Feminist rage and the power of women’s anger

Soraya Chemaly Transcript

Sabrina Merage Naim
Hello, hello!

Kassia Binkowski
Hi, Sabrina.

Sabrina Merage Naim
we are back for another incredible episode and an incredible conversation with someone I'm so excited to tell you about.

Kassia Binkowski
And I just have to say I want to give our audience a kind of a glimpse behind the scenes, the way that we've been doing all of this production, you guys is that, generally I lead kind of the pre production research, and I prep the interview guide. So I learn about the guests. But then whoever is carrying on the interview doesn't really disclose much to either Sabrina or myself, the other co host. And so we go into these recordings, these intro recordings, so curious and truly kind of blind to how the episode went. And this one is what I'm particularly excited about, because the research was fascinating. And the conversation could have gone a million different directions. So tell us everything.

Sabrina Merage Naim
Right, this is as much a surprise for you as it is for our guests. So yeah, I got to sit down with the incredible Soraya Chemaly who is an award winning author, activist. And one of the big kind of themes that we talk about is her book, Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women's Anger,

Kassia Binkowski
Yes!

Sabrina Merage Naim
which was recognized as a Best Book of 2018. By the Washington Post Fast Company cycle, it was just very well received. And it is fascinating to have a conversation with someone who is extremely knowledgeable and well researched about how women's tendency and societal pressure to push down our anger or to not deal with our anger in productive ways, has really impacted us has completely changed the trajectory of how we live our lives, what our relationships look like, how we can raise our children, you know, in healthier ways, the whole thing. We talk about some of the personal stories that led her into this work, we talk a lot about the societal implications. We talked about the familial implications. We even talked about the health implications of what happens when women swallow their anger for decades.

Kassia Binkowski
It's interesting, because it's something that I honestly hadn't thought that much about the gendering of anger in our society. I mean, I think, you know, we've all heard the criticism of being an angry feminist, and the fact that that's been used against the feminist movement. But I hadn't really like dug deeper or understood how gender is anger, or how anger is gendered from an incredibly young age.

Sabrina Merage Naim
Yeah.

Kassia Binkowski
And then to think of the ripple effects, like you just said, all the way down to physical health. It's fascinating.

Sabrina Merage Naim
Yeah, it was really interesting to hear about that, and how we all play into it, like even you and I, we are having these incredible conversations with women and men around the world about gender issues. I think we both consider ourselves pretty open minded around these issues. And yet, we're both raising daughters and completely repeating the same things for them. And I even acknowledged that and in this episode, I acknowledge how sometimes I get frustrated with my emotional daughter and I tried to tell her to swallow it, you know, in different ways. How we don't allow for our, our girls and our boys to really experience those emotions, those kinds of feelings, in the ways that they need to, right?

Kassia Binkowski
Well, in the full spectrum of those feelings, right? Like we silence different ones in different genders in a very fascinating way.

Sabrina Merage Naim
That's right. And another interesting thing that came up was not just the gendering of anger, but the racialized gendering of anger, which we see so prominently in society. But it's not something that we really talk about that much, I think, maybe more a little bit more now than in years past. But you talk about the stereotypes of the angry black woman, or the spicy Latina, or the, whatever it is all of these stereotypes that just come continue to push these things forward in society, and we're not dealing with it. But something that Soraya says that I think is so important that we really just need to bring back is that anger is actually a valuable tool in our relationships. And that's something that I was really fascinated by.

Kassia Binkowski
I mean, she really talks about it as a defense mechanism in the research. I remember her saying, you know, the feeling of anger is you protecting yourself and standing up for yourself and to squash that only makes you more vulnerable. And yet society is teaching women at large. But then certainly women of different races to do that more and more.

Sabrina Merage Naim
Yeah, it was really just such an interesting topic, something that I don't think for either of us has been so top of mind. But when you bring it to the forefront, it's like, wow, yeah, that resonates and it feels so prevalent when you start talking about it. So here we are talking about it, take a listen.

Sabrina Merage Naim
Hi , Soraya, thank you so much for joining me from the Bahamas today.

Soraya Chemaly
Thank you for having me Sabrina.

Sabrina Merage Naim
I am very excited about this conversation. And I have to just set the stage for our listeners that this is, this is a conversation for all of the girls and women out there who were ever told to tone it down, that they were being too much too loud, too aggressive, too anything, right, all of the "toos". And, so who were told to smile when they didn't feel like smiling, who were told that their anger wasn't warranted, all of those things. And I just love so much how you framed this conversation and how you frame this narrative. So I'm really excited to dig in. I want to start by asking you to take us back. And tell us more about your story about specifically the story of your mother throwing plates. But I also want you to set the stage of your upbringing a little bit. Where did you grow up? What was your family situation like? Tell us a little bit about that? And then tell us the story of the mother, your mother throwing the plates?

Soraya Chemaly
Sure. I mean, I think that my family situation is like a lot of women I know who tend to be they tend to grow up to be liberal and progressive. But with quite a traditional family background. And in my case, a very conservative father. And so I grew up Catholic Arab family, which also makes a difference. I think people think well Arab, let's be specifically especially patriarchal. And I don't actually find that to be the case, we all live in patriarchal societies, right. So whether you are an evangelical Christian, or Muslim, or particular variation of Judaism, you end up having these horizontal realities, right, you could have liberals and all of those kinds of religions, or conservatives and extremists alike. But I say all of that, because I think that an important part of all of these religions, and of traditional and conservative societies is gender norms, and gender stereotypes, as dualistic as binary as oppositional there roles for men and women, and they're carefully prescribed. And we learn about how to be in those ways as children being socialized in families and schools.

Sabrina Merage Naim
I want to interrupt you for a second just to highlight the word oppositional, which I think is really important that the gender binary is often taught to us as being oppositional. That's very poignant, that's very poignant. And something that we don't always, we're not always so consciously aware of.

Soraya Chemaly
Right. And I think that's because we learn to think of it as a lot of religions, again, will say as complementary, right, is making a whole, but in fact, it's not complementary, it is oppositional because, you know, to be a little boy, for example, and to embrace feminine aspects of your personality or your interests or your habits will literally lead to your probably being terribly bullied. You know, and so, if gender norms and gender kind of, I say this carefully, but gender ambitions for children, were genuinely complementary, then we wouldn't see that kind of prohibition on embracing those side those aspects of your self that are theoretically, the wrong gender. And for girls, that's anger. You know, for boys, it's sadness, instead of saying to a boy Oh, what are you upset about? Or why are you crying? A lot of people will say, still, it's shocking to me still today, you know, but they'll say, you know, only girls cry or Boys Don't Cry, or, you know, you have to be stronger than that. And for girls, if they feel angry, they get a sort of similar chiding and then penalisation you know, what are you doing? Why are you why are you being selfish. That's really unbecoming behavior being impolite or worse. That's just the surface surface level. So in my case, I just, I wrote about a story where I caught home once and my mom was standing and she was literally throwing plates off the side of out of the garden. And she threw them all and they just, they all shattered. And then she came back into the kitchen. And she didn't say anything. She said, how was your day?

Sabrina Merage Naim
What impression did that have on you?

Soraya Chemaly
I was like, well, something's happened. And she's not talking about it. And she's clearly angry. And she's also not talking about that. And, you know, what my mother was doing, I think is very typical of women, which is that she found a way to externalize her anger in a way that didn't interfere or disrupt her relationships. And we have a lot of dominant models of anger that are based on the way men experience and express anger. So if you think about rage, you often think about unhinged behavior, somebody's breaking something or throwing something. And if you Google, like anger or rage, you get a lot of images of particularly white men, screaming at computers or breaking things, right. But that's not how rage really works. For a lot of women, women become consumed with rage, without ever externalizing it. And that can lead to all kinds of other issues that I write about in the book. And essentially, women are paying to go get angry in a way that doesn't help them change anything, which is ridiculous.

Sabrina Merage Naim
I think what's so interesting about what you're saying is that your mother and so many other women in the same way. She did express her anger outwardly, but not impeding on anyone else.

Soraya Chemaly
Well, and she was angry at my dad, and she didn't tell my dad.

Sabrina Merage Naim
Right.

Soraya Chemaly
And this is what happens, a lot of women will find ways to get their anger out, quote, unquote, but it actually it's like, you know, I don't see in these, these articles recently about women meeting and stadiums to to yell and scream. And then like, but then what? You're gonna go back home to the exact same situation. You know, and that doesn't really do you any good?

Sabrina Merage Naim
Did that teach you anything about how to handle your anger?

Soraya Chemaly
Well, I mean, my point in writing it was to say, We never talked about anger at all, it basically taught me not to talk about anger. Right. And so part of what I'm saying in the book is, that really doesn't help, doesn't help you doesn't help change the circumstances of how you're feeling. And it's important to understand our feelings and to label them to make meaning out of them to make sense out of them. And I think it's also important in families, to acknowledge the way the people we love are experiencing the world, you know, and to care for them when they do and the thing about anger is that it it's an expression of need, and self defense. And so the main question that I start the book asking is, why do we sever this essential emotion from femininity, right? It's the emotion that warns us about threat or harm. And it says to us, Hey, pay attention, something's not right here. And, you know, something has to happen. And in fact, if we can't tell the people we love the most what's hurting us? Or what's threatening us? Or what has caused us pain or anxiety or anger? Who are we going to tell? Right, and so I think the hard thing for a lot of women is that in expressing their anger, they risk finding out that the people around them don't in fact, care for them the way they care back. Because the number one, one of the number one reasons women say that they get angry, is their realization of a lack of reciprocity in a relationship, which means they're experiencing intimate inequality.

Sabrina Merage Naim
That's really interesting. And something that I think a lot of people probably aren't so consciously aware of, particularly the women who are getting angry, or the women who are going through these emotional roller coasters maybe aren't always so aware of the fact that that is a fear of theirs, or that that's something that they're really feeling. I'm wondering if this is something that really does come to the forefront in those moments, and also the fact that women have been labeled as being emotional creatures since the beginning of time and yet, we have been told to temper that, you know, to, to kind of push it down, push it down, push it down, and what the result of that is that our emotions are no longer serving us or our relationships.

Soraya Chemaly
Right. Because they're then weaponized against us.

Sabrina Merage Naim
Against us. Yeah, so that's something that's really interesting and what you're saying about anger being such an important emotion to pay attention to, I think of, you know, anger versus complacency. being something that really sticks out to me, like, if you are complacent or you just don't care enough, you wouldn't get angry. And that's kind of when you know that a relationship is not worth fighting for or getting angry for and when you are angry, that's an emotion that you mentioned. It's an it's a hopeful emotion. Right?

Soraya Chemaly
Right. But I think I should clarify, I think a lot of girls learned very early not to express anger, and that ends up in a certain numbness or complacency, because to express anger is to risk relationships, or to risk being punished. And we know that I mean, you know, and, and it's not even expressing anger, like, for a young girl to be assertive or aggressive, can also result in her being like scolded or punished. And that is a very racialized proposition as well, because, you know, a young girl who is even in kindergarten, a young black girl, if she's assertive if she is behaving in ways that a young white boy people would say is, rambunctiousness, she is much more likely to be suspended, disciplined, policed, expelled. And that's true all the way through school, so that by the time you know, you're in fifth or sixth grade, the rate of expulsion and suspension for young black girls is five to six times higher in some states than for other students. And so, I want to be clear that there are different flavors of this right? If you're sort of ambiguously ethnic brown lady.

Sabrina Merage Naim
As both you and I are.

Soraya Chemaly
Both you and I are, you know, you several things, you're likely to be sexualized.

Sabrina Merage Naim
Right.

Soraya Chemaly
For expressing anger, or, you know, if you're Hispanic, you're definitely compared to food, right? If you're Asian, you're more likely to be described as sad or passive. And so they're all of these stereotypes. They all serve the purpose though, of ignoring what the person is saying, ignoring what the woman or girl is saying, right? It's a stereotype that is meant to silence or to shame. And then there's the aspect of age, right? Because you start off with a little girl who's maybe three and having a tantrum, and that's really cute. And someone dresses her up in a princess dress and films her in Target, having, you know, a fit, and everyone laughs But in fact, she's really angry and she's being made fun of, and she goes from being that toddler to being spoiled to being, you know, a hormonal adolescent to being a high maintenance bitch to being an old nag. There's no point at which your anger is acceptable.

Sabrina Merage Naim
In addition to being an activist and a change maker, you are the author of Rage Becomes Her this is the book that you've been talking about The Power of Women's Anger, which was recognized as a Best Book of 2018. By the Washington Post Fast Company Psychology Today and NPR. It was very well received. What I want to know in terms of your personal journey is when did you become interested in this topic? When was this something that you decided I'm gonna really dig into?

Soraya Chemaly
It was after the 2016 election, I really was very cognizant. I mean, it was very clear that male candidates left and right so Trump or Sanders could leverage populist anger, right? They could, they could be angry, they could look a little bit like mad scientists, they could pound their podiums. And that's because in men anger confirms our gender norm stereotypes. And so we tend to associate angry white men with Leadership and Citizenship. Right, an angry black man, on the other hand, is more likely to be criminalized. So there was a running gag, President Obama was in office. There was a whole skit just called you know, there was an anger translator because he could never actually be angry. And so you could compare all those men during that 2016 election with Hillary Clinton, who of course couldn't show that she was angry and had to look unruffled and calm and conform to stereotypes in order to even remotely be liked. And for that she was called inauthentic. And the interesting thing that happened, of course, was that Elizabeth Warren, who wasn't at that point later on you know she just wasn't running. She could express anger on behalf of Clinton, because she wasn't seeking power, which was interesting, right. And so there was that that there was candidates but there was also just global populist rage, there was a tide of really misogynistic, global backlash. And you could see that around the world in the rise in popularity of men like Trump. And their response to men like Trump was millions and millions of women kind of waking up for the first time. To really, how how easy it is to dismiss what it is women want or need.

Sabrina Merage Naim
I was certainly one of those women who had a rude awakening, not necessarily because of the results of the election, although yes, that was a part of it. But I think exactly what you're saying was just such a shock to the system. I couldn't believe that it felt like I was the only one who saw that Hillary Clinton had to keep composed, and put together surrounded by ludicrous behavior, right by men, not even not even talking about Trump, or one person or the other was just yet constant lunacy surrounding her and she had to be composed. And the result of that was male members of my family coming to me and being like, look at her, she's such a bitch. And I'm like, what, how do you not see that she's surrounded by chaos, and she's keeping her shit together. And nobody else is. But she's the one being criticized. And that's something that we are now seeing more and more and more, we're seeing gender disinformation happening, specifically against female politicians. A very intentional approach, it's so effective, right. And she was kind of at the epicenter of all of that, at least I can say, for myself, I didn't see at the time, how widespread it was until after the fact.

Soraya Chemaly
I mean, I'll be honest, for like, I've been doing this since college, and really writing full time in earnest as an activist since 2010. And, you know, if you spent time online as a woman writer, or a public figure in that period of time, you know, what was happening online, and it was happening again, to black women, even earlier. And it again, was treated as something women need to take care of privately, like keeping yourself safe, right, instead of understanding that the threat of rape shapes all of our lives, whether we're raped or not, we just choose to ignore that fact, as a society and expect women to keep themselves safe. And that's the same thing with what happens online. And yet, we don't tend to think about it that way.

Sabrina Merage Naim
I want to understand a little bit more about in that process. You've been you said that you've been writing about this, and you've been researching this for a long time. What have you really learned about the history of gendering anger? Why is it severed from femininity?

Soraya Chemaly
Well, I mean, I think that it's just part of it's part of our gender socialization, right? We have a sex segregated ideology. And that kind of governs the way we distribute resources and labor and power. And in order in order for that system to work, we basically need to have sex segregated ideas about how we live and how we are as individuals. And so starting in early childhood, we know that adults, for example, will look at babies and if they see a disagreeable baby, who's maybe fussy or touchy, if they think the baby is a boy, they will describe the baby as angry or difficult. And they're much less likely to try and actually help that boy. If they think it's a girl, they will see the exact same behavior and describe the girl as sad or anxious and give her more attention. And that continues throughout childhood and so we we literally will socialize and cultivate sadness and anxiety of girls and deny sadness and anxiety and fear and other quote unquote feminized behaviors and emotions in boys, and will do the opposite with girls, if girls are angry, or if they're assertive, again, not the same thing. But if they're assertive, they're understood as angry. They'll be castigated, right, so use your nice voice, smile more, you know, you're prettier with your mouth closed, like all these things that girls get told. That discourages them from expressing what they need or self defense or anger. And so we see that at every stage of child development and socialization. But we know that people who are able to accept and understand the both the theoretically masculine positive aspects of their emotions are healthier, happier, more creative, more even keeled. There's so many benefits to not segregating our emotions and behaviors. And yet, if you look at schools, if you look at religious institutions, if you look at family structures, we're constantly constantly telling children, we're sending them these messages all the time, about which emotions are acceptable for them to perform.

Sabrina Merage Naim
Yeah, it's, it's something that is so top of mind for me, as a mother of two young children. One is a boy one is a girl. And I consider myself relatively aware of a lot of these things. And yet I play right into it. Right?

Soraya Chemaly
Yeah, it's so hard not to. I mean, I certainly did that. I wrote about many examples, where I realized that I was literally passing this on to my daughters, without thinking about at all.

Sabrina Merage Naim
Last weekend, I took my five year old daughter to a friend's birthday party, and part of this thing was that the kids got to pet a snake. And a little boy, also five years old, was too scared to pet the snake. And the father was there, and was pushing and pushing and pushing. Come on, be brave, be strong, be this and

Soraya Chemaly
How could you let a little girl pet that snake?

Sabrina Merage Naim
Right, right, I'm standing there mortified watching this happen, as this boy is just cowering more and more into himself, because his father is putting all of this pressure on him and basically forced him to do something that he was very clearly uncomfortable with, with the message of, you need to be strong, you need to be brave, you know, everyone else is doing it, actually physically pushing him towards the snake. Those small examples throughout a child's life really shape how they grow up. And something that you touch on that really spoke to me, and I want you to talk more about it is how when girls become adolescents, and we call them difficult and angsty and they're going through such a challenging stage. And in particular, they tend to butt heads with their mothers. You know, this is something that I've been hearing, ad nauseam about my daughter because she's a wonderful, mature girl. And everyone's like, Yeah, but just wait, wait until she becomes this age.

Soraya Chemaly
It's ridiculous what people say, right?

Sabrina Merage Naim
So then, of course, I have this fear planted in me already from this age. She's five years old. And I'm already like, terrified of what's gonna happen in the next seven to 10 years, when my daughter becomes angsty and hates me, and we just don't have a relationship. But what you write about really flips that on its head, and I want you to kind of share with our audience, why is it? Why is it not only okay, but maybe a very important thing that we allow our daughters to go through that phase? And what does that really mean? What does that stem from?

Soraya Chemaly
Well, I mean I think it's interesting that we have specific stereotypes around the transition points in girls and women's lives that are very hard adolescence and menopause. Right? We have really terrible kind of myths and stereotypes about women who are going through these two changes. And the first thing is, until relatively recently, we didn't talk about either of those things much right, getting your period and losing your period. Were basically the only ways that people thought or talked if they ever did about those things, that and the hormones and the moodiness and that's not particularly helpful, right? Because in fact, when we go through those life stage changes, everything changes. Our bodies change the way people perceive us change our relationships change, our roles change, very often the clothes we do and can wear can change, our appearance is changing, everything is changing, right. And these are experiences that for the most part men don't have. They're not going through these changes. And so we minimize what women and girls are going through. And then we make fun of them, when they express pain, discomfort, anger, confusion, need any of those things. And so in adolescence, not only are girls going through those changes, but they've grown up in a culture that tells them how lucky they are compared to all those girls over there. Name your terrible place, right as though the United States is some kind of nirvana for girls and women. And, they are learning at the same time to have experiences that are jarring or threatening or difficult. They're being sexualized very early, they're having experiences of risk, they're probably many of them experiencing limitations on how far in space, they can go by themselves. You know, they can't ride their bikes the same way they can't walk at night, you know, they're very aware of these things, girls aren't idiots. You know, they know that the boys that they know, and their brothers or their friends can do things they cannot do anymore. And that would make you sad and angry, right. And yet, when girls express sadness, or anger, the go to place is to maybe give them some medication or put them through, you know, behavioral therapy, or if they develop an eating disorder, send them away somewhere until they're fixed, instead of actually saying, it sucks. What's happening to you right now. Let's talk about it. It's not all bad. But let's at least be honest about the street harassment, or the risk, or the fact that, you know, these things are happening to you in school. Same thing with menopause. You know, by the time a woman's going through menopause, there's so many things happening that can be said about her. And yet, we know very little about menopause. And the cultural way of dealing with it is to crack a lot of jokes about angry women, and their craziness. And I just think that that's kind of absurd, all of it.

Sabrina Merage Naim
Yeah, you're, you're bringing up so many memories for me of when I was growing up, and the way that my girlfriends were treated, versus how their brothers were treated, right. Oftentimes, the brothers didn't have a curfew, got cars sooner, were able to go to college, wherever they wanted to go. And the girls had to be home at a certain time, couldn't dress in a certain way, had to stay closer to home for college, those kinds of things that really impacted them. And it's very frustrating, very frustrating, right? When you feel those limitations. What is it specifically about the relationship between an adolescent girl and her mother that you think plays into this dialogue?

Soraya Chemaly
Well, the only person really, that an adolescent girl has license to really lose her shit with is her mother. Right? What does that tell us? Right? Like, I had three daughters and, and by the time they were 10, or 11, 12, I was openly saying, Listen, you're going to see movies, you're going to hear people talk about how we have to become enemies, how I'm going to be terrible, and you're going to be terrible to me. And that's just a lot of bullshit. And we're not doing that in this house. I said, it's just not going to work that way here. And in fact, you need to understand what these stereotypes are. And we should talk about them. And when you watch a movie, or you know, if you watch any Disney movie, you can have at it, like go for it. You can talk about the relationships between the older women and the younger women and what they look like, because for the most part, they're toxic. Even still, they were a little better in the last two years, maybe, right? There's a whole batch of Pixar and Disney movies that I think are actively trying to change those things. But what we have is 60 years of bullshit stories, right? And everybody watches them and loves them. And yet, what are they telling us about mothers and daughters, either the mothers are dead, or they're evil stepmothers or they're ugly, like, really kind of just terrible stereotypes about all kinds of people all across the board.

Sabrina Merage Naim
Look to your point I just saw Encanto for the first time and a lot of the, you know, older Disney stereotypes have been broken by this time with a film like that, and it's beautiful, and I highly recommend it and yet a big part of this film is the dysfunctional relationship between the girl and her grandmother. Okay, so it's exactly what you're saying.

Soraya Chemaly
It is over and over and over again. And so you rarely see films where you have multiple generations of daughters and mothers Who aren't at war? At some way, you know? And that then becomes a sort of self fulfilling prophecy for some people.

Sabrina Merage Naim
Can you remember a time when you were told you were being too emotional? Or to tone it down? Or

Soraya Chemaly
You mean like yesterday?

Sabrina Merage Naim
Yes, please tell me.

Soraya Chemaly
No, no. Listen, I think every woman understands what that feels like, right. And in fact, what we do is something that is called pre emptive policing of ourselves. In order to avoid that, we go out of our way, to project calmness and rationality, and to not use feeling words, and to avoid anger and aggression. So before anyone else can do it to us, we do it to ourselves, that's very well studied and documented. And so, you know, by the time a woman, a woman doesn't have to be overly emotional, to be called emotional, she just has to speak. Right. And so it's the same thing with anger and aggression. A woman can be very aggressive, and not feel one iota of anger, you can be aggressive without feeling angry at all, you can be angry in the most passive way possible, and have no aggression. You can just be an assertive person who's confident, and yet people are gonna call you angry and emotional.

Sabrina Merage Naim
What tools have you been able to utilize to break those patterns within yourself?

Soraya Chemaly
So first of all, I would say I needed to be older, to recognize what was happening in my own interactions in my own life. So being older, freed me in lots of ways from the constraints that I definitely was experiencing and imposing on myself. And some of that just had to do with the fact that I had more experience, I had more knowledge, I was more financially secure, right? Like, when at least in my case, I was in my 20s. You know, I didn't have a lot of money. I lived in a shoebox, I worked. And I'm now 55. And I don't, I'm not in the same situation I was in as a 25 year old. And so I just think all of these circumstances make a difference.

Sabrina Merage Naim
I just want to understand better, what does being financially secure have to do with it? Is it that it gave you the space to really recognize that versus having to constantly keep up with your paycheck?

Soraya Chemaly
Well, I mean, several things, right. I think a lot of women don't, it's difficult to admit that you are actually dependent financially, especially if you have children.

Sabrina Merage Naim
Right.

Soraya Chemaly
Right. Like, that's just a fact.

Sabrina Merage Naim
Yeah.

Soraya Chemaly
We know that we know that. That's not our economy functions, right. And so for example, it was a big article about the fact that women in their 20s in cities like New York and DC make more than men in their 20s. Great, right, everyone's celebrating Finally, after 150 years of women in the workplace in this capacity, they're making more money, but no one wants to talk about what happens after 30 When kids enter the picture. Right? Like that's really the issue. They're not making that much more money, and they come to be really circumscribed, lose their tenure, lose their benefits lose their 501ks, like, what happens when people have children is that women pay a price for that. And there's a motherhood penalty, and there's a fatherhood bonus. And so any reporting on that period very brief in a woman's life, between the ages of 22 and 30, where she might make more money. That's nice. But in fact, if you report on that, and you don't report on what happens after, it's really misleading and irresponsible to do that, right. But also, I think a lot of people experience anger at work. And if you really need to work, which most of us do, you can't treat your anger the same way. As you might in another situation, right. And so, I just think context is super important life stage is super important.

Sabrina Merage Naim
So a lot of what you're saying, took time for you to accomplish. How were you able to navigate that differently with your daughters? I mean, part of it, you're saying is having really open and honest conversations about what they're going to be exposed to in the world versus how they're going to behave in their household but what else? What else were you able to to do for them so that they didn't have to wait until they're 55 and financially independent to really feel and can be seen in that way.

Soraya Chemaly
I mean, honestly, I have no idea what works or what doesn't, I'm a parent, right, you just don't know. But I think it's important boys or girls, to allow children to feel the full range of their emotions. really allow them and give them the vocabulary that enables them to identify what's happening in their bodies, and their feelings. And then help them develop habits and skills for expressing those emotions in ways that won't hurt themselves or others. I think that's the best you can do as a parent, right. And so that's really hard and challenging.

Sabrina Merage Naim
I can tell you, as someone who has a highly sensitive daughter, she has a lot of feelings. And I also was a highly sensitive child, and I'm still highly sensitive, and I had a lot of feelings. So you would think that I would be more empathetic to what she's going through, and then I'd be able to support her and keep space for her feelings and let her go through her whole range of emotions. And I can tell you, as a parent, of a young child who has a lot of feelings, that it challenges me every single day.

Soraya Chemaly
Yeah, it's really exhausting.

Sabrina Merage Naim
It's exhausting. And it's and I've messed up here, there and everywhere. And I say things that I know are not good to say things like stop crying.

Soraya Chemaly
It's hard.

Sabrina Merage Naim
It's extremely difficult. So so the acknowledgement of yeah, that that's something we need to do. And yet we screw up at it every single day, and that there's nobody who's perfect, I think, is really important. Because whoever's listening to this and says, like, yeah, great, it's good to know that, but doing it in practice is a really different thing. Like, yes, we hear you.

Soraya Chemaly
You can only try your best, right? Like it's not. It's hard, and it's challenging. But I do think I also think, like, there was never a time at which. And then this might be burdensome to child, you know, I think it can get tiresome, it's tiring for you, it's tiresome for a kid. But also, just teaching kids how to understand stereotypes, is a very big deal. So that they are media critical, like learning to be aware of the information you're getting is increasingly I mean, it's clearly very important in our society, right? Like, it's just more important every day that you have a media literacy, so that you, you can really understand you can learn not to just accept what you're being fed every day.

Sabrina Merage Naim
Yeah, let's talk about the stereotypes for a second. So you alluded to this before, but there is the gendered stereotypes and the racialization of gendered stereotypes, the angry black woman, the spicy Latina, the sad Asian woman, you know, the crazy white woman. Talk to us a little bit more about from a societal standpoint, how those kinds of stereotypes have fed into this, this dangerous narrative. And then also, maybe from a more personal standpoint, how you see that playing out in families, among children, their upbringing, etc.

Soraya Chemaly
Well, I mean, I think there are two aspects, if we're talking about childhood one is, within families, most families still today are ethnically homogeneous. Right? So the first cut, so to say people's identities in families is gender. So the minute a person conceives, it's like, is it a boy or girl? You know, we won't even get into the gender reveal parties. But the first question that most people ask is that, right? And generally speaking, as infants in early childhood, children are being taken care of by people who look like them. But that ends pretty quickly. And then kids go out into the world. And, and they consume media, that's the world coming in at them. And exposure to those two things, media coming in and going out into the world automatically means that children are exposed to stereotypes about race and class and gender. And they have to navigate those stereotypes. And they have to navigate it as people without a lot of power. And so they don't go against the grain. And that's when the conformity really starts.

Sabrina Merage Naim
What are the circumstances where anger can protect us from injustice?

Soraya Chemaly
Well, I mean, every political movement that you can think of, in a fight for justice begins in anger. I mean, I can't think of one that didn't begin with the feeling of anger, of wrongness, right? And anger is the emotion of injustice. So I mean, I just think there are many situations, but you do have to calibrate, right, you have to assess the situation you're in, and then decide how to express it. I think, too, that maybe just the way you framed that you're thinking of a particular type of anger expression, right, which is the kind of rage or the expression, you can be extremely calm, and be extremely angry, and be extremely effective. Right, and that's how a lot of activists function.

Sabrina Merage Naim
That's interesting. Let's, let's talk more about activism, because there is this another stereotype about angry feminists. And as part of the work that we do, as part of this show, a lot of conversations that that I've had to have, often with men, not exclusively with men, is feminism as a term and as a movement is angry, right? It is polarizing. The adjective has really been used to discredit or undermine gender equity in a lot of ways. How do we reverse this?

Soraya Chemaly
Oh, wow, I don't think we really reverse it. Well, first of all, lots of feminism's right, but all of them get thrown into the same bucket of crazy angry women. So that's a stereotype. People who are going to embrace those stereotypes that have no interest in changing their minds. So that's a waste of time. I feel pretty strongly that if, if you're running around saying, you know, using language like that stereotypes like that, you at this point, you're doing it in poor faith, you know, and so the question is, who cares? Literally, who cares, because the achievements of feminism over the last century have they're monumental, right, they're transformative to society. I'd much rather talk about that. I'd much rather talk about what the anger has resulted in and continues to result in.

Sabrina Merage Naim
I really want to get into one more thing which kind of shocked the hell out of me, and I think is so important to discuss, which is women report being angrier and more sustained ways than men do. Something that you bring up is women's illnesses, that we physically get ill because we are holding all of this in for so long. And it leads to disordered eating anxiety, self harm, depression, so many other things. And this revelation became something that has kind of shrouded everything else that, that I was looking in terms of the research and the the questions that I wanted to ask you, I saw all of these women in my life who are dealing with, with physical illnesses, they're being swept under the rug by doctors, by medical professionals, not being taken seriously. women that I know in my life, and suddenly it's like, Oh, my God, how much of this is directly related to this issue?

Soraya Chemaly
Well, you know, I'm careful to say in the book, you can't claim causality. However, you can document through years and years of study. The degree to which suppressed or repressed or diverted rage is implicated in a whole realm of illnesses that we call women's illnesses. Sometimes anxiety, depression is eating disorders, autoimmune disorders, certain types of cancer, all have high high high rates, of suppressed anger, implicated in that. And there are legitimate connections between the suppression of this emotion and the manifestation of illness, because we would much rather pathologize women, then listen to what they're saying, and make societal change.

Kassia Binkowski
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