Yellowjackets and the catharsis of seeing women express rage

Shauna’s fellow former teammates wrestle to contain their anger, too, in often menacing and self-destructive ways. By her mid-40s, Misty (Ricci), a nurse and the hanger-on of the group who has always been desperate to be liked, swears, in private, at her frail patients before walking out and trilling to her co-workers, “Happy Friday, ladies!” Natalie (Lewis), a recovering addict in adulthood, lashes out at the one kind man who’s always loved her.

The joy in watching them is in part because while those around them don’t see the rage they’re withholding – “You’re in a mood,” Shauna’s husband, Jeff, says to her without looking up from his plate after Shauna says she’s slaughtered a rabbit she found in her garden, and slit it “chin to anus” for their dinner – we do. And in them, we see ourselves. We no longer feel alone; crazy and ashamed.

The best part is that there is no chorus of people in Yellowjackets, as there used to be in the TV shows and movies we grew up with, telling the women that they’re crazy bitches for feeling angry about the injustices they’ve suffered. (This includes the more garden varieties of female agonies they experience like being vilified for being a “prude” or a “slut” when they were teens.)

And this, crazy as it sounds, is revolutionary.

Because those of us who were taught to suppress our anger have paid. We have suffered – physically – for it.

“There’s a lot of research on the fact that expressive suppression tends to have sort of bad physiological outcomes, cardiovascular stress; it’s not good for you to be doing this in sort of a chronic way,” says Carolyn MacCann, an associate psychology professor at the University of Sydney and an expert on emotions.

She explains that this is because, while we might be able to suppress the expression of “negative” emotions – smiling instead of narrowing our eyes, saying kind words instead of spewing rage – we can’t suppress the physiological symptoms that naturally accompany our emotion. In the case of anger, this means blood flowing to our extremities and an increased heart rate, to prepare us to fight.

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So when we suppress our anger, rather than resolving it by expressing it, the amount of time our body is exposed to our increased heart rate and the blood flowing to our extremities is prolonged. So emotional labour has literally been exhausting us, with MacCann noting that suppressing emotions is related to work and parental burnout, too. (And, yes, says MacCann, her research has revealed that men, more often than women, “try to suppress the expression of other people’s emotions… [and] like to tell them not to express their emotions.“)

It was years of therapy that finally helped alleviate my friend’s panic attacks that arose from suppressing her anger. It did so by helping her to realise that her childhood neglect wasn’t her fault. “You cannot reach this if you don’t get angry,” she says.

So, what does it mean that Yellowjackets and other shows depicting justified female anger, like Mare of Easttown (starring Kate Winslet, sympathetically, as a sometimes vindictive detective) are now coming out to great acclaim?

The shows are, “like an iceberg”, says Dr Meagan Tyler, a senior lecturer at RMIT who specialises in gender inequality, noting that they reflect “an interest in tapping into the rage” that’s been seen in #metoo marches and in women speaking out about injustice like Brittany Higgins and Grace Tame. “There are these times that we just see a bit above” – social movements reflected in our cultural landscape – “but there’s a lot happening below.” It became evident this week just how much support there is now for women to express righteous anger after Tame was derided for standing, unsmiling, next to the prime minister. (Tame, the 2021 Australian of the Year, has long been critical of Scott Morrison for not doing enough to stamp out sexual harassment in Parliament House.)

Dr Khandis Blake, director of the Evolution, Conflict and Equality Lab at the University of Melbourne, agrees. “We’re definitely moving, in the West, towards a future where women are seen as able to express aggression [without] being seen as psychologically-damaged in some way, or abnormal.”

So, what next? For Professor Rae Cooper, an expert on gender equity at work at The University of Sydney, it’s directed anger that could help to chip away at the injustices Australia women still face at work: being talked down to, sexually harassed and ignored for promotions despite having more university credentials than men in Australia. Great social change – including cases and legislation that led to women being paid less than men to be deemed “unlawful” in the 1960s and 1970s – were driven by female anger, she says.

“The problem is that it has to be anger that’s organised and focused,” she says. “Rather than being individualised. It needs to be structural organised anger and rebellion.”

Certainly, more female friends of mine – some previously deeply uncomfortable with expressing any negativity, let alone rage – are game.

“Next night out?” one of the gentlest women I know texted a group of female friends the other day, with a link to an article about exhausted and enraged American women who recently gathered on a high school football field in Boston to jointly “primal scream” about the despair, anguish and anxiety they’ve endured during the pandemic.

Tyler thinks it could be just what we need. “I think we’re making more space for women to be able to express anger, even if it’s in limited ways. But there’s a helluva lot more to go. I hope we can keep pushing it in that direction before the backlash comes.”

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