Selena Schneider –201715039

Feminist Ethics – Allison Wolf

Final Essay

The rise of two enraged women – Two stories of normalized sexual assault

Women have always been labeled as emotional and not rational, supposedly because our

feelings interfere in the way of taking rational decisions. We are perceived as sensitive and

careful, but at the same time society calls us insane, hyped or mad when we get angry. This

is part of a dominant ideology that claims that “women’s anger is virtually non-existent”

(Hoagland, 1988, pg.178).

According to Vicky Spelman, women’s anger is the only emotion people don’t discuss

because it turns threatening when subordinates direct it toward those who dominate, it

challenges the relationship between them, and this is seen as something that cannot be

questioned or altered. Subordinates are constantly being oppressed and exploded, they have

a right and possibly and obligation to get angry, but when they try to rise up against those

who dominate, to have their voices heard, the dominants censure their anger as a way of

recruiting subordinate’s moral ambiguity and political judgment in order to maintain the

powerful society’s pedestal which the dominants have owned for decades.

The concept of femininity obscures female resistance to domination by characterizing as

normal the woman who remains submissive to men and crazy the one who reacts and fights
back. We are seen as a joke; we are diminished to a “whim” and a “temper tantrum”.

Under this concept, society undermine women’s anger and refutes the credibility of our

voices in order to block the political judgement of that anger and to avoid questions of

other subordinates usually reacting to their anger with comments like “the bitch is crazy”

“you look so cute when you’re angry” “Women are just emotional” “you must be

overreacting”.

The following story about how my anger was invalidated happened about four years ago.

I was with my the-boyfriend at his apartment, we had spent the day together and I

remember feeling completely in love with him. He asked me to spend the night with him,

so we ordered some food and watched a movie. We were in bed and we started kissing and

taking our clothes off, the desire was mutual. Between kisses he murmured “one of my

sexual fantasies is to rape someone” My body shivered, and I stopped kissing him. I said,

“As long as it is consented right?” he said, “yeah sure” and continued to take my clothes

off. We began to have sex, but my mind kept thinking about what he previously said. I

didn’t feel comfortable, so I pushed him away and told him that I didn’t “feel like it

anymore”. His gaze changed and he grabbed me brusquely against him and kissed me. He

wouldn't stop, I tried to push him away, but he was much stronger than me, so I just layed

in bed motionless and cried. When he finished, he seemed confused about why I had been

crying and he said, “I thought you wanted it, we are a couple anyway”. He wiped my tears,

hugged me and went to sleep as if nothing unusual had happened.

The next morning, I remember waking up because of the pain I felt. I opened my eyes and

saw him on top of me grabbing my neck as he tried to penetrate me. I was in pain, I never
agreed to have sex with him, I was unconscious. All these thoughts crossed my mind as I

tried to assimilate what was going on. He finished, got out of bed and said, "I'm late for

class, bye." I started crying, I felt completely used, like an inflatable plastic sex doll. I

wanted to yell at him but for some reason every thought was channeled by panic in my

throat that broke my voice and made those screams of outrage go unnoticed, as if I did not

want to wake up the monster.

At first, I was hurt and emotionally devastated, but the more I replayed this night in my

head my pain started to turn into enragement. I wanted the world to know what he had done

to me, the violence he exercised against me but when I reached out to people for help

nobody did anything, there was not the slightest outrage at what happened. Telling that

experience, in their ears was equivalent to any normal outrageous mistake of a boyfriend.

They just frowned and shook their heads disapprovingly. Some gave me an "I'm sorry"

while others tried to justify it saying, “he is your boyfriend anyway” or “you women are

just so emotional” and finally the most diplomatic said that those were things I needed to

solve with my partner.

I started going to therapy looking for another response to my story, I wanted to hear from a

professional that I had a right to be angry, that I was not crazy and overreacting. My

psychologist's answer was the following: «I am not going to justify what he did, but you

have set such firm limits. Perhaps you should consider relaxing a little bit. He had never

behaved like a rapist before so maybe he will not fulfill that role of aggressor that you are

attributing to him ».
Why was nobody on my side? Why was everyone supporting or justifying the aggressor?

Nobody gave the dimensions that I gave to the matter, so I came to a single conclusion: I

had exaggerated things. I eventually started to believe that I was wrong and question my

own anger about it. I tried to convince myself that what happened was not a big deal

because “we were a couple” and because it was his “fantasy” and my role as his girlfriend

was to pleasure him. I tried to justify it in any way and move on with my life as if nothing

had happened. I let myself be defeated, manipulated and blinded by a heterosexual

society’s opinion about what’s “normal”: I had invalidated my own anger and outrage. A

part of me died along with all the values I believed and preached.

Society positions certain people in pedestals where what they say must be held as absolute

truth because we harbor our entire trust in them and blindly believe in what they say,

psychologists, doctors, priests, teachers, academics, family members, and we forget that

they also struggle with an imperfect humanity that places them in a reality in which much

of what they say can be questioned and denied. In my case, I realized, a long time later, that

no expert is exempt from merging with the macho and patriarchal system in which we find

ourselves as a society and that the processes of deconstruction and vindication of women

sometimes transcends the academy. Sometimes the protocols of care for women victims of

violence are implemented by professionals who, although claim to be experts in gender,

continue to be allies of the aforementioned system in which we all grow, train, study and

reproduce along with their founding ideas. My psychologist, beyond anything, was just one

more victim of the patriarchal system that, as women, trains us to be complicit with our

own executioners.
A few years later I had a talk with a woman who is now my dearest best friend. She was

sexually assaulted by her boyfriend too. I asked her if I could share her experience for this

paper. This is her story:

« There was a lot of alcohol, but isn't it always like this at a party? We all drank,

danced, laughed. I remember dancing with him and feeling in love, confident and

calm. In the early morning we arrived at the house of one of our mutual friends. My

friend lent us his room to sleep and that's where it all started. At first each caress

and each kiss were consented, I wanted it, but after a while we agreed to stop. I was

so tired that I fell asleep almost instantly. A pain in my back woke me up, I turned

around to look and what I saw caused me to enter a state of panic and shock that is

difficult to explain, "what the hell? Are you aware that you are trying to force your

penis inside me while I'm asleep and completely unconscious?” I said to him, "I

thought you were awake and that you wanted to do it" he replied and went back to

sleep.

The second time that I woke up he was pressing his fingers on my hip and he was

forcing his penis in me. I reproached him that he was trying to rape me a second

time, that she had hurt my hip, that he had undressed me while I was unconscious.

He started yelling at me that he wasn't going to stop hitting himself until we had sex,

that I didn't care about his sexuality, that I had been the worst sex of his life and that

somehow, I needed to make up for it. I looked at him and noticed that he was staring

blankly at the wall, almost as if his soul had disappeared. Then he finally fall asleep.
 The next day he told me that he didn’t remember anything, and he asked for my

forgiveness about a thousand times. He said he loved me, and he would never do

something to hurt me.

I was angry, I wanted to tell everyone he was a rapist, that he was violent and

dangerous but when I talked about this with my friends, they all said “it was just the

alcohol” “He doesn’t even remembers this” “you know deep down he’s not a bad

guy”, so I came to the conclusion that I had to forgave him, that it was not his fault,

and I was overreacting and that I had no justification to be angry.

I continued my relationship with him, but I constantly reminded that I was hurt.

Each time he answered more aggressively "The next time you accuse me of being

an abuser, I hope you have proof!", I wanted to yell at him, reproach him that he did

not have to demand for proof as my memories, my pain my trauma and my words

were enough proof about what happened. »

After hearing each other’s story, we were able to go back in time and relive our traumatic

relationships and what they have done to us with much more objectivity. To be there for

each other with our feminism and empathy, helped us both to undertake an analytical

journey to condemn these episodes for what they actually were: a rape without any

justification. I never understood what to be a feminist was until this day.

As girls, we are not taught to acknowledge or manage our anger so much as to ignore, fear, hide,

and transform it. We are subtly encouraged to put anger and other “negative” emotions aside,

as they are not “feminine”. We are even discouraged from recognizing our own anger, from
talking about it or being demanding in ways that focus on our own rights and needs. The

anger of people who are not powerful white men is disregarded, marginalized, made to be

seen as hysterical, infantile or even threatening. 

With the rise of women’s liberation, we began to discuss in consciousness the meaning of

our anger and we transformed it into outrage. We realized that our emotions are cognitive,

and that anger is an emotion that is not independent of reasoning but rather it is combined

with our understanding and our perceptions. We understood that anger is political, and that

we have been wrongly focused more in how to cope with anger rather than addressing and

asking questions about the political judgement of it.

Why do we address a situation by asking whether we coped well with our feelings or if we

behaved in the right way rather than asking question about the politics of the situation, the

judgements of our anger? We avoid analyzing the political judgements of our anger in part

as a reaction to our earlier attempts to control, hide and diminish our feelings and certain

situations with fundaments of heterosexualism and the dynamics of control: power-over

and subordination.

Our emotions developed in such complexity as they gained their meaning from context.

They turned into the judgments within the context which affect how we feel and understand

ourselves and the choices we make. It took me years to acknowledge my own anger, and

when I did, I didn’t know what to do with it. I had the distinct sensation of being a stranger

to myself, which was ironic, since the real inauthenticity was inside of me, denying my own

anger, not recognizing and embracing it.

The aggressors and the people around us turned our anger into something invisible so they

could use it as tool to control and subordinate us in the normalized society’s dynamics of

heterosexualism. This is when I understood that my rage needed to be collective, I needed

to rise my voice and address other women’s stories in order to identify, resist, and eliminate

oppression out of my life. The importance of my rage couldn’t be diminished to a “normal

incident between couples” it had to be seen and understood, from me and others, as a fuel

for political trial and changes. This is why my friend and I created a feminist collective,

with the ambition that over time it can be consolidated as a foundation or an NGO. This

will allow us to create high-impact projects with communities to guarantee women's human

rights, to solve strategic litigation cases, interventions at the institutional court, community

work projects, talks, workshops and much more. But most importantly to help women

recognize, embrace and free their anger and outrage and use it as a political booster to

create visibility.

Overall, it may be said that our emotions can transform consciousness and they can be the

starting point of political changes. They not only show the reasons why we are angry but

also become a political fuel that creates visibility about the many daily problems we face

because of oppression and gender violence. Our outrage makes society listen and start

creating solutions to achieve a more just and fair social order. This order attempts to create

a framework in which non oppressive values can emerge and this is ultimately the central

focus in which we can change and break out the framework of heterosexualism.
I want to end this story with three things, the first, apologizing to all the women that I did

not endorse at the time, especially to my best friend. I remember defending the fact that

men could be feminists and that their voices should be added to our marches and our safe

spaces, even when many women demanded separatist marches and free spaces for men.

Now I understand that seeing your aggressor in spaces where you fight for a life free of

gender violence is not comfortable and that being surrounded by men in those spaces can

be counterproductive. I regret that it took me so long to understand it, I regret that I learned

it after such a coup and I regret not being clear about what I defended but that I will defend

with all my strength today: you always go first, we always go first, our sorority always

comes first!

The second, is to make an urgent call to resignify the spaces that surround us. For us to not

be complicit in gender violence. We cannot give a halfway fight and scream: "the rapist is

you" but be quiet and tolerate when that "you" involves a friend, acquaintance or family

member: gender violence is condemnable in all settings and must be fought from all fronts.

Finally, the third is to extend my help, whenever necessary, to all the women who need it,

between us we take care of ourselves and the more hands we interweave, the greater will be

the support networks of our resistance. You are not alone!