A demonstration organised by Women Against State Pension Inequality, Manchester, October 2019. Photograph: Barbara Cook/Alamy Live News/Alamy Live News.
British women are among the angriest in Europe. Well, what’s wrong with that?
Emma Brockes
A new survey seems to correlate anger with being unhappy – but it can be an energising and frankly entertaining emotion too.
A while ago, to amuse myself, I ran a search through my text archive for the phrase “I can’t stand it”, which delivered pages and pages of returns. Some recent things I can’t stand, in no particular order: the phrase “clutching her pearls”; a very obviously made-up anecdote in a big profile in a major magazine; someone’s passive aggressive use of the word “anyway” in an email; a reporter friend’s colleague who, every time she finishes a story, goes into the system and changes two small things on it so he can shoehorn his name next to hers on the byline; David Beckham sucking up to the royals; Jimmy Fallon’s large face; the opening episode of the Russell T Davies show Tip Toe; weather, specifically high wind.
If I was transported with rage by all of these things, I assumed it was a byproduct of age. You can’t miss the sheer amount of menopause content floating around at the moment telling us how age makes us angry, even though, apparently, the menopause remains a taboo (it could be more of a taboo!). As it turns out, however, it isn’t just me and other women in midlife who are furious, but rather British women in general, and to a degree that outstrips our counterparts in other countries. I take surveys with a pinch, but this particular poll was extensive, organised by a global health initiative in which 76,000 women worldwide were questioned about their physical and emotional wellbeing. Last week, the findings were released, including the fact that British women are among the angriest in Europe – angrier than the Germans, Swiss, French and Dutch – and that we’re getting angrier with each passing year.
There’s no way to come at this without resorting to national stereotypes, so first off: we’re angrier than the French? Seriously? What about the Italians?! Whenever I go to Italy, the Italians seem pretty angry! (The only European women angrier than us are the Czechs, Maltese, Greeks, Albanians and Spanish – make of that what you will.) A keener sociologist than me would look closely at cultural norms in each country to deduce the various thresholds for what defines anger. In other words: I know from living in the US that there are certain types of family fights, for example, that to a British person look catastrophically angry, but within certain American subcultures are considered regular discourse, to be forgotten about two seconds after they’ve happened. (Meanwhile, I still haven’t recovered.)
Britain is in a doom loop: people mistrust democracy and politicians. I say a hope loop is possible too | Polly CurtisRead moreWe do love a grudge in this country, and we also find complaining about things funny – so perhaps this explains why we top the polls. But can recreational anger still be described as anger? The fact is that “anger” is surely too broad a term to have any meaning here. To create an accurate picture, the pollsters at the Hologic Global Women’s Health Index would have had to break the test down into subcategories allowing for the difference between “seething resentment”, “mild irritation”, “a grievance going back 25 years”, and “I’m still banging on about this thing from yesterday because it really does give me enjoyment”.
The inference is that British women are unhappier than their European sisters and, while that may be the case, in my view, anger is the wrong metric to measure this. I think boredom correlates with unhappiness more reliably than anger. Passive indifference; that’s a problem. A sense of defeat; powerlessness; fear; insecurity. But anger can be energising and entertaining. We should be angry! Many things suck! And while there’s no data from the survey about how angry British men are, one assumes they are as subject to the same cultural norms as we are, with the caveat that – just to take a wild stab at it – one of the things that makes British women so angry is British men. If anger festers in this country, it’s because we can’t let it out because we’re all so hung up on keeping up appearances. Thanks, I’m fine.
What exactly are we angry about? The survey has no answers but I’d put money on it not being geopolitics, or the economy, although one assumes both those things create a fraught background against which small irritations land harder. It may be that I’m angry about interest rates in this country soaring, but it’s stepping on a piece of Lego that will really make me howl. I am angry about recent gains made by Reform UK, but it won’t cause me to have a meltdown in the way that, for example, someone harassing me to hang out with them when I’ve already said no does. Or the image of Meryl Streep yukking it up with Jenna Bush Hager. Or someone I haven’t seen for 15 years popping up to ask a favour. I could go on, and on, and on.
Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist.
