Random
Don’t piss us off
I’ve been thinking about pissed off women lately. Or, rather, I’ve been thinking about why writer-artists like to portray women as pissed off, including female writers. Are women really as angry as art and pop culture say? If so, aren’t men equally angry?
Think Medea.
Think Clytemnestra.
Think Gertrude (as in Hamlet’s mother, not my cat).
I mean, a lot of women are pissed off in literature.
And in film.
And in music.
For example, here is a song about an angry woman. It is beautiful. Watch it. Love it. (I must’ve watched this fifteen times in a row on Sunday, no exaggeration.)
So, why do you think art & pop culture portray women as so angry? Surely, it’s an exaggeration. And what about men? Do you think lit-art portrayed men to be equally pissed off as women? Are women simply better at being pissed? What does this say about expected gender roles?
I close with William Congreve, who so aptly wrote:
Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned / Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned.
It’s sad to know writers think that’s really all that’s going on with us. Congreve made it sound so poignant, but the angry woman characters of today don’t have that mythic quality. There’s probably a good way to write an angry woman, but most bore me to tears.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HasEPeeiX4A
How in the world do you count Gertrude as angry? She’s always trying to placate everyone. Hamlet is angry, Laertes is angry and throws himself on his sister’s grave; Gertrude is so not angry. Achilles is angry (“This is the story of an angry man.”) Lear is angry. Eminem, inexplicably, is angry.
On possibility is that men feel that their anger usually makes sense (which isn’t to say it’s necessarily rational, only that it can be clearly explained) whereas (to men), female rage often seems nigh unfathomable (even when rational.) The female trope is one of emotion, whereas the male trope is one of thought. (And I’m speaking in very broad terms about societal perception.)
I think there are plenty of instances of angry males in literature, though it’s possible that the fairness of such portrayals are tipped in favor of men. (Right now, I’m about a third of the way into Franzen’s “The Corrections” and all of the male characters seem to be angry.)
I thought women in art were pissed off because they have to go through a lot more bullshit in life than guys do? Like getting attention as poets so long as they dress nicely in Oprah magazines?
I’m angry, but I’m not fictional so I don’t count.
If a lot of male authors understood what was going on with women, they probably wouldn’t have ended up as authors.
If a lot of male authors understood what was going on with women, they probably wouldn’t have ended up as authors.
i feel like i’ve read a lot of angry male characters too, but yeah women are def portrayed angry or at least not happy. but honestly, characters who are emotionally balanced aren’t that interesting to read about.
Just yesterday I was reading about how annoying it was for a woman to read women who were passive, dependent and emotionally stunted at 12. In general I would say it’s going to far to say over the whole expanse of history women are commonly portrayed as ‘angry’–I don’t think it’s going to far to say that that was never largely true until very, very recently.
I think women are frequently angry in literature because women are frequently angry, among other emotions. Beyond that you have to take it on a writer by writer, character by character basis, or the question becomes a net too widely cast, if not vapid. You have to assess ideological anger, personal anger, and where they overlap. What is the woman angry at? ‘Men’? ‘History’? A man? A woman? Her mother? The door she shut her finger in? Is the woman’s rage the writer’s rage? Is the writer a man or a woman? As ‘anger’ became a more socially acceptable emotion for a woman to have its frequency of occurrence quite naturally increased. Both because it turns out women had shit to be angry about and it was also a cheap way of progressively not writing ‘feminine’ characters.
Now it’s like any other culturally encoded tendency for living life or representing it–frequently superficial, frequently authentic, always too simple when taken by itself. The added trouble to being a woman is that almost every aspect of being one has been given political dimension, which can be as confusing as it is clarifying. Many of the more searching women who post here post with regularity about living with this confusion, one some level or another–the dual feeling of having been broadened and reduced, expanded and exploited by the level of sheer self-consciousness developed in response to social circumstances. If we’re talking about broadly applying one, single emotional status to a whole human being to reflect its over all state–I know more confused women than I do angry ones. Maybe it’s easier to project an angry woman, maybe it’s easier to write an angry woman.
Just yesterday I was reading about how annoying it was for a woman to read women who were passive, dependent and emotionally stunted at 12. In general I would say it’s going to far to say over the whole expanse of history women are commonly portrayed as ‘angry’–I don’t think it’s going to far to say that that was never largely true until very, very recently.
I think women are frequently angry in literature because women are frequently angry, among other emotions. Beyond that you have to take it on a writer by writer, character by character basis, or the question becomes a net too widely cast, if not vapid. You have to assess ideological anger, personal anger, and where they overlap. What is the woman angry at? ‘Men’? ‘History’? A man? A woman? Her mother? The door she shut her finger in? Is the woman’s rage the writer’s rage? Is the writer a man or a woman? As ‘anger’ became a more socially acceptable emotion for a woman to have its frequency of occurrence quite naturally increased. Both because it turns out women had shit to be angry about and it was also a cheap way of progressively not writing ‘feminine’ characters.
Now it’s like any other culturally encoded tendency for living life or representing it–frequently superficial, frequently authentic, always too simple when taken by itself. The added trouble to being a woman is that almost every aspect of being one has been given political dimension, which can be as confusing as it is clarifying. Many of the more searching women who post here post with regularity about living with this confusion, one some level or another–the dual feeling of having been broadened and reduced, expanded and exploited by the level of sheer self-consciousness developed in response to social circumstances. If we’re talking about broadly applying one, single emotional status to a whole human being to reflect its over all state–I know more confused women than I do angry ones. Maybe it’s easier to project an angry woman, maybe it’s easier to write an angry woman.
I apologize in advance for stereotyping, and I’m not sure about a consistent thread of angry women literature and art, but my personal experience in general is that you really want to avoid getting woman angry.
My initial responses: I don’t really perceive a trend in the arts of women portrayed as angry as some kind of phenomenon. While the representation of women, across the arts, is pretty narrow, more often than not, I see women portrayed quite passively. I’d say women in literature and other arts aren’t portrayed as angry enough. When we do see women angry, those depictions are quite narrow and weirdly stereotypical I can’t take them seriously. The artistic expression of female anger might be the one place where it can be adequately expressed. Women have lots of reasons to be angry. People have lots of reasons to be angry. Artistic expression is one of the better ways of dealing with that anger.
yeah ok, amy, you’re totally right about Gertrude. i had her confused with another character. it’s been a while since i’ve read my shakespeare.
Ha, Frank! It’s more how men portray women as angry that bothers me. Women portraying themselves as angry, well, ho-hum.
The Angry Young man is so common in art that there is a capitilized term for it.
I hate the passive women too. Mostly, I’ve been listening to that Adele song, and I thought about all the angry, vengeful women songs, which got me thinking about the way women are stereotyped, by each other and by men. Mostly by men. The “angry woman” is def a stereotype though, one that I’ve had pelted at me with some regularity.
I guess that’s only part capitalized. Angry young Man.
I would have assumed women are more typically portrayed as passive than angry as well.
I have layers of issues relating to my mother’s anger I experienced as a child. I think that creates a strong subconscious force for alot of people. I am perversely attracted to angry women, just blind, senseless, intense female anger. I love it, it is so consuming.
Conversely I am repulsed by male anger, I fear it.
I have layers of issues relating to my mother’s anger I experienced as a child. I think that creates a strong subconscious force for alot of people. I am perversely attracted to angry women, just blind, senseless, intense female anger. I love it, it is so consuming.
Conversely I am repulsed by male anger, I fear it.
http://qr.net/CD0
The main problem (that I perceive) is the portrayal of black women as perpetually angry and only capable of anger. In the otherwise forgettable but sort of funny movie ‘Zach and Miri Make a Porno’, the only black woman in the movie is only capable of communicating by screaming and being angry at her husband. She yells every single line. (And she’s angry for no apparent reason.)
On the “angry black woman” trope is so fucked up and so pervasive. In every movie or TV show, the black woman is constantly rageful. Look at the wife of that one guy on 30 Rock. She always has some kind of issue. This one really gets to me.
angry like the woolf
Women have been portrayed (mostly by men, who’ve been, in Western civ (and one or two others), most of the portrayers) in many aspects or behaviors; ‘anger’ is one of the universally human modes that women ‘get’ to be represented as partaking of.
I don’t think this history of characterization, of categorization, means it’s impossible to say anything accurate about, say, actual ‘angry women’.
Women use rage to get or to express power. Rage is a mechanism or context for self-authorization; among people who are denied ‘official’ authority nearly generally, rage is a piercing of the veiling construct of that denial.
Oh this was fun to read! Partly because I am on a big Adele kick right now and also I go to a Women’s College so these are daily conversations for me. I think you raise some really great issues.
Take it easy.
Maybe women are so angry because we are constantly asking them why they are angry and making comments about their anger, rather than treating anger as a valid human response.
In general I would say
I don’t think it’s going to(sic) far
largely true
I think X are frequently
Beyond that
You have to
If we’re talking about broadly
Ok yeah. That makes more sense.
I’ve stared at this comment for a while trying to figure out etiquette with regard to writing a “Roger that” sort of reply. Like, is it necessary for me to say “I understand”? Or is lack of a reply implicit?
Someone should write something about the etiquette of posting on these blogs. Maybe I’ll be that someone, but I’m on the fence, doing that feels like it’d be a lot like writing the Hipster’s Handbook.
sweet post. i am surprised that more people (women?) aren’t chiming. or seems like a more focused generalization would be the ‘psycho exgirlfriend’ or something.
i think generally men are expected to handle anger in a collected mindful way. they, of course, will knock their opponent the fuck out — but with like the force, jedi stylee, while (and only more recently since we can vote and make money) women just get to do a little ineffectual yelling, maybe boil an innocent bunny or two. and attempts to ‘reclaim’ (e.g. that meredith bitch from the 90s, i think) are eventually ridiculed.
even for a woman, a woman’s anger is going to be difficult to portray accurately or in a balanced way in the wake of all these well-worn cliches.
not even portray, but do you even know how to BE angry lily?
if you do, i envy you it. what does that look like? sometimes i feel like i wasn’t made so that i could be able to express anger which makes me want to key my ex’s car in the middle of the night and go home and eat haagen dazs (<–jokes).
I think due to lots if issues woman engage in…. thats why they are often depicted as angry in arts and even clip arts.. nice topic thou…lol