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is a loud and livid objection to the kinds of control that have long been in place in a nation built by white men who, when they angrily broke free of imperialist control themselves, promptly encoded protections of liberty and independence only for themselves, building their new nation on slavery and the oppression of women, on the legal and civic subjugation of that nation's majority.
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Rebecca Traister |
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The Women's March on January 21, 2017 was the biggest one-day political protest in this country's history, and it was staged by angry women.
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Rebecca Traister |
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Stone kept her last name, and generations of women who have done the same have been referred to as "Lucy Stoners."
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Rebecca Traister |
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I returned again and again to a proclamation made by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, nearly two centuries earlier, that "if women would indulge more freely in vituperation, they would enjoy ten times the health they do. It seems to me they are suffering from repression." --
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Rebecca Traister |
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The ability to narratively flip the dynamics of aggression and abuse--to view the less powerful as a menace to the aggressors--has been key to how white patriarchal structures have persisted.
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Rebecca Traister |
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The violence done by the more powerful entity--the police and the state--to the less powerful entity is often so normalized, so banal, so expected as to not even be discernible, not even visible. 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.
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Rebecca Traister |
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The very fact that she had carefully established close relationships with big donors and garnered the support of bigwigs made her part of a political elite and vulnerable to the anti-establishment rhetoric of the men she'd wind up running against; it kept her from being understood or celebrated as the outsider that, as a member of a gender that had been historically denied access to executive power, she was. In figuring out how a woman migh..
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Rebecca Traister |
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Consider that the white men in the Rust Belt are rarely told that their anger is bad for them. Rather, and correctly, we understand that what's bad for them are the conditions that have provoked their frustration: the loss of jobs and stature, the shortage of affordable health care, day-care, the scourge of drugs.
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Rebecca Traister |
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The vitriolic hatred of Clinton was sometimes only slightly less muted on the left, in part because of the sticky truth of her position: she did have power, she was one of the exceptional women to have risen within a white patriarchal capitalist system that hadn't been built for her, and she'd risen in part by participating in it.
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Rebecca Traister |
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We must train ourselves to even be able to see and hear anger from women and understand it not only as rational, but as politically weighty. It is, in fact, an anger on behalf of the nation's suppressed majority and therefore especially frightening and combustible because of the threat it poses to the minority. We are primed to hear the anger of men as stirring, downright American, as our national lullaby, and primed to hear the sound of wo..
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Rebecca Traister |
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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 sti..
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Rebecca Traister |
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Clinton's left critics would often comment that she'd lucked out in her draw of opponents, that she'd won--and then blown--a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to run against such a cartoonishly awful man. What this view failed to acknowledge was that it was the opposite of both luck and accident that this man had been summoned, elected by his party to face down the first woman who was running to be president, the woman we'd been assured would ..
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Rebecca Traister |
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Of course, single people are lonely. Of course. We have all been lonely. For moments, for days, for endless, chilled seasons of sequestration. For some women, the loneliness may stem from, or be exacerbated by, the drain of having to do everything for yourself.
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Rebecca Traister |
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Perhaps the reason that women's anger is so broadly denigrated--treated as so ugly, so alienating, and so irrational--is because we have known all along that with it came the explosive power to upturn the very systems that have sought to contain it. What becomes clear, when we look to the past with an eye to the future, is that the discouragement of women's anger--via silencing, erasure, and repression--stems from the correct understanding ..
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Rebecca Traister |
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Consider that the white men in the Rust Belt are rarely told that their anger is bad for them. Rather, and correctly, we understand that what's bad for them are the conditions that have provoked their frustration: the loss of jobs and stature, the shortage of affordable healthcare and daycare, the scourge of drugs. We understand their anger to be politically instructive, to point us toward problems that must be addressed. What we all--in th..
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Rebecca Traister |
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The connection women were feeling in shared fury was its own home, its own reward, its own community, and for some the pushback to their activism, the losses it incurred--money, domestic comforts, relationships built in other circumstances, based on earlier expectations for comportment--were not worth retreating for.
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Rebecca Traister |
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calls for civility are designed to protect the powerful by casting them as victims.
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Rebecca Traister |