Soraya Chemaly Quotes

Rage became a layer of my skin.

How many times does a woman say, "I'm so tired," because she cannot say, "I am so angry!" How many times is women's anger deliberately miscast as exhaustion?

Anger is an assertion of rights and worth. It is communication, equality, and knowledge. It is intimacy, acceptance, fearlessness, embodiment, revolt, and reconciliation. Anger is memory and rage. It is rational thought and irrational pain. Anger is freedom, independence, expansiveness, and entitlement. It is justice, passion, clarity, and motivation. Anger is instrumental, thoughtful, complicated, and resolved. In anger, whether you like it or not, there is truth.

Anger is the demand of accountability. It is evaluation, judgment, and refutation. It is reflective, visionary, and participatory. It's a speech act, a social statement, an intention, and a purpose. It's a risk and a threat. A confirmation and a wish. It is both powerlessness and power, palliative and a provocation. In anger, you will find both ferocity and comfort, vulnerability and hurt. Anger is the expression of hope.

The core issue is that, no matter where you may live in the world, dominant norms of masculinity are actively constructed out of women's vulnerabilities.

If there is a word that should be retired from use in the service of women's expression, health, well-being, and equality, it is appropriate - a sloppy, mushy word that purports to convey some important moral essence but in reality is just a policing term used to regulate our language, appearance and demands. It's a control word.

We are done with control.

Instead of having lost her mind, I thought it more likely that it was the only thing she had managed to keep to herself.

We minimize our anger, calling it frustration, impatience, exasperation, or irritation, words that don't convey the intrinsic social and public demand that 'anger' does. We learn to contain our selves: our voices, hair, clothes, and, most importantly, speech. Anger is usually about saying "no" in a world where women are conditioned to say almost anything but "no.

Our silence around this subject, like the silence around so many topics that specifically affect the lives of girls and women - incest, abuse, street harassment, pregnancy, menstruation, childbirth, rape - is related to the second dimension of epistemic justice: hermeneutical injustice, or the injustice of having one's social experience denied and hidden from communal understanding.

In the classroom, it was almost certainly the case that the women were managing a double bind that we face constantly: conform to traditional gender expectations, stay quiet and be liked, or violate those expectations and risk the penalties, including the penalty of being called puritanical, aggressive, and"humorless.

Reenvisioned, anger can be the most feminine of virtues: compassionate, fierce, wise, and powerful. The women I admire most... have all found ways to transform their anger into meaningful change. In them, anger has moved from deliberation to liberation.

Age shame is also a problem primarily for women. As women approach and go through menopause, naturally gaining weight as fat-to-muscle ratios shift, they exhibit many of the same anxieties and symptoms that teenage girls do. The process of growing older makes women's 'flaws' more visible and acute, thus, aging, a natural process, becomes frightening, disorienting, and difficult for many women.

It is hard to overstate how problematic the transfer of anger, as a resource, from girls to boys and from women to men is - not only to us as individuals but to our society. This transfer is critical to maintaining white supremacy and patriarchy. Anger remains the emotion that is least acceptable for girls and women because it is the first line of defense against injustice.

Today there is no law giving rapists the right to rape, but fewer than 3 percent of rapists, the overwhelming majority of whom are men, are ever prosecuted and imprisoned.

Anger is like water. No matter how hard a person tries to dam, divert, or deny it, it will find a way, usually along the path of least resistance. As I will discuss in this book, women often ¨feel¨ their anger in their bodies. Unprocessed, anger threads itself through our appearances, bodies, eating habits, and relationships, fueling low self-esteem, anxiety, depression, self-harm, and actual physical illness. The harms are more than physical, however. Gendered ideas about anger make us question ourselves, doubt our feelings, set aside our needs, and renounce our own capacity for moral conviction. Igrnoring anger makes us careless with ourselves and allows society to be careless with us. It is notable, however, that treating women's anger and pain in these ways makes it easier to exploit us - for reproduction, labor, sex, and idealogy.

The summer my daughters were six and four, we were at the beach one day and went for a long walk. It was astonishingly hot, and the sun, bouncing off a clear sea and blinding sand, was relentless. Wearing bikini bottoms but no tops, my children alternated between making sandpiles and running into the sea to cool off. The beach was empty. Eventually a woman and her son appeared in the distance, moving lazily in our direction. The boy seemed to be around the same age. Eventually the children came together, playing in the water with on another but not talking. His mother and I, farther back in each direction, waved and smiled.
I thought we would just keep walking, but when we got close to the children, she said loudly, 'You really should put tops on them.' At first, I didn't understand her.
'Thanks,' I replied. 'They're covered in sunscreen.'
'They're girls,' she said. It wasn't until she was near my daughters that she'd realized this.
I was dumbfounded. She might have been equally dumbfounded if I had taken the time to explain that her statement was an overtly sexist sexualization. The four children were physically indistinguishable, physically active on a hot beach. When I made no move toward shielding her son from the girls' scary, tempting, and corrupting bodies, she pulled him out of the water by the arm. They rushed down the beach before it crossed my mind to whip off my own top. Aggression takes many forms.

The anger and aggression that women feel, however, can always be abated by an infinite list of beauty products, some of which have the added benefit of eliminating the appearance of anger entirely. Even if a woman is angry, no one should know it by looking at her face – optimally lineless, expressionless, and, in some cases, actually paralyzed.
In 2015, news outlets announced a plastic surgery that promised to fix women with 'resting angry face,' popularly known as Resting Bitch Face. Plastic surgery, facial exercises, and even 'facial yoga' hinge on the idea that showing strong, particularly angry, emotions is bad and makes women undesirable. Antidepressant advertising targeting menopausal women encourages them to be tranquil, sedate, and, essentially, nice to look at. Lotions, creams, and injections are 'soothing' and 'calming'. Good skin care, the way to overcome 'angry' rashes or textures, has become a matter of carefully managing not just the feel of the body but also the disciplining of emotions.

One of the most powerful effects of learning to prioritize other people's perspectives above your own is that you lose the ability to see others as blameworthy, even when they are openly acting as aggressors.

I have since learned that my rage is a critical part of my self, and it is a part of myself that I have grown to respect and love instead of suppress.

Women who are actively aware of discrimination and develop a comfort level in speaking about it openly are the most likely to challenge aggressions in their daily lives and report higher levels of "closure" and satisfaction than those who don't.

Women often endure infertility, pregnancy, infant loss, miscarriages, and stillbirths in isolation, because while sadness is a socially palatable response to these often life-altering events, rage, frustration, jealousy, and guilt are not.

For many men, just seeing a woman in a sexually objectifying pose, such as in a bikini, deactivates the part of the brain's prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain where thinking about people and their intentions, feelings and actions happens. Instead, the region of the brain that lights up... is the one that reacts to looking at inanimate objects, such as a pen or a ball.

I wanted to own my anger, because it brought me back to myself. It gave me clarity and purpose.

... when women themselves perceive that they are being objectified, which happens every day to a visibly pregnant woman, they act more like objects, moving less and speaking less.

We are so busy teaching girls to be likeable that we often forget to teach them, as we do boys, that they should be respected.

Anger is a forward-looking emotion, rooted in the idea that there should be change. Resentment, on the other hand, is locked in the past and usually generates no meaningful difference in the situation.

Cursing numbs pain. The relationship between pain and cursing is not one-way (for example, stubbing your toe and letting out a stream of expletives in rage). Those expletives, in turn, affect our perceptions of pain. Through a series of creative experiments, scientists have found that the stronger the curse words people use while experiencing pain the higher their tolerance for that pain. Byrne notes, depressingly, that women who curse when in pain, however, are less well cared for by those around them.

In their 2001 study 'The Girl Who Cried Pain: A Bias Against Women in the Treatment of Pain,' Diane E Hoffmann and Anita J. Tarzian pointed out that women are 'more likely to have their pain reports discounted as 'emotional' or 'psychogenic' and, therefore, 'not real.' This invalidation parallels the invalidation of women's anger, which is similarly often reduced to proof of women's mental weakness. One study of postoperative pain relief for patients who had undergone coronary artery bypass surgery revealed that men in pain were given pain relief medication, but women were given sedatives. Sedatives aren't pain relievers, or analgesics. They're calming and dulling agents that 'take the edge off.' But for whom, exactly?

... if a man gets angry, he's having an off day, if a woman does, she's a raging bitch.

Men learn to regard rape as a moment in time; a discreet episode with a beginning, middle, and end. But for women, rape is thousands of moments that we fold into ourselves over a lifetime.
Its' the day that you realize you can't walk to a friend's house anymore or the time when your aunt tells you to be nice because the boy was just 'stealing a kiss.' It's the evening you stop going to the corner store because, the night before, a stranger followed you home. It's the late hour that a father or stepfather or brother or uncle climbs into your bed. It's the time it takes you to write an email explaining that you're changing your major, even though you don't really want to, in order to avoid a particular professor. It's when you're racing to catch a bus, hear a person demand a blow job, and turn to see that it's a police officer. It's the second your teacher tells you to cover your shoulders because you'll 'distract the boys, and what will your male teachers do?' It's the minute you decide not to travel to a place you've always dreamed about visiting and are accused of being 'unadventurous.' It's the sting of knowing that exactly as the world starts expanding for most boys, it begins to shrink for you. All of this goes on all day, every day, without anyone really uttering the word rape in a way that grandfathers, fathers, brothers, uncles, teachers, and friends will hear it, let alone seriously reflect on what it means.

A society that does not respect women's anger is one that does not respect women; not as human beings, thinkers, knowers, active participants, or citizens.

Shame infuses women's most intimate experiences, from menstruation to sex. Women who internalize objectified ideas about their bodies often feel intense disgust with bodily functions – even pregnancy. Objectification and self-surveillance also put women at higher risk of sexual dysfunction. Rather than enjoying sex or engaging with their partners to ensure sexual satisfaction, women, distracted by what their bodies smell, feel, and look like, become unable to think about their own pleasure.

Harassment and the ever-present suggestions of violence at this scale constantly reminds women and girls of their place. For the most part, girls' and women's experiences with harassment are still cloaked in silence, and we continue, as a global society, to peddle dangerous advice to girls about "staying safe." This isn't about safety. If it were, we'd teach boys, who are also subject to childhood molestation and risk, the same lessons, but we don't. It's about social control.

Improving maternal outcomes means valuing women not only as reproductive engines but also as human beings - something that is still, quite apparently, a problem.

The importance and visibility of women's collective anger can't be overstated. This anger takes determination, thoughtfulness, and work. It means respecting our own anger and being willing to respect the anger of other women.

One of the most astounding and telling features of the Women's March and the #MeToo movement is that they both illustrate how many angry women it takes to generate public response.

Ask a man what his greatest fear is about serving jail time, and he will almost inevitably say he fears being raped. What can we deduce from the fact that jail is to men what life is to so many women?

When a woman shows anger in institutional, political, and professional settings, she automatically violates gender norms.

If #MeToo has made men feel vulnerable, panicked, unsure, and fearful as a result of women finally, collectively, saying "Enough!" so be it. If they wonder how their every word and action will be judged and used against them, Welcome to our world. If they feel that everything they do will reflect on other men and be misrepresented and misunderstood, take a seat. You are now honorary women.

When we are taught that our anger is undesirable, selfish, powerless, and ugly, we learn that we are undesirable, selfish, powerless, andy ugly. When we forgo talking about anger, because it represents risk or challenge, or because it disrupts a comfortable status quo, we forgo valuable lessons about risk and challenge and the discomforts of the status quo. By naturalizing the idea that girls and women aren't angry but are sad, by instisting that they keep their anger to themselves, we render women's feelings and demands mute and with little social value. When we call our anger sadness instead of anger, we often fail to acknowledge what is wrong, specifically in a way that discourages us from imagining and pursuing change. Sadness, as an emotion, is paired with acceptance. Anger, on the other hand, invokes the possibility of change and of fighting back.

What I wish I had taught my daughter in that moment was that she had every right to be angry, and subsequently demand that the adults around her pay attention to that anger. Only then can she feel she has the right to make demands on the world.

As women, we are continuously told to live in the cracks of a world shaped by and for men, without complaining or demanding. Without being angry. So we adapt, and when we do, we use familiar minimizing expressions to describe what we feel: 'It was annoying.' 'I was so frustrated.' 'I can't believe he said that.' 'I'm so disappointed.

In a study of children's toy and television preferences, researchers Isabelle Cherney and Kamala London found that, when left alone, half of boys ages five through thirteen picked "girl" and "boy" toys equally - until they thought they were being watched. They were especially concerned about what their fathers would think if they saw them. Over time, boys' interests in toys and media become more rigidly masculinized and codified, whereas girls' stay relatively open ended and flexible.

Women are just as motivated by the desire for power as men; it's just that our cultural ideas about power don't associate it with femininity.

In 2015 a sixth-grade girl named Madeline Messer analyzed the fifty most popular 'endless runner game' apps and found that 98 percent came with built-in boy characters, compared with only 46 percent that offered girl characters. The real kicker, however, was that in 90 percent of the games, the male characters were free, whereas 85 percent of the games charged extra for the ability to select a female character. This is a simple but telling example of the ways children learn to think that masculine = normal; male = standard; boys = human; and girls = have to pay.

In the coming years, we will hear, again, that anger is a destructive force, to be controlled. Watch carefully, because not everyone is asked to do this in equal measure.

Contrary to the idea that anger clouds thinking, properly understood, it is an astoundingly clarifying emotion.

Her anger was essential to her survival. Where my father and uncles saw a penny-pincher, I saw a smart and pragmatic woman who understood her financial situation and was trying to plan for the future. Where they saw unreasonable, I saw a woman who knew she was playing a long game and would do what she had to, even if others failed to understand. Where they saw selfishness, I saw her insistence that she mattered as an individual, not as an eternal handmaiden.