Resisting Kings, Reclaiming Hunger
What AOC can teach us about hunger, healthy aggression, and the fawn response
On February 19th, 2025, in Foley Square, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez stood energized as she declared, “We have an obligation to resist kings.” Her voice and form didn’t waver, and she didn’t mince words. A symbol of unapologetic feminine power, she called out corporate greed, authoritarianism, and systemic corruption with clarity and conviction, empowering everyone in attendance.
I want to tell you I see myself in her. I’d love to sit here writing overlooking the Pacific Ocean and tell you I’ve figured it out. That after years of various therapies, nervous system repair, boundary work, and hundreds of hours of trauma training, I can hold my anger without collapsing in on myself. That I know when to say no, and say it over and over like a set of lyrics I know by heart. That I don’t override my body’s cues in the name of keeping the peace. But like nearly every person I know socialized as a woman, however smart and resourceful, I’m still disentangling myself from a survival strategy we rarely talk about: The fawn response.
What is the fawn response?
You’ve probably heard of fight, flight, and freeze survival responses, but have you heard of fawn, the lesser-known of the four? Fawning is a survival response that refers to the act of appeasing, pleasing, and accommodating others in the service of staying safe. It’s playing coy with the man who grabs your ass as though your body is his property while you’re out serving tables, keeping quiet about sexual harassment in the workplace out of fear, and suppressing your hunger until someone in your group casually brings up lunch. And as you may have guessed, it’s associated with those with higher amounts of estrogen in their systems, those who are more likely to tend-and-befriend than fight back.
Fawning is over-apologizing, silencing your opinions and preferences, and staying too long in relationships where you feel unseen and unheard. It’s serving the needs of others before your own even crosses your mind, and believing your likability and attractiveness make you worthy. It’s saying yes when you really don’t want to, no a one-syllable foreign language you can’t wrap your tongue around. And it’s also feeling unsure of what you really want, because how can you know what you want when you’ve spent a lifetime prioritizing safety over satisfaction? Educated and trained by men, fawning was never discussed in any of my somatic training. It’s rarely acknowledged anywhere. Fawn itself lacks the distinctive, sympathetic high notes of fight or flight, far more subtle and low-key in its expression.
Women, Anger, and Healthy Aggression
I don’t believe that the world always punishes women for being angry, but I do believe it punishes us for being angry publicly. Anger, or healthy aggression, is unpalatable to the patriarchy. We’re called out for being too loud, too direct, too much, and rewarded for being agreeable, flexible, and emotionally generous, even when it comes as a tremendous cost to our physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being.
It’s no surprise, then, that this survival strategy has woven itself nearly into the fabric of our society, crept into our backyards unnoticed, and blended with our identities. We might say, “I’m in fight-or-flight,” over coffee (these are two separate states, btw), acknowledging our sky-high stress levels. We might say we feel really numbed out, burnt out, disconnected. But when it comes to fawn, it’s easy to mistake nervous system patterning for personality: the cool girl, the easygoing one, the one who gets along with everyone, the low-maintenance one, the one who never has a problem or talks back or asks for anything.
It’s exhausting.
For most women, our cultural training ground entailed learning how to make ourselves smaller. Some of us have mastered subtle forms of control: people-pleasing, moulding ourselves around others’ needs, trying to get by on as little food as possible, and smoothing out the things others detest.
While these responses are often criticized, fawning is an incredibly dynamic and intelligent strategy. The dominant trauma narratives love to talk adrenaline coursing through your veins, narrow escapes, and survival against all odds. But what happens when your nervous system learns that self-erasure is the path of least harm? When smiling and nodding keeps you alive, rather than running and failing your arms and legs or fighting to the death?
How Fawning Gets Activated
Fawning is what happens when healthy aggression isn’t available. Healthy aggression, in contrast, is energy mobilized toward protection, aliveness, and boundaries. Many people conflate anger with violence, but violence is disconnected anger. Healthy aggression is the animal taking what it needs to survive, not the feral wolf raiding the chicken coop. We all need it. Have you ever wanted to stand up for something only to sink back into yourself and fill with shame and guilt? It’s easy to blame ourselves when we falter on our impulses, but we can’t move forward with what isn’t safe to hold.
When that healthy aggression energy is suppressed, it doesn’t disappear. Instead, it leaks. It turns inward. It gets displaced onto our bodies, our food, our self-worth. As you can imagine, it can heavily impact our relationship with food and our bodies.
It can look like:
Calorie counting as an attempt to gain control
Binge eating as a form of protest
Over-exercise to prove you’re enough
Chewing and spitting, purging, or restriction as ways to soothe or suppress
Emotional eating to metabolize anger that has no other outlet
For so many of my clients, eating disorders aren’t “bad choices.” They’re survival strategies in response to unintegrated fight energy. When we can’t assert ourselves, we internalize the conflict. Rage turns into self-harm, elaborate food rituals, chewing and spitting, and purging. Instead of protesting, we withhold food from ourselves, punish ourselves, and ultimately turn our fight response on ourselves, where it’s easier to contain and control.
Reclaiming Your Right to Boundaries and Hunger
Reconnecting to healthy aggression changes how you eat, how you relate, and how you live. When you re-integrate our capacity to say no, your appetite stops being the enemy. Food becomes less charged. You might stop eating in secret and stop swinging between extremes. You start honouring the body's cues because you’ve remembered you’re allowed to protect yourself, to have preferences, and ultimately, to have needs. You’re allowed to want more.
When you grow your capacity for healthy aggression, you stop outsourcing your self-worth to how likable or disciplined or contained you are. Instead, you learn to differentiate what is good for you from what is merely acceptable to others. You might come to see that while thinness may grant temporary status in a hierarchy, it’s not the same as genuine safety. Reclaiming healthy aggression, or healthy predator energy, is needed to defend our needs, our bodies, and our boundaries.
The Personal is Political
The collective suppression of women’s anger is no accident. Systems of control, including diet culture and anti-fat bias, rely on our dissociation. But healing is resistance. Learning to feel your anger, to set boundaries, to allow the fullness of your hunger and appetite rather than policing them, are radical acts. While I don’t believe women and those socialized as such will ever stop fawning — it’s an important survival response, after all — but we would all benefit from being able to hold more healthy aggression, like AOC, so that we can live life on our terms.
Children need to be good. But adults? We need to be whole.