Angry Girls

By the time I was in tenth grade, I was terrified of having to walk through the hallways of my school — not out of concern about being late to class or even the large number of people in the hallway. The mere presence of boys — the same boys who had harassed me in middle school — made my body stiff with anxiety. Nothing about them had changed over the years except their size; the same unnerving presence they carried in middle school was now paired with six-foot-tall bodies.

No matter how I demonstrated my anger about this harassment, no one seemed to understand or take it seriously. The tears I showed to my therapist, parents, and school administrators in tenth grade never felt like they appropriately represented my true feelings. My therapist told me I needed to get angry as I sobbed in her office and discussed my anxieties, but I was mad at the boys who intimidated me, followed me home, and ridiculed me in the hallways. It felt wrong to be told to get angry because I already was angry.

Societal norms disabled me from expressing anger like boys can — the expression of anger we all seem to recognize. In the book Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger, author Soraya Chamaly describes how societal ideals modify and suppress feelings of anger in girls. “I don’t remember my parents or other adults ever talking to me about anger directly,” she writes. “Sadness, yes. Envy, anxiety, guilt, check, check, check. But not anger ... While parents talk to girls about emotions more than they do to boys, anger is excluded.” Aggression through words did not come naturally to me the way it did for the boys who harassed me in middle school. Instead, my anger manifested in tears.

The normalization of bad behavior in boys at the expense of girls further hindered my ability to feel and express anger caused by those boys’ harassment. Even though their behavior was often dismissed by adults, deep down, I knew it couldn’t be fully OK because of how it made me feel. Messages like “boys will be boys,” which I often heard, invalidate and dismiss the way girls feel when boys mistreat them. The dismissal caused me to keep quiet while silently grappling with the conflicting messages my body and society were sending me.

Sexist ideas about how girls should behave also intersect with racism. Take the stereotype of the “angry Black woman,” for example, which actively invalidates and dismisses Black girls’ and women’s anger as just a part of their inherent disposition. While 56% of girls in grades 7 to 12 experience sexual harassment at school, teachers have been found to see Black girls as hypersexual, which could lead to the dismissal of the sexual harassment they experience. Not only do Black girls experience higher rates of sexual harassment (and assault) at school, but they also experience racism and microaggressions, all of which fuel many emotions, including anger. Black girls have every reason to be angry (and I believe we should all be angry about the injustices they face), but their anger has been taken and used against them.

It took a long time for me and the people around me to understand that I was angry. The widely accepted presentation of anger requires raised voices, insults, and even violent behavior — all things society doesn’t allow women to do. So how are girls and women supposed to express their anger? How are our feelings supposed to be taken seriously?

We need to ditch these sexist ideas of anger and expect more from our boys, men, and society. If we want to change the experience of young girls in our schools, we need to hold boys accountable and de-normalize harassment and assault. Sexist jokes and uninvited sexual comments can no longer be “just a joke.” We need to recognize boys’ bad behavior and do something about it. We also need to recognize that sexist ideas have shaped how we think about emotions, specifically anger. We need to ask crying girls, What is really going on? We need to stop dismissing tears and “moodiness.” We need to be better for all of our angry girls.