. As a teenager, I sincerely needed that and when I got it, I could feel where it landed in my body. It felt good, like iced tea after a hot day.

So I know why other people my age who harbored similar feelings love when a candidate yells. Oh, God, I get it. I get it so hard.

If you feel as though your government has been doing nothing but fucking you over since you were born, you want someone strong and powerful to admit that. You want someone who takes your side and gets angry. You almost need that at a visceral level.

But the tragedy of misogyny is that if a female candidate were to get on stage and successfully perform her anger, millions of men would rededicate their lives to destroying her.

If a female candidate for US Senate got on a stage and started yelling about how fucked up the oligarchy is and how much she's going to tax the shit out of Jeff Bezos, men would start showing up outside her rallies with signs of her face in crosshairs.

If a woman got on a stage and started going on angry tirades about climate collapse, the media wouldn't focus on her words at all, they'd be sending junior reporters to find dirt that shows this angry woman is a bad mom and an even worse wife. If she were single, male pundits would explain why no one would never fuck her and that’s why she’s unelectable.

Don't kid yourself.

It will never matter how much education or professional experience a woman has, if she shows herself to be an angry woman, people will do whatever it takes to silence her.

It's an age of political infotainment and there's a huge, huge audience of people who would pay cash money to watch a smart, angry woman reduced to silence. That's all the Right wants to do most of the time.

The societal default setting is to shut angry women down. And that's a shutdown process that begins in her infancy. Every single day of our lives we are reminded of the lady imperative, of what we will suffer if we fail to lady.

Failing to lady opens you up to attack. Many men in this country are raised to feel as though a woman who fails to lady is asking for abuse. Because she is breaking some tacit gender contract we all agree on at birth, her failure to lady appropriately opens her up to social punishment.

So most women never go on full blast. Being an angry woman breaks the gender code. It violates the lady imperative. Angry women are crazy. No sane lady would allow herself to get mad.

Men ask me all the time what they could do to show up as better men in the liberation movement and I'm just like build space for women to be angry. Stop getting defensive about it. Examine your feelings in their presence. Let them get mad. They have a lot to be mad about.

And try to remember that the expression of anger around others is still VERY much a gendered privilege. You may think women talk a lot about their feelings but I assure you that there are precious few women who feel safe expressing their anger.