So sometimes I get angry, and it took me many years to be able to say just those words. In my work, sometimes my body thrums, I'm so enraged. But no matter how justified my anger has been, throughout my life, I've always been led to understand that my anger is an exaggeration, a misrepresentation, that it will make me rude and unlikable. Mainly as a girl, I learned, as a girl, that anger is an emotion better left entirely unvoiced.
有時,我會生氣, 為了說出這幾個字 花了我好多年的時間。 在我工作時, 我的身體有時會顫抖, 我會很憤怒。 但無論我的怒火有多正當的理由, 在我的一生中, 我一直被教育, 我的怒火是一種誇大、 刻意的扭曲, 認為這怒火會讓我 顯得無禮且不討喜。 主要是身為女孩, 我了解到身為女孩, 憤怒是一種情緒, 最好不要表現出來。
Think about my mother for a minute. When I was 15, I came home from school one day, and she was standing on a long veranda outside of our kitchen, holding a giant stack of plates. Imagine how dumbfounded I was when she started to throw them like Frisbees...
來講個跟我媽有關的故事。 我十五歲時,有一天我放學回家, 她站在我們廚房外的長廊上, 拿了一大疊的盤子。 想像當她把盤子當飛盤般 扔向我時,我有多目瞪口呆……
(Laughter)
(笑聲)
into the hot, humid air. When every single plate had shattered into thousands of pieces on the hill below, she walked back in and she said to me, cheerfully, "How was your day?"
扔向又熱又濕的空氣中。 在所有的盤子碎成數千片 掉落到下頭的斜坡上後, 她走回屋內,開心地對我說: 「你今天過得如何?」
(Laughter)
(笑聲)
Now you can see how a child would look at an incident like this and think that anger is silent, isolating, destructive, even frightening. Especially though when the person who's angry is a girl or a woman. The question is why.
各位應該可以理解 孩子在面對這樣的事件之後, 會以為憤怒是沉默的、孤立的、 摧毀性的,甚至是可怕的。 特別是當憤怒的人 是一位女孩或女人的時候。 問題是,為什麼?
Anger is a human emotion, neither good nor bad. It is actually a signal emotion. It warns us of indignity, threat, insult and harm. And yet, in culture after culture, anger is reserved as the moral property of boys and men. Now, to be sure, there are differences. So in the United States, for example, an angry black man is viewed as a criminal, but an angry white man has civic virtue. Regardless of where we are, however, the emotion is gendered. And so we teach children to disdain anger in girls and women, and we grow up to be adults that penalize it.
憤怒是一種人類情緒,沒有好壞。 它其實是一種信號情緒。 它在對我們受到的 屈辱、威脅、侮辱和傷害發出警告。 然而,在各個文化的認知當中, 憤怒這品格特質 被保留給男孩和男人。 但無可否認,是有差別的。 比如,在美國, 憤怒的黑人會被視為罪犯, 但憤怒的白人卻被認為有公德心。 然而,不論在哪個地方, 這種情緒都有性別差異。 所以,我們會去教導孩子 鄙視女孩和女人的憤怒, 長大後還要懲罰憤怒的女性。
So what if we didn't do that? What if we didn't sever anger from femininity? Because severing anger from femininity means we sever girls and women from the emotion that best protects us from injustice. What if instead we thought about developing emotional competence for boys and girls? The fact is we still remarkably socialize children in very binary and oppositional ways. Boys are held to absurd, rigid norms of masculinity -- told to renounce the feminine emotionality of sadness or fear and to embrace aggression and anger as markers of real manhood. On the other hand, girls learn to be deferential, and anger is incompatible with deference. In the same way that we learned to cross our legs and tame our hair, we learned to bite our tongues and swallow our pride. What happens too often is that for all of us, indignity becomes imminent in our notions of femininity.
如果我們沒這麼做,會怎樣? 如果我們不把憤怒 和女性氣質分開來談,會怎樣? 因為切斷女性氣質的憤怒 意味著女性面對不公不義時 最能保護她們的情緒也被切斷了。 倘若我們轉而思考 直接培養男孩和女孩 處理情緒的能力呢? 事實上,我們的社會還是會用二分法 或非常對立的方式 將男女生分別看待。 也就是,男孩要遵守荒唐 又死板的男子氣概標準—— 告訴他們不能夠有女性特有的 悲傷或害怕的特質, 且直接面對侵略和憤怒 才是真男人的表現。 另一方面,女孩則要學會三從四德, 且憤怒與遵從是不相容的。 同樣地,我們女生得學會 兩腿併好,把頭髮梳順, 我們得學會忍著不說出 自己的感覺,把自尊往肚裡吞。 於是大部份人遇到一種情況: 女性觀念使得侮辱變得迫在眉睫。
There's a long personal and political tale to that bifurcation. In anger, we go from being spoiled princesses and hormonal teens, to high maintenance women and shrill, ugly nags. We have flavors, though; pick your flavor. Are you a spicy hot Latina when you're mad? Or a sad Asian girl? An angry black woman? Or a crazy white one? You can pick. But in fact, the effect is that when we say what's important to us, which is what anger is conveying, people are more likely to get angry at us for being angry. Whether we're at home or in school or at work or in a political arena, anger confirms masculinity, and it confounds femininity. So men are rewarded for displaying it, and women are penalized for doing the same.
此個人觀感與政治都不正確的二分法 是長久以來存在的謊言。 一旦發怒就會被扣上這些帽子: 犯公主病、荷爾蒙作怪的青少年, 或難以伺候、愛尖叫 又醜又嘮叨的女人。 我們有不同的口味;隨你挑。 當你生氣時,你是火辣的 拉丁美洲女郎嗎? 還是悲傷的亞洲女孩? 憤怒的黑人女性?抓狂的白種女人? 隨你挑選。 但,事實上,效應就是 當我們說出對我們重要的事, 表達我們的憤怒時, 大家比較有可能會對 我們的憤怒而感到生氣。 不論我們在家、在學校、 在工作,或在政治舞台, 憤怒是男子氣概的表現, 這會混淆我們對女性特質的定義。 所以,男人展現憤怒會被獎賞, 換成女人,則會被懲罰。
This puts us at an enormous disadvantage, particularly when we have to defend ourselves and our own interests. If we're faced with a threatening street harasser, predatory employer, a sexist, racist classmate, our brains are screaming, "Are you kidding me?" And our mouths say, "I'm sorry, what?"
這讓我們處在非常大的劣勢, 特別是當我們得要保護自己 或守護自身利益時。 如果我們面臨有威脅性的 街頭騷擾者、掠奪型的僱主、 性別歧視、種族歧視的同學, 實際上我們的大腦是在尖叫: 「你在耍我嗎?」 但我們的嘴巴卻只能說: 「我很抱歉,怎麼了?」
(Laughter)
(笑聲)
Right? And it's conflicting because the anger gets all tangled up with the anxiety and the fear and the risk and retaliation. If you ask women what they fear the most in response to their anger, they don't say violence. They say mockery. Think about what that means. If you have multiple marginalized identities, it's not just mockery. If you defend yourself, if you put a stake in the ground, there can be dire consequences.
對吧? 這很矛盾,因為憤怒和焦慮、 恐懼、風險、報復都糾纏在一起。 如果問女人,她們最怕別人 在她們憤怒時做出什麼樣的反應, 她們不會回答是暴力。 她們會說是嘲笑。 想想看那是什麼意思。 如果你有多種被邊緣化的身份, 受到的就不僅僅是嘲弄。 如果你為自己辯護, 如果你勇敢站出來為自己發聲, 可能會有可怕的後果。
Now we reproduce these patterns not in big, bold and blunt ways, but in the everyday banality of life. When my daughter was in preschool, every single morning she built an elaborate castle -- ribbons and blocks -- and every single morning the same boy knocked it down gleefully. His parents were there, but they never intervened before the fact. They were happy to provide platitudes afterwards: "Boys will be boys." "It's so tempting, he just couldn't help himself." I did what many girls and women learn to do. I preemptively kept the peace, and I taught my daughter to do the same thing. She used her words. She tried to gently body block him. She moved where she was building in the classroom, to no effect. So I and the other adults mutually constructed a particular male entitlement. He could run rampant and control the environment, and she kept her feelings to herself and worked around his needs. We failed both of them by not giving her anger the uptake and resolution that it deserved. Now that's a microcosm of a much bigger problem. Because culturally, worldwide, we preference the performance of masculinity -- and the power and privilege that come with that performance -- over the rights and needs and words of children and women.
如今,我們不會大辣辣地 讓這些事一再發生, 但卻不知不覺地,每天在 我們的日常生活中一直出現。 前陣子,我女兒去上幼稚園, 每天早上,她都會建造一座 精緻的城堡——絲帶和積木—— 每天早上,同一個男孩 都會興高采烈地把它撞倒。 他的父母也在場, 卻不會在事發前干預。 他們總是在事後 很開心的說些陳腔濫調: 「男孩就是這樣子的。」 「這太誘人了,他無法控制自己。」 我所做的事,是許多女孩 和女人學會做的事。 我會提前表示和平, 我會教我的女兒也要這麼做。 她用她的言語。 她試圖溫和地用身體阻擋他。 她移動了她在教室中 建城堡的地點,但沒有用。 所以其實,我和其他成人是在 建造一種男性專有的權利。 讓他可以很猖獗並且控制環境, 而她要把自已的感覺藏在心裡, 避開,不影響他的需求。 我們辜負了他們兩人, 因為我們沒有理解她的憤怒, 她的憤怒應當獲得解決,但卻沒有。 這只是一個更大問題的縮影。 因為,全世界的文化 都偏愛男子氣慨的表現—— 賦予這類表現權力及特權—— 相對不那麼重視孩子和女人的 權利、需求、語言。
So it will come as absolutely no surprise, probably, to the people in this room that women report being angrier in more sustained ways and with more intensity than men do. Some of that comes from the fact that we're socialized to ruminate, to keep it to ourselves and mull it over. But we also have to find socially palatable ways to express the intensity of emotion that we have and the awareness that it brings of our precarity. So we do several things. If men knew how often women were filled with white hot rage when we cried, they would be staggered.
所以在座各位應該不意外 如果將來有報告指出: 女人的憤怒比男人更久, 強度也更高。 部分原因是我們被社會化, 會反覆思考, 把憤怒藏在心底。 但我們得必須找到 社會可接受的方法, 來表達我們的強烈不滿, 並意識到這些會帶來衝突。 所以,我們會有幾種做法。 如果男人知道,我們女人哭泣時, 心中充滿怒火的頻率, 他們會嚇到。
(Laughter)
(笑聲)
We use minimizing language. "We're frustrated. No, really, it's OK."
我們會裝沒事的說 : 「我們很難過。但其實沒關係。」
(Laughter)
(笑聲)
We self-objectify and lose the ability to even recognize the physiological changes that indicate anger. Mainly, though, we get sick. Anger has now been implicated in a whole array of illnesses that are casually dismissed as "women's illnesses." Higher rates of chronic pain, autoimmune disorders, disordered eating, mental distress, anxiety, self harm, depression. Anger affects our immune systems, our cardiovascular systems. Some studies even indicate that it affects mortality rates, particularly in black women with cancer.
我們會自我合理化, 甚至失去了一種能力, 一種無法發現到自己憤怒時的 生理變化的能力。 我們大部分會生病。 如今,憤怒與一大堆疾病有關, 這些疾病也無端端地 被視為「婦女疾病」。 頻繁的慢性疼痛、自我免疫失調、 不正常進食、心理痛苦、 焦慮、自我傷害、憂鬱。 憤怒會影響我們的 免疫系統、心肺系統。 有些研究還指出, 憤怒會影響死亡率, 特別是得癌症的黑人女性。
I am sick and tired of the women I know being sick and tired. Our anger brings great discomfort, and the conflict comes because it's our role to bring comfort. There is anger that's acceptable. We can be angry when we stay in our lanes and buttress the status quo. As mothers or teachers, we can be mad, but we can't be angry about the tremendous costs of nurturing. We can be angry at our mothers. Let's say, as teenagers -- patriarchal rules and regulations -- we don't blame systems, we blame them. We can be angry at other women, because who doesn't love a good catfight? And we can be angry at men with lower status in an expressive hierarchy that supports racism or xenophobia. But we have an enormous power in this. Because feelings are the purview of our authority, and people are uncomfortable with our anger. We should be making people comfortable with the discomfort they feel when women say no, unapologetically. We can take emotions and think in terms of competence and not gender. People who are able to process their anger and make meaning from it are more creative, more optimistic, they have more intimacy, they're better problem solvers, they have greater political efficacy.
認識的女人生病、疲憊 ——我受夠了。 我們的憤怒帶來極大的不適, 而衝突就在於 我們要扮演安慰人的角色。 有些憤怒可被接受。 我們謹守分際時生氣可被接受。 身為母親或老師可以生氣, 但不能因勞心勞力養育生命而憤怒。 我們可以氣我們的母親。 比如,青少年時—— 爸媽訂的規則和規定—— 我們不怪罪體制,但怪罪他們。 我們可以對別的女人生氣, 因為那些人特別愛勾心鬥角。 我們能對那些社會階層低 支持種族歧視和仇外的男性生氣。 但我們有很強大的力量。 因為感覺舒不舒服是主觀的, 人們對我們憤怒感到不快。 我們要讓「聽到女人說不」 會感到不快的那些人 適應他們的不快, 我們用不著覺得過意不去。 我們可以用能力而非性別 來看待情緒與思考。 能夠處理自己的憤怒, 並讓它有意義的人, 是比較有創意、比較樂觀的人, 他們比較親密, 比較會解決問題, 他們有比較好的政治效力。
Now I am a woman writing about women and feelings, so very few men with power are going to take what I'm saying seriously, as a matter of politics. We think of politics and anger in terms of the contempt and disdain and fury that are feeding a rise of macho-fascism in the world. But if it's that poison, it's also the antidote. We have an anger of hope, and we see it every single day in the resistant anger of women and marginalized people. It's related to compassion and empathy and love, and we should recognize that anger as well.
我是女人,我寫的主題 是女人和感覺, 所以,很少有權力的男人 會認真看待我說的話, 並把它視為一個政治議題。 我們會用輕視、鄙棄、暴怒的角度 來看待政治和憤怒, 這會讓大男人法西斯主義 在世界上興起。 但,如果它是毒藥, 它也會是解藥。 我們對憤怒有所期望, 我們每天都會看到 女人以及被邊緣化者不停地憤怒。 這和同情心、同理心以及愛有關係。 我們也應該要認知到這種憤怒。
The issue is that societies that don't respect women's anger don't respect women. The real danger of our anger isn't that it will break bonds or plates. It's that it exactly shows how seriously we take ourselves, and we expect other people to take us seriously as well. When that happens, chances are very good that women will be able to smile when they want to.
問題在於: 不尊重女人憤怒的社會 就不尊重女人。 我們的憤怒最危險之處 不在於打壞關係或盤子, 而在於我們有多認真對待自己, 和期望別人多認真對待我們。 如果能實現這一點,很有可能, 女人就能在她們想要 微笑的時候微笑了。
(Applause)
(掌聲)
Thank you.
謝謝。
(Applause) (Cheers)
(掌聲)(歡呼)