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

by Rebecca Traister

Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the husbands. Remember, all men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation. —ABIGAIL ADAMS

“The public censure of women as if we are rabid because we speak without apology about the world in which we live is a strategy of threat that usually works,” wrote Andrea Dworkin in the preface to Intercourse, her incendiary 1987 volume on the politics and power inequities of sex. “Men often react to women’s words—speaking and writing—as if they were acts of violence; sometimes men react to women’s words with violence. So we lower our voices. Women whisper. Women apologize. Women shut up. Women trivialize what we know. Women shrink. Women pull back.”

“I’m a radical feminist,” she once said. “Not the fun kind.”

Yes, this is a problem. In fact, it’s your problem. Seek to address it.

the quickest, oldest, and most reliable weapon to turn on feminists: the aspersion that we don’t want sex or men.

As cheered as I was by the nervous self-reflection of some of my male compatriots, I was simultaneously frustrated by those who claimed they couldn’t differentiate between harmless flirtation and harassment, because I believed that most women could.

“But I just can’t believe that men are that weak. I’m really sorry, but if men are that weak and we have to defend them all the time, then why do they have all the power?”

Tarana Burke’s original Me Too campaign had been about sexual assault and violence. But in the fall of 2018, the conversation being held under the umbrella of the hashtag #metoo was addressing a broader range of power abuses, chief among them, sexual harassment. Yes, sexual and professional damage were certainly related, and in some cases were combined. But the reason that they were sharing conversational and journalistic space during this reckoning was because sexual harassment is understood as a crime not because it is a sexual violation, but because it is a form of discrimination.

What became infuriatingly evident, through all of it, was how much time and energy women had been forced to spend maneuvering around the harasser, time and energy that might otherwise have been spent in service of their own ideas, work, advancement. This was a longtime cost for so many women who had dedicated percentages of their careers to fighting the many biases that kept their opportunities reduced and one of the true tolls of anger at injustice: the amount of time it takes away from the work we might otherwise be doing. “The very serious function of racism is distraction,” Toni Morrison once said. “It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being.”

the history of America had been one of wholly mediocre white men wielding unearned influence, often building their power by stoking resentments against nonwhite non-men via belittlement and vilification.

We could not retroactively resituate the women who’d left jobs and whole careers because the navigation of the risks, of the daily abuses, drove them out. We would not see the movies or the art that those women would have made, could not live by the laws that they might have enacted, could not read the news as they might have reported it, had they ever truly had a fair shake at getting to tell it their way. The tsunami of #metoo stories hadn’t just revealed the way that men had grabbed and rubbed and punished and shamed women; it had also shown us that they had done it all while building the very world in which we still were forced to live.

But here was a crucial reason that he’d behaved so brazenly and badly for so long: He did not consider that the women he had tortured, much less the young woman who’d been mutely and nervously watching his performance and trying to steer clear of him, might one day have greater power than he did, however temporary it might be. He hadn’t considered this because in a basic way, he had not thought of us as his equals. That made me angry too.

Perhaps the most popular iteration of the woman who makes herself more valuable to patriarchy by adhering to its every expectation for femininity, and distancing herself from other kinds of women who challenge it, is the figure of the “cool girl.”

Yes, things were out of control. That was the point. Because control was when no one was able to report the story of Harvey Weinstein raping women; control was Donald Trump getting elected president, thanks to voter suppression and the electoral college systems designed to suppress, and thus better control, nonwhite populations. Control was the unchallenged reigns of Bill O’Reilly and Roger Ailes and Bill Cosby. Control was women being too terrified to defy Eric Schneiderman by telling of how he hit them; control was ensuring that no one cared about the abuses sustained by Ford factory employees or flight attendants; control was all male presidents and vice presidents; control was only two black women senators and no black women governors in the history of the country; control was marital rape being legal to the seventies; control was slavery and locking women in unsafe shirtwaist factories. Control was Jordan Peterson’s Taoist white serpent, thrust at us against our will.