THERE IS A JAR of severed heads sitting on the windowsill of Gemma Whiddett’s waiting room. China heads, to be precise, that customers have gleefully smashed from the shoulders of figurines she finds in charity shops. She drops the latest head into the jar, with a satisfying clink: all ready for the next session.
Whiddett manages Rage Rooms in Norwich, where customers can make an appointment to smash up heaps of unwanted crockery, small electrical appliances and miscellaneous jumble, using scaffolding poles. The concept first caught on in Japan as a way of working off stress, before spreading across the US and Europe, and is promoted as a fun, liberating means of venting everyday frustrations. And in Norwich around two-thirds of the customers are women.
“We had a group of little old ladies come in and I did wonder if they knew what they’d booked. But they absolutely got stuck in,” says Whiddett, a cheerful 40-year-old who reckons the most satisfying smashables are breadmakers (“They last for ages”). They get a lot of primary school teachers, she says, but this afternoon’s booking is for three impeccably mannered teenagers.
Maddie’s parents have driven her up from Suffolk for a belated 18th birthday celebration with friends Annabel and Kitty. The girls, fresh from trawling Norwich’s vintage clothes shops, explain that they’ve never done anything like this before. But they all know the episode of the Netflix series Sex Education where a bunch of teenage girls cathartically smash cars in a scrapyard, and they’ve all seen rage room videos on TikTok, where they’re often pitched as the antidote to relationship angst. “Block his number and smash up a printer instead,” as TikToker @vickaboox urges her almost 800,000 followers.
Seventeen-year-old Annabel, who recently did her A-level mocks, admits being “a bit nervous” as they’re ushered off to don protective boiler suits, boots and masks. Minutes later, she is hurling plates at the wall and pulverising a toaster as everyone else watches on camera in the waiting room. “It feels weird at first because you know everyone’s watching you, but once you get into it, it’s great,” she enthuses as Whiddett sweeps up the remnants. Later, the rubble will be carefully sorted for recycling.
Once upon a time, women showing anger in public might have been deemed unladylike, even shameful. Yet ours is increasingly an age of rage. Last December, the BBC crunched data from the Gallup World Poll – an annual snapshot of emotional reactions across 100 countries – and found that while both sexes reported similar anger and stress levels in 2012, women’s were on average six points higher than men’s by 2022. The gap widened significantly during the pandemic.
Female wrath can be a powerful catalyst for change, channelled into movements such as #MeToo, the protests against sexual violence in India and
