Sugar and Spice

Evidently, they’ve run yet another study concluding that women are angry:

IT is the research finding every man suspected, and every women will vehemently disagree with – women are the angrier sex.
New research that examined the responses of 22,000 people over 50 years has found that women are more likely to feel angry and persistently frustrated than men.
They also are more likely to act on their frustration in an unhealthy manner, choosing passive aggression over non-violent confrontation, psychologists say.

For some reason, the fact that women also feel anger continues to sneak up and bite unsuspecting people, and off they go into the wilderness of speculation. Is it the result of entrenched societal sexism? Are women frustrated by social and/or economic inequality? Do they feel powerless?
The manifest differences between the sexes continues to confound:

“One can only speculate at this point, but it certainly should be looked into. My guess is further research will relate higher levels of anger to larger inequality issues facing women today,” Joshi said.

Beyond wondering about their “small but significant” (and unfortunately unspecified) margin, Polimom’s amused by how the article concluded:

Dr Dryden, who runs a clinical practice in London, said his work with patients suggests women respond to anger in a less constructive manner than men.
He said: “Instead of using it as an opportunity for assertion, they tend not to deal with it directly, often becoming passively aggressive, talking behind people’s backs, or taking feelings out on other people.
“Men have their own problems – violence mainly – but I don’t think women have learned to use anger for the positive,” he said.

I wonder whether Dr. Dryden read his own words, because they contain the answer he evidently cannot see. He’s described the ultimate justaposition of nature and nurture, and all he’d have to do is arm wrestle one of his female patients to get it.
Assuming his genetic structure runs toward the male norm, and his female opponent is also representative, he’ll immediately notice that men are (*gasp*) both bigger and stronger than women. Our ancestors, of course, didn’t need to engage is arm wrestling to know this. In pre-“civilized” yesteryear, assertive confrontation of the larger, more physical male doubtless brought rather definitive (and painful) results.
And so the females learned to be non-confrontational. After thousands of years, we’ve gotten pretty darned good at it, too… but that never meant women don’t get angry. Since we’ve been trained to hide it, though, these “bad” feelings tend to slither out in other ways.
Is this a healthy technique for managing emotion? Of course not. Is it mysterious? Umm…. no.
Meanwhile, Dr. Helen (whom I don’t normally read, but whose take on this study surfaced in memeorandum) speculates that all this unexpressed rage may be behind some of the anonymous ad hominem attacks in the hostile internet:

With all of the anonymous insults being thrown around on the internet these days, do you ever wonder about the sex of the poster? Do you think it’s mainly men who are the supposed angrier sex so the insults must be coming from them? Think again.
[snip]
It would be interesting to do a study of all of the anonymous posters of insults on various blogs around the web and see if proportionally, there are as many (or more) women who pen the insults (I am not talking here about discussing issues–I mean ad hominem attacks). Because if that is the case, that more women are behind the anonymous insults, it indicates that deep down, women have learned little from feminism over the last years–they are still too afraid to come out in the open in an assertive and constructive manner. They are still, ultimately, too intimidated to take real responsibility for their actions. It’s no wonder they are so angry.

I agree with her that it would be interesting, but I don’t think the results would support her theory.
Passive-aggression and confrontation-avoidance would more likely mean that women comment far less frequently, generally — similar to how they’re under-represented in the more hostile political blogosphere.
But I think she’s right about one thing: we’re still teaching our little Janeys to stuff those “bad” feelings. We’ve come a long way, baby — but in our collective minds (and thus in our socialization processes), we’re still living in caves, worried that we’ll be smacked with a club.