The New Yorker Radio Hour - Rebecca Traister Is Happy to Be Mad

Episode Date: October 5, 2018

After the election of Donald Trump, the feminist journalist Rebecca Traister began channeling her anger into a book. The result, “Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger” combines an analysis of how women’s anger is discouraged and deflected in patriarchal society, with a historical look at times when that anger has had political impact. Landing a year into the #MeToo movement, it could not be more timely; an unprecedented number of women have spoken bluntly about their experiences with sexual harassment and abuse and demanded consequences. Yet Traister told David Remnick that she sympathizes with men “caught in the middle” of #MeToo, “who entered the world with one set of expectations . . . and are being told halfway through that [their behavior is] no longer acceptable.” But, Traister says, “There’s no other way to do it. We don’t get to just start fresh with a generation starting now.”   New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of the New Yorker and WNYC Studios. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. If you watch the video of two protesters with Senator Jeff Flake in an elevator during the Kavanaugh hearings, if you saw them confront him with so much anger at the way women have been treated for so long, the way they said to a U.S. Senator, don't look away from me, look at me and tell me it doesn't matter. If you look at the way Flake changed its position afterwards, it's all becoming clear that something absolutely remarkable is taking place in America right now. This is very much the subject of Rebecca Traster's new book, Good and Mad, the Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger. The book combines a kind of history of women's uprisings with an analysis of the Me Too movement.

Traster is written for New York Magazine, L, the New York Times, and the Washington Post, and her last book, was called All the Single Ladies, Unmarried Women, and the Rise of an Independent Nation. Rebecca Traster and I spoke on the very day that Christine Blasey Ford and Brett Kavanaugh both testified about her sexual assault allegations. Rebecca, there's no way to avoid this. We are talking now just hours after the Senate Judiciary Committee has done its questioning. There was a very specific story being told by Professor Ford, as well as Ramirez and others, in a very particular milieu as well.

What did the specifics tell you? The specifics of their stories. Well, we are getting a very full and detailed view of cultures around wealth, white, fundamentally patriarchal power centers that begin in, you know, when people are teenagers, the prep school, you know, Deborah Ramirez's story, which was about how she was an outsider to this very elite, fratty, hard drinking, badly behaved, relatively repercussion-free, social circle of extremely wealthy, privileged white men who were all on paths toward immense power.

And the narrative of it was when I was young and irresponsible, I was young and irresponsible. Boys will be boys. Right. Who amongst us has not? Right? Like that's, and that's a, again, that's about the sort of invisibility of certain kinds of power abuses. I write about in the book and something that I've become kind of obsessed with and thinking both about how, for example, a Black Lives Matter movement has been talked about in a mainstream press and then watching the same kinds of things around the Me Too movement. It's helped me to understand a little bit about how when power is abused in the direction that is sort of natural, the more powerful do something bad. or harmful or even violent to the less powerful.

It's sort of invisible, right? Oh, oh, he was a drunk boy. Of course he did this. Like, what young man, what 17-year-old healthy young man with a sex drive and a keg like, hasn't behaved that way? It's like indiscernible as harm in some way. In your book, Good and Mad, you write very early in the book, I am a white woman who has been angry in my life and my work,

occasionally on my own behalf, but more often about politics. about inequity and the grotesque unfairness of the world and this country, how it was built, and who it still excludes and systematically diminished. And then you're off to the races. This book is in large measure about anger, the legitimacy of anger, the employment of anger historically toward good. What set you off on it? It was an attempt to get my thoughts clear after the election. Did that take some doing? Oh, God, yes. I didn't know. I was wrestling with what my job was.

I was wrestling with what my work was. How do you mean? I was very muddy about what the story was that I needed to tell. I have to say that I haven't talked about this before. And there's a degree to which I was deeply. obsessed by the question of the white women. I was acutely aware of my identity as a white woman. The degree to which my work has been blinkered by my whiteness, my work on feminism, the degree to which I have been pushed to be better, to think more clearly about race and

class, that's been a big part of my evolution as a writer. And there was something that had happened right before the election. I'd been on part of a podcast. with a bunch of women, and one of them had said about the young white men who was like the classic Bernie supporter. Like she had said something like, where are you guys out there trying to persuade people to vote for Hillary? Because it's your guys. It's white men who are not voting for her. Where are the left white guys? Go get your boys.

Right. That was the phrase that she'd used. Go get your boys. Right. And it was not a surprise to me that white women had voted for Donald Trump. But I was acutely aware of this demographic, and I felt some responsibility. And I'm very sympathetic to the argument, which is like, leave them be. It is not worth the investment in trying to persuade white women to be on our side.

There's a woman in my book, Jess Morales, who says she worked on the Hillary campaign. And she was like, look, this was about persuading white women to not be Phyllis Schlafly. And that has never, ever worked. They're always going to be Phyllis Schlafly, right? I understand and have sympathy with that. Like, just let them rot, right? They want to support a system that fundamentally oppresses them and that oppresses other people. Great.

But I felt that phrase, go get your boys, was echoing in my own head. And I think that part of what I wanted to do was also think about white women and what impulsives and messages are at work on white women. And I felt like it was my responsibility to examine race from the perspective of, of, of, whiteness in conjunction with looking at gender. And then the anger, so I was feeling that, but I wasn't sure how to do it, right? And that was the question about my work. How do I do? What do what is my job? What's my, what's the story here? But everything was so clouded. And I was on a walk with my husband between Christmas and New Year's of that year, since 2016 and 2017. And I was trying to explain to him the despair I was feeling about like not knowing what my role was

supposed to be. What was I, what was my work going to be? Professionally. Professionally, yeah. And I said, I just can't think straight, derives. I'm so mad. And he was like, well, maybe that's what your work is. And I said, what do you mean? And he goes, well, maybe that's what you need to write about is anger. And as soon as he said it, he's not a writer. He was just something he was responding to and what, but suddenly in that, in that exchange, I'm not exaggerating when I said it was the first feeling of like clarity. and lightness in my head that I'd had at that point in two months.

It is interesting that a lot of the exemplars of constructive anger in the book, historically, are black women. Shirley Chisholm, Florence Kennedy, who I remember well watching on public access television for hours in her great hats. Rosa Parks. And of course, the mother of Emmett Till, that's not by any coincidence. That's not by accident. No, not at all. Women of color have often been not only the leading activist organizers and the people who first gave voice and forum to a lot of the transformative social and political movements that have reshaped America. They also often have done the thinking. I mean, Polly Murray, who's somebody I write about in this book, Polly Murray was credited by both Thurgood Marshall and Ruth Bader Ginsburg for the intellectual work she did laying out the framework for racial and gendered inequity in this country. and laying the groundwork for the laws that would ultimately wind up protecting and trying to ameliorate the kind of gendered and racial inequality that she was trying to address. She's so very rarely credited as this leader.

And Florence Kennedy, I haven't heard the name Florence Kennedy in years. I mean, she's very much of the generation of Gloria Steinem or a little even older. She and Gloria Steinem were speaking partners on the road, yes. Right. Tell us a little bit about Florence Kennedy. So Florence Kennedy was a black feminist lawyer. She was outrageous for her time, but I think she would be outrageous now. I think so. In her demeanor and her willingness to be vocally, profanely, unapologetically and joyfully pissed off about everything she was pissed off about.

And there was a lot of it. She was mad about racism. She was mad about sexism. She wasn't going to play nice at all. Now, you wrote about a time when you were, you were working in a male-dominated office, and you found yourself in tears, you're angry and you're crying, until you write a chilly, hard-ass manager, those are in quotes, a woman, pulled you into a stairway and said to you, they don't know you're furious. They think you're sad and will be pleased because they got to you. Where were you working?

What was going on? was at the New York Observer. I've never talked about this with the woman who said it, and I don't know if she even remembers. And I don't remember, to be honest, I don't remember what I was angry about. I mean, I can take guesses. But I was, the thing that was astounding to me is that this is a person who had always intimidated me,

because she wasn't, there was nothing outwardly emotional, no sense that she was paying close attention to the experiences of the people. was just she was an incredibly efficient, incredibly talented manager of people and of copy. And the fact that she saw in sort of what was a split second, something that I wouldn't have been able to describe as soon as she said it, I was like, I am furious. Of course I'm, of course I'm crying because I'm furious. I think that's such a common experience for women. Which is to express what out at least seems the sadness, but inside is rage. Yes. Yes. It's hammered home to us so often that rage, our rage is fundamentally in express.

because if we express it, we will not be heard, we will not be taken seriously, will be seen as, you know, crazy, unhinged, ball-busting, unattractive, invalid, marginal, like it will go badly for us if we express our anger directly. And I think that I write about this in the book, that one of the tactics that so many of us turn to, we cry, which is a fundamentally more acceptable mode of emotion for women. It's, it is in part because, of what that manager said to me. It will be understood as vulnerability, which is more acceptable in women. To me. Right. Now, that's especially true for white women, by the way. There's a racial dynamic in terms of crying as being something that can elicit sympathy, and that sympathy is very much more likely to accrue to a crying woman if she is white. What are you saying? What is a woman of color more likely to do. Well, women of color have written about this very beautifully that the vision of the traditionally vulnerable femininity that garners sympathy or empathy is very often the suffering white woman. The crying black woman doesn't have that same kind of imaginative hold. And more than that,

white women's tears have often been used to cover for instances. of racism. I mean, it's the vision of the suffering white women and the need to protect her has often been the cover for lynching for, you know, for racialized racist violence. So I just want to, you know, when we talk about the tears of women being something that makes them vulnerable, that is a dynamic that applies especially if you are a white woman. I really do hope men read this book in great numbers as well as women. And for me, there was a, an especially affecting moment that I'm going to touch on. Your husband comes to you. It's just as the Me Too movement is really exploding. And he says, I'm shocked. The profusion of it, the violence of it,

the horror of so many stories that we've heard about in the last year about sexual harassment and sexual assault, it was all shocking to him, shocking to me. And he's coming to you in some way for what you call feminist absolution. So what's to be learned here? What can you? you tell him and really by extension what can you tell me well i think that this i my hope is that this is a moment of education and readjustment of the the view of of a full human experience for a lot of men who have just not seen the have not realized how common how ubiquitous how every day these kinds of experiences are aren't all men blinkered to some of the group this is part of opening eyes men are learning something about the experience of not being men in the world that they've been blind to.

And yet much of the learning comes out in terms of defensiveness. For some, for some. And it's a process. And I don't, I don't. And worry about, you know, thinking about, oh, my God, in high school, maybe I said something terrible. I made a bad joke in the office. That's what you're all at all. For all of my anger.

And this is an angry book that I've written. And I am very angry at men. and I talk about the complexities of the tricks of a women's movement or a feminist movement, is that it asks you to identify as your oppressor, a group of people who are your intimates, your loved ones, the men you share beds with and families with, and who are your brothers and your fathers and your sons and your friends. It asks of us to complicate those incredibly intimate relationships that are often loving and that are often based in need and dependence on the men on whom we rely.

I really do feel for the men for whom this is difficult. We are changing rules part way through the game. That's what this process is asking us to do. That is hard. But there's no other way to do it. We don't get to just start fresh with a generation starting now, right? If you actually want to change the way that the power structures work and the abuses that they permit and you want to say, actually, we don't want to have those abuses anymore. We want to make them no longer acceptable.

That is going to mean that there are some people who are caught in the middle who entered the world with one set of expectations and one set of assumptions about how they could behave and are being told halfway through that that's no longer acceptable. And that has a cost, it has a toll. And I do feel for those guys that doesn't mean that I don't think the process is necessary and I stand behind it. And I don't think I'm alone in this. Most of the people that I know who are fervent proponents of the Me Too. movement and of this difficult, painful process are incredibly conflicted about it, too. We don't want to be the police who determine if somebody should lose their job or not lose their job. And a lot of the anti-me-2 stuff says, oh, it lacks nuance and it's just a bunch of

executioners. No, everybody I know who is behind this movement, you know, most intensely and fervently feels incredible conflict. And so I feel tremendous sympathy for the guys, too. The book, and it's a remarkable one, is Good and Mad. Rebecca Traster, thanks so much. Thanks so much for having me, David. Rebecca Traster's new book is called Good and Mad, the Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger. I'm David Remnick, and that's our podcast for today.

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