What does female rage look like?

Mumbai-based Singh believes her anger lands better now—her craft has sharpened in the seven years since she began her standup career, and more women are watching comedy. She calls Australian comedian Hannah Gadsby’s special Nanette (2017) a masterclass in turning personal trauma into sharp social commentary, using comedy to balance rage and release.

Also read: Let women reclaim the right to rage by Swarna Rajagopalan

Screenwriter Pranjali Dubey, 28, channels her anger into rant-filled reels on @prawnchilli, her Instagram account with over 21,000 followers. “I was always angry growing up in response to everything I saw at home, in school, the world around me..." she says. Unlike Hulk, the Marvel Comics character whose “always angry" nature is met with roaring applause to date, Dubey quickly learned that her anger wasn’t welcome—not at home, not in social settings. The internet changed things for her. “On Instagram, women have begun to sing, rant and vent their rage," she says. She refers to Shamita Yadav, popularly known as @the.ranting.gola, among the women content creators whose expression of anger inspires her. “When five other women comment ‘hard relate’ under your videos, it reinforces that this anger is valid, not just a fleeting outburst," says Dubey.

Women’s rage isn’t new—history and mythology are filled with it. But in recent years, its expression has grown louder, and its portrayal more nuanced. In films, on social media, through feminist rage playlists, “femgore" books about vengeful women, and profanity wielded as defiance, this fury is being expressed—raw, cathartic and unapologetic. It carries the weight of generations of suppressed anger breaking free. Yet, it remains largely confined to screens and pages—and struggles for acceptance in the real world.

Singh recalls films like Mother India (1957), Damini (1993) and Lajja (2001), where women’s fury was tied to protecting something—morality, their children or the nation. “It’s like they were merely vessels for male rage." But in recent years, movies like The Great Indian Kitchen (2021) in Malayalam and its Hindi remake, Mrs. (2025), Thappad (2020) and Pagglait (2021) have portrayed a quieter, simmering rage—one that brews against the daily indignities women endure. “I haven’t lived the lives of these women, yet I feel the ghost of these women lives inside me," says Singh. When she tears up watching them, she adds, “I’m crying for them, but also for a version of me I narrowly escaped." This anger, Singh concludes, is deeply personal yet universally shared.

Where once a woman’s frustration on screen, in music, books and stand-up sets was dismissed as “nagging wife," “crazy ex," or simply blamed on PMS, more women are now calling it what it is—rage. Instead of being shamed for it, women are finding solidarity from other women—like Dubey through the chorus of women commenting on her Reels, and Singh through the women who attend her shows. This support not only validates their anger but also helps them push back against the trolls who refuse to understand or accept their rage.

Anger's anthem

Almost every woman Lounge spoke to for this story mentioned Labour, a 2023 single by 20-something British singer-songwriter Paris Paloma. On YouTube, it has racked up 45 million views and over 21,000 comments from users calling it an anthem of female fury.

“All day, every day, therapist, mother, maid

Nymph then a virgin, nurse then a servant

Just an appendage, live to attend him

So that he never lifts a finger…"

Over 31,000 Reels feature this verse from the soundtrack, often set to movie scenes of women reaching breaking point—like Sanya Malhotra and Nimisha Sajayan in Mrs. and The Great Indian Kitchen throwing dirty dishwater at men in their homes who oppress them. Some posts show female characters in international movies and shows fleeing perpetrators with the caption “Run Like a Girl" to drive home the point that nobody runs like a woman trying to escape danger. Some Reels carry clips of women protesting injustices or powerful writing on what it means to carry female rage. The hashtag #FemaleRage has over 35,000 posts on Instagram the Meta-owned social media platform.

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Listen to this track on an audio-streaming platform like Spotify and it will push feminist rage playlists with tracks like The Man by Taylor Swift, What it Means to be a Girl by Emeline, Run the World (Girls) by Beyoncé and Dhaakad by Raftaar featuring the young women wrestlers of Dangal (2016). Instagram will throw Reels featuring instances of “microfeminism", where working women, mostly from the global West, talk about tiny rebellions against deep-seated patriarchy.

These acts include handing a baby to a man among friends, subtly challenging the assumption that women are cut out for caregiving. Refusing to stop speaking when a man interrupts to reclaim space in conversations long dominated by male voices. In board meetings, referring to a powerful figure as “she" to challenge the default assumption of male authority. Much of this content features young women—not just because Gen Z creators gain larger followings faster and dominate our feeds, but also because they are leading the charge in sharing rage-related content in creative ways, like through GRWM (Get Ready With Me) make-up videos.

On-screen and online, women can be seen embracing profanity as a raw expression of frustration. While Kareena Kapoor Khan’s Geet in Jab We Met (2007) stopped just short of saying a Hindi expletive in full, a decade later, Shweta Tripathi’s Golu in Mirzapur (2018) hurls curses freely. On social media, more women are reclaiming swearing as a language of anger, says advertising and marketing professional Ketki Lohakare. “Girls who swore used to be seen as ‘cute’ in urban circles, then as ‘girlfriend material.’ Now, we own the narrative. We curse because we’re angry," she says.

What’s fuelling this surge of self-expression and rage? In one line: Women are done suppressing their anger. “Women’s anger is rarely spontaneous—it brews over time when systemic inequalities go unaddressed," says Bengaluru-based Pallavi Pareek, founder of Ungender, a DEI solutions agency. “The persistent pay gap, the glaring lack of women in leadership, and the daily microaggressions at work and home have left women feeling unheard and undervalued for far too long."

The #MeToo movement in India, which ignited in October 2018, revealed how many women had endured sexual harassment in silence for years. That collective rage pushed more women to recognise, name and express their own anger, which found recognition in movies abroad like Bombshell (2019), She Said (2022) and Women Talking (2022).

Women are seeking out content that articulates their rage. In turn, social media and streaming platforms—designed to serve more of what users engage with—are amplifying this anger, creating a feedback loop that reinforces and fuels it. That might explain why Dhoom Dhaam, a recent action comedy on Netflix, features a 90-second angry monologue by Yami Gautam’s character Koyal Chadda on being a woman in India. It echoes America Ferrera’s cathartic speech in Greta Gerwig’s Barbie (2023) but here it feels deliberately inserted into an otherwise lighthearted film, designed to be clipped for Reels and YouTube Shorts later.

Actor and activist Rajshri Deshpande finds this a bit concerning—the risk of female rage becoming just another clickbait genre. “I worry about it crossing the thin line between expression and commodification," says Deshpande, who has portrayed different shades of rage in films like Angry Indian Goddesses (2015) and web series like Trial by Fire (Netflix, 2023). “Rage should push you to address its cause, to do something about it. But when it’s manipulated for engagement, it loses its purpose—it should make you more human, not just more viral," she says.

Monologues, not confrontation

Despite growing self-expression, female rage still struggles for acceptance in the real world—perhaps why it so often pours into a selfie camera for a video monologue with a woman looking at herself instead of staring the cause of her anger in the eye.

“I can’t think of a single space where a woman’s anger is socially acceptable," says Divija Bhasin, 28, a Delhi-based counselling psychologist who creates content exploring the roots of female rage. Her comment sections on YouTube and Instagram, she says, are flooded with gaslighting—mostly from men—calling her a “bad woman". It reminds her of these lines from Taylor Swift’s The Man: “When everyone believes ya, what’s that like?"—a way to point out how easily men’s voices are validated. Bhasin has nearly 300,000 followers across platforms. Even as she has started noticing more Indian creators making content around women’s rage of late, she says, “If I didn’t have access to global expressions of rage, I would probably feel more hesitant to create such content."

Expressing rage in the workplace often invites professional backlash: being sidelined or labelled “difficult", says Pareek. “For women from marginalised communities, expressing anger often feels futile. If they’ve seen the system fail them time and again, many decide it’s safer to stop asserting themselves."

Filmmaker Arati Kadav, 42, dealt with mixed reactions to her female lead’s rage in Mrs. “People couldn’t understand why she took such an ‘extreme’ step of leaving her husband instead of reforming him," she says. “Women are expected to radiate positivity, to manifest happiness. Rage is something people associate with goddesses, destroying everything in their path—not ordinary women."

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Kadav admits she, too, had to justify the expression of anger while directing the film, as she rarely shows rage in her own life. “The issue at hand was the erasure of personality and passion—something that doesn’t even have a name. I had to imagine how I’d feel if someone asked me to erase all my films," she says. That perspective shaped the scene where Sanya Malhotra’s character is ordered by her husband to delete her social media videos after marriage. “I told Sanya to channel that anger into her reaction," Kadav says. “We shot the film in sequence, so she could feel the rage build up naturally."

Holding rage

Vasan Bala’s Jigra (2024) offered a rare portrayal of female rage through Alia Bhatt’s character, Satya. Unlike the usual depictions—both in Indian and global cinema—where a woman’s anger erupts as a helpless, last-resort outburst, Satya’s fury was neither desperate nor explosive. Bhatt’s past roles have often followed this pattern of pent-up rage, from Highway (2014) and Udta Punjab (2016) to Gully Boy (2019), Gangubai Kathiawadi (2022) and Darlings (2022).

But in Jigra, “she is always angry," says Bala, 46. “So much so that she doesn’t need to show it. It’s a state of being. I wanted Satya’s anger to be seething, almost cold and mechanical because I have seen many women in this state. It’s not about who screams the loudest—it’s about those in a silent, meditative state of rage." Even this quiet, unshaken anger—one stripped of vulnerability—was difficult for many to accept, Bala notes, hoping that this conditioning will shift in the years to come.

Women navigate social dynamics in an indirect way to avoid being perceived as openly aggressive, says screenwriter Atika Chohan. “This constant deflection shapes their decision-making and, in turn, intensifies the drama surrounding them." Chohan has written female-led films and shows like Ulajh (2024), Guilty (2020) and Chhapaak (2020). “I don’t feel the need to justify my female character’s anger any more than a man’s," she says. “But I do find myself plotting their journeys more deeply." Women, she adds, are often seen as overthinkers but this is not by choice or compulsion; it is because their circumstances demand it.

Perhaps that also explains why, in real life, much of women’s anger is never directed at the root cause of their frustration but at those with less power. Scroll through social media, and alongside videos of women calling out the lack of medical research on female bodies, you’ll also find clips of women in positions of privilege lashing out at gig workers.

Forcing a conversation

Delhi-based Sania Rehmani, an activist in her early 20s, is careful about how she expresses rage, both online and in life. “When women show anger, they’re labelled hysterical. For a Muslim woman, it’s worse, they brand you anti-national." She observes that many women in her community remain unaware of their right to be angry. While working on a project about mobility in Mumbai, she met young hijab-wearing women who refused to speak about their struggles in public spaces, even anonymously because they feared it would somehow be traced back to them. Their silence helped her understand that the ability to express rage is a privilege in itself.

The cost of unexpressed rage runs deeper than most realise. In Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger (2018), feminist author Soraya Chemaly examines the negative impact of suppressed anger on women’s bodies and mental health. An October 2023 Time magazine article collates various medical studies to conclude that women suppressing anger isn’t just tied to psychological issues like depression and eating disorders but also to physical illness like IBS, HIV, chronic fatigue and cancer. Highlighting that women account for almost 80% of autoimmune disease cases, the piece cites excerpts from physician and author Gabor Mate’s best-seller, The Myth of Normal, stating that “female self-silencing" is among “the medically overlooked but pernicious ways in which our society’s ‘normal’ imposes a major health cost on women."

Rage is an essential emotion but it is also exhausting, says Dubey. “When you’re angry, there’s no space to feel anything else. That catharsis you find in other people’s art—it gives you food for thought, a way to reflect on how to channel your anger."

Pareek has observed cases where women’s anger over harassment or discrimination has led to revised policies, better complaint mechanisms, and a shift in workplace culture. “Sometimes it sparks solidarity, where others step forward with similar experiences. Though it comes at a personal cost, anger can force a conversation that complacency would never allow."

For Singh, therefore, comedy isn’t just an outlet but a way to build solidarity. “My rage isn’t for those who should feel accountable; I know it won’t change them," she says. “It is for women to feel seen and heard."