Rage is a battle-cry of a book, drawing on all corners of contemporary life, from media to education and medicine.
“It’s why I tend to research so compulsively.” “I can’t afford not to be,” she says, pointing to the bullying that women endure in the public sphere. Despite having weathered a transatlantic flight and a morning of interviews, she is the consummate professional: calm, precise and succinct with every phrase. She has years of experience in public speaking, often to resistant audiences on heated topics – and it shows. It enabled me to focus these thoughts through that lens,” she says.Ĭhemaly is a US-based feminist writer and director of the Women’s Media Center, a nonprofit organisation that aims to increase women’s participation in the media and the public sphere. Men’s anger, women’s anger, just anger everywhere. “I had already been writing about many of these issues in the book, but in the wake of the US election, the anger was palpable. Couldn’t such an unleashing change the world? Chemaly hopes so. In the end, I just replied: ‘In the beginning, there was darkness.’ As if to say: ‘Where do I even start with this?’”īut mainly Rage … asks what it would mean for us to “ungender our emotions” and for women to feel their full range of rage in a healthy, productive way. I also knew that I was older, in authority and I shouldn’t bully him.
So many thoughts crossed my mind simultaneous disbelief and anger. “I am still arrested by the thought of Toaster Boy,” as he is called in the book, she says. Then there was the young male student attending a guest lecture Chemaly was giving at a college in New England who couldn’t see why, hypothetically, him sending somebody a photo of a naked woman without getting her permission first was any different from sending a picture of a toaster (no woman at the lecture challenged this assertion).
The book opens with a memory of her mother silently throwing her wedding china out of the window – a lot of the plates were destroyed. Rage Becomes Her uses anecdotes from Chemaly’s own encounters with female anger. Williams just never has the benefit of the doubt.” “When you think about the male players – most of whom seem to be white men in this extremely genteel sport – the ones who do explode are ‘bad boys’ they’re charismatic. “Of course she’d be angry, but she wasn’t explosive.” She also notes the intense media scrutiny that Williams came under, typically accompanied by images of her looking “almost unhinged”. “The Serena Williams incident is a really good example,” says Chemaly, referring to the 2018 US Open final last weekend, in which Williams was penalised for arguing with the umpire when he accused her of cheating. Photograph: Dave Shopland/BPI/Rex/Shutterstock
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