![]() ![]() On the one hand, we had two very different candidates, with two very different ideologies, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, and they were understood to be successful in part because they were able to channel rage so effectively. How do you make sense of this in the book? Rebecca Traister “People in power have assumed that they can behave in certain ways and get away with it” Sean IllingĪnger works for men in ways it doesn’t for women, and we - as a culture - cater to male rage and often punish women for expressing their rage. So rage is powerful in terms of setting things in motion, but if it boils over, it can destroy a movement from the inside. There are always internal frustrations within a movement that can split it into factions and undercut solidarity. This is true of the women’s movement, but also of every social movement. It is catalytic because of its ability to communicate shared frustration over injustice or a need to resist some injustice, and then once you have the communicative part, you can get to the mobilizing and action part.Īt the same time, all that rage can be problematic because it’s hard to contain, hard to direct. It could be catalytic and problematic for the very same people. What does it catalyze, and for whom is it problematic? Rebecca Traister You speak of women’s anger as both catalytic and problematic. I also asked her what the #MeToo movement and Kavanaugh’s nomination reveal about this cultural moment.Ī lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows. We discussed the roots of female fury in America and what happens when it’s finally unleashed in the political sphere. I spoke to Traister last week, just before Ford and Kavanaugh testified in front of the Senate. Titled Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger, Traister details the long history of female rage in this country, showing how it’s often mocked or caricatured but also how it has ignited many movements for social progress, including the early suffragist struggle and the more recent #MeToo movement. Anger works for men in ways it doesn’t for women, and the Kavanaugh hearing was an unusually clear example of this.Ī new book by Rebecca Traister, written long before the hearing last week, has a lot to say about why male and female anger plays so differently in our culture. Here’s a question worth asking: if the tables were reversed, would Ford - or any woman - be rewarded in this way for expressing her rage? Probably not. He became the victim, and the hearing was suddenly about his pain and his struggle. Inspired by Kavanaugh’s rage, the Republicans spent most of their time apologizing to him. ![]() ![]() “This whole two-week effort has been a calculated and orchestrated political hit,” he fumed. His testimony was the polar opposite of Ford’s. It was as convincing as it was painful, and the all-male Republican panel sat silently through most of it. One of the most striking things about Brett Kavanaugh’s Senate hearing last Thursday was how quickly the male Republican senators dismissed everything they heard from Christine Blasey Ford, the woman accusing Kavanaugh of sexual assault.įord sat before the entire country and calmly laid out the details of her alleged assault in excruciating detail.
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