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

by Rebecca Traister

That he was the candidate felt absurd, anachronistic in the era we were assured was postfeminist. Yet a postelection study done by Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center, looked at the nation’s leading newspapers and news networks and found that the press covered Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton equivalently, as if they and their faults were legitimately comparable. The ratio of negative to positive coverage of their fitness for office was the same: 87 percent of the stories about each of them were negative, thirteen percent were positive.21 This relative parity in coverage, the both-sides-ism that defined media coverage of the race, was a reflection of the lie at the center of everything. Because the reality was that Trump’s racist and sexist attitudes were not in fact out of line with contemporary assumptions; they were not disqualifying. They were measured on the same scale that weighed Clinton’s real but politically ordinary flaws, because on some level, his biases were still considered legitimate. The idea that the nation had moved beyond retro, macho white attitudes about who could lay claim to political power had always been a fable, one that had worked to quash the dissent and discourage the disruptive fury that might have otherwise had more power to beat back Trump before his rise.