How to be an aggressive woman

Another day, another article from the Daily Mail on one of the dangerous social trends threatening to tear women’s lives apart. Today, it’s a three page feature on being an “aggressive woman”. Supposedly girls’ anger issues are starting to get so bad that it’s now becoming dangerous to our health.

The writer, Jo Scott (presumably a woman who can control her aggression) sees angry women not only as a “dangerous trend” but, even worse, “the dark side of equality”. As we catch up with men on the aggression from we’re supposedly putting our frail and delicate bodies in literal physical danger.

To be fair to her, the gal’s done her research at least. In troops a variety of experts. “We’re treating more women than ever who struggle to regulate their emotions and express themselves appropriately”, warns Monica Cain, a counselling psychologist from London’s Nightingale Hospital. “Women feel aggression is a form of empowerment”, says Elle Boag, a social psychologist at Birmingham City University.

“It’s become so commonplace that it’s not even shameful.”

Her words hang heavily in the air. You can imagine women reading the article, looking at each other in silence, slowly realising the magnitude of their horrible, hateful, unattractive anger. Guys, it’s not even shameful anymore. We’ve ceased to be ashamed of normal emotions. The end is fucking nigh.

The bizarre piece is almost Victorian in its world view. It doesn’t exactly sound scientific, explaining how we’re hurting ourselves and rendering ourselves incapable of rational thought due to supposedly debilitating, apoplectic rage. It wouldn’t be a huge stretch to imagine the author warning that we’re going to descend into hysteria soon. The whole thing has a sinister Charlotte Perkins Gilman kind of vibe.

It doesn’t help that the ‘testimonials’ they have of so-called “respectable women” with anger issues are frankly laughable. There’s Jo, who’s so consumed by rage that even a simple trip to buy the weekly groceries can lead to frighteningly aggressive outbursts. There’s “Oxford-educated” Jocelyn Robson, who etched the word ‘cunt’ in capital letters on two of her former boyfriends’ cars after they broke up – which to be fair, is a bit extreme, but whether they actually were cunts is left unconfirmed.

One woman says she started to lose control of her temper while pregnant with her son. One bizarre anecdote simply details how a 27-year-old graduate just got a bit annoyed looking at her friends holiday photos and took a break from Facebook.

Unsurprisingly, the heartfelt advice is having the opposite effect on social media, where women are getting understandably quite angry over it (guys be careful!).

It’s as though, in attempting to find another thing women simply should not do the Daily Mail are casting the net wildly searching for evidence, searching for a new social craze for impressionable women.

But this is not a growing cultural phenomenon, it’s an offensive collection of anecdotes lazily shoved together in an attempt to identify a trend which doesn’t exist.