Female Rage

Knives Out, 2019

I used to be petrified of the word feminist; the infamous F-word that would instantaneously label you a liberal snowflake. As I near adulthood, that fear has nowhere near dissipated, yet has deformed into a bloodcurdling anger.

To alleviate this newfound fury, I turned to music. I began with rock and eventually graduated to rap and hip-hop, but degrading lyrics about the ampleness of women’s body parts got tiring.

Longing for a distinct female sound, I scoured the internet in hopes of finding female artists. Rappers such as Rico Nasty and Awkwafina scratched that itch and thus “Girls Invented BDE” was born. Though I was thrilled to find this newfangled vibe, for lack of a better word, I still felt as if there was something missing.

That’s when I stumbled upon Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag. The one-woman show turned television series follows a London woman struggling with her past. This was the first show I had watched that portrayed true, raw, female emotion. It also exposed me to the term “female rage,” which sounded like an oxymoron. The striking juxtaposition of the two words begs the question: “Why does female anger feel so foreign?”

That is thanks to the cool girl trope, coined by Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl. Flynn had shed a light on how female “badasses” in media seemed to have characteristics that are commonly attributed to men. All whilst characters with feminine traits were deemed irrational, dramatic, and emotional, and were only portrayed as a comedic relief or villain.

What Fleabag did was embrace it, delved into it. Yup, we are angry. Who knew?

That was the missing link, that was what I yearned: good ol’ womanly rage. I curate “Female Rage” to be a lot angrier than its predecessor “Girls Invented BDE”. It has more of a mosh energy and evokes the bitter, violent, innate, fervent, enigmatic anger that we all feel at times. All songs are female led, with a few featured male artists as to not take away from the emphasis on women.

The purpose of this playlist became twofold: to support female artists and to extinguish my own internalized misogyny. That fear I experienced as a child was merely a mask to justify my avoidance of the term feminist. Introspection is painfully liberating and necessary.

“Female Rage” is intended to be irrational, dramatic, and emotional. This is pure, unadulterated anger.