WOMEN ARE ANGRY by Jennifer Cox
Reading reflections - WOMEN ARE ANGRY by Jennifer Cox
After listening to episodes of the excellent podcast ‘Women Are Mad’ hosted by Jennifer Cox and Salima Saxton, I knew this book was for me. Written by psychotherapist Jennifer Cox, this is a hard-hitting and important book about the anger women hold within them, anger built up from a life-time of pressure and conditioning.
“Anger is eating us up, from the inside out. The pressures heaped on women by every level of society, and its systems, leave us furious. But we’ve been conditioned not to recognise our rage, so it burns behind the scenes. And from there, it’s destroying us.”
Cox draws on her knowledge and experience as a therapist to track a journey through the different stages of a woman’s life, from a baby girl through to an older woman, and everything in between. She explores the different expectations placed on girls and boys, the language girls hear about themselves, the way they are praised and criticised, and how shame and confusion about their bodies intensifies as they get older. She examines women’s struggle to understand their own sexual desire when the dominant pressure of the male gaze makes them feel their body is not their own. There are sections on fertility, pregnancy, maternity, miscarriage, parenting, employment, the menopause, aging, and, throughout it all, the lifelong and generational conditioning that leads women to feel they must please others at the expense of themselves.
Cox writes that women in her clinic are often apologising: they “will almost always say sorry for the perceived smallness of their troubles.” This resonated for me, reminding me of my first few therapy sessions where, despite my breaking body and mind declaring otherwise, I told my therapist that I felt indulgent coming to therapy, that I knew many people had much more significant challenges in their life. He told me, in a moment of unusual directness, that from his perspective if anything I should have come sooner. Women spend so much time worrying that they are ‘too much’, or that they are making themselves ridiculous, or that they are upsetting those around them, that they end up internalising everything that they really feel in order to keep others happy. I can think of so many times in my life when I’ve given in, apologised, pretended something was my fault, convinced myself I wanted something that I actually did not want at all, simply to protect myself from being hurt, or laughed at, or criticised, or accused of being difficult. Cox writes how some women “seek to flatter male egos as a familiar way of keeping themselves protected.” The ‘fawn’ approach to conflict, perhaps, when we don’t feel safe enough to fight.
“That 13-year old girl is still inside you. We’re doing this for her.”
As Cox writes with such clarity in her book, this pressure is making us sick. Women feel so much in their bodies, and I know from my own experience that it was when I was feeling a terrible and indescribable rage that I had no idea how to expel, that I developed a chronic auto-immune disease that seemed to flare up when my emotions felt unbearable. Cox expresses it beautifully: we need to use our anger better, to find a vocabulary for our feelings, to pay attention to our bodies and take them seriously, to ‘get back in there’ and stop being afraid of our strong emotions.
“The more adept we get at hearing our feelings and taking them seriously, the less we feel frightened and floored by them.”
This is an important book for everyone. It is for the women who can see themselves in these pages; it is for anyone who has ever struggled with the overwhelming strength of their emotions; and it is for all of us who have coped by hiding from difficult triggers for fear of exposing ourselves. Cox tells us: “Let’s start feeling it. Let’s feel it all.”