'I'm Fascinated By How Differently Men And Women Express Anger'

My book, Why the World Needs Angry Women, has arrived at a very particular moment, when women’s anger is visible across our country. I could say that’s a coincidence, but I don’t really believe in coincidences. I think this moment has been in the making for decades.

I have been preoccupied with women’s anger for a very long time. I began looking at it more closely during the Shaheen Bagh protests, which I covered for TIME magazine. I also covered the farmers’ protests in 2021 for TIME. At both these protests, I saw women who had never before challenged patriarchy, stood up to the men in their families to assert their rights, or perhaps even been fully aware of those rights, using their anger not to wield power or intimidate others, but to demand justice. During both protests, women told me that when they stood on a stage, shouted slogans and mobilised other women, they felt a power they had never experienced before. And what did they do with that newfound power? They didn’t go around intimidating people or lording it over those weaker than themselves. They used that power to protest, to demand justice.

But long before 2020, as a journalist first in the United Kingdom and then in India, I met women channelling their anger in different ways. I have always been fascinated by how differently men and women express anger. Much of it comes down to social conditioning, but I also believe much of it is a matter of choice.

I completed the book in 2023, but its publication was delayed. Looking back, I am glad it has come out at this landmark moment in our country, when women have once again taken up the mantle of justice and are leading from the front. What I hope readers take away is something that became clear to me only after writing the book: women are not just reclaiming anger; they are also redefining it.

Women have always been angry. Look at our history. Savitribai Phule challenged caste and gender oppression through education. Pritilata Waddedar fought colonial rule. Bhanwari Devi’s fight for justice changed the conversation around sexual harassment in India. Their anger didn’t arrive with social media. It existed long before we had the vocabulary or platforms to recognise it.

Social media has made women’s anger more visible. It has given women a space to express what they might otherwise have been forced to swallow. And when I say a safe space, I don’t mean women aren’t abused, bullied or trolled online. Of course they are. But there is a difference between confronting someone behind a screen and confronting male anger in your immediate physical environment.

Women live with the threat of violence. We grow up learning to calculate risk, to be careful about when, where and how we express anger. So social media has opened up possibilities that didn’t exist before. It has allowed women to find one another, recognise shared experiences and realise that what they thought was a personal problem is often something much larger.

Of course not. Look at what happens when women do that. Our prime minister addresses the nation and calls it a ‘culture shock’. I think that says it all about how we view women’s right to anger in this country. Women are expected to adjust, compromise, accommodate, and, when it all becomes too much, scream into their pillows. Just don’t let anyone hear you.

We have turned women’s ability to endure injustice into a virtue. Think about how often we praise a woman for being strong. Sometimes what we really mean is that she suffered quietly, didn’t complain, didn’t make anyone uncomfortable. Women are constantly being told to forget, to let things go, to move on. A bad marriage, a sexist workplace, everyday humiliation, unequal labour. We are expected to absorb all of it and carry on. And when we refuse, we become difficult women.

But I think that is precisely what anger allows us to question. Why must I adjust? Why must I be the one to compromise? Why is my silence considered goodness? And that is exactly why patriarchy does its best to keep women from owning their anger. Because when women own their anger, things begin to change. They begin to change the world around them.

I think the very definition of anger, or rather its expression, has been shaped by male experience. We recognise anger as temper, tantrums, aggression, intimidation, sometimes even physical violence. That is the version we have been taught to take seriously, the version that carries power and authority. And women have largely been at the receiving end of that anger. Do women have the right to be loud, confrontational, messy, even unreasonable in their anger? Absolutely. Why should men have a monopoly over that? But I also believe that many women are uncomfortable with that version of anger because they understand it differently. For women, anger is often what pushes them to stand up for themselves or others.

Women have been redefining anger for generations. We just haven’t been particularly interested in recognising their version of it. Perhaps the most important way women have redefined anger is by showing us it doesn’t always have to be about force, intimidation or control. It can also be about questioning what is wrong, refusing to accept it and finding ways to change it.

These are women I have followed through my work over the years. I followed some online, watching their work and the journeys they have made. So these weren’t random choices. I knew their stories, and in some cases, I had been following them right from the beginning of their journeys. I was also clear that I wanted to showcase women whom younger women could identify with. Women who hadn’t necessarily been born into privilege, who hadn’t been handed opportunities, and who had built something despite the circumstances they found themselves in. I wanted to bring together women whose stories would show younger readers that you don’t have to begin with power to challenge it. And that anger can take you somewhere you may never have imagined.

These conversations fundamentally changed my understanding of anger. I had begun with the idea that women needed to reclaim their right to be angry. And I still believe that. But as I listened to these women, I realised that reclaiming anger was only part of the story. Women were reclaiming anger, but they were also redefining it. They were trying to understand their anger, reimagine it and find ways to channel it.

And I began to see that anger doesn’t have to remain the same throughout our lives. It changes as we change, as our circumstances change and as we find different ways of responding to the world around us. For a long time, I felt I had failed myself because I had never really reclaimed my right to anger. I was never comfortable expressing it loudly. But as I spoke with the women in my book, I realised something about myself: I had been pouring my anger into my writing since I was ten. That was the expression I chose.

That was probably my biggest takeaway from these conversations: there isn’t one right way to be angry. Women shouldn’t have to express anger in a particular way for it to be recognised or taken seriously. Most importantly, when we tell women to reclaim their right to anger, we must also recognise and celebrate how they have been using their anger and, in doing so, redefining it for future generations.

We are living in the age of what I call everyday feminism. For a long time, feminism was seen as something that belonged to academics, activists, intellectuals or organised movements. And there was also this persistent caricature of feminists as women who hated men or wanted to burn bras. But ordinary women are increasingly recognising that feminism is simply about questioning why things are the way they are. And technology has played an enormous role in making that possible.

Social media has let women share experiences that earlier generations might have suffered in isolation. A woman speaks about unequal household labour, workplace sexism or the mental load of motherhood, and thousands of other women recognise their own lives in that experience.

Take microfeminism, for example. Small, everyday acts of resistance. Refusing to automatically take notes in a meeting because you’re the only woman in the room. Not laughing at a sexist joke. Questioning why the responsibility for remembering birthdays, planning meals, or keeping the peace always falls on women. These may seem small, but they are not insignificant. Because real change doesn’t happen only through legislation or mass protests. It also happens in homes, workplaces, WhatsApp groups, kitchen-table conversations and everyday decisions.

What interests me about this fourth wave of feminism is precisely that. Feminism is becoming part of ordinary life. Women who may never call themselves activists are questioning things their mothers and grandmothers were told to accept. That is a very powerful shift.

But what do we really mean when we call anger performative? Are we saying the anger isn’t genuine, or that someone is expressing it publicly because they want to be heard? Those are two very different things. Of course, anger can be performative. But I think we need to be careful about how quickly we apply that label to women’s anger, particularly on social media.

Because being publicly angry comes at a cost for women. They are judged, labelled, dismissed, abused and threatened for expressing anger. So I find it difficult to believe that women would willingly put themselves through all of that simply to perform for an audience. For generations, women were told to keep their anger private. To swallow it, soften it, make it acceptable. Now that they have spaces where they can express it publicly, we are questioning whether that anger is authentic. There is something deeply ironic about that. But I also think visibility is only one part of the story. What interests me is what happens after anger is expressed. Does it start a conversation? Does another woman recognize something of her own life in it? Does it make her question something she has always accepted?

And even if we assume, for a moment, that the original expression of anger was performative, what happens when other women join in, sharing their own anger and experiences? The conversation becomes real. It becomes about their lives, their experiences, the things they have been carrying for years. So perhaps the more important question isn’t whether the anger was performative to begin with, but what it makes possible. Because even anger that begins as performance can become a shared, lived experience.