When you say I seem angry, I get more angry
Why your anti cancel culture fave, Clementine Morrigan, is still a fucking feminist
“Early childhood mechanisms of self-suppression are reinforced by persistent, gendered social conditioning. Many women end up self-silencing, defined as “the tendency to silence one’s thoughts and feelings to maintain safe relationships, particularly intimate relationships.” This chronic negation of one’s authentic experience can be fatal. In a study that followed nearly two thousand women over ten years, those “who reported that, in conflict with their spouses, they usually or always kept their feelings to themselves, had over four times the risk of dying during the follow-up compared with women who always showed their feelings.”” — Gabor Maté, The Myth of Normal
“The hostile tropes often found in pornography — Take this, bitch. You fucking love it, bitch — express, to be sure, an idea that women shouldn't desire sex; that if she does love it, one can feel contempt for her. But they also work to turn the tables; to deny and displace vulnerability — the vulnerability men experience in feeling desire for a woman. It’s a response that wants to punish the feeling of desire for opening up a chasm in the façade of mastery, and that relocates in the woman the troublesome feeling of men’s own desire. I don't want; you want. Heterosexual men get to work out, here, the aggression they feel towards their own weakness, towards their own vulnerability to desire. And this may be why desire, a troubling symbol of the loss of control, gets refigured so insistently as triumph over the woman; as denigration of her; as humiliation of her. These are the ideals of mastery and power with which men punish women, but also themselves.” — Katherine Angel, Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again
“Sometimes it is hard not to give in to the impulse to sever parts of myself for the attention which can feel more worthwhile than actual love.” — Tara McGowan-Ross, notes on mermaids
“Every time you call me crazy I get more crazy, what about that? And when you say I seem angry, I get more angry. There’s nothing like a mad woman; what a shame she went mad. No one likes a mad woman; you made her like that.” — Taylor Swift, Mad Woman
“Sometimes I feel like everybody is a sexy baby and I’m the monster on the hill.” — Taylor Swift, Anti-Hero
Recently a male friend of mine kept trying to make a point to me about an article he had not read, that I had read. I insisted that the point he was making didn’t make sense, and that he should read the article before we discussed it. He continued to write long texts arguing his point and I continued to say that he should read the article. The exchange devolved into a fight in which he accused me of being aggressive. I did not think I was being aggressive. I wasn’t being insulting or disrespectful. But I was mad. I expressed to him that I found it really frustrating that he was arguing with me about something he hadn’t even read, and wouldn’t let it go. I told him that I felt there was a gendered element to the exchange and that I am used to be condescended to by men who often assume the position of authority even when they have less knowledge of the subject. He then accused me of “weaponizing identity politics” at him and claimed that this was ironic given my work (my work critiques identitarianism, not identity politics — for the record). He got really upset and threatened to end our friendship. I went into relational caretaker mode, assuring him that I cared about our friendship and I didn’t want to lose it, that I respect his intelligence and opinions, and suggested that we revisit the conversation when we’d both calmed down. He told me he didn’t want to revisit and that our friendship was over because I “clearly can’t handle being disagreed with.”
Later, after some time had passed, I reached out and expressed my desire to save our friendship. He agreed to meet up and talk. I started by taking ownership over everything I could take ownership for. I admitted to being mad. I said it was possible some of my anger was coming from other experiences I’d had. I said we should have been talking in person rather than over text so the tone was clearer. The conversation wrapped up and we started making plans to hang out that week. It was only later, when I went home, that it hit me that he had not owned any of it. He had not owned the condescending way he was arguing with me about an article he hadn’t even read, or the way he had threatened to end our friendship for maintaining my disagreement with him. He didn’t admit to shutting down any consideration of gendered dynamics in our friendship as “weaponizing identity politics” (and misrepresenting my own work to me, at that) or to inaccurately framing disagreement as aggression (something I do actually critique at length in my work). So I reached out to him and expressed that I didn’t feel he had owned his side of the conflict. He maintained that there was no conflict, only one-sided aggression coming from me.
Recently I was having a conversation with my roommate who is a woman ten years younger than me. I offhandedly said something about the fact that I am smart. She told me she had never heard a woman say that about herself, and that she actually felt impacted by hearing me call myself smart in such a straightforward, matter of fact way. She talked about how she’s heard guys say things about their intelligence casually in conversation but that she’d never heard a woman do the same. I wrote an article not too long ago about how often my haters make derisive comments about my intelligence, implying that I’m dumb and laughing at the idea that I could take myself seriously as a public intellectual. Jay and I have discussed how, while we are both widely hated, the haters don’t imply that Jay is dumb. The thing is that I am not in the least bit insecure about my intelligence, so while I find condescension and ridicule frustrating and annoying, I know that I am smart. Being a smart girl, and then a smart woman, has always caused me problems.
The condescension of a male friend arguing about something he hasn’t even read and refusing to let it go, then getting emotional about it, and accusing me of being the one who is being overly emotional (“aggressive”) is straightforward boring sexism. His attempt to throw my own work back in my face by misrepresenting it to mean that I can never name sexism when it’s happening, is an interesting, spicy touch. But what gets me the most about this interaction is the way that I was framed as being emotional and out of control, while simultaneously being the one to take on all the emotional and caretaking work of relationship. Even though I was mad, I was still able and willing to be kind and generous. Even though he’s the one who lost it on me and threatened our entire friendship over a stupid argument, I was the one to reach out and offer an olive branch. Even though I hadn’t done anything wrong, I was still able to look for and own what I might have done to contribute to the conflict. Even though he had thrown a fit, he was still able to paint the interaction as “one-sided aggression” coming from me.
One of the quotes I opened with, from Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again by Katherine Angel, blew my mind when I read it. The degradation of women in porn is a disavowal of men’s own desire, desire that they find shameful, chaotic, and out of control because it “open[s] up a chasm in the façade of mastery” and forces them to confront their own vulnerability. “I don't want; you want.” It is easier to place all the desire in the woman, and then to degrade her for her desire, than it is to face the desire in themselves and what that desire brings up for them, including, importantly, vulnerability. I think men disavow emotion in a similar way. I am not being emotional; you are being emotional.
I can’t count the number of times I’ve been called emotional in my arguments with men. And sometimes, it’s true, emotion has been present. In this case, I was angry. But my anger is not alien to me. My anger is not shameful, chaotic, or out of control. My anger is not something I disavow and act out unconsciously, causing me to behave in ways that are disrespectful or mean or cruel. My anger does not cause me to entirely shut down my sense of attachment in relationship or the vulnerability of my heart. I’ve had too much therapy for that. I was able to say I was angry and explain why without attacking, demeaning, or abandoning relationship. And yet this was framed as aggression.
Often, when I am accused of being emotional in arguments with men, they too are being emotional. They don’t see themselves as being emotional because they have disavowed their emotions and placed them on me. Now I carry my emotions and his emotions: both are my responsibility. I also carry the responsibility for all the work of emotional and relational repair. If relational repair is to happen, it will be me who will instigate it and carry it out. I’m the one who will initiate owning my part. I’m the one who will emphasize the importance of the relationship. I’m the one who will say kind and soothing things. And — up until relatively recently in my life — I would be the one to repress my own emotions and my knowledge of his emotions, so that the conflict can be “resolved” and he doesn’t have to do the troublesome work of facing what any of the emotions might mean — mine or his.
One of the things this former friend of mine kept saying when I tried to discuss the conflict with him is that I could have just let it go. From my perspective, he is the one who wasn’t letting it go. He made an argument about an article he hadn’t read. I explained why I disagreed and encouraged him to read the article and then we could discuss it further. It is at this point that it would make sense for him to say “Oh yeah, of course. Let me read the article and get back to you.” Instead he decided to write walls of text defending a position that couldn’t really be based in anything because he didn’t have any of the relevant information. What I did was maintain my disagreement with him. At no point did I say “Oh, I see what you’re saying” because what he was saying did not make sense. It is this — maintaining my disagreement — that is so often the cause of intense anger and emotion in men. They are not used to women confidently and assertively maintaining disagreement with them. When they get emotional they are used to women switching to caretaking mode and soothing their emotions (emotions which, we must remember, they are definitely not having at all!).
At this point I will interject with my #notallmen disclaimer. For anyone getting upset or assuming I’m falling off the edge of a cliff into essentialism, or who may worry that their fave anti cancel culture thinker is “weaponizing indentity politics”, let me be clear. Sexism is learned behaviour, not an essential trait. All men are capable of noticing and unlearning sexist patterning in themselves and many of them have done so quite thoroughly. The patterns I’m describing here are damaging to men as well as women and result in large part from the totally dysfunctional ways that boys are raised to repress and deny their own emotions. This isn’t an argument that “men are trash.” It’s an argument that sexism still very much exists, and it is damaging to both women and men.
It is bad for women to hold everyone’s emotions. It is bad for women to repress our own emotions in favour of maintaining our relationships. It is bad for women to allow men to repress their own emotions by projecting them onto women. It is bad for women that we are still routinely called “aggressive”, or treated like we are being crazy or over-emotional, when we are in fact assertively stating what we think and feel. It is bad for women that the entire responsibility for emotional and relational work so often falls entirely on our shoulders. As the Gabor Maté quote I opened with makes clear, this not only sucks for women generally, but it makes us physically sick and can literally shorten our lives.
I have two autoimmune conditions. They have caused me so much stress and pain. One of the most frustrating things about autoimmune conditions is that modern medicine basically responds to them with a giant question mark. There are things you can do to control the symptoms, sometimes. But there is no cure. Autoimmune conditions are when the immune system turns on itself, attacking the body, instead of outside invaders like bacteria, viruses, and parasites, or internal problems like cancer cells. Women make up 80% of those with autoimmune conditions. Gabor Maté has argued persuasively that the reason autoimmune conditions effect women so much more than men is because of our chronic repressing of our emotions and our chronic caretaking of other people’s emotions at the expense of our own perspectives, needs, limits, and boundaries. The impact of constantly repressing our own emotions and caretaking other people’s emotions has a profound impact on women’s health. The only way for us to improve our health is to begin to assertively express our thoughts and feelings, even with the risk of losing relationships, and to demand that the labour involved in maintaining relationships, navigating conflict, and working with emotions be shared equitably.
Sexism creates a situation where women being smart, assertive, confident, or successful brings up big emotions for many men. When women don’t immediately move to appeasement, or don’t bother with appeasement at all, this too brings up big emotions. Men are not used to women challenging them and poking holes in “the façade of mastery.” This is why, what can feel like simply disagreement from a woman’s perspective, can seem like an attack to a man. “Why don’t you just let it go?” “Okay, but quite literally, why don’t you just let it go?” Why is it a woman who must assent, concede, back down? Why is it a woman who must put aside her disagreement? And why does a woman’s refusal to do so bring up such emotion in men?
Because he is not used to managing the emotions that her refusal brings up in him. When she refuses, he has emotions, and when he has emotions, who does he turn to in order to soothe those emotions? Her. If she refuses to do this also then there is no way for him to understand what is happening other than to frame it as an open display of aggression, an attack. What else could possibly explain this sneaking sensation of abject helplessness that he is desperately trying to push down? A “chasm in the façade of mastery” is opening and it is fucking terrifying and there is no one there to tell him that everything will be okay (not that he needs that!).
After one of these encounters, even if I am able to hold my ground and refuse to fold into appeasement, I am still left with incredible guilt. The guilt weighs on me and haunts me. I have been thoroughly socialized to believe that the work of relationships is my responsibility, so if the relationship has failed, then I have failed. Maybe I could have done something differently. Said something a diferent way. Maybe I could have somehow both avoided the constant self-betrayal of appeasement and the anger of a person I care about, or even the destruction of a relationship that matters to me. The better I get at maintaining my boundaries and resisting the urge to appease, the more (sometimes unresolvable) conflict I experience in my relationships, especially in my relationships with straight men.
I believe strongly and wholeheartedly in the work of relationships, in the necessity of self-reflection and the careful searching for our own part, in kindness and generosity and letting people be imperfect, in dropping the content of the argument and turning toward the underlying relational needs. But I can’t be the only one doing this work. When this work is one sided it leaves me disempowered and holding the burden of everyone’s emotions. When this work is one sided it changes from the healthy work of relationship to the unhealthy and disease-promoting work of repression and self-betrayal. If I am expected to do this work all on my own and I won’t then I get called angry, aggressive, crazy, and emotional, while the men in my life get to remain calm and logical and reasonable even as they throw literal tantrums.
On top of all this, a significant part of the way that desirability is constructed for women in the matrix of heteronormativity is through our willingness to concede. Our unwillingness to back down, to “let it go”, is simultaneously painted as hysterically feminine and unattractively masculine. A hot girl is receptive, not assertive. A hot girl might have some smarts, some success, and definitely some confidence, but not too much. Certainly not so much that it could be perceived as threatening to, or in competition with, the men who might desire her. Success, intelligence, confidence, and achievement, things that you’d think would be uncomplicated sources of positive self-regard, are for women, a double-edged sword. Hot girls are unthreatening. They can be good at “girl stuff”, sure, but if they venture into the realm of intellectualism, ambition, or firmly held conviction, they risk losing their seat at the hot girl table. Hot girls do the work of emotion and relationship without ever drawing attention to the fact that they are doing it. They would never humiliate a man by saying: those emotions are yours.
Desirability might seem like a silly thing to worry about, except that it is tied to our deepest human need: connection. Many women still believe that the surest path to love is through becoming desirable, which under heternormativity and sexism means becoming unthreatening, complacent, receptive, and self-betraying. This path never leads to love. It always leads to more self-betrayal.
I am a feminist. That means that I believe we must have language for gendered dynamics that remain invisible because they feel so normal and natural. That means that I am beyond exhausted from carrying the weight of my own repressed emotions and the emotions which men disavow and displace onto me. That means that in order to become physically healthy and not unnecessarily shorten my lifespan, I must be willing to say things that will have me painted as aggressive and crazy when I am actually being assertive and fair.
I am well known for my work opposing identitarianism, and there seems to be some confusion about what that means, though I think I have been clear. Opposing indentitarianism does not mean that I believe we have no need for feminism, or for the opposition of racism, or homophobia, or transphobia, or any other identity based discrimination or oppression. It does not mean that I believe we should never draw attention to or talk about the ways these systems show up in our personal relationships or our political work. It means that I don’t think that identity is the only or primary way that power operates in the world today (I think the primary way is capitalism). And it means that I reject essentialism — the homogenizing of identity groups by acting as if they have shared, essential traits or beliefs. And while I do write this as a woman, there are many women who would disagree with much of what I’ve written here. I do not place the authority of my words on my identity as a woman alone. I place them on my capacity to be a deep and careful thinker and a persuasive, compelling writer. If I do say so myself. I do not bar men, on the basis of identity, from careful and sincere engagement with these ideas, or even from principled disagreement with them. And I am not cancelling anyone.
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Clementine Morrigan is a writer and public intellectual based in Montréal, Canada. She writes popular and controversial essays about culture, politics, ethics, relationships, sexuality, and trauma. A passionate believer in independent media, she’s been making zines since the year 2000 and is the author of several books. She’s known for her iconic white-text-on-a-black-background mini-essays on Instagram. One of the leading voices on the Canadian Left and one half of the Fucking Cancelled podcast, Clementine is an outspoken critic of cancel culture and a proponent of building solidarity across difference. She is a socialist, a feminist, and a vegan for the animals and the earth.
Browse her shop, listen to her podcast, book a one on one session with her, or peruse her list of resources and further reading.
Very well stated, as always.
I did this in some ways in my marriage, and it was a contributing factor to the dissolution of said marriage. Unraveling this pattern and learning how to take responsibility for my own emotions made me a better man, a better person. I recommend it for everyone.
I have read this and reflected this morning on how I was guilty of doing this to the person I loved the most. I destroyed the most deep connection by being "that guy" expecting to not own the feelings that were actually mine. I projected them onto her and for that I could not be more sorry. I hope if anyone like that ever comes along again, I can truly cherish the deepest connection of friendship that is the root of my true desire with people without doing this to another person. I'm still thankful for what we had while we had it.