Despite all my rage

Female rage seems to be a topic of discussion recently and actually... yeah, I am extremely pissed off, now you mention it.

Earlier this week I read a Guardian article about the phenomenon of female rage and that in 2021 we were apparently 6% angrier than men, and that the gap has gotten wider since the pandemic. In the rest of the article it doesn't say by how much but going on my own unscientific vibe-check I'd say it's something in the vicinity of a metric fuck-tonne. Genuinely, I was surprised by the 6% being true AT ANY TIME IN MODERN HISTORY.

That this situation has apparently gotten worse in the wake of a pandemic during which many women had to somehow work from home while simultaneously home-schooling their children (HOW?!) or in the US were three times more likely to have lost their jobs than male parents should surprise absolutely no one.

The aforementioned Guardian articles talks to the author of Women Are Angry: Why Your Rage is Hiding and How to Let it Out about non-destructive ways in which women can release this anger, such as screaming underwater or hitting a pile of coats and... look, I'm sure that advice is well-intended, and if taking a padder tennis bat to your family's winter outerwear does it for you, absolutely go for it. But could we not also do with fixing some of the broken shit that's causing this problem¹?

I never would have considered myself an "angry person" for the first half of my life but it does feel like the older I've got, the less and less impressed I've become with the state of things.

I feel like I spent the first 3 decades of my life walking around with blinkers on, barely noticing the frankly fucked up shit that was going on and as I careen headfirst towards 50 I find myself looking around and thinking "This is the best we could manage? REALLY?". Year upon year, disappointments in leaders, politicians, famous people who turned out to be just absolutely disgusting pieces of humanity, family members, friends, lovers, employers, billionaires, tech bros, the justice system, the media, DAVID SEYMOUR, SPECIFICALLY, and the ongoing injustice of [insert literally one of thousands of options here] and so on and so forth has caused a lump of anger in me so hard and so cold it's practically a superconductor.

Or perhaps a solution for the energy crisis we'll all be causing when we default to making AI do everything (badly).

Some days I think about my anger as if it is some kind of substance in my body. Did you know that the tensile strength of pounamu (greenstone) is greater than steel? Steel is strong but pounamu is less brittle, more resilient. Sometimes I imagine that my rage infuses my bones like greenstone² of the most furious kind, making my spine wholly unbreakable, my skull impenetrable, my ribs a glowing green cage - like some Adamantium, Wolverine-type shit.

But what do I do with this anger, this calm, absolute zero rage? Should I really be punching cushions for catharsis? It's in my bones though. I don't think I can punch it out of my bones. I don't think I can scream it out of my lungs. I think it's there for the long haul.

I think I have become that most terrifying of creatures... an angry Māori woman.

So look out, I guess.

¹ Look, I'm just going to say it - leave your shitty husband. Will your anger evaporate immediately? No. But in the words of a famously formerly married New Zealander of note, "It won't happen overnight, but it will happen."

^{2 "}I'm not fat, my mum says I just have big pounamu bones."