Rage Becomes Her: Soraya Chemaly
Today we're talking about righteous anger and indignation with writer and activist Soraya Chemaly. Her book Rage Becomes Her explores how women's expressions of anger are vital to their own health, freedom, and wellbeing.
Despite the fact that we women have plenty of things to be mad about - unequal pay, unchecked sexual harassment and abuse, just to name a few - anger is still considered a taboo emotion around the world. We're called emotional, hysterical, irrational, and yet Soraya argues that anger holds information that is essential to our liberation.
This is not a self-help book for anger management, but rather an in-depth investigation into the perils and possibilities of anger and what's possible when we unleash our sacred rage on the world. Take a listen.
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+ Read Transcript
Kerri Kelly: Welcome to CTZN Podcast, this is Kerri Kelly. Today we're talking about righteous anger and indignation. Our guest is writer and activist Soraya Chemaly, who wrote a book called the Rage Becomes Her, which claims that women's expressions of anger are vital to their own health, freedom, and wellbeing. Despite the fact that we women have plenty of things to be mad about, unequal pay, unchecked sexual harassment and abuse, just to name a few, anger is still considered a taboo emotion around the world. We're called emotional, hysterical, irrational, and yet Chemaly argues that anger holds information that is essential to our liberation. This is not a self help book for anger management, rather an in depth investigation into the perils and possibilities of anger and what's possible when we unleash our sacred rage on the world. Take a listen. (singing). Soraya Chemaly, welcome.
Soraya C.: Oh, thank you so much for having me today.
Kerri Kelly: I would love to begin by simply hearing about your own personal journey of finding your voice and tapping into the anger that you write about in your book, Rage Becomes Her.
Soraya C.: Sure. It's funny, someone asked me the other day when I had my first feminist thought. And I honestly can't remember when that was. I was really young when I had a sense of double standards related to race and gender, and I don't really remember not having that sense and thinking about it or responding to it, but I think that for me to actually acknowledge the amount of anger I felt about these issues took my whole life really because I was definitely in the category of people, overwhelmingly women who learn to set their anger aside, to ignore it or sublimate it or divert it into other emotions or behaviors. And so that's not really sustainable because in fact it's very unhealthy for most people and it's extremely frustrating. I mean your anger really... As Audre Lorde said it's a source... it's knowledge. It's based on what you know of the world and what you think has to change.
Soraya C.: And so it took me I think a lifetime of activism and writing and living until I sat up and thought, "If someone asked me, I'll say I'm not angry, but why do I do that?" Because actually what people kept telling me, resonated with them in my writing, that I was not really conscious of was my anger. And so I had to unlearn childhood socialization and life lessons. And I think that all of us understand what it feels like to be penalized for expressing anger, which for many people is expressing need. Right? What people are saying when they're angry is that they have a need and they're asking their society whether that's family or their workplace or their spouse to pay attention to that need.
Kerri Kelly: Yeah. It's funny. While I was reading your book and while I was preparing for this conversation, I was trying to think back to when I began to allow myself to give into anger and be openly, publicly, righteously angry. I really appreciate that you brought up socialization because I actually grew up a good girl, and was extreme. It totally indoctrinated-
Soraya C.: Right. Me too.
Kerri Kelly: ... Right? In perfectionist culture and in performance culture. And I want to say I did that for 20 something years and I wish... I was also trying to pinpoint, "When did I start to feel dissonance around that?" And I do think you're right. I think something happened where I started to really tap into some righteous indignation around the way that I felt moving through the world as an adult and how I wasn't treated equally. And the way I started to see more clearly the injustices that were all around me. And that's what unleashed my anger. But I literally can't pinpoint it because it feels like it was just a gradual unraveling.
Soraya C.: Yeah. I think that's true. I think people come to it at different stages. Some people never come to it. I've spoken to so many women in the last years since I published the book about this topic. And there are some women who have written to me that are in their '70s even their '80s who say, "I've lived my whole life without ever saying the words, I am angry. Even though I know how angry I am, I cannot bring myself to say the words, I'm angry." Which is quite amazing.
Kerri Kelly: I love what you just said around how anger is knowledge and anger is another way of expressing a need. And one of the things I found fascinating about your book is that it talks about both the possibility of anger, which I'm hearing you say, but also the perils of anger?
Soraya C.: Right.
Kerri Kelly: And we've been seeing, I think the possibility made manifest especially over the last three years, right? In a way in which women have been resisting the era of Trump. But you also talk in your book about the risks associated with women expressing their anger and how weighty that is.
Soraya C.: Well, I mean I think that we understand what the risks are because they're real, there are penalties for expressing anger and that's not just true of women obviously. I mean any sub [inaudible 00:06:19] class of people, people who have less power in the society, people who have less cultural capital resources, to express anger incurs a lot of danger often. I mean if you're a black man and you express anger, and I write about this, it's much more likely that you'll be criminalized for that to be seen as an overwhelming danger in the society. If you're a black woman, your anger is definitely seen as a threat. And in fact, the stereotype of the angry black woman doesn't even require a black women to act it.
Kerri Kelly: That's right.
Soraya C.: I mean, basically, this is just assumed about them just because of these stereotypes and biases and racism. And so there are different categories, there are different ways that we dismiss anger throughout our lives. So in a little girl, it might start off as something that's cute. People will feel more temper tantrum and want it to turn into a really cute viral video, but that's really a form of mockery of her anger, right? It's not really respectful of her anger. And then as we get older, we're hormonal teens or we're high maintenance bitches and then we're old nags. And so those are age-related stages. And then again, you get all of the race and ethnicity aspects. So if you're maybe of Hispanic descent, you see a lot of descriptions of hot, spicy Latino tempers, some kind of food consumable. Women of Asian descent are often called sad instead of angry. Girls in general, sadness is attributed to girls when they're angry much more often than to boys.
Soraya C.: And conversely, boys who are sad or are called the angry because people have a hard time desexing those emotions, degendering those emotions. So yeah, I mean I think that the prevalent theme is that women, all women understand that they risk being called crazy, irrational, incompetent. And we know that that's actually true. We know that for women politicians for example, or women managers, their anger doesn't increase their loyalty or leadership the way it does to a man, it decreases it. So the penalties I think are real.
Kerri Kelly: Yeah. And I really like that you brought social location into it. And how the risks that we take are relative, right? To our location and to all of our intersectional identities, and it makes me think about allyship. Right? Because not all women are having the same experience, right? Of moving through the world based on their race or based on their gender choice and so on and so forth. And I'm just thinking about, does that call women with more proximity to power, women with more proximity to privilege to take more risk? And if not more risk because it's less risky, but you know what I mean to actually take more leaps because they have less to lose?
Soraya C.: Well, I think that that's true and I think that's also true of men. I mean we think about women helping other women, but in fact that also fits into the fundamental issue, which is a sex segregation, right? We need women with more privilege to use that privilege more effectively on behalf of those without it. But we also need men to do that, right? Women just don't have enough power, they don't have enough resources and enough money in society the same way. And so I would just alter what you said a little bit by saying I always resist the segregation in that way. Because in fact, we need men to be allies and we need to hold them accountable for doing the right thing.
Kerri Kelly: Yeah. Okay. Let's talk about men. Your TED talk is called who is allowed to get angry, and really speaks beautifully of the double standard, right? Around anger between men and women. Obviously we're speaking in binaries here for the purpose of creating that opposition. But I'm thinking specifically about the testimony of Christine Blasey Ford and Brett Kavanaugh, right? Where she was gracious, respectful, smart, and he was hostile and disrespectful, uncooperative, very bullying. I remember his exchange with Senator Colbert [inaudible 00:10:57]. And yet that behavior for men is celebrated, right? It almost strengthens their position in the eyes of many. I think it's called... Is it called empathy?
Soraya C.: Oh, that’s-
Kerri Kelly:
The way…
Soraya C.: ... Right. That's what Kate... Kate Manne calls it himpathy. That's a little different. I think that's really the excessive sympathy towards men. I would say that what happened in that exchange during the hearings for his confirmation was a little bit different. There was himpathy, but in fact, what we saw so openly was the ways in which anger in a man confirms traditional norms because people expect a man to be angry. They expect him to defend his honor. They are comfortable with his asserting power and authority with an angry expression, which is all... He did all of that. Right? And so because it confirmed beliefs, support for him actually went up. But when a woman does it, it transgresses. Right? It actually pulls the rug out from under our beliefs. It makes people very uncomfortable. And so she actually didn't do that. If anybody in that courtroom had the right to be enraged it was her.
Kerri Kelly: Totally.
Soraya C.: But as you said, she retained her composure. She was not only calm, she was deferential. Right? And so I think that that distinction is really important because she had to really walk that fine line of not only being a witness to her own life, being an expert in the topic, right? She was both of those things. And also navigating the cross currents of gender expectations while she did those two things. And that's virtually impossible. It's really impossible to do all of that. And then, Oh, by the way, seem, which is what we saw happen with Hillary Clinton, authentic. Right? If you have to constantly be catching yourself and calibrating yourself and as you said, performing in order to minimize the risk and the backlash against you for acting in a way that people don't like, then you cannot seem that authentic.
Kerri Kelly: Yeah. And it's making me think of like, "Oh, now we have an election with no female candidates left." And I would imagine very directly a result of that kind of double standard of the way in which these women were treated by the press. Or the way in which people held a narrative of electability over their heads that they don't hold over other people. Do you think we're chipping away at the ability for women candidates, women in leadership, women decision makers, women representatives to transcend that culture?
Soraya C.: I think in some places we are. I think that very clearly after Trump's election, white people particularly white women had a shock, right? I mean, a real shock to the system that this could happen. And that activated people to become engaged in new and different ways. And so we saw in the midterm elections on the Democratic side, of course, a surge in electing a diverse group of people, people who were overtly angry about what was happening and use that anger, transgender women, cisgendered women candidates all along, any kind of spectrum you would look at, they really seized that moment and were able to do that. But I would say that that's really happening in half of the culture and half of the country because in the conservative half, which is significant and not necessarily... I mean, it's aging, but it may not be shrinking the same way, that might imply, right? There's a very strong conservative and neo-traditional movement in the country, especially among millennials.
Soraya C.: Millennials are very neo-traditional. But anyway, that I think is not necessarily happening. So we see fewer and fewer women running as Republicans of course, and getting into office. And if you just looked at the GOP for women's representation, we would rank in the world about 134 alongside hybrid authoritarian regimes like Molly. It's just absurd when you consider how few women... I mean Trump managed to pull together a coven task force that had no women on it at all when it started. And that's not seen as a failure of governance that it is.
Kerri Kelly: Yeah. And now I believe, correct me if I'm wrong, we rank across parties, we rank 79th in the world for women representation and political leadership. Is that the rate?
Soraya C.: I think that is the changes. Yeah, it's been swinging between 79th and 95th for a few years, and it's almost entirely due. It is entirely due to women on the left because during that time, conservatives have been falling off from both elected positions and leadership positions.
Kerri Kelly: And to your point, I think we're seeing the cost of that right now, of an all white male predominantly task force…
Soraya C.: And government. The whitest, the malest since the '80s. Right?
Kerri Kelly: That's right. Responding to a life threatening pandemic, that is the coronavirus, I'm wondering what would it look like? Do you think if we did in fact have a woman in the White House responding to this pandemic right now? How would it look different?
Soraya C.: Well, I mean I think that depends on the woman, right? You could have a Margaret Thatcher in the White House and it might not look different.
Kerri Kelly: That's right. I saw something on Twitter the other day when everybody was screaming about having a woman vice president and someone said, "Sarah Palin was the woman.”
Soraya C.: Yeah. I mean I think it really depends. I mean if you look at Norway where the prime minister just held a press conference just for children, right? I mean that is remarkable. This is a person who understands what it means to care, what it means to care for children, what it means to be a parent, what it means to engage children all of them, boys and girls in the political life of the culture at just a very scary time. And that's radically different from what's happening here, right? We don't have that here.
Soraya C.: I think the main issue is that this level of homogeneity is dangerous. It's dangerous because we know that groups of people who lack so profoundly in diversity are outlier risk assessors. They just don't see dangers that will reduce their status, They don't see dangers that requires solutions that will threaten their identities or their power, and that's the situation we're in right now. And so understanding the relationship between inclusivity and diversity, not as a matter of some kind of quota system or numerical representation or to make people feel better, is really important from the perspective of understanding governance and intelligence and systematic ways of assessing threat and risk and then addressing them.
Kerri Kelly: Well, and I really appreciate you bringing a power analysis into it. Because we know historically, right? That power systems are power people in power have adapted quite resiliently, right? To maintaining their power and to holding onto power and to reorganizing society so that they could stay in the majority of domination and supremacy. And I think in some ways we're even seeing that now, right? What are the subtle ways in which we continue to reorganize ourselves so that we can maintain the status quo?
Soraya C.: That's right. And I think there's that, that's just the sheer fact of power and seeing it exercised abusively with impunity. Right? But I also think that there is something else going on. You can see the relationship, for example, between different forms of denialism, right? You have the denial of science, the denial of the scientific method, the denial of failures of capitalism, the denial of people's equality. I mean these are different but they're densely interrelated. And there is a cognitive mechanism. There is a well understood identity protective cognition that goes into that denial. And unfortunately for us that identity protective cognition, which has been implicated in science, denial, and culture, it's called cultural cognition, lots of different forms of perception that are affected by identity. It's really dangerous right now. It's really dangerous to have people in charge who are calling the pandemics a hoax or minimizing what's happening or just refusing to understand fundamentally how many people are going to die.
Kerri Kelly: Right. Is that cultural cognition around denial? And I remember in your TED talk you talked about discomfort. You said, "We should make people comfortable with the discomfort they feel when a woman says no apologetically.”
Soraya C.: Unapologetically.
Kerri Kelly: Unapologetically rather. Don't say you're sorry. Unapologetically. But I'm wondering about that, right? Because I'm just thinking about what you're naming and the cognitive shift that's required, the behavior shift that's required for the culture shift that we need and that this moment is calling for, because it's not just about women changing their relationship with anger, right? I feel like what everybody's asking women to do is about men and everyone else building up capacity to hear and allow for everyone's anger as valid.
Soraya C.: Right. And to understand why they themselves might erect obstacles to understanding why women's experiences are what they are or why they're meaningful. I have a chapter in the book on denialism where I really try and focus on this. If you take for example, me too as a movement, right? So you had literally tens of millions of women saying, "Yes, I've been sexually harassed, street harassed, sexually assaulted, raped, harassed at work." And enough is enough, right? This is happening to us every day. It's inhibiting our ability to work, to live freely, to live safely. Just an outpouring of testimonies. And yet in the United States, over 50% of men say sexism no longer exists. And they routinely underestimate the percentage of women that experience these things. So between 85% and 100% of women say that they've experienced everything I just listed, but when you ask men, the average number they believe is the case is 43%. So that's a very huge gap. And that gap in knowledge and experience and trust and belief is very meaningful when we have so few women in power, right?
Soraya C.: We have roughly 20% of our Congress, for example, is women. And we see that in virtually every corporate environment. So women's experiences are not shaping public life, public understanding, public policy, media coverage of these issues. But why would men deny that? What's in it for them? And a lot of is in it for them, right? There's just the sheer fact that people don't want to give up power or privilege or status, even if they don't feel like they have power, privilege and status, right? They're like, "Well, wait a minute. I also am struggling. I can't earn a living. I can't do my job. I can't support my family." All of that is true, but none of that is true on the basis that they are men. And I think that's the issue.
Soraya C.: And so when women say what they're saying, it's a specific threat and the threat to men has a lot to do with the identities born of masculinity. So if you're taught to provide and protect and women are saying, "You're not protecting me, look at how fucked up this is. And Oh, by the way, I want to provide for myself. I want this to stop so I can work and make a fair wage." Where does that leave men whose identities are grounded in those expectations? And I think that leads to denial.
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Kerri Kelly: How do we intervene with men? If in fact, right? There's so much cultural cognition, denial, a failure to see their own complicity right in the system. I'm thinking about like we have all of these men's groups popping up around the country to talk about men's feelings and to try and tackle toxic masculinity. Is that the answer? Do you have any ideas around? What does the intervention look like?
Soraya C.: I think it has to just be pervasive and multi-pronged, right? It has to be first of all, I think getting away from the idea that gender means women, right? I think it's very easy culturally for people to just assume that those two things mean the same thing-
Kerri Kelly: But it's like race means black.
Soraya C.: ... Right. And so I remember I was at a symposium a few months ago and it was about authoritarianism and there was a man who'd written a book, a recent book about authoritarianism and culture, and he did a whole discussion and never mentioned anti-woman, anti-feminist movements as very central to both authoritarianism and anti-authoritarianism. And so I said, "Can you please address those movements? Because women in situations of extreme inequality are the first to embrace authoritarian leaders and beliefs, and women who are feminists are the first to confront those authoritarian movements." And he said, "Oh, well, I have a chapter on gender in my book." And I wanted to respond, "Actually, all the chapters in your book are about gender." Right?
Kerri Kelly: You're about gender.
Soraya C.: "You're about gender. This is about gender. Our exchange is about gender. And you clearly are thinking, well, I checked off the woman box and I'm good." And so I think making everyone aware that gender isn't about being a woman but about masculinity and femininity is important. And then second thing is I think a lot of women protect men from their experiences for variety of reasons. And also because we're taught to care for other people and not make them uncomfortable, we do that. We try not to make people uncomfortable, but in fact, these problems make people uncomfortable and we have to be prepared to do that. And then third, people have to be accountable. There have to be consequences. And that's really hard, right? Especially I think in heterosexual relationships that are gender factory's, heterosexual relationships by default create a very traditional mode of interacting for many people because it enables them to leverage institutions that count on that model more effectively and it's much more efficient. So to disrupt that is inefficient, more expensive, puts a strain on people. That's hard. That's really hard to do.
Kerri Kelly: You're also making me think about discomfort and denial as it relates to polite politics and to the call for decency and civility.
Soraya C.: Oh, and civility. Yes. I'm still not that person.
Kerri Kelly: Right? Even in the Trump era, which is I think as extreme as it gets. Right? Amidst so much disinformation and lies and abuse and bullying, there is this deep... And I think it's like a majority of Americans, right? Want more civility and decency in American politics. But I wonder what is the cost of that?
Soraya C.: I mean, I think that people who call for civility... Well, I don't know how to put this. I don't really think there's a way. I mean, yes, sure, it's always great to be civil, but at some point you have to realize that your civility is part of the problem and not actually a path to solving the problem. And that's hard for some people. I mean, should you entertain civilly person who's advocating for your oppression and for violence to be done against you? Probably not. And what does it mean not to be civil? That doesn't mean you have to punch someone, but it also doesn't mean you have to be polite or entertain what they're saying.
Kerri Kelly: Right. It makes me think about how...? I mean this is also, I think part of the muscle building that you're talking about around discomfort. We need to build a muscle around conflict.
Soraya C.: That's right.
Kerri Kelly: Right. We need to learn how to... Everybody talks about having conversations across the aisle. But I actually think it's like I need to have conversations with my neighbor. I don't need to reach so far across the aisle to talk about these issues because they're very proximal to my family and to my friends and to my coworkers.
Soraya C.: I think that's right. And in some people... The minute you encounter the person who's like, "I'm just going to be devil's advocate." It's a waste of your time. You have to know when to walk away too. There's no convincing some people. So why spend your time and energy engaging in what for the other person is not an existential threat but a game? And there are a lot of those people who're running around who just think that this is a game and not understanding what that means in terms of their own place or safety or status.
Kerri Kelly: Yeah. I mean that's why I like working with a power framework. Feels so essential to having these conversations or else we're all talking in different languages, literally.
Soraya C.: Yes. And it also when you take power out of the equation, it enables all of those extremely misleading, false equivalences in arguments or discussions or in media. The tyranny of the false equivalence is more and more evident every day. Right? I mean it was bad in 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019. And now it's really bad.
Kerri Kelly: Yeah. I mean we see the growth and the new movement and yet there's a whole lot of back slipping happening at the same time and rollbacks. Right? It's like we're standing still. It makes me think of... I spend a lot of time in the spiritual and wellness world. I come from that space and often what I see happening in those spaces is replicating what we're naming around dominant culture, the narratives of dominant culture. And I hear a lot of nuance around anger. People putting footnotes on anger, deciding which anger is appropriate, which isn't warning us when anger is too much. So I'm curious if you have a definition of anger, because I feel like that's really harmful too that there's all these guardrails around anger and it's just a reinforcement of power people deciding what anger is appropriate and what anger isn't. I'm just curious if you have a definition of anger that is spacious enough to hold everyone's authentic feelings inside of it.
Soraya C.: Right? I mean, well, first of all, a big red flag to me is when people use that word appropriate, right? Because it's such a limiting word, it's such a scolding, especially for girls to hear that's not appropriate. I always tell girls, I told my girls this, I said, "The minute someone uses the word appropriate, take a big step back and just understand where you are because that implies a whole lot of things about norms that have never really served us well." So it's very complicated, right? Anger encompasses such a range of things. What I usually start with though is rage because in fact, rage is a huge mismanagement of anger. By the time a person is exploding with rage, lots of other things haven't happened that optimally should happen.
Soraya C.: The feeling of anger, the feeling of wrongness, of unfairness, of injustice, I think everybody understands that. Threats to dignity, threats to safety. It's a very visceral, emotional response that has helped humans survive. So the question is, when you have that feeling, whether it's mild and it's like, well, it's really inconsequential. "I left the store and I forgot my change and I'm angry because I needed that money." That may be one form of anger.
Soraya C.: Another form of anger though maybe, "This person is about to punch me and I'm angry, I'm going to punch them back." Right? That's sort of physical anger that people may feel. But in either case, the response should be, "What is my anger telling me? Why am I feeling this way? And what step do I need to take next? Is it immediate? Or is it short term? Is it long term? Do I need to physically remove myself from this place right now? Or do I need to invest myself and my time and my effort and form a community?" Those are really different equations. But what you don't want to have happen is that the feelings are ignored and pushed down and suppressed or diverted because that will lead to ill health and mental distress and all kinds of bad relationships, lack of intimacy, poor parenting. Anger, I think I wrote it's like water. It always finds a way. And so if it isn't addressed, it will eventually end up in a very destructive rage. Rage is not particularly productive and it's not particularly healthy.
Kerri Kelly: But is understandable. Is that what I hear you saying too, right? That-
Soraya C.: It is.
Kerri Kelly: ... Especially for women who have had to deal with so much suppression of anger. And I think you said it was like... I'm paraphrasing your quote right now, but something around anger has been severed from womanhood.
Soraya C.: Yes. For femininity. Why would we do that? Why would we take the signal emotion that is supposed to protect us from harm and indignity and threat and detach it from girls sense of self? Why would we say, "This is not your moral property. You don't have the right to this emotion. We're going to punish you for this emotion. Smile more, use your nice voice. Don't say anything if it's not something positive." There are all of these excessive politeness demands put on girls that essentially say, "We don't want any negativity from you. We don't want to hear bad things from you." And so we end up detaching ourselves from our own sense of unfairness or need or injustice and prioritizing the needs of others to the degree that it's harmful. One of the reasons I wrote the book was so that girls and women could reframe the issue in a way that didn't lead to self harm or illness.
Kerri Kelly: What do you say to the mothers or the fathers, the parents of young girls about how to allow for the full flourishing of their emotional development? But I'm sure there's complexity around discipline and cultural nuance and so on and so forth. How do you coach parents in this?
Soraya C.: I think that parents have to go through a dual process. They have to think about how they can free all children to experience their emotions and not be punished for those emotions. And to cultivate what I call emotional competence. How can you grow people who know themselves? Can name and label their emotions and then make senses of that are those emotions in a healthy way. That's the ideal, right? Because we know that people who feel and acknowledge all of their emotions, both the positive and the negative tend to be calmer, happier, more creative individuals. They have a more solid sense of themselves and are able to articulate their needs in a healthy way. But while that's happening, parents also have to confront their own ways of expressing themselves, of modeling behavior, and of considering how their own dynamic with others might need to be revised. Right?
Soraya C.: I mean if you're an adult and you really did grow up in the United States in the 20th century, everything about your identity has been shaped by these ideas. The first thing we do when a child is born is assign a sex to that child. And the minute that happens, we start treating that child differently. And so it's complicated if you're a parent, because you're like, "Oh, did I just actually show my children a way of acting that I would never actually want them to learn?" So it takes a lot of awareness.
Kerri Kelly: I feel like this is advice for everybody.
Soraya C.: Yeah. I mean, I think it requires consciousness raising.
Kerri Kelly: Yeah, like radical self interrogation. And I think for those of us who believe we're on the right side of justice, I mean, even saying that feels absurd, but I'm saying I think everybody, right? Needs to be in a constant process, a sustained process of radical self interrogation, because to your point, we're all embodied in so many social conditions. So much indoctrination that for me, I still find myself defaulting all the time, no matter how educated I get, how practiced I get, how informed I get, how resistant I get, when I'm not paying attention, I still default to being the good girl, to trying to be perfect, to trying to be nice, right? To managing my anger, to not trying to be too aggressive. I find myself doing that shit all the time. Even now-
Soraya C.: We have to allow ourselves to do it. It's hard because the vigilance is exhausting. And so I think it has to come with compassion for others and for ourselves. And so there's the awareness like, "Oh, now I'm aware." And frankly, I think what follows awareness is often a feeling of being overwhelmed or a feeling of almost grief because you're like, "Wow, this is a major, huge, profound problem. I can't fix this problem." We live in a fast fix culture, right? I can't fix this problem in a week. This is all life. I have to do this for the rest of my life. And I think for some people that's okay because it's not that big a challenge they really want to do it. And they understand that it's a matter of changing habits and creating a new culture, and that can be creative and fun. But for other people, they feel a loss. They feel a loss of tradition, they feel a loss of parts of their identity that they maybe understand or problematic, but they love. So it's complicated and it's complicated on every level.
Kerri Kelly: This is my last question for you and maybe it's the hardest one. But what is your vision for this movement of... I don't even know what to call it, right? I know we're in some phase of feminism, but it feels more like a movement of righteous anger that's emerging, and I think it's emerging for women and men. And even while it feels like the systems are pushing back harder than ever, I also do feel at least relationally and in my circles that things are shifting. We're having different conversations than we had many years ago, there's more nuance, we have more vocabulary. Do you have a vision for where you hope this movement is in a couple of years?
Soraya C.: I think it's tied to something that has been actually making me feel fairly optimistic and that is that even though we're in a moment of global backlash against the radical social change of the last half of 20th century, what's interesting to me is what I can only really call the subversive successive feminism. So if you think of the ways in which for Gen Y for example, thinking in terms of spectrums instead of binary is completely the norm in a lot of places, right? Kids are just fine with the notion of fluidity of gender expression that is variable with sexuality that isn't rigid. Somehow that message made it through the culture and altered the way an entire generation is capable of thinking about issues. And that happened during a time of conservative backlash. It happened during a time when, for example, our government excessively invested in abstinence on the sex ed. It happened in a time of retrenchment of powerful conservative forces. And so my vision is that feminism as a multiplicity of movements can focus on how transformative childhood socialization is and how we can better understand and think about that.
Kerri Kelly: Yeah. It makes me think that the subversive successive feminism is also like the water that you need to-
Soraya C.: Yes. It will find its way.
Kerri Kelly: ... It will find its way. I feel like that's a perfect note to end on. Soraya thank you so much for your wisdom and for your book and for your time. And I also thank you for your push. Thanks for pushing us-
Soraya C.: Welcome.
Kerri Kelly: ... to transform, I feel like to channel and embrace our anger in a way that's actually going to make a difference.
Soraya C.: Well, thank you so much for thinking about this and for the work that you do and for having me on today.
Kerri Kelly: Got it. Well, this podcast is coming to an end. Our work in the world is just beginning. This week's call to action is to channel your anger and counter oppression everywhere you see it. And trust that our collective anger is powerful enough to make big change. You can buy Rage Becomes Her at ragebecomesher.com, and follow Soraya on Twitter @schimaly. Special thanks to DJ Drez for the amazing soundtrack. You can check out his music at djdrez.com. And to our Executive Producer who puts it all together and makes it sound great, Trevor Exter. And thank you for being here today.
Kerri Kelly: You can stay in the know and engaged by subscribing to our free weekly newsletter, Well-Read at ctznwell.org. CTZN Podcast is community inspired and crowdsourced. That's how we keep it real. Join community on Patreon for as little as $2 per month so that we can keep doing the work of curating content that matters for citizens who care. And don't forget to rate us on Apple podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Google Play, and share the love you all by telling your friends to check us out.