Her Anger Was Once a Diagnosis. His Was Always Just Passion - Fact 12

THE WOMAN PROJECT — Woman Fact 12

Woman are all far too familiar with saying "Women are from Venus and Men are from Mars". Don't get me wrong, I am not attacking men, in fact not attacking at all. Just last night another woman said, women are tired of hearing that we are here today, because Adam's rib was taken to form us. Funny how we all believe that, but no where is it stated that we are "Spare Ribs" The cheek, the nerve. If women are capable of so much, accomplish so much, being formed from only a tiny rib, imagine if we were made exactly the same as Adam! It is not ANGER, it is much more than that, it is a culmination of many emotions , all mixed together, cannot be labelled, yet it is.

Until 1980, a woman's anger could get her diagnosed with a mental illness. His anger just got him a promotion.

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For over a century, "hysteria" was an official medical diagnosis, and it was reserved almost entirely for women. Any strong emotion, anger especially, could be labeled a symptom. It wasn't removed from psychiatry's official manual until 1980. Let that sink in: a woman's anger used to be treated as a disorder.

The pattern never really left, it just changed its clothes. Yale researcher Victoria Brescoll ran studies putting men and women in identical scenarios, same words, same anger, same context. Angry men were consistently given more status, more pay, more respect. Angry women, expressing the exact same emotion, were rated less competent and less deserving of power, by both male AND female evaluators. Even Hillary Clinton was once publicly dismissed as "too angry to be elected president," a line no one has ever used to disqualify an angry man.

In 2018, Serena Williams, one of the greatest athletes alive, defended herself to an umpire and was penalized for it, in a moment that sparked a global conversation about how differently a woman's anger, especially a Black woman's anger, gets policed compared to a man's.

Here's the truth worth saying out loud: her anger was never a flaw to manage. It was information, real, valid, deserving of exactly the same respect his gets automatically.

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Have you ever softened your own anger, smiled through it, called it "frustration" instead, just to seem easier to be around? What was underneath that softened version?