Let's Talk About: Anger

Humans are angry, I've discovered. I don't know where it all hides, but there's an anger deep inside all of us, ready to pounce on anyone who dares say the wrong thing. My anger has been triggered... Let's just say, a lot. And it doesn't only respond to remarks that inflame anger, that are or are not meant to trigger an angry response. Many different feelings evoke an outwardly angry response.

In class today, a girl reacted with a high amount of anger to remarks made by a couple of guys in our class. As far as I could tell, this is how the conversation went:

Guy 1: In games girls are the ones who talk to you because they want something. Once they've gotten what they wanted, they find somebody else.

Guy 2: That's in life, too!

Class erupts in laughter.

Honestly I didn't hear too much of what she said, but I can assure you there was a varied choice of curse words. Somehow she changed the topic from girls seen as "manipulative" to girls being raped and men not understanding. I'm not really sure how that happened...

To me, this was a classic case of misplaced anger. She was hurt in the past, or offended in the past, and something one of the boys said triggered the same feeling she experienced then. Instead of reacting with that emotion, which would have been some kind of extreme sadness, based on the volatility of her response, the emotion transferred to the boys was anger. Red, seething anger. She really let those guys have it.

And when another boy interjected, to make some point or other (I was in shock and pretending the whole thing wasn't happening because I dislike confrontation and yelling), she turned on him, bringing in a piece of art he had made for a particular fandom that employed rape as part of its "punch line" and screamed at him.

The whole scene was excruciatingly long and took all of two minutes. But by the end of class, the girl was surreptitiously crying, the boy was highly upset and, I imagine, feeling personally attacked, and the entire class was uncomfortable and a touch frightened, afraid to say anything for fear of setting someone off.

I don't see the point to this type of anger. How do we respond when someone reacts with this irrational anger to something, however innocuous, we've said? What do we do in these types of situations so as not to further inflame the angry? How can we react as the girl? If someone says something that offends us, how should we react? Is what the girl said and did helpful, harmful, or plainly unnecessary? How can we take events like this in our lives and use them to better ourselves and the way we treat the world?

Do we?