On feminine rage, a year later

I wrote a piece about feminine rage while it was still fashionable to. A year on, the phrase has done what phrases do when they get popular. It has softened into an aesthetic. There are playlists now. There is merchandise. The rage got a marketing department.

That is the trouble with naming a feeling. The name lets you talk about it, and then the name starts doing the talking for you.

Feminine rage, when the idea still had teeth, described something specific and uncomfortable. Anger that women had been trained to route into acceptable shapes, into competence and care and a tight smile, finally getting pointed outward. It was ugly on purpose. The films and books that earned the label were not flattering. They let women be unreasonable, which is a freedom men have had in fiction for three thousand years.

What the aesthetic does is make it pretty again. It takes the least convenient thing about the anger, that it is not decorative, and decorates it. A woman screaming in a beautifully lit bathroom is not rage. It is rage’s headshot.

I am not above this. Part of why the idea travelled is that it was, frankly, a very good content engine, and I have written to that engine. The honest position is not to stand outside the trend and tut. It is to notice that the same machine which let the feeling be spoken also files the edges off it, and to keep asking what the edges were for.

The test I keep coming back to is discomfort. If a story about a furious woman leaves you comfortable, admiring, reaching for the word iconic, it has probably done the aesthetic thing rather than the real one. Genuine rage in art should cost the reader something. It should make you like the character less and understand her more at the same time, which is a difficult trick and the whole point.

The word will fade. The feeling it briefly described will not, because it was never really about a trend. It was about the gap between what women are allowed to show and what they are allowed to feel, and that gap does not close because a hashtag got tired.