Women aren't angry enough, apparently

The urge to set everything on fire and savage the lot of them says otherwise, however

Photo by Vidar Nordli-Mathisen on Unsplash

As slogans go, ‘women aren’t angry enough’ can frankly go f**k itself. I saw it pop up a couple of weeks ago in response to the steady stream of revelations in the Epstein files, as we and the world discovered how many powerful men had been allegedly complicit in a wide range of crimes ranging from sexual trafficking to paedophilia, and how this wasn’t just about one man and his tawdry network but how this kind of perverted thinking was baked into the bones of our society.

I needed time to think about and process what I wanted to say about it all - from that godawful photo of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor on all fours hunched over a prone woman that I saw repeatedly (it’s doing the rounds again now that he has just been arrested in relation to his role as UK trade envoy) to seeing absolutely nothing happen in terms of consequences for the people implicated and involved. Will he be charged and arrested for his alleged conduct towards women? Who the fuck knows because we seem to be living in a consequence-free culture. Emails seem to have more protected rights than women.

Back to the slogan. It’s the ‘enough’ that makes my teeth fizz. The implication that until now we’ve been passive dolls merely observing, indirectly complicit perhaps because we haven’t created enough of a stink. Women are angry. They’ve been fucking angry for a long, long time. I know I have. When I think of the anger that prowls beneath my skin, it looks out from matted hair and claws, fury held in the foam around my maw. Every single one of us knows a woman who has been assaulted, if not raped. Many of us know the evisceration of the soul that is required to speak up and say what has been done to our bodies. We have protested, screamed, cried, we have tried to pass laws, we have tried to speak up. My gods, haven’t we tried to speak up?

It’s also a misplaced sense of responsibility. Why are we the keepers of the anger alone? Why are men not angry about this? I’m not talking about men on social media or on TV - I’m talking about the men I know, and who I have conversations with. Where is their anger? It occurs to me while writing, that I have never, ever had a conversation with the men I know about rape and sexual assault as a topic, without them centring themselves. And by that, I mean projecting their fears of what would happen if they were accused of assault.

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The reactions around sexual assault generally fall into one of two camps. The first is wrongful accusation. Most men I have conversations with instantly mention this. What if the woman was lying? And then they’ll go on to cite a story about how a woman once lied about being raped, and that’s the end of the conversation. They don’t mention that men are more likely to be raped by other men, than they are going to be wrongfully accused of assault. They don’t even talk about the woman who has been raped because they can’t allow themselves to think of her as a person. Because then they will have to think about the things that were done to her and why, and who does most of the assaulting. They will then have to think about their daughters and wives and sisters, and what might happen one day if they are ever in that situation when another man has violated their body, and who will believe them. And they don’t want to think about that.

The second, of course, is: why didn’t she say anything sooner? I’ve heard it every single time. Because it’s easier to believe that if a woman didn’t come forward earlier, it must be because she’s lying, or looking for a payday, rather than the crimes being true. Because no man on earth knows what it is like to not exist in a readymade power structure designed to give your voice power just because you open your mouth.

When I heard a male friend say this about Russell Brand, I wanted to punch a wall. But men would rather believe that women are de facto liars than do the work to understand how power structures operate. Of course they believe that all you have to do is speak up to get justice because their experience of being heard is the default. Ours is being disbelieved.

Both responses ignite a bubbling lava beneath my skin - I feel hot and upset at my keyboard even just thinking about it. Not just because of what they signify but because even if that is someone’s first response, there is no second response that grants the victim dignity or the benefit of the doubt.

The conversation never comes back round to understanding the woman’s side because it’s all about centring men. In a way, it reminds me so much of conversations with people about race in 2020 following George Floyd’s death, where they were more concerned with being perceived as racists than actually listening to what people in the black community had to say. It’s hard to draw any other conclusion now that so many of the diversity and inclusion charters that sprang up during that time have been cut.

And speaking of - ‘women aren’t angry enough’ feels like a slogan that whitewashes the problems that black women have historically faced as being perceived as angry whenever they raise concerns about racism, sexism or simply don’t agree with what is being said. It has been systemically used as a way to silence black women. As a rallying cry it falls flat, and demonstrates the blind spots that exist in terms of intersectionality within our own gender.

Women as a whole have not been allowed to own their anger, and some of us even less so. The conversation which gathered pace in 2024 and 2025 (Women are Mad podcast was one of the frontrunners in this, run by Salima Saxton and Jen Cox) has gone some way to unpacking this and starting much-needed conversations around it. Internalised anger is the deadliest - it quite literally makes us sick whether that is through auto immune diseases and stress.

I would venture to say that women have been angry for a long, long time. And I think the problem is that the world doesn’t know where to put that anger. So it pretends like it doesn’t exist, and we get sicker, and sicker. Would that I had a solution. For now, I would advise any woman to give that anger an outlet, because the consequences we want are going to take a long time, if ever they arrive.

The world order is upheld by those who have the most to gain from it, whether that is consuming women’s bodies at their whim and without consent or raking in millions from the industries designed to drive us to the brink of madness. I wish it would burn to the fucking ground.

Is that angry enough, do you think?

My new book She Wanted More is out next week on 26th Feb. Pre-orders help a ton and would be greatly appreciated! Click here for where to buy.