Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger

by Rebecca Traister

I’d felt that, as a young woman, wide-eyed at the realization that this kind of thing—coercion, harassment, assault—happened to lots of people, regularly, and that no one else around me in the adult world seemed to treat it like it was worth objecting to, making a big deal about.

That is what the movement had done. It had offered women the chance to hear from others that it had happened to them too, and that they too were angry, and that they too could say it aloud.

“Racism may well provide the clarity to see that sexual harassment is neither a flattering gesture nor a misguided social overture but an act of intentional discrimination that is insulting, threatening, and debilitating,” Kimberlé Crenshaw has written.”

First, that the world is stacked in favor of men, yes, in a way that is so widely understood as to be boring, invisible, just life.

But more deeply, it was a reminder of how easily we can see in men—even in the bad ones—talent. Brilliance. Complexity. Humanity. We manage to look past their flaws and sexual violations to what value they bring to the world. It is the direct opposite, in many ways, of how we view women, whose successes can still be blithely attributed to the fact that the boss wanted to fuck them.

It’s not that the compassion for these criminals is wrong; it is morally correct. But it is not applied to those who are not white men, who are routinely and easily described in the press as “terrorists” if they are Muslims, and who, if they are black, are lucky to be arrested alive.

But angry resistance to that violence, coming from the less powerful and directed at the more powerful, is automatically understood as disruptive, dangerous, electric. The upset of power dynamics creates chaos.

Perhaps #metoo wasn’t going to be about retribution, rather it might be about replacement.