I once believed that writing off opinionated women as being belligerent and not worth listening to was something of a modern time period. Recently I’ve started thinking about how long women have been conditioned to be soft and easily swayed. It began with gender roles and the perceived notion of what a woman should be. Once women began to educate themselves and make their own decisions people took personal offense and found the need to create another roadblock in the path to their success. Thus, the angry woman was born. History has shown that the angry woman doesn’t get the man she wants, isn’t respected, and doesn’t have many female friends.

I thought back to an excerpt from A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf and how she disguises her rebellion against the social norm of the time. Her rage is brought on by the way women were being kept from pursuing writing. She has been tasked with writing about the role of women in the writing/literature community and, of course, the commissioners figured that she would say something very generic and optimistic. However, she decides to state her own opinion, showing how women are mostly shunned and discouraged when they try to begin to write. Nothing is all daisies and peaches. As she is stating her thesis she plays coy, pretending to be the innocent little woman who doesn’t know much but will try her best. The fact that Woolf had to present her thesis as if it was a heavy pill that the reader needed to be eased into swallowing shows how she had to find a way around sounding angry or too opinionated for the time period.

Two semesters ago I took a seminar on intersectional feminism in the media and there were many times that the angry woman was discussed. We used the book Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud: The Rise and Reign of the Unruly Woman by Anne Helen Peterson to analyze modern female figures in the media and how their actions or opinions made people uncomfortable.

Peterson mentions Nicki Minaj and how she is very controversial for her provocative songs and appearance. She says that Minaj goes far away from the conventional idea of a woman, which makes her unruly. Not only does Minaj use sex to sell, but she speaks out about the disparities between men and women in the hip hop industry and many people don’t like that. They fall back on her highly sexualized status in the industry and use it to brand her as the angry and slutty woman, something that seems much worse than just being angry alone.

Peterson also mentions Serena Williams, who is constantly criticized for having a “masculine physique” simply because she is in great shape. Her muscles are a threat to those who believe women should only have soft and doughy bodies. She has one of the strongest serves in the history of tennis, which people have often described as angry or scary. She’s had some outbreaks of emotion on the court, where she has yelled at the chair umpire. It was such big news that people who didn’t even watch tennis knew about the incident, but things are kept quiet when male players curse out the umpire and throw their racquets down, completely destroying them. They’re often fined, if anything, not slandered in the public view.

During that seminar, we also watched a short part of a documentary about hip hop/rap and how it affects the African American community. They mentioned how male rappers portray women in their songs, calling them “bitches”, “hoes”, and talking about all the derogatory things they would do to them. They interviewed some women who were furious with the lyrics, saying that they disrespected women everywhere and made women sound like property. Several famous rappers responded, claiming that any woman who was angry with their lyrics simply wasn’t sexy or cute enough to be in their videos or be rapped about in their songs.

The documentary also takes the viewers to a hip hop event where a multitude of up and coming rappers are trying to get noticed. There are groups of women huddled together all around the venue, while men catcall and harass them. When the men are asked why they were catcalling, they say it’s simply because of how the girls are dressed and they cannot get angry because they’re asking for it. When the women are asked whether or not these derogatory lyrics anger them, they respond by saying that they know they’re not the girls the rappers are talking about in their songs.

For years, women have been discouraged from being opinionated by being told that speaking their minds makes them angry or bitter and somehow that’s wrong. To reinforce this idea, women are often pitted against each other, which is why so many women seem to have a “pick me” attitude towards relationships with men. The scantily dressed women at the venue criticize the kind of woman that the songs relate to but they’re so caught up trying to be accepted that they don’t realize that, in the eyes of these men, they are exactly the kind of woman in the songs. The men view them as “bitches” and “hoes” and give them the wrong kind of attention, which the women lap up. It’s a cycle of learned behavior and degradation of one’s self-worth and it has succeeded for years.

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