In praise of anger
Aug. 30th, 2006 11:17 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sabotabbyI noticed that no one immediately took issue with my statement yesterday that anger is the emotion most likely to produce change. So that's uncontroversial, at least on my friends list. Well, duh.
Notice that hardly any of you were encouraged to express anger when you were children or teenagers.
Boys and girls alike, most of you were either encouraged to repress it or your anger was ignored. I don't think that my friends list is a very representative sample, though. (![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
wlach pointed out, when we were discussing this, that boys who were encouraged to express their anger are less likely to have grown into the sorts of people who would read my friends list.) And in hindsight, I should have broken down "encouraged to channel anger into productive activities" into physical activities vs. non-physical activities, because it's also a gendered distinction. When I was growing up, I tended to channel my anger through writing and art. Cathartic though this may have been, these are both introverted and isolated activities, making me far more prone to repressing my anger than if I'd, say, taken up boxing.
If anger leads to change, then it follows that those lower on the totem pole would be the most encouraged to repress their anger. I'd wager that white liberal moviegoers tend to prefer scenes of Indians calmly lining up to get their heads cracked in by the British in Gandhi over Algerian guerrillas blowing up the French in The Battle of Algiers. But because breaking it down by other systems of oppression (class, geography, ethnic background, sexual orientation, etc.) would have gotten far too complicated for a quick LJ survey, So, sex. My suspicion was that those socialized as girls would be discouraged from expressing anger more frequently than those socialized as boys.
This wasn't confirmed in questions 2–4, but like I said, my friends list is probably atypical that way. (I wonder whether other groups of people are as likely to list injustice as their top rage-inducer.)
The next set of questions were more telling. My home life was very different than my school life; though introverted by virtue of having talkative parents, at home I was told that girls should stand up for themselves. Outside of the home, my socialization conformed much more faithfully to mainstream notions of power and gender hegemony.
Confession time: I actually was a Brownie. Don't ask me why I got the notion in my head (I think it was because I was nature-girl and I thought it'd be like Scouts, with camping expeditions and rope-tying and such), but I went through the thing and they were happy to get rid of me at the wing-sprouting ceremony or whatever.
Anyway, every week we had to repeat a pledge to think of others before ourselves. Survey says that Boy Scouts did not have to do this. While I think that in some ways, it is good to think of others before oneself (I'm an activist, after all), this only works as a cultural ethos if everyone is putting other people first. Otherwise, you have girls being trained to put boys first, and boys trained to put themselves first, and what does that sound like to you?
The next question was vaguer and more open to interpretation. But check out the numbers: 35.3% of girls were told to "speak up" by adults, versus 45% percent of boys. Half of girls weren't, versus 35% of boys.
Which brings me back to one of the prompts for this skientifical survey: Being told, mostly by men, that I'm "too angry."
What does "too angry" mean? In one recent conversation, it had to do with me being too angry about things that aren't within my power to change. There are things that aren't within my power to change that I'm happy about, though, and no one ever accuses me of being too happy. (And I disagreed, at least in part, that some things weren't within my power to change. Certainly, it was true on an individual level, but I've never held that one's individual actions were terribly important in the grand scheme of things. That's why we have mass movements.)
So among the emotions typically thought of as negative, we have fear and sadness. There's a greater acceptance when women channel negative reactions into either one of these.caprinus hit the nail on the head in terms of what I was trying to find out with this survey:
To get the last question, check out David Brin's essays about Star Wars. He Godwins all over the place (and totally lets Western democracy and racist stereotypes off the hook), but he makes a good point:
Or as the bumper sticker says, "If you're not angry, you're not paying attention."
Notice that hardly any of you were encouraged to express anger when you were children or teenagers.
Boys and girls alike, most of you were either encouraged to repress it or your anger was ignored. I don't think that my friends list is a very representative sample, though. (
wlach pointed out, when we were discussing this, that boys who were encouraged to express their anger are less likely to have grown into the sorts of people who would read my friends list.) And in hindsight, I should have broken down "encouraged to channel anger into productive activities" into physical activities vs. non-physical activities, because it's also a gendered distinction. When I was growing up, I tended to channel my anger through writing and art. Cathartic though this may have been, these are both introverted and isolated activities, making me far more prone to repressing my anger than if I'd, say, taken up boxing.If anger leads to change, then it follows that those lower on the totem pole would be the most encouraged to repress their anger. I'd wager that white liberal moviegoers tend to prefer scenes of Indians calmly lining up to get their heads cracked in by the British in Gandhi over Algerian guerrillas blowing up the French in The Battle of Algiers. But because breaking it down by other systems of oppression (class, geography, ethnic background, sexual orientation, etc.) would have gotten far too complicated for a quick LJ survey, So, sex. My suspicion was that those socialized as girls would be discouraged from expressing anger more frequently than those socialized as boys.
This wasn't confirmed in questions 2–4, but like I said, my friends list is probably atypical that way. (I wonder whether other groups of people are as likely to list injustice as their top rage-inducer.)
The next set of questions were more telling. My home life was very different than my school life; though introverted by virtue of having talkative parents, at home I was told that girls should stand up for themselves. Outside of the home, my socialization conformed much more faithfully to mainstream notions of power and gender hegemony.
Confession time: I actually was a Brownie. Don't ask me why I got the notion in my head (I think it was because I was nature-girl and I thought it'd be like Scouts, with camping expeditions and rope-tying and such), but I went through the thing and they were happy to get rid of me at the wing-sprouting ceremony or whatever.
Anyway, every week we had to repeat a pledge to think of others before ourselves. Survey says that Boy Scouts did not have to do this. While I think that in some ways, it is good to think of others before oneself (I'm an activist, after all), this only works as a cultural ethos if everyone is putting other people first. Otherwise, you have girls being trained to put boys first, and boys trained to put themselves first, and what does that sound like to you?
The next question was vaguer and more open to interpretation. But check out the numbers: 35.3% of girls were told to "speak up" by adults, versus 45% percent of boys. Half of girls weren't, versus 35% of boys.
Which brings me back to one of the prompts for this skientifical survey: Being told, mostly by men, that I'm "too angry."
What does "too angry" mean? In one recent conversation, it had to do with me being too angry about things that aren't within my power to change. There are things that aren't within my power to change that I'm happy about, though, and no one ever accuses me of being too happy. (And I disagreed, at least in part, that some things weren't within my power to change. Certainly, it was true on an individual level, but I've never held that one's individual actions were terribly important in the grand scheme of things. That's why we have mass movements.)
So among the emotions typically thought of as negative, we have fear and sadness. There's a greater acceptance when women channel negative reactions into either one of these.
caprinus hit the nail on the head in terms of what I was trying to find out with this survey:Similar chemistry governs anger and fear. They are basically one kind of response (acute stress response) with a number of possible situational expressions, from "fight" (anger) to "flight" (fear). I think sabotabby is curious to see whether the situational expressions seem dependent on the differences in nurture given boys and girls in our cultural environment, encouraging anger in boys and fear in girls. An alternative explanation would be that the differences are genetically/hormonally hardwired to some degree; as with everything else about behaviour, it's probably a mix. But what proportions? And what should be nurtured if both gender's best interest was at heart of rearing? (i.e. outside of patriarchy)Being a rather angry girl myself, despite social conditioning to the contrary, I'm inclined to go with nurture over nature. It's taken a long time for me to go from internalizing anger to expressing it. That's probably lost me some friends and made my life considerably more difficult. Even now, I value self-sacrifice and repression far more than I should.
To get the last question, check out David Brin's essays about Star Wars. He Godwins all over the place (and totally lets Western democracy and racist stereotypes off the hook), but he makes a good point:
The biggest moral flaw in the "Star Wars" universe is one point that Lucas stresses over and over again, through the voice of his all-wise guru character, Yoda.Okay, that tangent was excessively geeky (I could also talk about the "deadly sin" of wrath, but "Star Wars" is more fun to talk about), but I'd assert that the repression of anger remains an effective means of social control.
Let's see if I get this right. Fear makes you angry and anger makes you evil, right?
Now I'll concede at once that fear has been a major motivator of intolerance in human history. I can picture knightly adepts being taught to control fear and anger, as we saw credibly in "The Empire Strikes Back." Calmness makes you a better warrior and prevents mistakes. Persistent wrath can cloud judgment. That part is completely believable.
But then, in "Return of the Jedi," Lucas takes this basic wisdom and perverts it, saying -- "If you get angry -- even at injustice and murder -- it will automatically and immediately transform you into an unalloyedly evil person! All of your opinions and political beliefs will suddenly and magically reverse. Every loyalty will be forsaken and your friends won't be able to draw you back. You will instantly join your sworn enemy as his close pal or apprentice. All because you let yourself get angry at his crimes."
Uh, say what? Could you repeat that again, slowly?
In other words, getting angry at Adolf Hitler will cause you to rush right out and join the Nazi Party? Excuse me, George. Could you come up with a single example of that happening? Ever?
That contention is, in itself, a pretty darn evil thing to preach. Above all, it is just plain dumb.
Or as the bumper sticker says, "If you're not angry, you're not paying attention."
