Thread by @arghavan_salles

I thought February might be a good month for me to share a quote a day from @rtraister’s Good and Mad. Hopefully these little pearls will give you a sense of this important work on the power of women’s anger.

*you may recall my bias on this topic: usatoday.com/story/opinion/…

1/?

On the 2016 election: “In treating [Clinton] as though she had already beat [Trump], and not like the single tool on the table with which the nation might stop this monstrous racist patriarch, we talked ourselves out of the outrage we should have been mustering.”

2/?

“Americans who might have exerted more energy to oppose Trump...were goaded into inaction by the assurance that sexism and racism were things of the past, and that to work themselves up about either would look silly...”

3/

Clinton “...had been discouraged from talking too loudly or too aggressively, leaving her nervous and hesitant about getting too passionate, too enflamed, too screechy or shrill or emotional or any of the other ways America hears women’s voices raised in feeling.”

4/

On the minimizing of the Women’s March in 2017: “It was as though a massive political eruption of women had happened, and the male-dominated political media hadn’t even seen it.”

5/

On #metoo, quoting Ijeoma Oluo, “To the men scratching their heads in concern and confusion: The rage you see right now, the rage bringing down previously invulnerable men today, barely scratched the surface. You think we might be angry? You have no idea how angry we are.”

5/

“We are primed to hear the anger of men as stirring, down-right American, as our national lullaby, and primed to hear the sound of women demanding freedom as the screech of nails on our national chalkboard.”

6/

“And it can be maddening—in both the enraging and the crazy-making sense of the term—to come to grips with the fact that many men have no idea how rocky the terrain of anger is for women.”

7/

“The aspersion that a woman who is angry is also unstable is cast every day in popular political discourse, so often we probably don’t understand how completely we absorb the connection.”

9/

(my numbering got off earlier but this is correct)

“There’s perhaps no neater example of how rage is an emotion that is permitted and encouraged in (some) men—and can be used to their advantage—while for women it is forbidden, invalidated, and treated as a path to self-defeat, than the 2016 presidential election.”

10/

Quoting Flo Kennedy on how facts and figures are not the way to fight discrimination: “Honey, when you are lying in a ditch with a truck on your ankle, you do not send someone to the library to find out how much the truck weighs. You get it off!”

Let’s stop weighing trucks.

11/

“...white patriarchy persists in part by making white women dependent on white men, and then ensuring that those women enjoy benefits in exchange for their support of those men’s continued dominance, at the purposeful expense of....other women.”

12/

From Alicia Garza: “I’m mad as hell about a whole bunch of things, every single day I’m mad inside, seething right beneath the surface. But I want to be free more than I want to be mad. And I want to work with people who also want to be free more than they want to be mad...”

13/

On #metoo: “it was loud, thanks to the megaphone that is social media and the ‘whisper networks’ that were now less about speaking sotto voce than about frantically typed texts and all-caps group chats.”

Happy Valentine’s Day.

14/

“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.” #metoo

15/

On discrimination: “we were horrified like women in 2017 who had briefly believed they were equal to their male peers but had just been reminded that they were not, like women who had suddenly had their comparative powerlessness, their essential inequality, revealed to them.”
16/

“We could see that the men who had had the power to abuse women’s bodies and psyches throughout their careers were in many cases also the ones in charge of our political and cultural stories.”

17/

On some men: “...part of the reason they had gotten so far was not simply that they had cleared the field of competition by harassing or demeaning women around them, but because they had capitalized on a broad cultural desire to see women belittled, humiliated, diminished.”

18/

From Aditi Juneja: “...if this movement is going to be sustainable, once you stand shoulder-to-shoulder with someone who’s not quite like you, can you see how connected your fights are? Do you realize: I have to show up for them? Because our liberation is intertwined...”

18/

White men “...have had such a disproportionate share of...power, when they have been allowed and encouraged to be...the voices that explain the news to us & make our movies & tell our stories, they have a disproportionate grip on our sympathies, imagination, and affection.”
20/

“Women’s determination to voice...fury toward men in 2017 and 2018 had led...men to feel some fraction of the anxiety that nonwhite non-men feel daily.”

21/

“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.”

22/

“We just don’t consider, don’t even see, the loss of all the women who—driven out, banished...or marginalized—might have been more talented or brilliant or comforting to us, on our airwaves or in our governing bodies, but whom we have never even gotten the chance to know.”

23/

“...sexual harassment is understood as a crime not because it is a sexual violation, but because it is a form of discrimination.”

As though it’s not enough to be sexually violated.

/24