Why did Christine Blasey Ford have to smile and politely ask for breaks while
Brett Kavanaugh could rage at the cameras and dismiss the hearings as a farce?
The answer is in Rebecca Traister’s essential, perfectly timed new book, Good
and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger. It’s a book, Traister
writes, about how anger works for men in ways it doesn’t for women. I happened
to read it the weekend before the Kavanaugh/Ford hearings, and it was eerily
prescient: The book was essential to understanding not only what I was seeing
at the hearings but, as importantly, what I wasn’t seeing. My conversation
with Traister is about those hearings, but about much more too: When is anger
constructive and important? Can it tie us together, rather than just pulling
us apart? How is the #MeToo movement navigating the fact that sometimes the
people it’s angry about are also the people it loves — that our bad guys are
also our good guys, as Traister puts it? And what does it mean to see each
other in our full humanity, including in our angry humanity? Recommended
books and essays: Intercourse by Andrea Dworkin The Uses of Anger by Audre
Lorde The Power by Naomi Alderman
Read more
Why did Christine Blasey Ford have to smile and politely ask for breaks while
Brett Kavanaugh could rage at the cameras and dismiss the hearings as a farce?
The answer is in Rebecca Traister’s essential, perfectly timed new book, Good
and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger. It’s a book, Traister
writes, about how anger works for men in ways it doesn’t for women. I happened
to read it the weekend before the Kavanaugh/Ford hearings, and it was eerily
prescient: The book was essential to understanding not only what I was seeing
at the hearings but, as importantly, what I wasn’t seeing. My conversation
with Traister is about those hearings, but about much more too: When is anger
constructive and important? Can it tie us together, rather than just pulling
us apart? How is the #MeToo movement navigating the fact that sometimes the
people it’s angry about are also the people it loves — that our bad guys are
also our good guys, as Traister puts it? And what does it mean to see each
other in our full humanity, including in our angry humanity? Recommended
books and essays: Intercourse by Andrea Dworkin The Uses of Anger by Audre
Lorde The Power by Naomi Alderman
Read less