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Rebecca Traister Profile picture
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9 Jan, 4 tweets, 2 min read
My lengthy conversation w @RepJayapal about Wed's violence, being left in the House gallery as rioters broke windows, her rage, her keen awareness as an immigrant & woman of color of the peril she, her colleagues & democracy face & what Dems must do next: thecut.com/2021/01/pramil…
"The threat is extremely real," she told me. "I just knew this was going to be terrible and consequential. And that it would not be fixable quickly....I saw them put a Confederate flag on the Capitol."
Jayapal herself had been among 600 arrested in 2018, after protesting the child separation policy by peacefully occupying the Hart office building. 600 people, mostly women, had been arrested that day after refusing to leave.
I've been unsettled since we spoke by her description of the advanced awareness of this week's threat: Maxine Waters had raised concerns, safety advisories were in place, she'd texted her worried husband that she was in the safest place she could be. And yet armed rioters got in.

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More from @rtraister

Rebecca Traister Profile picture
27 Jul 20
“‘She laughed & said, ‘that’s politics.’ She had no remorse’” said Chris Dodd. When your pals help you pick your lady VP based on how contrite she is about having challenged you in a debate. No no no no no nope this is gonna be the thing that ends me. politico.com/news/2020/07/2…
Note it’s the fact that she LAUGHED that put Dodd over the edge. What’s the line? Women are afraid men will kill them; men are afraid women will laugh at them?
Please also note that when a woman practices what she correctly calls politics, ie landing a blow on a competitor during a presidential debate, Chris Dodd thinks it’s a “gimmick.” Monday morning, you have already been a long week.
Read 4 tweets
Rebecca Traister Profile picture
24 Jul 20
Women’s anger at male power abuse regularly presented as path to self-advancement for the women. Voicing fury at systemic degradation is read as opportunistic. Whereas men’s abusive behavior rarely understood as fundamental to how they attained & maintain THEIR power. But it is!
Framing women (would-be competitors & adversaries) as bitches, as crazy, as disgusting, as stupid—in private & in public—is huge part of how men gain & maintain disproportionate power, but that’s very rarely acknowledged, permitting myth that men somehow earned a greater share.
They didn’t! They rode in on the discounting of disgusting fucking bitches. But when bitches point that out at any audible volume, the story that PROMPTLY gets told is how the women are leveraging their (correct & righteous) anger for their own gain. Magic. See also: Gillibrand.
Read 4 tweets
Rebecca Traister Profile picture
7 Feb 20
I wrote this last year, but it's evergreen. In 2008, Deutsch called Palin a "new feminist ideal:" because "I want her watching my kids … I want her laying in bed next to me...women want to be her, men want to mate with her" He's paid to explain politics. thecut.com/2019/07/politi…
In a 2005 book he wrote "I cannot remember a time in my career when I was not having either a flirtation with a woman in the office, or a friendship, a fantasy, or all of the above. I am at my best when women are there to energize & excite me." He's tasked with political analysis
This morning he explained that Warren's electability challenges aren't tied to gender or sexism, rather they exist because she is strident. This guy's wisdom is remunerated and broadcast widely to viewers wanting to understand the election.
Read 4 tweets
Rebecca Traister Profile picture
15 Nov 19
Also, a thread about this piece & some stuff that didn't wind up in it. First, when I was playing with the Breakfast Club menu of caricatures up top, I realized that several of the women could fit multiple roles, based on how they've been presented. thecut.com/2019/11/lesson…
ie: who's the lightweight? who's the meanie? There can be several answers, bc so many of them can be, and have been, labeled with more than one derogatory stereotype. Which is fascinating, since several of those stereotypes kind of contradict each other!
Then I played the game w/ the men, front-runners & sea of others: which of these stereotypes have been applied to them? A number of them have definitely been caricatured as lightweights. Bernie, as I say in the piece, regularly gets called out as yelling/angry. But...
Read 11 tweets
Rebecca Traister Profile picture
8 Oct 19
If you are asking "is it accurate to say you were fired? Forced to resign? How would you characterize this?" you may simply not know much about a discriminatory practice that was AN ACCEPTED NORM until, like, five minutes ago & that still happens even tho it is officially illegal
In her 2014 book Waren writes that the "principal did what I think a lot of principals did back then--wished me luck, didn't ask me back for the next school year & hired someone else for the job." Even in 2014, she's describing it as something she understood BECAUSE IT WAS NORMAL
If you didn't live through this being something so ubiquitous and acceptable that it did not even require (& often lacked) explicit expression, that's fine. But learn the history before you go around asking authoritatively demanding questions of those who DID live through it.
Read 8 tweets
Rebecca Traister Profile picture
15 Sep 19
A good morning for reading suggestions to help process fury. Because I wrote it, I’ll start with my book, Good and Mad, about the history & political power of women’s anger, now in paperback (& on sale in hardcover). BUT WAIT THERE’S LOTS MORE: amazon.com/Good-Mad-Revol…
Like @schemaly’s eye-opening Rage Becomes her, an exploration of women’s anger on a global scale, also in paperback: amazon.com/Rage-Becomes-H…
And @ProfessorCrunk’s luminous Eloquent Rage, which is specifically about black feminist anger: amazon.com/Eloquent-Rage-…
Read 9 tweets

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