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Summary: Anger in feminism is a tool that forces attention and drives change. Silencing it weakens the movement and protects those who benefit from oppression.
Every time feminists speak up, there is always someone ready to tell women how to behave, speak respectfully, lower their tone, don’t sound too angry, and don’t be too emotional. This demand almost always comes from men who have never experienced the harm feminists are naming, people insulated from the consequences of misogyny.
This is because what is really being policed is not just tone or manners, it is also emotion, and specifically feminist anger. The anger is always framed as a flaw, a problem, a character defect, rather than what it truly is: proof that someone is passionate enough to refuse silence, to refuse complacency, to refuse being ignored for decades. Anger in this context is a sign that the issues being raised are urgent and real.
Emotional delivery is essential to activism; it shows investment, commitment, and the unwillingness to accept the status quo quietly. The problem with telling feminists to calm down is that it strips this energy away, it tells women to mute their passion to make others comfortable, and this is where respectability politics becomes dangerous, because it is not about civility or strategy, it is about control, about taking the bite out of a movement that is meant to disrupt, unsettle, and demand change.
Imagine feminism as a tiger, fierce, strong, and unapologetic, and respectability politics comes in like a dentist, carefully removing its canines so it can look impressive but can no longer hunt successfully. A tiger without teeth is still a tiger in form, but it cannot protect, cannot strike, cannot demand accountability, and this is exactly what emotional policing does: it transforms a movement with the power to challenge patriarchal systems into something soft, ornamental, and safe to ignore. Once anger is removed, once vocal insistence is silenced, what remains is a hollow version of feminism that is polite, gentle, self-conscious, but toothless, and toothless tigers do not change systems.
Feminism is supposed to be uncomfortable; it is supposed to shake people, to check the parts of society that are complacent, to push individuals to confront injustice, and it is supposed to make people reflect, argue, challenge, and act. Without passion, without disruption, nothing shifts; oppression continues quietly, invisibly, and anger in feminism functions as currency, just like in any other movement. It is the thing that forces attention, it is the pressure that leads to progress, and to demand that feminists remove it is to be misogynistic, because it treats women differently than every other group, it demands civility from the oppressed while excusing it from the privileged, and it places comfort over accountability.
When movements lose their bite, they become ceremonial, symbolic gestures rather than forces that drive change, and feminism stripped of anger is no different. It exists to educate, reassure, and soothe rather than to challenge, to make polite requests instead of systemic demands, to hope that the powerful will act without being shaken, but no system has ever changed that way, no injustice has ever been dismantled quietly. Anyone who thinks the movement must be palatable to be effective is misunderstanding the point entirely, because when you stop shaking tables, when you remove teeth from tigers, what remains is silence. Silence has never forced accountability, silence has never delivered justice, silence has only protected the comfortable, the privileged, the ones who benefit from oppression, and anger in feminism refuses that comfort, refuses silence, and refuses to let the powerful sleep easily.
