The idea that women's anger is fundamentally illegitimate, because they have nothing real, no big things to be rationally angry about, is part of what undergrids the claim that furious women are mentally ill.

Women's ire in any political context remains coded as chaotic, while men's is comprehensible, understood as rational and often admirable.

...[W]hen women do explode with rage, even if the effect is to catalyze a social movement, their anger will never be recorded, never noted, never recalled or understood as nation-reshaping. The fact that we can often only register the fury of white men as heroic is so established that it would verge on the comical if it weren't so deeply tragic.

Rose McGowan, one of Weinstein's earliest and most vociferous accusers, recalled being asked "in a soft NPR voice, 'What if what you're saying makes men uncomfortable?' Good. I've been uncomfortable my whole life. Welcome to our world of discomfort.

Maybe we cry when we're furious in part because we feel a kind of grief at all the things we want to say or yell that we know we can't. Maybe we're just sad about the very same things we're angry about.

This is one of anger's most important roles: it is a mode of connection, a way for women to find each other and realize that their struggles and their frustrations are shared, that they are not alone, not crazy. If they are quiet they will remain isolated. But if they howl in rage, someone else who shares their fury might hear them, might start howling along. This is of course, partly why those who oppress women work to stifle their rage.

Having had the rare and privileged experience of having had my anger taken seriously, valued on its merits, I no longer believe that it is anger that is hurting us, but rather the system that penalizes us for expressing it, that doesn't respect or hear it, that isn't curious about it, that mocks or ignores it. That's what's making us sick; that's what's making us feel crazy, alone; that's why we're grinding our teeth at night.

This book is about how anger works for men in ways that it does not for women, how men like both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders can wage yelling campaigns and be credited with understanding--and compellingly channeling--the rage felt by their supporters while their female opponents can be jeered and mocked as shrill for speaking too loudly of forcefully into a microphone.

The task— especially for the newly awakened, the newly angry, especially for the white women, for whom incentives to renounce their rage will be highest in coming years—is to keep going, to not turn back, to not give in to the easier path, the one where we weren’t angry all the time, where we accepted the comforts of racial and economic advantage that will always be on offer to those who don’t challenge power. Our job is to stay angry . . . perhaps for a very long time.