No Rage Like the Feminine
October 18, 2023
Author: Alanna Madry
Editor: Zoe Harris
Never have I ever been catcalled more in my life than the weekend I spent in Amsterdam this summer. By the final night, we had accumulated dozens of crude comments, stares, unwanted passes, and subtle ass-grabs, but it was only when we were leaving the club that I realized a foreign hand was under my skirt, touching me, that I finally lost it. I spun around in an attempt to identify the closest man to me, releasing a scream composed of pent-up sheer terror and fury, and shoved him before running away in tears. As I stood outside with my friends surrounding me, I remember yelling an exasperated “fuck you” through sobs to the final group of men passing by and calling at us. The exhausted rage I felt that night was strictly feminine.
It is abundantly clear that women have withstood oppression, violence, and misogyny since nearly the beginning of time. From enduring the adolescent shame brought about by our growing and changing bodies, to an adulthood filled with unsolicited comments on puberty's external effects, we are cultivated to expect experiences that objectify us. The second a girl remotely begins to resemble a woman, she is submerged under the weight of over-sexualization, patronization, discrimination, and more. Regardless if it’s school, the workplace, or just simply society, this inherently disheartening treatment builds throughout adolescence and permeates into adulthood. We are drowned in the expectations of being perfect, pleasant, and congenial as the imminent understanding we may not be upset about this pattern eventually wash over us.
There is a quote from CS Lewis that has stuck with me since I first heard it: “I sat with my anger long enough until she told me her real name was grief.” Grief and pain, when ignored, have a tendency to grow into deep-rooted anger, and the sadness of being perpetually betrayed by society eventually morphs into rage; an anger that feels like an ever-present storm cloud simply waiting for the monsoon. The irony of this fury, however, lies in the assumption that it should never be released. Then you’re just an overly dramatic, sensitive, unfit, emotional “mad woman” or, worse, a bitch.
Carrie Underwood’s “Before He Cheats,” Megan Fox in Jennifer’s Body, Amy Dunne in Gone Girl, Taylor Swift’s “No Body No Crime” - all of these are varying examples of how feminine rage presents itself in the media. These admired, celebrated works portray visceral scenes of feminine rage; ones so elaborate and disturbing that it can be easier to become engrossed than turn away at the thought of their insane ploys.
For women engaging with media containing similarly intense scenes, there is an innate sense of catharsis in seeing other women release the rage that has been rooting itself in them since birth. We are so conditioned to see women in the media take on submissive roles that, when this narrative is reversed, it can feel oddly intoxicating. Even more disturbing, is the subconscious feeling of relief that comes from a woman suffering on screen that isn’t us. Fictitious or not, women breaking down in the media provides a sense of comfort to the pain of womanhood.
TikTok, in particular, has begun to perpetuate this recent obsession with feminine rage. The hashtag “#femininerage” alone has 120.8 million views of videos featuring women letting their storm clouds pour. The difficulty with this use of feminine rage, however, is that TikTok can morph a serious topic into almost a trivial fetishization. Short clips with angry pop music layered behind a woman shattering her boyfriend’s windshield or slapping a girl who called her fat aren’t representative of the true essence of feminine rage. Rather, these clips keep women chained to the stereotype that the only thing that could betray us is our own obsession with men and our surface-level female friendships. A notion far from the truth.
Female rage is a topic as complex and layered as it is relevant. On the one hand, I can personally say that I find release in watching movies or listening to songs with women bordering insanity. Engaging in this media is a metaphorical pillow to scream into when I cannot release the anger that was born in me through so much as a scowl. As Anya Taylor-Joy once said, “I get a lot of men doing really terrible things and women sitting silently while one tear slowly falls.” For decades, the portrayal of angry women has been a dainty, shallow, unrelatable version of reality. With the insurgence that is feminine rage, this narrative is shifting, however, we must also remember that this romanticization of our pain is not the ideal answer. In the meantime, the nostalgia of shoving the man in Amsterdam and listening to Carrie Underwood slash her boyfriend’s tires will do the trick.
