TCSE: Ted Corpus Search Engine

Recorded at	November 28, 2018
Event	TEDWomen 2018
Duration (min:sec)	11:30
Video Type	TED Stage Talk
Words per minute	153.01 very slow
Readability (FK)	54.54 medium
Speaker	Soraya Chemaly
Country	United States of America
Occupation	writer
Description	American writer


1	00:12	So sometimes I get angry,
2	00:15	and it took me many years to be able to say just those words.
3	00:20	In my work,
4	00:21	sometimes my body thrums, I'm so enraged.
5	00:26	But no matter how justified my anger has been,
6	00:30	throughout my life,
7	00:31	I've always been led to understand that my anger is an exaggeration,
8	00:36	a misrepresentation,
9	00:38	that it will make me rude and unlikable.
10	00:42	Mainly as a girl, I learned, as a girl, that anger is an emotion
11	00:47	better left entirely unvoiced.
12	00:51	Think about my mother for a minute.
13	00:53	When I was 15, I came home from school one day,
14	00:56	and she was standing on a long veranda outside of our kitchen,
15	01:00	holding a giant stack of plates.
16	01:02	Imagine how dumbfounded I was when she started to throw them like Frisbees...
17	01:08	(Laughter)
18	01:09	into the hot, humid air.
19	01:12	When every single plate had shattered into thousands of pieces
20	01:16	on the hill below,
21	01:17	she walked back in and she said to me, cheerfully, "How was your day?"
22	01:21	(Laughter)
23	01:25	Now you can see how a child would look at an incident like this
24	01:31	and think that anger is silent, isolating, destructive, even frightening.
25	01:37	Especially though when the person who's angry is a girl or a woman.
26	01:43	The question is why.
27	01:45	Anger is a human emotion, neither good nor bad.
28	01:49	It is actually a signal emotion.
29	01:50	It warns us of indignity, threat, insult and harm.
30	01:55	And yet, in culture after culture, anger is reserved as the moral property
31	02:01	of boys and men.
32	02:03	Now, to be sure, there are differences.
33	02:05	So in the United States, for example,
34	02:07	an angry black man is viewed as a criminal,
35	02:12	but an angry white man has civic virtue.
36	02:15	Regardless of where we are, however, the emotion is gendered.
37	02:19	And so we teach children to disdain anger in girls and women,
38	02:24	and we grow up to be adults that penalize it.
39	02:29	So what if we didn't do that?
40	02:32	What if we didn't sever anger from femininity?
41	02:36	Because severing anger from femininity means we sever girls and women
42	02:40	from the emotion that best protects us from injustice.
43	02:43	What if instead we thought about developing emotional competence
44	02:47	for boys and girls?
45	02:49	The fact is we still remarkably socialize children
46	02:53	in very binary and oppositional ways.
47	02:56	Boys are held to absurd, rigid norms of masculinity --
48	03:01	told to renounce the feminine emotionality of sadness or fear
49	03:05	and to embrace aggression and anger as markers of real manhood.
50	03:10	On the other hand, girls learn to be deferential,
51	03:14	and anger is incompatible with deference.
52	03:18	In the same way that we learned to cross our legs and tame our hair,
53	03:24	we learned to bite our tongues and swallow our pride.
54	03:28	What happens too often is that for all of us,
55	03:32	indignity becomes imminent in our notions of femininity.
56	03:36	There's a long personal and political tale to that bifurcation.
57	03:42	In anger, we go from being spoiled princesses and hormonal teens,
58	03:47	to high maintenance women and shrill, ugly nags.
59	03:52	We have flavors, though; pick your flavor.
60	03:55	Are you a spicy hot Latina when you're mad?
61	03:58	Or a sad Asian girl? An angry black woman? Or a crazy white one?
62	04:05	You can pick.
63	04:07	But in fact, the effect is that when we say what's important to us,
64	04:11	which is what anger is conveying,
65	04:14	people are more likely to get angry at us for being angry.
66	04:18	Whether we're at home or in school or at work or in a political arena,
67	04:24	anger confirms masculinity, and it confounds femininity.
68	04:29	So men are rewarded for displaying it,
69	04:31	and women are penalized for doing the same.
70	04:35	This puts us at an enormous disadvantage,
71	04:38	particularly when we have to defend ourselves and our own interests.
72	04:43	If we're faced with a threatening street harasser, predatory employer,
73	04:47	a sexist, racist classmate,
74	04:50	our brains are screaming, "Are you kidding me?"
75	04:54	And our mouths say, "I'm sorry, what?"
76	04:58	(Laughter)
77	05:00	Right?
78	05:03	And it's conflicting because the anger gets all tangled up
79	05:06	with the anxiety and the fear and the risk and retaliation.
80	05:09	If you ask women what they fear the most in response to their anger,
81	05:13	they don't say violence.
82	05:15	They say mockery.
83	05:17	Think about what that means.
84	05:20	If you have multiple marginalized identities, it's not just mockery.
85	05:25	If you defend yourself, if you put a stake in the ground,
86	05:29	there can be dire consequences.
87	05:32	Now we reproduce these patterns not in big, bold and blunt ways,
88	05:37	but in the everyday banality of life.
89	05:41	When my daughter was in preschool, every single morning
90	05:44	she built an elaborate castle -- ribbons and blocks --
91	05:47	and every single morning the same boy knocked it down gleefully.
92	05:51	His parents were there, but they never intervened before the fact.
93	05:56	They were happy to provide platitudes afterwards:
94	06:00	"Boys will be boys."
95	06:02	"It's so tempting, he just couldn't help himself."
96	06:06	I did what many girls and women learn to do.
97	06:10	I preemptively kept the peace,
98	06:12	and I taught my daughter to do the same thing.
99	06:15	She used her words.
100	06:18	She tried to gently body block him.
101	06:20	She moved where she was building in the classroom, to no effect.
102	06:25	So I and the other adults mutually constructed a particular male entitlement.
103	06:32	He could run rampant and control the environment,
104	06:35	and she kept her feelings to herself and worked around his needs.
105	06:41	We failed both of them by not giving her anger the uptake
106	06:45	and resolution that it deserved.
107	06:48	Now that's a microcosm of a much bigger problem.
108	06:51	Because culturally, worldwide,
109	06:55	we preference the performance of masculinity --
110	06:59	and the power and privilege that come with that performance --
111	07:03	over the rights and needs and words of children and women.
112	07:08	So it will come as absolutely no surprise, probably, to the people in this room
113	07:13	that women report being angrier in more sustained ways and with more intensity
114	07:19	than men do.
115	07:21	Some of that comes from the fact that we're socialized to ruminate,
116	07:24	to keep it to ourselves and mull it over.
117	07:27	But we also have to find socially palatable ways
118	07:31	to express the intensity of emotion that we have
119	07:35	and the awareness that it brings of our precarity.
120	07:39	So we do several things.
121	07:42	If men knew how often women were filled with white hot rage when we cried,
122	07:47	they would be staggered.
123	07:49	(Laughter)
124	07:51	We use minimizing language.
125	07:53	"We're frustrated. No, really, it's OK."
126	07:55	(Laughter)
127	07:57	We self-objectify and lose the ability
128	08:01	to even recognize the physiological changes that indicate anger.
129	08:07	Mainly, though, we get sick.
130	08:11	Anger has now been implicated in a whole array of illnesses
131	08:15	that are casually dismissed as "women's illnesses."
132	08:19	Higher rates of chronic pain, autoimmune disorders, disordered eating,
133	08:24	mental distress, anxiety, self harm, depression.
134	08:29	Anger affects our immune systems, our cardiovascular systems.
135	08:33	Some studies even indicate that it affects mortality rates,
136	08:37	particularly in black women with cancer.
137	08:42	I am sick and tired of the women I know being sick and tired.
138	08:49	Our anger brings great discomfort,
139	08:52	and the conflict comes because it's our role to bring comfort.
140	08:57	There is anger that's acceptable.
141	08:58	We can be angry when we stay in our lanes and buttress the status quo.
142	09:05	As mothers or teachers,
143	09:08	we can be mad, but we can't be angry about the tremendous costs of nurturing.
144	09:13	We can be angry at our mothers.
145	09:15	Let's say, as teenagers -- patriarchal rules and regulations --
146	09:19	we don't blame systems, we blame them.
147	09:21	We can be angry at other women, because who doesn't love a good catfight?
148	09:26	And we can be angry at men with lower status in an expressive hierarchy
149	09:32	that supports racism or xenophobia.
150	09:35	But we have an enormous power in this.
151	09:38	Because feelings are the purview of our authority,
152	09:43	and people are uncomfortable with our anger.
153	09:46	We should be making people comfortable with the discomfort they feel
154	09:51	when women say no, unapologetically.
155	09:55	We can take emotions and think in terms of competence and not gender.
156	10:01	People who are able to process their anger and make meaning from it
157	10:05	are more creative, more optimistic,
158	10:08	they have more intimacy,
159	10:10	they're better problem solvers,
160	10:14	they have greater political efficacy.
161	10:17	Now I am a woman writing about women and feelings,
162	10:20	so very few men with power
163	10:23	are going to take what I'm saying seriously, as a matter of politics.
164	10:27	We think of politics and anger in terms of the contempt and disdain and fury
165	10:33	that are feeding a rise of macho-fascism in the world.
166	10:37	But if it's that poison, it's also the antidote.
167	10:41	We have an anger of hope, and we see it every single day
168	10:45	in the resistant anger of women and marginalized people.
169	10:49	It's related to compassion and empathy and love,
170	10:54	and we should recognize that anger as well.
171	10:59	The issue is that societies that don't respect women's anger don't respect women.
172	11:07	The real danger of our anger isn't that it will break bonds or plates.
173	11:14	It's that it exactly shows how seriously we take ourselves,
174	11:19	and we expect other people to take us seriously as well.
175	11:24	When that happens, chances are very good
176	11:27	that women will be able to smile when they want to.
177	11:33	(Applause)
178	11:34	Thank you.
179	11:35	(Applause) (Cheers)

Soraya Chemaly: The power of women's anger