By Nour Termos | Staff Writer

Angry women have been getting more representation in art: they kill, plot revenge schemes, and most importantly, emerge triumphant. This trend is most notably observed in movies such as “Gone Girl” and “Pearl” and books like “Boy Parts” and “A Certain Hunger”. It has even evolved into a theme where people seek out and idolize “unhinged” women who become heroic figures. While this sudden interest might seem striking to many, it is a valid one. This fierce anger portrays everything women have been taught, like submission and forgiveness.  

Women are socialized to occupy as little space as possible both physically and emotionally. Traditionally, big feelings must be reduced to tears and sadness, as anger and violence are perceived as aggressive and masculine. Over the years, the image of the “frail sad girl” has been constructed. This trend was particularly evident in 2014, with the influence of Tumblr and Lana Del Rey’s music and has recently resurfaced under “cottage core”/ “coquette” lifestyles. This aesthetic associates stereotypes of softness, calmness, and sensitivity with womanhood, romanticizing sadness and dismissing the validity of women’s feelings. Alternative attempts at showing strong emotions like anger were referred to as “hysteria”, the first mental illness attributed to women. Hysteria was linked to supernatural forces and women’s genitalia and is still used to belittle them.

The “female rage” wave has been mostly a response to that and a way to reclaim agency over our feelings after decades of being reduced to irrational emotional beings. It challenges the idea that women must self-sacrifice for others and never have boundaries, as the anger portrayed in these popular films is due to patriarchal treatment from men. This is why people are consuming such media: violence no longer contradicts womanhood. It is comforting because we are seeing our anger materializing and, most importantly, being feared.  We are used to men as angry murderers; it does not shock us as much as women covered in blood do. It is precisely that shock that people are enjoying, as it makes others take female voices more seriously. Women have long been feared and their anger has been believed to be destructive: witches, mermaids, Eve, fertility, and nature are all instances of suppressed female power that has turned evil out of weakness.

The anger that women feel is internally built up from years of silencing and objectification. With the rise of this trend, many are expressing the need to have similar outbursts and really see themselves in the character. It brought a lot of people together and created a collective sense of liberation through self-expression that defies gender norms. So, overall, women’s anger is a fresh and liberating outlook into our lives, but that outlook is not as feminist as we think. These representations of angry women still cater to the male gaze, especially when directed and produced by men. Jennifer in “Jennifer’s Body” is a hot skinny white woman, Lisa from “Girl Interrupted” deeply expresses her anger, and no matter how ugly and real that expression is molded into, it is still sexy and conforming to beauty standards. The women who kill and come out drenched in blood and holding knives are half-naked and end up being “slutty” Halloween costumes. The woman who is rightfully mad becomes the embodiment of the “hot psycho girl” stereotype. The anger is fetishized and turned into an object of male consumption, which defeats the initial purpose of the message. It is still a performance for a male audience, and the screams, the fancy clothes, and the messy hair are good enough to become a whole aesthetic.

What some consumers fail to grasp is that showing anger is a privilege. Women already struggle in doing so, but black women struggle more, and any instance of anger is labeled as “ghetto” and delusional. Hijabis are masculine and extreme, and lesbians are disrespectful and dominant. Anger is only valid when it is white and rich.  A hierarchy of cultures is created, as the image of the angry beautiful women is internalized and adopted by others with a complete exclusion of the struggles of underprivileged women who have the most anger out of everyone. The long-denied sense of emotional release that this trend is encouraging is good for many and is making us question the gendered difference in emotions, but it seems like the level of assimilation tied to it transformed anger from a form of resistance and unity to a tool of male satisfaction and conformity.