Soraya
Chemaly是一位获奖记者、散文家和作家,她的作品经常出现在媒体上。Soraya表示愤怒是一种强大的力量,但是在世界各地,大多数女性所受到的教育都是不要表达自己的愤怒。
为什么会这样?在这种沉默中女性会失去什么?在这篇发人深省的演讲中,Soraya展示了女性的愤怒是合理的、健康的,也是改变的潜在催化剂。
中英全文翻译如下
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.
所以有时我会生气,我花了很多年才能够说出这句话。在我的工作中,有时我的身体颤抖,我太愤怒了。但是,无论我的愤怒是多么合理,在我的一生中,我一直被告知我的愤怒是一种夸张,一种曲解它会让我变得粗鲁和不可理喻。主要是作为一个女孩,我了解到,作为一个女孩,愤怒是一种情感将它置之不顾。
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...
想想我的妈妈,我15岁的时候,有一天我放学回家,她站在在我们厨房外廊上,拿着巨大的一堆盘子。想象一下,当她开始把它们像飞盘一样
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?"
扔进炎热潮湿的空气中,我是多么傻眼。当每一个盘子砸在下面的山上,碎成数千块时,她回到房里,乐呵呵地对我说,“你今天过得怎么样?”
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.
现在你可以想象一个孩子在面对这样的事件之后,以为愤怒是沉默的,孤立的,破坏性的,甚至是可怕的。特别是当生气是一个女孩或女人。问题是为什么。
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.
愤怒是人类的情感,它既不好也不坏。它实际上是一种信号情感。它警示着我们屈辱、威胁、侮辱和伤害。然而,在各种文化中,愤怒仅仅被归于为男孩和男人的道德财产。
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.
现在,当然,会有差异。例如,在美国,一个愤怒的黑人被视为罪犯,而一个愤怒的白人则具有公民美德。无论我们在哪里,情感是有性别的。因此,我们教孩子蔑视女孩和妇女的愤怒,我们长大成人后又惩罚这种愤怒。
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?
那如果我们不那么做呢?如果我们不切断愤怒与女性气质?因为将愤怒从女性气质中去除,意味着我们切断女孩和妇女与最能保护她们免受不公正的情感。如果相反,我们考虑培养男孩和女孩的情感能力,如何?
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.
事实是,我们仍然以非常二元和相对的方式让儿童交往。男孩们被要求具有荒谬、僵硬的男子气概,去除悲伤或恐惧这些所谓的女性情感,并抱侵略性和愤怒,这被看作是男子汉的标志。
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.
在另一方面,女孩学会要毕恭毕敬,但愤怒与恭敬并不兼容。以同样的方式,我们学会了交叉腿而坐并驯服我们的头发,我们学会了咬住舌头保持沉默,吞下我们的骄傲。经常发生的是,对我们所有人来说,我们认知的女性观念中,无礼侮辱变得迫在眉睫。
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.
这一分歧有着漫长的个人和政治故事。当愤怒时,我们可以是宠坏的公主和荷尔蒙爆发的青少年,也可以是难伺候的妇女,刺耳,丑陋的唠叨狂。我们也有口味,请挑选你的口味。当你生气时,你是热辣拉丁女郎?悲伤亚洲女孩?愤怒黑人女人?疯狂白人妇女?你可以挑选。
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.
但事实上,当我们在表达对我们很重要的事时,就是愤怒所传达的,人们更有可能对我们的愤怒感到生气。无论我们是在家里、在学校、在工作中还是在政治舞台上,愤怒证实了男子气概,却混淆了女性气质。所以,男人会因为展示它而得到回报,而女人也会因为它而受到惩罚。
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?"
这使我们处于巨大的不利之中,特别是当我们必须捍卫自己和自身利益的时候。如果我们面对有威胁性的街头骚扰者或是强取豪夺的雇主,或是一个有性别歧视、种族主义的同学,我们的大脑尖叫,“你逗我啊?”而我们的嘴却说,“对不起,什么?”
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.
对吧?这是相互矛盾的,因为愤怒与焦虑、恐惧、风险和报复纠缠在一起。如果问女性,她们最害怕别人如何回应她们的愤怒,她们不会说暴力。而是嘲弄。
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.
想想这意味着什么。如果你有多个被边缘化的身份,如果你为自己辩护,受到的就不仅仅是嘲弄。如果你认真对待这些,可能会有可怕的后果。
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."
现在我们一直再现这些情况,虽不是生硬直白地展现,而是在于日常的平庸生活。当我的女儿在幼儿园时,每天早上她会搭一个精致的城堡,用丝带和积木。每天早晨,同一个男孩会兴高采烈地把它撞倒。他的父母在那里,但他们从来没有在事前干预过。但他们很乐意在事后提供陈词滥调。“男孩总归是男孩。”“这如此诱人,他只是忍不住而已。”
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.
我做了很多女孩和妇女学会做的。我先发制人维持了和平,我教我的女儿做同样的事情。她用她的话语阻止他。她试图轻轻地挡住他。她把城堡搬到了教室里其它地方,没有影响他人。
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.
所以我和其他成年人共同构建了一个特定的男性权利。他可以肆无忌惮地运行、控制环境,而她把自己的感情藏在心里,并努力解决他的需求。我们没为她的愤怒提供应有的理解和决心,这让他们两方都失望了。现在,这是一个巨大问题的缩影,因为在文化上,世界上,我们更喜欢男性的表现,以及伴随这种表现而来的力量和特权,而不是儿童和女性的权利、需要以及诉求。
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.
因此,对于在座的人来说,报告说女性比男性更持久、更强烈地愤怒这是不足为奇的。其中的一些原因是,我们被社会化了,会反复思考,将它藏于心中并自己思考。
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.
但我们也必须找到社会可接受的方法来表达我们的强烈情感和意识到它给我们带来的不稳定。所以我们做了几件事。如果男人知道当女人哭的时候,我们是充满了多么炽热的愤怒,他们就会非常吃惊。
We use minimizing language. "We're frustrated. No, really, it's OK."
我们使用最小化的语言。“我们只是感到沮丧,不,真的,没关系。”
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.
我们自我客观化,失去能力去认清表明愤怒的生理变化。但大多情况下,我们会生病。现在,愤怒与一整套疾病有关这些疾病随便被视为“妇女疾病”。慢性疼痛,自身免疫性疾病,饮食紊乱,精神痛苦,焦虑,自我伤害,抑郁症的比率较高。愤怒影响我们的免疫系统和心血管系统。一些研究甚至表明,它影响到死亡率,尤其是黑人患癌症的妇女。
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.
我厌倦了我认识的女性所受疾病与疲惫的困扰。我们的愤怒带来了极大的不适,而这其中的冲突就在于我们的作用常常是给别人带来安慰。有愤怒是可以接受的。当我们在自己的界限中作为母亲或老师的时候,我们可以生气。我们可以生气,但我们不能对养育生命的巨大代价感到愤怒。我们可以对我们的母亲生气。
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.
比方说,作为青少年,父权规则和条例,我们不怪系统。我们责怪她们。我们可以对别的女人生气因为谁不爱好勾心斗呢?我们可以对那些在种族歧视、仇外主义的社会中处于社会底层的男性泄愤。
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.
但是,我们有巨大的力量。因为感情是我们权威的范围,人们对我们的愤怒感到不适,我们应该要让那些听到女人毫无歉意地说不会感到不适的人们感到舒服。我们可以以能力而非性别来看待情感和思考。能够处理愤怒并从中找到意义的人更有创意,更乐观,会与人更亲密,更能解决问题,更有政治效力。
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.
我是一个女人,我书写女性和感情,所以很少有权力的男人会认真对待我说的话,将它作为一个政治问题。我们认为政治和愤怒就是轻蔑,蔑视和愤怒这些正在助长世界各地的大男子-法西斯主义。
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.
但是,如果它是毒药,它也是解毒剂。我们有着怀着希望的愤怒,我们每天都在妇女和边缘化人民的抗拒中看到这种愤怒。它与同情心、同理心和爱相连,我们也应该认识到这种愤怒。
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.
问题在于不尊重女性愤怒的社会同样不尊重女性。我们愤怒的真正危险不是它会破坏纽带或盘子。
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.
它恰恰表明了我们是多么认真地对待自己,我们期望其他人也认真对待我们。当发生这种情况时,女性很有可能可以在她们愿意的时候微笑。
Thank you.
谢谢。