Soraya Chemaly

While parents talk to girls about emotions more than they do to boys, anger is excluded.

Coping often involves self-silencing and feelings of powerlessness.

Context is equally critical, however. Our responses to provocation, our assessments, and our judgments always involve a back-and-forth between character and context.

While we experience anger internally, it is mediated culturally and externally by other people’s expectations and social prohibitions. Roles and responsibilities, power and privilege are the framers of our anger.

Relationships, culture, social status, exposure to discrimination, poverty, and access to power all factor into how we think about, experience, and utilize anger.

Anger is also not unidirectional but part of endless mental, physical, and intellectual feedback loops that operate below our conscious understanding.

If everyone feels anger, why focus on women? Why does gender matter?

As girls, we are not taught to acknowledge or manage our anger so much as fear, ignore, hide, and transform it.

On the other hand, anger and masculinity are powerfully enmeshed and reinforce one another. In boys and men, anger has to be controlled, but it is often seen as a virtue, especially when it is used to protect, defend, or lead.