Reading Material
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Women and anger:
Our culture has a huge problem with women who do not appear to be happy every hour of the day and night. I believe this is magnified with mothers, who are not only supposed to be Happy Smiling People constantly by virtue of their gender but also by virtue of their glorious state, the role of mother, which is supposed to be JOY. Right? Unhappy mother=bad mother.
Unfortunately this does not reflect reality, as Bernadine P Healy says in the Journal of Women’s Health, Vol 7(4), pp. 393-394: “…. studies have shown that within family life, women with or without children are actually angrier than men. As children arrive, and their numbers increase, women’s anger increases even more…. Anger management strategies for women are suggested including biological and rational responses to anger stimuli and turning free-floating anger to constructive purposes.”
[via]
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Translating Wal-Martese into English:
Dear Fornicating Harlot,
Shut up about the birth control already. Your comments and concerns are so very important to us, that we responded to your questions about our policies with an uninformative form letter.
To get a copy in the original Wal-Martese, sign this petition.
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Eco-poverty - one of these days Christy will convert me to Rhetorical Deism:
In addition to being a profoundly beautiful story, I love the theological implications of God creating the earth. At every stage, God blessed it and hallowed it and said that it was good - all the plants and trees and birds and fish and animals. It was all growing and running and singing and swimming, and God liked it all. Then God played in the dirt and blew us full of the breath of God and thought that we were the best thing ever. The deepest truth is not that we are wounded. The deepest truth is that we’re good. We tend to forget that about ourselves - and each other.
- And finally, a kitten.
Rana wrote:
I needed that kitten!
Yeah, I got that oh-so-not-helpful WalMart form letter too. Talk about arrogant non-answers; your “translation” is dead on.
Posted 18 Apr 2020 at 4:40 pm ¶
Rana wrote:
Oh, wait, it was someone else’s translation. But thanks for the link!
(Yes, it is the end of the day and I am tired.)
Posted 18 Apr 2020 at 4:41 pm ¶
yami wrote:
I can’t blame them, though, really - if they actually answered our concerns they’d be stuck saying some absurd and indefensible shit. If you can’t say anything sensible, don’t say anything at all!
Posted 18 Apr 2020 at 4:58 pm ¶
Kim wrote:
HOLY COW that kitten is CUTE.
Posted 18 Apr 2020 at 7:21 pm ¶
Amanda wrote:
I think it’s time for a nationwide boycott of Walmart. Bring them to their knees! Force them to start treating women like human beings for a change! Who’s with me?
(I doubt it would work, because where else are people going to shop for cheap stuff in communities where Walmart has driven all the competition away? But it would be so, so wonderful if it *did* work.)
That essay on women and anger is totally apropos. I’ve been in a real “Hulk SMASH!” kind of mood lately. It’s not just the pharmacy issue, it’s everything I hear on the news. Anyone else feeling the same way?
Posted 18 Apr 2020 at 8:13 pm ¶
Steve Kite wrote:
It’s not you, Amanda…. it’s just parts of the world and some of its participants need a good Hulk SMASHing now and then and we’re living through one of those thens.It’s not an ENTIRELY feminist issue though… Jerks are jerks regardless of plumbing.
Posted 18 Apr 2020 at 9:13 pm ¶
yami wrote:
I haven’t been to Wal-Mart in yonks - it helps that the nearest one is an irritating drive away, though, I have no idea how my resolve would hold under other circumstances. I’m all for a boycott but my list of demands for that company is so absurdly long… if they
Stop letting their employees interfere at random with my medical decisions;
Stop interfering with unionization efforts;
Become just a touch more ethical about the ways in which they drive the competition out of business; and
DIE DIE DIE
… then they can have my business. Aside from the bit about how they’ll be DEAD DEAD DEAD and thus hard to give money to.
Steve, you’re dead on; this is one of those times. But honestly, has it ever not been?
Anger itself is not a feminist issue, but women are socially constrained in expressing anger in ways that men are not, and those constraints are totally a feminist issue. An angry one! GRRAAR!
Posted 18 Apr 2020 at 9:34 pm ¶
wolfangel wrote:
There are so many reasons to avoid Walmart, somehow birth control is far off the field for me (reasonable pay? health coverage? end of union busting?).
Posted 19 Apr 2020 at 3:01 am ¶
yami wrote:
‘Zackly.
Posted 19 Apr 2020 at 7:18 am ¶
Daniel wrote:
Does anyone have any ideas for the origins of society’s discomfort with women’s anger come from? Is it a protestant fear of anger not being the “christian” ideal? It just seems absurd to me that one sex can be angry and the other can’t? (i.e. Why is Kurt Cobain a hero and Courtney Love a slut?) Any good reading matterial would be appreciated.
Posted 19 Apr 2020 at 2:09 pm ¶
Shai wrote:
Daniel, I remember a book by Elizabeth Wurtzel called “Bitch” that delivered a pretty incisive (and incensed) discussion of the gender relativity of anger in pop culture, citing Cobain and Love. It’s a good read.
Posted 20 Apr 2020 at 2:01 pm ¶
yami wrote:
Yow! I’m not enough of a historian to even begin on this topic. If you find anything good, report back, will you?
So, quickie Amazon linkage, then it’s off to bed for me:
Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women
Fighting Women: Anger and Aggression in Aboriginal Australia
Just Anger: Representing Women’s Anger in Early Modern England
The last two looked interesting, but it’s hard to know if either Aboriginal Australia or Early Modern England would be a useful contrast without actually having some kind of hypothesis… eh.
Posted 20 Apr 2020 at 9:37 pm ¶