Fury is a political Weapon. And Woman need to wield.

This is an artical was written in the NY times IN September 1018 by Rebeca. SHe is touching on women and the fact that they have never been taken seriously in politics due to their emotions. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/29/opinion/sunday/fury-is-a-political-weapon-and-women-need-to-wield-it.html this is the link.
Here is the article in its entirety :Fury Is a Political Weapon. And Women Need to
Wield It. Rebecca Traister, published Sept. 29, 2018 in The New York Times

Inside the room, in
the morning, she spoke carefully, precisely, in a high voice; she made jokes
about caffeine, asked deferentially about whether it would be O.K. to take a
break. She acknowledged her terror, but remained calm, and cited her scientific
expertise in how the brain responds to trauma.

Her voice trembled in
moments of intense recollection; it sounded as though she might be crying,
though no tears appeared to fall. She described a past sexual assault and the
more recent media assault on her in excruciating and vulnerable detail, but did
not yell, did not betray a hint of the fury she had every reason to feel as she
was forced to put her pain on display for the nation.

That is how women have
been told to behave when they are angry: to not let anyone know, and to joke
and to be sweet and rational and vulnerable.
Outside the room where
Christine Blasey Ford was testifying on Thursday morning, women were
incandescent with rage and sorrow and horror. They were getting angry in a new
way, a public way, an unapologetic way a way that is typically reserved for
men, and that would again serve men well, when afternoon came.

Brett Kavanaugh
bellowed; he snarled; he pouted and wept furiously at the injustice of having
his ascendance to power interrupted by accusations of sexual assault. He
challenged his questioners, turned their queries back on them. He was backed up
by Lindsey Graham, who appeared to be having some sort of fit of rage over
people having the audacity to listen to a woman speak about her life and
consider that she might be telling an ugly truth about a powerful man. And, as
soon as he was finished, it certainly felt as if the white mens
anger had been rhetorically effective, that we had reflexively understood it as
righteous and correct.
Fury was a tool to be
marshaled by men like Judge Kavanaugh and Senator Graham, in defense of
their own claims to political, legal, public power. Fury was a weapon that had
not been made available to the woman who had reason to question those claims.

What happened inside
the room was an exceptionally clear distillation of who has historically been
allowed to be angry on their own behalf, and who has not.

And outside the room
was a hint of how it might be changing.

Most of the time,
female anger is discouraged, repressed, ignored, swallowed. Or transformed into
something more palatable, and less recognizable as fury something like tears.
When women are truly livid, they often weep.

Maybe we cry when
were furious in part because we feel a kind of grief at all the things we want
to say or yell that we know we cant. Maybe were just sad about the very same
things that were angry about. I wept as soon as Dr. Blasey began to speak. On
social media, I saw hundreds of messages from women who reported the same
experience, of finding themselves awash in tears, simply in response to this
womans voice, raised in polite dissent. The power of the moment, the anxiety
that it would be futile, the grief that we even had to put her and ourselves
through this spectacle, was intense.

But its not just
sorrow mingled with our wrath; our impulse toward tears in moments of fury
stems also from an instinct that things will go better for us tactically
especially if we are white, our perceived feminine fragility more easily
discernible and likely to elicit sympathy within a white patriarchy if we
emote through tears, which are associated with womens vulnerability, rather
than through rage. Crying affirms many of us as female, and if youre
a woman, comporting yourself in traditionally female ways is rewarded, while
lashing out is punished.

Whatever the
connection, theres been a lot of crying in politics, and very little of it has
stemmed just from womens feeling sad.

Barbara Lee, the
liberal Democratic representative from Northern California, knows well how to
titrate rage in a palatable way; as a black woman in the House, she has had to
learn. When I spoke to her last year about anger and tears, she recalled to me
how the nations first black congresswoman, Shirley Chisholm, whose
presidential campaign brought a young Ms. Lee into politics, used to cry
behind closed doors when she was hurt, adding, You know how pain leads to
anger. The tears, Ms. Lee recalled, were a product of Ms. Chisholms being
very sensitive, very hurt and very angry.

And she was never the
only one crying. In 1972, at the Democratic National Convention to which Ms.
Chisholm brought her delegates, George McGovern persuaded many feminists to
support him (over Ms. Chisholm and others). But Mr. McGovern then
double-crossed them, instructing his delegates not to support a plank that
would legalize abortion and violating an explicit promise to the women by
permitting an abortion opponent to speak from the floor. The journalist (and
later screenwriter) Nora Ephron covered the messy convention for Esquire: At
four oclock in the morning, Ms. Ephron wrote, Gloria Steinem in tears, was
confronting McGovern campaign manager Gary Hart: You promised us you would not
take the low road, you bastards.

The next day, Ms.
Ephron trailed Ms. Steinem out of a hotel where Ms. Steinem had gone
to confront Mr. McGovern directly but hadnt succeeded. If youre a woman, all
they can think about your relationship with a politician is that youre either
sleeping with him or advising him about clothes, Ms. Steinem seethed, and
started to cry again.

Its just that they
wont take us seriously, Ms. Steinem told Ms. Ephron through tears. And Im
just tired of being screwed, and being screwed by my friends. Later, she said:
They wont take us seriously. Were just walking wombs.

It is a righteous diatribe,
months and years of fury spilling over, and she cant get it out without
weeping.

We cry when we get
angry, Ms. Steinem said to me 45 years later. I dont think thats uncommon,
do you? She continued, I was greatly helped by a woman who was an executive
someplace, who said she also cried when she got angry, but developed a
technique which meant that when she got angry and started to cry, shed say to
the person she was talking to, You may think I am sad because I am crying. No.
I am angry. And then she just kept going. And I thought that was brilliant.

Tears are permitted as
an outlet for wrath in part because they are fundamentally misunderstood. One
of my sharpest memories from an early job, in a male-dominated office, where I
once found myself weeping with inexpressible rage, was my being grabbed by the
scruff of my neck by an older woman a chilly manager of whom Id always been
slightly terrified who dragged me into a stairwell. Never let them see you
crying, she told me. They dont know youre furious. They think youre sad
and will be pleased because they got to you.

Patricia Schroeder,
then a Democratic congresswoman from Colorado, had worked with Gary Hart
on his presidential runs. In 1987, when Mr. Hart was caught in an extramarital
affair aboard a boat called Monkey Business and bowed out of the race, Ms.
Schroeder, deeply frustrated, figured there was no reason she shouldnt explore
the idea of running for president herself.

It was not a
well-thought-out decision, she said to me with a laugh 30 years later.
There were already seven other candidates in the race, and the last thing they
needed was another one. Somebody called it Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
Because it was late in the campaign, she was behind on fund-raising, and so she
vowed that she wouldnt enter the race unless she raised $2 million. It was a
losing battle. She discovered that some of her supporters who gave $1,000 to
men would give her only $250. Do they think I get a discount? she wondered.

When she made her
speech announcing that she would not launch a formal campaign, she was so
overcome by emotions gratitude for the people whod supported her,
frustration with the system that made it so difficult to raise money and to target
voters rather than delegates, and anger at the sexism that she got choked up.

You would have
thought Id had a nervous breakdown, recalled Ms. Schroeder about how the
press reacted to her. Youd have thought Kleenex was my corporate sponsor. I
remember thinking, what are they going to put on my tombstone? She cried?

For a while Ms.
Schroeder kept what she called a crying file, a list of all the male
politicians whod wept publicly that year. Reagan would tear up every time he
saw a flag, she remembered. Her file included John Sununu, who cried as he was
stepping down as governor of New Hampshire, and George H.W. Bush, who was a
steady weeper.
But the reaction to
tears from those men was wholly different from what Ms. Schroeder got. Saturday
Night Live ran a skit in
which the actress playing Ms. Schroeder repeatedly burst into tears while
moderating a debate.

Women across the
country reacted with embarrassment, sympathy and disgust, wrote The Chicago
Tribune. One Washington Post writer argued that older women like
Ms. Schroeder were setting the cause of young women back a century, calling it
crazy, reckless, for one of Congresss few women to be the one to give
ammunition to those who saw women as sugary little girls rather than serious
people to be taken seriously.

Ms. Schroeder found
this last argument the most galling. Recalling a man who had suffered
politically after he wept in public, Edmund Muskie, whose tears effectively
ended his bid for the presidency back in 1972, she still wondered, so many
years later, Why dont I remember anyone saying that he set men back?

No one would say it
set men back, because most men are allowed to cry and yell the way Judge
Kavanaugh did on Thursday. They are allowed to rant the way Lindsey Graham did.
Their expressions of ire serve as a signal of their strength and power. This is
how men get to behave, to emote, to communicate.

Slowly, women are beginning
to behave that way too.

This political moment
has provoked a period in which more and more women have been in no mood to
dress their fury up as anything other than raw and burning rage. Many
women are yelling, shouting, using Sharpies to etch sharply worded
slogans onto protest signs, making furious phone calls to representatives.

On Friday morning, two
sexual assault survivors, Ana Maria Archila and Maria Gallagher, confronted
Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona as he got into an elevator after announcing that
he would vote to send Judge Kavanaughs nomination to the Senate floor. You
have children in your family! Ms. Archila shouted at him, pointing her finger
in his face in vivid wrath. I have two children. I cannot imagine that for the
next 50 years they will have to have someone in the Supreme Court who has been
accused of violating a young girl. What are you doing, sir?
Ms. Gallagher, weeping
but also shouting, told him, Youre telling all women that they dont matter,
that they should just stay quiet because if they tell you what happened to them
you are going to ignore them!

Look at me when Im
talking to you, she added. Dont look away from me!

Later, Ms.
Archila told a reporter: I wanted him to feel my rage. Shortly
afterward, Mr. Flake demanded that the F.B.I. investigate the accusations
against Judge Kavanaugh before a floor vote.

Many of the women
shouting now are women who have not previously yelled publicly before, many of
them white middle-class women newly awakened to political fury and protest.
Part of the process of becoming mad must be recognizing that they are not the
first to be furious, and that there is much to learn from the stories and
histories of the livid women many of them not white or middle class who
have never had reason not to be mad.

If you are angry
today, or if you have been angry for a while, and youre wondering whether
youre allowed to be as angry as you feel, let me say: Yes. Yes, you are
allowed. You are, in fact, compelled.

If youve been feeling
a new rage at the flaws of this country, and if your anger is making you want
to change your life in order to change the world, then I have something
incredibly important to say: Dont forget how this feels.

Tell a friend, write
it down, explain it to your children now, so they will remember. And dont let
anyone persuade you it wasnt right, or it was weird, or it was some quirky
stage in your life when you went all political remember that, honey,
that year you went crazy? No. No. Dont let it ever become that. Because
people will try.

The future will come,
we hope. If we survive this, if we make it better even just a little bit
better the urgency will fade, perhaps the ire will subside, the relief may
take you, briefly. And thats good, thats O.K.

But then the world
will come and tell you that you shouldnt get mad again, because you were kind
of nuts and you never cooked dinner and you yelled at the TV and werent so
pretty and life will be easier when you get fun again. And it will be awfully
tempting to put away the pictures of yourself in your pussy hat, to stuff your
protest signs in the attic, and to slink back, away from the raw bite of fury,
to ease back into whatever new reality is made, and maybe youll still cry
angry tears at your desk and laugh with sharp satisfaction in front of
late-night television, but you wont yell anymore.

What youre angry
about now injustice will still exist, even if you yourself are not
experiencing it, or are tempted to stop thinking about how you
experience it, and how you contribute to it. Others are still experiencing it,
still mad; some of them are mad at you. Dont forget them; dont write off
their anger. Stay mad for them, alongside them, let them lead you in anger.

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