How Many Angry Women Does It Take to Smash the Patriarchy?

And is it possible to get pleasure from rage?

Photo by Mike van den Bos on Unsplash

I once cried at Les Schwab. The desk clerk had been gaslighting me, trying to convince me that my tire almost falling off on the interstate wasn’t their fault, even though I had taken my car to Les Schwab the day before to get the tires changed. I asked to speak with the mechanic. He gaslit me, too. He suggested that a neighbor had played a prank, loosened the lug nuts on that tire.

This wasn’t the first time a car mechanic had patronized me. I was accustomed to male car people treating me like an idiot. There was the time I called a mechanic to schedule dropping my car off, and he asked if I had checked the dipstick. I told him I had. He then mansplained how to check a dipstick, and I told him, again, that I had checked the dipstick. He said, “Why don’t you have your boyfriend check it for you and then call me back.”

I was livid. Instead of shouting at him or writing a Yelp diatribe, though, I hung up the phone and cried.

At Les Schwab, standing before two men who were telling me I was mistaken, I saw red. I wanted to explain to the mechanic, voice steady and low, that his negligence had almost cost me my life. Instead, I asked for half my money back, then began to cry.

I was in a fury by the time I got home. Decades of being treated this way by greasy-fingered men had bubbled to a white-hot boil. I told my husband, through sobs, how angry I was. “I think tears are the way I express rage,” I said. “It’s so frustrating.” I didn’t want my rage to be interpreted as sadness or weakness. I wanted the people who pissed me off to feel my wrath.

In the long weeks since the United States re-elected a misogynistic dipstick, I’ve wanted to shout, I’ve wanted to scream. I’ve wanted to punch and kick and throw things at hard surfaces. Instead, when the rage bubbles up, I begin to cry.

Looking at the research, it’s no surprise that I seem unable to express my anger in more classically angry ways. There may be gender-based differences in brain biology to explain this. One study found that the orbital frontal cortex, the part of the brain that controls aggressive impulses, is larger in women than in men. In other words, in addition to the social conditioning that tells women to tamp down our anger, there is also a biological mechanism that helps women to keep our anger in check.

Which is great for moving through the world in a frictionless, people-pleasing way—and completely maddening if you really, really want to smash the patriarchy.

Photo by Gayatri Malhotra on Unsplash

A friend of mine was recently broken up with. And then she lost funding for her job because of mismanagement by a male colleague. I suggested we book a rage room.

Before long, we were comparing pricing packages for rage room options with two other female friends. How much were four women willing to pay to channel our rage into physical violence? For $400 total, we could book a room filled with bottles of paint, paint blaster guns, and paint balls. For $750, we could smash an entire car. Because we are writers, we booked the most basic room for $35 per person, which would include one bucket of ceramics and glass objects for each of us, plus wrenches, hammers, and baseball bats for smashing.

The night before our rage date, I was nervous. Would I, in the middle of the session, break down and weep? Would all my pent-up fury pour out in a flash flood of ugly crying? Was it even healthy to seek out anger-driven activities? I had trouble falling asleep that night, my body humming with adrenaline.

The next day, on a soggy Saturday morning, the four of us met at a drafty building on the city’s outskirts. The desk clerk led us to a room where we each changed into helmets with noise-canceling headphones, baggy coveralls, and cut-resistant gloves. She then took us to our rage room, explained the safety rules, and shut the door. I scanned the sheepish grins of my three riot grrrl companions, then hooked up a carefully curated rage playlist to the Bluetooth speaker, thinking that maybe loud, angry music would amp us up. I dialed the volume to near-deafening, then we faced our buckets.

Tentatively, each of us smashed our first object on a table in the middle of the room. We expelled some nervous laughter. We threw bottles and mugs and bowls against a metal wall, some of them exploding in pleasing showers of shards, some of them bouncing off the wall and hitting the ground intact in anticlimactic thuds. We took turns kicking and pummeling a punching bag at one end of the room, quickly discovering how good it felt to get more physical. Our bodies bounced as if warming up for a boxing match. We were loosening. We were figuring this rage thing out.

One friend suggested that we announce the symbolism for each object before we smashed it. I held up a small, stupid-looking ceramic pig and shouted, “This is for Trump!” I placed it on the table and lifted a heavy wrench over my head. It came crashing down onto the wood, missing my target. I felt a jolt of anger at this and aimed more carefully, this time breaking it, sending a large chunk flying onto the concrete floor. I lunged at the escapee, wielding the wrench until the pig was powder. When I looked up, everyone was laughing. I laughed, too.

We continued like this, announcing the metaphors, then smashing, then cheering, then laughing.

“This is for Elon!”

“This is for RFK Junior!”

“This is for the unequal distribution of household labor!”

“This is for all the mechanics who have made me feel stupid!”

We smashed in the name of reproductive rights, immigrant rights, affordable housing, and the environment. We smashed and laughed. Laughed and smashed.

There were a few items, though, that weren’t bashed to smithereens. One of my friends kept pulling dainty glass cups out of her bucket until she had a four-piece matching set. We cheered at the poetry of this. My friend stowed the glassware in her purse, and we vowed to drink from our “rage cups” at a future gathering. We joked about how you can take the angry woman out of her house, but you can’t take the domestic out of the angry woman.

By the time our forty minutes were up, it felt like we’d only just begun. We were pumped. We were cackling. We were electric with rage.

Our bodies were ready for a bar fight. Instead, we reconvened at a smoothie bar. Back in the civilized world, where unspoken social rules apply, we waited patiently for a table. Over baked goods and smoothies, my friend who had been broken up with confessed that she had been nervous at the outset. Later, she texted the group saying that it had been an adjustment for her to tap into her anger and express it violently, but that it was “such a good exercise in the productive and necessary expression of that emotion.”

She was right. What we were doing was completing the cycle. In one anger study, a psychologist recorded toddler tantrums and his findings showed that when kids were able to just be angry, without interference, they moved through their tantrum cycles more quickly, getting to the other side of them. Which makes so much sense. There’s nothing more aggravating than being angry and being told, “Everything is OK. Don’t be angry.” Completing the cycle of rage allows the body to release.

Another friend chimed in on the text thread: “Anger is so fun when you get to share it!” She was right, too. It only then occurred to me that I hadn’t cried in the rage room. We had cheered, laughed, danced, and ended the session with a group hug. The tears never came because it had been so much fun.

I thought about all the times I’ve sat alone in my office, doomscrolling the news—and how angry I’ve felt, how isolated. I thought about all the times I’ve joined a protest or a march, a volunteer organization or a fundraiser—and how energized I’ve felt, how connected.

There are many ways to move through anger. What’s clear is that one of those ways is a lot more fun than all the others. Completing the cycle in community is the most effective way to channel our collective rage.

How many angry women does it take to smash the patriarchy? There’s only one (fun) way to find out.

---

Download my playlist “Unhinged Feminist Rage” here.

The riot grrrls in our rage room.

---