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America Still Hates an Angry Woman
Another round of Hillary vs. Bernie shows us there’s nothing that benefits a man like being seen as a victim to a woman’s anger
For a brief moment, in the wake of Donald Trump’s 2016 victory, it seemed that America was ready to love angry women. We lauded the outrage of the Women’s March; we made Maxine Waters go viral every time she ripped Trump a new one; we elected female politicians, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who were blunt and unsparing in their critique of American politics. Some of our best feminist authors published books celebrating women’s rage. Largely-female survivors of sexual assault and harassment brought their abusers to heel with the #MeToo movement.
It lasted just a short while, the feminine-rage thing, and it felt great: Anger may be the least feminine and most female emotion, the feeling that sexism both continually stokes and punishes us viciously for expressing. Finally, we thought, the ability to snap back, to demand a hearing, to be ungenerous with those who had been ungenerous to us, was being allowed into the public consciousness. But what had seemed like a new era was, in hindsight, a blip: The female-rage moment is over, and in 2020, nothing benefits a male politician quite like the impression that he is being assailed by angry, unreasonable…
