EP. 225 — What’s Making Us Angry with Jennifer Cox

Jameela: [00:00:00] Hello, and welcome to another episode of I Weigh. So, a few weeks ago, I was invited on a podcast by someone in my DMs. Her name is Salima Saxton, and she is one of the co hosts of a podcast called Women Are Mad. And there was just something about the subject matter that caught my eye. And it resonated with how I’ve been feeling and what I’ve been talking about publicly, both on this podcast and online lately, about the experience of women and how fucking pissed we are to be in this situation still, even in 2024, all the different things that are happening to us, being taken away from us, being put upon us. I’m just fucking sick of it. I can’t believe that we don’t get to talk about it without being considered whiny. It’s ridiculous. The world is ridiculous for us. I feel terrified for my friends, especially the ones who are raising daughters now. And I, I honestly just feel like I wanna fucking tear my hair out half the time. So [00:01:00] anyway, I went on this podcast and while I was there, I also met Salima’s co host, Jennifer Cox. Now, Jennifer is not only a co host of Women Are Mad, but she’s also written a book called Women Are Angry. And she’s a psychotherapist, she’s a podcast host, she’s also now an author of this book, and a true expert in the rage of women. Not only because she spent thousands of hours talking to hundreds or more women about their experiences in this world and all of the things that have fucked them up, but also because she herself has resonated so deeply with so many of those women and all the things that they feel. And she’s probably been triggered to bloody near death and had to just swallow it and try and help these people through without internalizing it too much. But it was just in her, and one day, she decided to just start writing and writing all of her thoughts and then she just couldn’t stop and before she knew it, an entire book about the rage of women had come out and this book is excellent. It is so helpful. It’s so good at [00:02:00] investigating the fact that not only are women angry, but a lot of us don’t even know how angry we are. Some of us think we’re not angry at all. Some of us think that’s just our lot. Uh, we gaslight ourselves and she talks about what the impact is of not acknowledging that anger and also what the impact of just carrying all that anger can do to not just our mental health but also our physical health and she talks about that from a scientific background.

This podcast is hopefully very affirming, it hopefully makes you feel less alone in your experience if you are a woman and maybe it is something you could send to a man that you know who you don’t think understands the perspective or experience of women. It’s not a hopeless episode, I promise you. We do investigate how fucking infuriating life can be. But we also talk a lot about hope and what we need to do to get out of this situation. How we need to begin the journey of unraveling all of this rage that is making us feel [00:03:00] mad. And so I think you’ll enjoy this chat. I think Jennifer Cox is lovely. I’m so happy that her friend Salima reached out about their podcast and also made sure to really promote Jennifer Cox’s book to me. Uh, I love seeing women support each other like that. It makes me really happy and I think they’re a fantastic duo and I had a lovely time on their podcast recently so you can go and listen to that if you fancy it where I just kick off about the things that I’m mad about but this time round it’s Jennifer talking not only about her own experiences but those of the many, many, many people who she has helped as a psychotherapist so I will leave you now with this excellent and way overdue chat, this is Jennifer Cox.

Jennifer Cox, welcome to I Weigh. How are you?

Jennifer: I’m really good. Thank you, Jameela. How are [00:04:00] you?

Jameela: I’m very good. I had a lovely time on your podcast, Women Are Mad.

Jennifer: We loved having you.

Jameela: Yeah. And I, uh, I was intrigued by the title of your book, Women Are Angry, for obvious reasons, for anyone who’s been listening to this podcast in the last four years. It’s something I talk a lot about, uh, in general and the nuances of things that you discuss throughout your book about women being angry, all the things that are making us angry and the impact upon our psyche and our physical health of that anger, especially when we don’t address it and even recognize it. Those are all topics that we have at some point tried to cover over the course of this podcast and what I love is that you’ve condensed it all down into one very easily digestible book that I think is a kind of call to arms. I’m going to let you explain it yourself, but what is this book and why did you choose to write it?

Jennifer: I mean, how I kind of see it is I, I couldn’t not write it for probably about 10 years. I’ve been sitting [00:05:00] on these ideas and being completely kind of, um, growingly immersed in them and unable to shake them off. And I just needed to get this stuff known. So my best pal Salima suggested a podcast and that’s what we did like literally a year ago to the day. And it’s grown and grown like, you know, pretty much overnight because I think absolutely landed where it needed to, like it really struck a nerve. And in fact, you know, you’ll know this from the work that you do, this, women are desperate to connect on this stuff. We feel in our little silos, we feel so isolated. You know, we’ve talked about the ways in which society kind of keeps us separate more than allows us to come together. And I think I really needed to find places where community could spring up and, um, women could kind of finally like [00:06:00] find solace in each other instead of like being at each other’s throats and, you know, being kind of torn or tearing ourselves apart, as the patriarchy would refer.

Jameela: So what would you say are some of the things that stand out to you the most about the challenges that women face that are making us so fucking angry. Do we even realize that we’re so angry?

Jennifer: No, I think, Jameela, I think that is the most excruciating point about the whole enterprise is that we have no idea. I mean, I still struggle with my own feelings about, I’m still surprised, like, oh, what’s this? What’s this kind of terrible three day long migraine I’ve had? Oh, yes, I know why. You know, it’s like, it’s so, endemic, and it’s so habitual that we just repress, repress, repress. We don’t recognize, we’ve never been taught to recognize. In fact, one of the things I, I discuss is like how in primary schools now, children are [00:07:00] far more encouraged to think about what they’re feeling. So they sort of have like a little chart, one to 10, or little, you know, smiley faces with, in just a very basic kind of coded system that helps them to, begin to articulate, this is me, this is this morning, and this is what I’m feeling. We didn’t have that. Was tuning in and helping us to tune in to our most basic emotional responses. And I think, you know, this is what I kind of try and talk to with the book is, so, how many of us can actually afford therapy and kind of therapy to the frequency that would actually benefit us. So if we can start tuning in to just some of the feelings that we have in a day, I think that would be very, very helpful.

But on top of that, I think there are definitely certain themes that I notice. So working with these women, you know, across time, there are certain [00:08:00] patterns that are pretty much played on repeat in women’s lives. And that is to do with the dilemma of care, and the demands around care, coupled with, you know, this newer desire to actualize ourselves and, and the fact that society seemingly is encouraging, encouraging us to do so. So in developed society, it educates us, you know, to the extent that we wish to be, but we are a bit hamstrung by that ultimately because at what point does it come to pass that all the efforts we put in amount to nothing when essentially the school is calling us in the middle of a board meeting to come and get a kid because they’ve got knits or whatever, and there’s this sort of problem then that I think we are never really getting to the bottom of because women contort themselves to try to be [00:09:00] that person that can do everything and keep everybody happy. There’s no one offering to help us. We don’t have a choice. And the guilt that gets incurred when we fail at any of these points is unbearable. So we just keep going, and we keep pushing down those feelings of, you know, confusion, bafflement, frustration, rage about the situation we’re in.

Jameela: And it’s also, it’s not just the fact that we’re overstretched and the fact that we’ve been told, here you go, go for your dreams, but no one’s come into place to take over our position as the main carers for the entire household or the entire community. So we’ve essentially been told not, you know, it’s positioned as to have it all, but it’s to bear it all.

Jennifer: Oh, that’s good.

Jameela: You can, you can bear it all.

Jennifer: Yeah. Bear all.

Jameela: Yeah. Bear that. Um, and so, uh, it’s not just that. It’s also the fact that being angry is something that is championed as passion or a given in boys and men. [00:10:00] And it is something that is hugely stigmatized for women, even to this very day.

Jennifer: It very much is, isn’t it? And I guess it goes hand in hand with the kind of be nice, be kind, be polite, don’t show off, be very quiet, please, that I don’t think boys get to the same extent. I think there’s like a division that also comes in. At some point, you kind of see up to about five or six, kids play together, so you sort of see these, even if they’re beginning to be conditioned differently, you know, in the home, they’re finding some commonality with each other. And it is quite rough and tumble and, and in fact, or more gentle, the boys can be more gentle as a result of this kind of communal setup. But then something starts to happen, I’d say before the age of about eight, where they’re in their corners and the girls are playing with dollies and chattering and the boys are rough and tumbling it probably in a [00:11:00] larger part of the playground playing football and whatever and climbing on each other and pulling each other’s hair and that’s oh boys will be boys it’s all still very much encouraged we just don’t seem to have kind of moved beyond these really boring archetypes and that just embeds and sort of gets more and more pronounced as we go through, obviously, puberty.

But I think the other shocking thing is that our bodies are separated and sort of segregated from, you know, certainly pre puberty when girls are told about periods and birth control, and boys are not in that lesson. So they’re already not party to so much of what’s going to be happening with their future, you know, if they’re heterosexual, future partner and excluded from the conversation. So we’re excluding as much as anything. It’s not the boys don’t want to know and support us. It’s that everything is set up from so young to create these divisions. And as you say,

Jameela: So it’s a mystery. [00:12:00]

Jennifer: Yes, it’s a mystery. And then you get the sort of witchiness around that and the kind of, ew, gross blood and everything. And then, and then I think that gets absorbed, reabsorbed back into womankind, so we’re then really ashamed and we do the tampon shuffle and like, you know, shimmying along the corridor in case we’ve got a stain on our pants. It’s, it’s it, why? How have we all become so Victorian and repressed when we’re, or why are we still so Victorian when we are no longer Victorians?

Jameela: Yeah.

Jennifer: Nothing’s really moved on.

Jameela: Yeah, it’s so mad how, uh, open we are on some subjects like choking as a mainstream conversation. Uh, you’ve got like stepbrother and stepsister porn on the front page of Pornhub and everyone’s wanking on it and sharing it and commenting publicly on it. So, so many things that we are, like, ahead of the times on. I had Cindy Gallop, uh, you know, who has, uh, Make Love Not Porn on here talking about this. [00:13:00] But it’s so funny how we, um, we are so comfortable putting certain things, uh, into the forefront of the zeitgeist, but still periods and endometriosis and menopause are, like, ushered to the back as if they are too uncomfortable and disgusting and private to be spoken about when it’s constant, these are a given to impact most of the, um, 50% of the population.

Jennifer: Yeah.

Jameela: And so it is, it is baffling to me. And I’ve never thought about the fact that boys are not included in the, the conversation for women. I mean, I don’t actually think my school, my school never even had a conversation about periods or

Jennifer: Did it not?

Jameela: No, no.

Jennifer: So I instruct, um, women here to say, um, 16 vaginas a day, because I think we’re not even, even the word makes people, what? I mean, Selima, podcast co host cannot stand it. She is, she, it’s like a sort of, [00:14:00] oh, uh, like pollution reaction in her. And I think she’s not alone. I think many women are so sort of dislocated. It’s like there’s this dissociation from our own body. And I don’t think men have that, you know, the phallus is still something to swagger about. I mean, look at the man’s breath.

Jameela: They also play with it. The whole time they’re on the phone, like openly without even realizing.

Jennifer: They don’t realize.

Jameela: They just walk around back and forth on like, you know, you’ll see them on balconies or even just like in the park, swishing it around, moving it, you know, just having a little feel while they’re just chatting to someone on a business call. It’s not even sexual. It’s just a comfort familiarity and everything is just dick and balls and dick and balls and penis, penis, penis. And so there’s just, there is a huge vacuum of vagina.

Jennifer: I wonder if as well it’s because our vulva and, and you know, all of our kind of, I was going to say equipment, but that sounds like I’m [00:15:00] trying not to use um, biological language. But it’s also tucked away, like you can’t see it. And maybe there is something, maybe we need to show it more. We were saying the other day, maybe we should just get our kind of camel hooves out a bit more and sort of be flagrant about it. We’re very tight lycra, lots more.

Jameela: I think the only reason that doesn’t happen is because men are so scary, right? When we see someone’s phallus, we normally feel a bit threatened and afraid, or like, oh god, I don’t want to look at that, or why is it staring at me? Whereas if we were to explicitly show off our nudity, we know that that would come with a certain amount of attention because they are turned on by that in a way that we are less visually stimulated. That’s the fucking problem. And so it’s this just strange obsession men have with the visual, I don’t know, with the visual of the female form.

Jennifer: It’s their kind of apparatus of desire. It is really different, isn’t it?

Jameela: Whereas I love [00:16:00] someone doing the dishes, like that really turns me on, you know, like, chores, chores, not, not like doing something without having to be asked, lifting my mental load. These are the things that get me, you know, hot and bothered. It’s not the sight of a, it’s not the, it’s not the, um, the curve of the bollock in the gray tracksuit, you know.

Jennifer: I wonder if, if we were, if we saw more of the men doing the chores, um, and less of the curve of the bollock, there would be a sort of mystery to it.

Jameela: Maybe, maybe that’s what it is, because you know what, I grew up in Spain where nudity is just so much more comfortable. And, uh, and at least like, you know, growing up in the kind of more rural parts sometimes of Spain, on the beach, it was just completely normal for every woman of every size, every age, mothers, grandmothers, children, all to be [00:17:00] topless, and, and

Jennifer: And were men around?

Jameela: No, they were just completely casual about it. No one’s staring at anyone’s boobs, uh, the men sometimes were all so naked, like, it was just so normal. So I think you’re right, there is something to the fact that it’s the scarcity of a man doing chores that makes it so sexy. It’s the scarcity of our hoof. So maybe if there was a sort of global hoof movement, yeah, uh, then perhaps we would, we would see less shock. I think maybe the secrecy does create a further enticement, but it’s also fucking disturbing. Something else I want to touch on is, uh, you mentioned women kind of being detached from our own bodies as well. And when you talk about the fact that we, we don’t always know that we’re angry, because we’ve gone off on a tangent, so I want to pull it back just to there. That we don’t always register our own anger. But also, sometimes it gets kind of pushed down into the body. I was a compulsive starver and binger my whole life. And I used to use binging [00:18:00] specifically when I was overwhelmed with emotion and I would want to physically stuff that emotion down. I would do it with bread and cake and Haribo. Um, and, and, we all find out whether it’s alcohol, whether it’s food, whether it’s, I don’t know, an obscene amount of cosmetic surgery, we all find different ways to mask our pain. And you talk about that in the book, that so many of the physical symptoms that we have you think could be attributed to anger?

Jennifer: Yeah, I do think that. I would go so far as to say I, I know that now and I think you can kind of see it as you say from this sort of the stifling position of how do we literally repress this stuff in us by using maybe substances, by using food, by using, like, certain relationships to kind of lose ourselves in. But I [00:19:00] think, you know, from a kind of, science point of view, you also see how when you, when you don’t attend to cortisol in the body, like you were saying earlier, things like inflammation start to occur. And once you’ve got inflammation in your body, all sorts of chain events kick off. So, I think on this kind of double pronged, um, like footing of we’re doing it to ourselves, we’re literally doing it to ourselves. We’re saying no, no, no, we can’t feel this stuff. We don’t know how to express it. So let’s just repress it, but you can also see how, you know, the body is kind of, it has its own series of, of responses, you know, that, that it takes up once we, once we begin to do that, it sort of goes, oh, okay, fine, fine. I know what I’ll do with that. I’ll just, I’ll just kind of stash it over here for you. Oh, whoops. Now you’ve got a [00:20:00] terrible, you know, chronic back pain, but Hey, at least you’re being really nice to everybody and you’re not in trouble. Um, and you’re still doing your work really well. So I think it’s, it’s really kind of perverse how we’ve set this relationship up with ourselves and our bodies comply because we’ve never taught it, you know, we don’t listen to what it’s really trying to tell us. We teach it to do something for us that we think is helpful.

Jameela: And the medical industry has clearly known this for a long time because even since the late 80s, I remember hearing, you know, my mom and godmother come home and be told that their symptoms are probably just being exacerbated by stress? And that’s where the conversation was left. It’s like, oh, it’s probably stress, or you’re you’re having a heavier period than normal because of stress, or you’re having this headache, or you’re having this gastric issue because of stress. And so then the woman goes home and goes, Oh, I must be stressed. And then the woman feels guilty that she’s allowed herself [00:21:00] to become so stressed. But we don’t really ever talk about what that specific stress is. And I guess that’s why I have become so fixated upon the subject of cortisol of the of what is the number one stress in our lives. Sure, of course, on some level, it’s going to be gender equity, and it’s going to be, you know, the pressure to stay young and the pressure to look young and the pressure to stay thin and all these different like horrible, unfair, unequal measures that we’re expected to hold, live up against, live up to. But, ultimately, I am certain it is the stress of our safety.

Jennifer: Is that how you would articulate it then? Do you think

Jameela: That’s genuinely, I think, I don’t think it comes down to that. I’m just saying I think the leading source of stress is that of our safety.

Jennifer: Yeah.

Jameela: I really think we just don’t, it’s you know, it’s like I refer to it as kind of calculating death maths all day that I don’t even realize I’m doing where I’m going if I take that alleyway or there’s not [00:22:00] really a lot of women down the alleyway, it’s just men or there’s no one down that alleyway and there’s a lot of doorways and I don’t know who’s gonna jump out from one of those doorways. Or do I take this road? It’s much more beautiful, but it is a park and it is about 7 p. m. now. And also, I saw a documentary about rapists who said that they prefer to, uh, attack women, uh, in the, uh, late evening rather than first thing in the morning when they’re alert and they’ve just had their coffee and they don’t like to do it late at night because women can often be hyper vigilant and are more likely to take the safest possible route home whereas there’s that kind of feeling of safety when you’re tired after a long day you don’t have your guard up the sun is sort of maybe still up just about so you feel relatively safe and so you’re not going to be hyper vigilant and take lots of precautions. And I was like fucking hell and knowing that I’m not supposed to turn my lights on in my apartment when I get home because someone might be watching for which apartment it is that I live in so I end up crashing around into furniture as I get home you’re like good all of these things, I don’t realize that I’m thinking about them. I don’t realize how much I’m looking behind me. I don’t realize that I’m scanning every single man that I see being like rapist, not rapist, rapist, not rapist. Um, and that [00:23:00] I’m relieved if I can tell someone is circling me because they want my phone.

Jennifer: Wow.

Jameela: So I’m like, God, how would I not have inflammation? How will I not be sick?

Jennifer: Absolutely, how would you not? But imagine if instead of calling it stress and sort of like accepting it into your body as such, you got ahead of it and went, I’m fucking furious and I’m furious about this, I’m furious about that death maths, the energy I spend on it, the fact that I cannot know for sure that I’m going to get home safely and that I can’t know for sure that he’s not going to try and kill me. What if it could be externalized before it kind of flipped around on itself and sat in you like that.

Jameela: So how do we do that?

Jennifer: So, so the book basically gives, so I take us through a cradle to grave structure of how, what we can do for each life stage. So if we’ve, if we’ve got little girls in our lives, or if we’re sort of helping to [00:24:00] heal the little girl in us, then from there, we need to start thinking about, right, what do we do? What does she need? How do we help her eliminate and externalize some of the stuff that she’s been carrying around her whole life? And, um, I think it can be, you know, the simplest of techniques that we kind of all have come to know, but we don’t do. So highly explosive, really fast movements are really great for just discharging energy. And we want, this is energy, like anger is, is energy. We need to get it out of us so that it doesn’t sit in, and as you say, turn into all the, these kind of, you know, more toxic presentations because it’s become stress. So we get it out. I mean, we all know how important exercise is for our mental health, but I’d kind of go a step further and say it’s imperative for preventing the kind of buildup of these, of negative energy in us. [00:25:00] And so, actually, the sort of more restful, relaxing types of exercise, like yoga or swimming, I think just do that after. First of all, let’s get punching, like whatever it is, cushions, mattresses, like if you’re lucky enough to go to a gym, a punch bag. Screaming is amazing, you can do it into a cushion and no one can hear you. Screaming underwater, I love. Um, screaming from, you know, a motorway bridge, amazing. Again, no one can hear you, it just gets carried off by the wind. It’s just how to get this shit out, and then we can talk because I think our brain, when we’re I mean, you know, when you’re, let’s say, frightened, that was an inverted commas, because I think, you know, are we frightened or are we absolutely fucking livid that these men could kill us and we can’t protect ourselves from them?

If we’re walking around, uh, perpetually in these kind of states of fear, [00:26:00] stress, um, anxiety, then our brains aren’t working properly. We’re kind of offline, but if we can discharge that energy in a really active and, um, kind of confident way, then we get back online in as confident a way. We come back into the room, we can have the sensible conversation about what it is that’s made us feel like this.

Jameela: I remember when I was training at Marvel, when they were making me kick and hit stuff for the first time in my life, I’d never made any kind of, um, I’d never done any kind of contact sport because I’m very weak, um, and I don’t like hitting things, and I became obsessed with kickboxing and obsessed with beating the shit out of this sort of large foam man called Bob. You know, it’s just that they have in all of the gyms. I don’t know why they call him Bob, but it’s in all stunt gyms. And it, it really changed my entire life. I’ve never slept better. And it wasn’t just from the exercise. It was from the release. It was from every person of, [00:27:00] regardless of their gender, I was imagining hitting. I was getting it out. And you know,

Jennifer: Beautiful. You were getting it out.

Jameela: Yeah, you, you go to those um, large, I mean, lots of people listen to bands like Slipknot, but you know that kind of death metal community where it’s a lot of rage, it’s a lot of screaming, it’s a lot of emphatic displays of anger and pain. And actually a lot of those people, when you meet the musicians or you meet the members of the community, they are some of the loveliest, you know, Most chill,

Jennifer: They’re so gentle.

Jameela: kind people. It’s like, because they’re getting it out.

Jennifer: I think you’re probably right, actually. I think you’re probably right.

Jameela: And so, you know, you mentioned that when you have a headache, sometimes you’re like, do I have a headache or am I just fucking angry about something? Obviously, sometimes that can just be a dehydration headache. But when you do, when you do question a symptom, what do you do? Do you go and hit something? What would be your practical advice if a woman right now is going like, something’s hurting or my back’s hurting and I don’t know why it would hurt, so it must be some sort of stored [00:28:00] inflammation. What should she do with that?

Jennifer: I think, obviously, it’s kind of case by case, and I wouldn’t want to say, you person lying spread eagle because you can’t move easily, you’re so caught up with pain.

Jameela: Get out the ambulance! Get up out of intensive care.

Jennifer: Come on, get you to a gym. Yeah. One has to be careful, but I think, look at the overall, look at the lifestyle, look at, you know, what is probably contributing at conscious and deeper unconscious levels to this state that you find yourself in currently. Are there any changes we can make, please? Like, I really loved the other day when you were on Women Are Mad, the microdosing rebellion idea. Loved it. Because that’s, I think, just small amounts of something that in your life is achievable, but you’re not doing it. And you think, you know, Oh yeah, I could, um, [00:29:00] tell that person, no. I could say, no, I don’t have space for that. Or I know I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to go to that banks and see what happens. See what starts to happen in your body when you hold your ground, when you listen to what you’re feeling and what you actually want.

Jameela: Do we want people to make a list of all the things that they might not realize are fucking them off?

Jennifer: That would be a really good start.

Jameela: Did you kind of make a list? Because you know, this book started as an ode to all of the, especially women, who you’d seen in your office as a psychotherapist, but it kind of, it must have extended naturally into your own experience. How were you able to identify all those different things that were making you fucking angry?

Jennifer: So I think because I’ve basically had a lifetime of therapy, for me it’s more about the the stuff I know about myself and the list that I would maybe boil it down to these [00:30:00] days because I’ve tried to attend like, and I think therapy, you know, I’ve had it more than once a week for more than half my life. It’s so, you can’t be in yourself that much without accruing, a kind of daily list of, you know, this, I feel this in a certain way, I need to sort that out in a certain way. This I need to attend to, I need to be thinking about this in the longer term or in the shorter term, depending on what’s going on. Um, and, and I think, so for me, these things are kind of much more automatic and, and they, and it’s like a rolling process that shifts and changes according to, you know, what might be going on. And a lot of the time, because I’m sitting with patients kind of from first thing in the [00:31:00] morning to last thing at night, I can’t help but, you know, be party to some of the stuff. Like, as I say, this was the, this was the kind of progenitor for the book, the stuff that they’re bringing in. It’s hard to sit with that and I have to take it somewhere.

So I guess I’ve devised in my own life, as I say, this sort of rolling, um, method for like making sure that I’m really trying not to hold on to these things myself. And that, a key part of that is therapy. Another thing for me is, is walking, you know, I’ve got dogs, I’ve, so this is good because it’s a great excuse, I have to get out a couple of times a day. But that, plus blasting music into my ears. Like you say, I think that whole kind of feeling something else almost like, it takes you, it takes the feeling away from you.

Jameela: Well, also there’s increasing evidence to show that walking has a similar effect sometimes to EMDR, which is eye movement desensitization reprocessing, because you’re having to look back and [00:32:00] forth, get back and forth, and you’re, you’re having to be so aware of, like, when you’re the neuroscientist and psychotherapist, would you like to explain how there’s a similarity?

Jennifer: Yes, it’s the bilateral processing. So basically, both sides of the brain are kind of talking to each other. Connections are being made. And you can kind of see how, so because everything is works on pathways, and in our daily lives, it’s really easy for us to get stuck along kind of certain, very familiar ways of coping, ways of thinking, ways of behaving. And they’re all dominated. They’re all, um, uh, decided by our neural pathways and what we want to start doing, what therapy does, whether it’s EMDR, whether it’s psychoanalytic, um, and what certain forms of exercise do is actually kind of different connections happening. Um, and once that begins, so we say like neurons that fire together, wire together. So once you start having [00:33:00] kind of little changes going on at a brain level, um, the more you repeat them, you know, these healthy movements or, um, strategies, the, the better your brain gets a kind of working out, Oh, okay. That’s what we’re doing now is it, okay. That’s, um, these are the new pathways we’re going to form and this is now how we’re going to treat this problem. So we’re sort of kitting ourselves out in a different way.

Jameela: So this is why when you go for a walk and you’re angry about something by the end of the walk, you are often feeling more resolved about that thing. Even if you’re still angry, you’re, you’ve been able to work through and you’ve been able to sort of allow your brain to reorganize the information in a way that actually makes sense and causes you less anxiety. It makes you feel more clear about the situation and then more, more in control, which is what EMDR literally did for me. But I was astonished to understand why I feel this impulse to walk, which again is what makes me so fucking angry that at the end of the night, which is normally when we argue with our fucking [00:34:00] partners or when we’ve had to have to process the hard day at work or the shitty thing that we heard on the evening news, is the most dangerous time for us to go out for a fucking walk. It is the thing that is so imperative to our well being. You can’t get it in a treadmill in your home in the same way. And you just need to go out fucking walking. And so I guess, you know, that’s what all my work is now based in, is working out how the fuck we can go for a fucking walk safely.

Jennifer: How can we do this?

Jameela: I’m starting women’s walking groups. I’m starting self defense as exercise classes. And I’m starting night walking groups, which everyone who follows me online will start to learn more about. We’re doing them across the UK and then across the world. Um, and so it would be great to have you at one of the events to talk about some of this stuff, but you know, we have secret service agents come in and teach us how to protect ourselves. And then we all go out on a massive night walk together. Hundreds of women who’ve just been taught how to gouge someone’s eyes out.

Jennifer: Yes please!

Jameela: And it is, honestly, it’s honestly the most fun and the most safe and liberated I’ve ever felt. Just out with hundreds of women who are [00:35:00] pissed and who just want a fucking walk together. And there is such a sense of solidarity and we all got each other’s backs. And I would love to turn this into a massive global movement.

So tell me, with all these women who come into your office and all of your friends, and I’m sure doing the podcast means so many people must message you telling you all the reasons that they feel mad or they feel angry. What would you say are some of the common denominators that you see?

Jennifer: So I think the most common is this care problem. And I think this goes from the very beginning of life all the way up to the end. We know that the numbers on kind of older females caring for their, their male partners, um, it’s, it’s hugely skewed, um, but we also obviously are very aware of how from, from really the very beginning of our lives, [00:36:00] we’re told that we need to look after people and you know, whether that’s an emotional level or whether that is quite literally, take care of your younger siblings, please, you know. Um, or, or again, be nice. Let’s, we’re going to put this slightly disruptive little boy next to you in maths because you’ll exert a calming influence on him. It’s all care, care, care. And I just, honestly, fuck care. The amount of women that I speak to that feel so obligated to their aging parents, as if, as if there’s a sort of law that says that you have to take care of them even when they’ve been horrific to you in your life.

Jameela: Yeah, and also, you know, I’ve got a lot of people who I know who are now at an age where they’re caring for their parents, and they’ve got many brothers, and yet it always falls on the sole sister.

Jennifer: Every time. Every time.

Jameela: To do the main caring for the parents, rather than share it equally, which I think is astounding.

Jennifer: It’s [00:37:00] disgusting. And I think what’s really gross, I mean, I don’t know how much you know about like the cost of care homes, but of course people can’t afford to put parents into them. So, oh, what do you know? The women basically take the hit for this. We’re carrying like all of this extra load at a point where maybe, you know, we’re almost sandwiched, um, and squished. Uh, but we’re saving the country like billions.

Jameela: And this care goes beyond just our parents or the little boy at school. It goes into the lack of equity and how much women are expected to care for the children in a heterosexual relationship compared to the man, all the different ways in which we are expected to be nurturing to everyone around us and from, you know, as you say, from cradle to grave. And so, so many people don’t really feel like they have a choice.

Jennifer: No, they don’t.

Jameela: And so what do they do with that? What do they do with, with, you know, it’s good to register the burden of care and register the [00:38:00] burden of care isn’t fair. But then what?

Jennifer: Yeah.

Jameela: How do you say no? How do you reject it? Do you ask for help? Do you insist on help?

Jennifer: I think when we are like, and this is the point again about the kind of tuning into our needs and what we are feeling because when we are so far away from being able to understand what, you know, our basic, um, uh, emotion is of, of a day or of an hour. How can we possibly be expected to know when it just isn’t feeling right that we’re looking after this person? You know, you just say yes, and you squash down the response in you that’s going, Oh God, me again. And I think the more that we can prioritize and make dominant these feelings in us that are, you know, really accurately attuned to our environment, our, our emotional apparatus [00:39:00] is amazing. Let’s let it do what it, what it should and stop, stop telling ourselves that we can’t, we’re not allowed to feel those things, and then practice saying it.

And you’re right, I don’t think this stuff can happen overnight. I, I wish I could wave a wand and make it be that governments would start listening to women saying this is too much for me. But we’ve got to, uh, the first, thing we’ve got to do is say, it’s too much for me. And if lots of us say it, then maybe at some point people start listening. And I think this is the kind of my, the major message of the book is, please, can we just start talking about this stuff? Please, you know, it’s all being squished down in our bodies and we need to say it.

Jameela: Because without talking about it, there’s no way to build the bonds that create the village that it takes to keep anyone alive, right? It takes a village and there are many cultures in which people don’t feel as burdened because there are so many people chipping in [00:40:00] and there are men who also look after their parents more than you see that happen in the West. You know, in the West, it’s such an individualized country. I think it was Trevor Noah who once said to me that what’s fucked up about the West, which he didn’t, you know, experience growing up in South Africa is that they take your community away from you and then sell it back to you. So you, you encourage individualizing, you encourage people moving away from their families, which, you know, can have positive benefits if you don’t get on with your family. But still, they encourage you to move away from your network, and, you know, become, disappear off into spousal living into a tiny little unit where you then have to pay out for childcare, you have to pay out for the night nurse, pay out for the doula, you know, all of these different things, pay out for someone, for a housekeeper or for a cleaner, all those things if you’re lucky enough to afford those things. Uh, so they’re selling you back what should have been your normal community. And so you’re right that, that talking about it is an important way to fuse people together so that they can actually start reforming those villages. Because a [00:41:00] problem shared is a problem halved, but how are we going to halve the problem if we don’t fucking talk about it or even acknowledge it to ourselves. We feel so dirty and guilty to say I can’t cope.

Jennifer: Yeah.

Jameela: Um, in a way that makes me feel so sad. And I chose to not have children for this very reason because I know I won’t be able to cope, and I watch my friends who have made that extraordinary sacrifice and a lot of them are fucking drowning. They’re really drowning. They’re drowning also in love and affection and oxytocin for their baby and, you know, the family that they’re growing, but they’re also fucking drowning and I’m looking at that going, well, I, this is why I can’t do it because no one really steps in and helps. If anything, my choice to be childless is partially rooted in the fact that there’s no one to look after my female friends when they become mums and are looking after their mother in law and their own mother and their own dad and their own dad in law and then the child and then the husband and, you know, they say that women who aren’t in relationships or who are childless live longer than men who aren’t in relationships and childless and that part of that is, is [00:42:00] supposedly because women are the ones encouraging men to eat better and look after themselves and actually go to the doctor if they’re not feeling well.

So all these, like all this unconscious mental load that we carry all of the time is just so and so exhausting looking to me and so i’m like well I’ll be there for them then. I’m gonna be their fairy godmother rather than the godmother to their child is already getting more than enough fucking attention. I’m gonna be here for you because you look like you’re gonna fucking snap.

Jennifer: That’s i mean that is a beautiful statement. I guess I hope that’s not coming from in you, Jameela, a place of, I’ve got to care for people. That’s all I would say.

Jameela: No, but I mean, listen, there’s a part of me that I think has a maternal instinct, just isn’t towards children. I have a maternal instinct. I have a, I have a genuine instinct for care and, and my brother has got a paternal instinct for care. He also doesn’t want to be a dad, but he has a, an urge to want to care for other people. That’s very normal. An urge to care for your community, for your village is completely normal. In [00:43:00] my opinion, that’s what all of what tribalism, you know, is built from is a desire to work together to achieve a goal, and I’m interested in that.

Jennifer: Yes.

Jameela: But what I’ve become very boundaried with is not overextending myself. As soon as I start losing sleep, as soon as I start losing my health, all of which I know I would lose if I had a child.

Jennifer: Mm hmm.

Jameela: Then that’s where I pull up a boundary and I go, okay, like, for example, I’ve stopped working for the last two years. I barely work because I was getting sick and I was missing my friends and I was losing time with my dogs, um, and my relationship. And all of that just felt like it was damaging me emotionally, so I just said, well, then fuck it. I’m going to sell my house and live in a cheap flat and I’m just going to do that and move to a cheaper city and live a cheaper life and eat cheaper food and then work less so that I can have more fun and more time for myself. So I do think I’ve got a good boundary, but that boundary for me had to be not having children.

Jennifer: Yeah, I really see that. And I think what you say about care is so true because I think there’s a very [00:44:00] natural impulse towards it. And actually, it’s, it’s really good. It’s very positive for our mental health to, to obey that natural impulse, but I think in women, it gets hijacked and exploited by society.

Jameela: Totally. Totally abused. And we’re told that we don’t really have a choice and that we’re a bad woman if we don’t wish to completely overextend. And also, I think what’s interesting is that Is that we’re not really encouraged to care for ourselves and self care has been bastardized, uh, into really doing things that make us more appealing to look at for other people.

Jennifer: Yes!

Jameela: And that makes me really fucking sad that self care is face masks. It’s really expensive face masks and facials and, uh, hair massaging or it’s a lot of things that which I don’t mean to in any way undermine because I think those things can be lovely but it’s interesting that that’s been marketed as self care when really who the fuck are we doing, who, who are we doing that for? Who’s getting a vampire facial [00:45:00] for themselves? In COVID, we all looked like fucking monsters. There’s no way that when none of us could be seen by anyone, any of us would have opted in to have a salmon sperm facial injected into our skin.

Jennifer: I’ve just heard about these, oh my god.

Jameela: In order to, and it’s so expensive and it’s painful and it’s um.

Jennifer: And it’s salmon sperm.

Jameela: And it’s, it’s salmon sperm.

Jennifer: Swishing up in there.

Jameela: There’s, I don’t know, all of my friends stopped having filler during the pandemic when no one could see them. They stopped dyeing their roots. They stopped shaving their armpits and their legs. After that, I never, I never again said, I do this for myself. Post pandemic, I never uttered those disingenuous words because I really thought all this time that I was doing it for me. But now I know.

Jennifer: Right. Now you know.

Jameela: It’s only for us.

Jennifer: It is funny how the pandemic definitely did kind of, the scales fell off in a number of ways actually.

Jameela: 100%.

Jennifer: And the hair grew, that is for sure.

Jameela: It’s all just [00:46:00] fucked. And hearing all of this together just shows why we’re all so fucking tired, all the chronic fatigue that so many of us feel and the fact that we don’t get enough sleep because we’re either up worrying or so many of us feel like we have to get up earlier than men to get ready and spend longer on our disgusting appearances that are perfectly good without all of this preening that we feel like we have to do. And may we all be released from those shackles sooner rather than later, myself included. Um, but more importantly than just what we need to do, which is the acknowledging the grouping together and fighting for systemic change as, as one. What do you want men to fucking do? What do you want the men who get sent this book or sent this episode to know and to do?

Jennifer: I just got a message actually from a dear friend of mine, um, who is a gay man. Does that make it different? I don’t know. [00:47:00]

Jameela: A bit. Probably a bit.

Jennifer: But he said I’m a changed man. He read the book and he said I’m a changed man. And, uh, he’s the first man in my life to have read the book fully.

Jameela: Wow.

Jennifer: I know. My husband’s had it sitting by the bed and he sort of occasionally dips in. He’s, no, it’s never going to get done. Um, so I just, I want men to just come and sit next to us and join our conversation. I just want us to stop being so, is binarized a word? If it is a word, that’s the one I would use. Why, just stop with the segregation, stop with the them in the football field and us in the corner, squished into five centimeters of playground. Just come sit next to us. And, and stay there.

Jameela: And have this experience on earth as a communal experience. There’s so much that we don’t know about them and there’s so much that they don’t know about [00:48:00] us. And we walk around with this idea of, you know, men are from Mars and women are from Venus, but it’s not true. We’re all on this fucked planet being fucking beaten to death by patriarchy, all of us in different ways.

Jennifer: And our brains before we’re born are the same. The differences are negligible.

Jameela: And our behavior is so similar. This isn’t to say that testosterone doesn’t have an impact on our behavior. We know that it does. We know that hormones are at play. We know that some of it’s, uh, you know, um, nature. I think most of it is nurture. Purely even from just how differently men behave in different parts of the world. And women behave in different parts of the world. Women are much more assertive in some countries more so than others. You know, for example, men are much more emotional. Men in Italy cry about their feelings all the fucking time. You know, and so therefore are, you know, maybe have some less aggression. I’m sure there’s still significant aggression in all countries, even ones in which men cry, but there are all these different practices, so we know that there are differences. We know that a lot of this is conditioning and I feel like [00:49:00] by keeping us, you know, in the same way that when we used to keep women separated from each other by telling them that you know, we’re all competitors and you know, we’re all bitches and we can’t be trusted. I think men and women have been separated by design so that we don’t come together and realize that actually so many of us share experiences, so many of us are in the same fear and the same rage and the same confusion and we all feel disembodied from who we’ve been told we’re supposed to be.

Jennifer: Yeah.

Jameela: And so I agree that having men join the conversation and, and know that, just because we’re angry with the system

Jennifer: Yes.

Jameela: That benefits men.

Jennifer: Yes.

Jameela: It doesn’t mean that we’re angry with each individual man. We are just exhausted and we, and it can only be a better and happier society if we were to all have an easier and less exhausting time on this planet. They’re also fucking tired. They’re going through all kinds of things that we don’t even consider.

Jennifer: And we’re really curious about it. Like, let’s, [00:50:00] let’s find out, please. We’ll tell you about us, you tell us about you. Like, join it up.

Jameela: 100%. I, I feel very hopeful. Your book is hopeful.

Jennifer: Thank you.

Jameela: Do you feel hopeful?

Jennifer: I hope, I mean, the more we’ve spoken today, um, ’cause I suppose a lot of the feedback I’ve been getting is like, um, oh my gosh, uh. Yes, like this one to say, I’m a changed person, but also, Oh God, I wish my therapist wasn’t away for the summer, that type of thing. You know, it’s bringing stuff up. I need to read this, but it’s painful. It’s confronting. I mean, it is, there are some kind of realities in here that we need to, to really look at. And we, I couldn’t not say it as I, as I say, but having said it, let’s now decide what to do about it. Yeah, I, I’m very hopeful.

Jameela: 100%. Well, Jennifer, thank you so much for coming today. Everyone go and read the book, Women Are Angry. And, [00:51:00] uh, write to her, tell her your thoughts and feelings and then send it, send it to every man you know.

Jennifer: That’s the most important thing.

Jameela: Thank you for coming today and best of luck with the sale of this important book. Lots of love.

Jennifer: Thanks, Jameela.

Jameela: Thank you so much for listening to this week’s episode. I Weigh With Jameela Jamil is produced and researched by myself, Jameela Jamil, Erin Finnegan, Kimmie Gregory, and Amelia Chappelow, and the beautiful music that you are hearing now is made by my boyfriend, James Blake. And if you haven’t already, please rate, review, and subscribe to the show. It’s such a great way to show your support and helps me out massively. And lastly, at I Weigh, we would love to hear from you and share what you weigh at the end of this podcast. Please email us a voice recording sharing what you weigh at [00:52:00] iweighpodcast@gmail.com.