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Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger – review

Rebecca Traister’s polemic around #MeToo has passion and fury but seems blind to the complexity of its subject

How you feel about Rebecca Traister’s new book will depend, to a degree, on how you feel about anger. Personally, though furious as I am at both Brexit and the behaviour of Donald Trump, I think there’s a little too much of it around. Like most women, I fear male rage, for which reason I don’t exactly long to see my own sex indulging in even vaguely similar behaviour. Nor do I find anger particularly productive. Yes, it can power a newspaper column; carefully harnessed it will get people out on to the streets to march, too. But when it comes to deep thought – something we desperately need right now – it seems to me to be more of an impediment than a spur.

This is not a thesis with which Traister, an American journalist, would agree. Good and Mad: the Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger was written, she tells us, in just four months, an unusually profitable stretch during which her feminist fury helped her not only to complete her manuscript, but also to sleep more deeply, to communicate better with those she loves, and even to have “great sex”. Women, she believes, have for far too long disguised their anger, covering it with jokes or hiding it completely from view – and who can blame them? An angry woman isn’t justified. She is irrational, hormonal, out of control, incapable, crazy. But perhaps all this is about to change. Traister believes that Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016, and #MeToo, the movement that sprang up following the allegations of sexual assault against Harvey Weinstein in October 2017, have together released the genie from the bottle. Women are, with good reason, very angry – and they are finally letting it show.

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from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2yBqWhG
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