These men are playing with fire

[T]the reason these men are getting so upset is that the force of female protest right now feels like it has the potential to shake our power structure to its core.

Twenty-seven years ago this fall, Anita Hill, came forward, not of her own volition, with claims that Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas had sexually harassed her when they worked together at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Thomas was confirmed to the Court nonetheless, but a wave of angry women ran for office in the wake of Hill’s treatment by the committee, and her story was crucial to establishing “sexual harassment” as a form of gender discrimination. The seeds sown during the Hill hearings have come into full flower in the past two years, as the #MeToo movement erupted following the election of a multiple accused sexual harasser, and angry women jumped into electoral contests around the country.

It’s those women who’ve been winning primaries, toppling men who’ve occupied seats of power since God was a boy. The partisan gender gap has become a chasm, a fault line splitting open under the pressure of so much rage. Based on polls going into the midterms, the gap has grown to 33 points, largely because white women — a majority of whom voted for Trump in 2016 and have supported Republicans in all but two elections since 1952 — have shifted toward backing Democrats over Republicans, 52-38; among millennials, 55 points separates women who favor Democrats and men who prefer Republicans. It’s angry women who’ve staged teachers’ strikes, who’ve knocked powerful men off their perches at television networks and in the Senate; it’s often female elected officials who’ve linked arms with the angry masses. It was Kamala Harris, whose place on the Judiciary Committee, along with Cory Booker’s, opened up after the resignation of Al Franken and the loss of Roy Moore — both sidelined by the agitations of women — who first interrupted the Kavanaugh hearings and called for an adjournment.
Harris was told that she was “out of order.”

But the challenges deemed by ideological foes to be “out of order” may be so discomfiting in part because they suggest a yearning for a new order.

The idealized vision of what this country might be was born of the virtuous, and sometimes chaotic, fury of the unrepresented. We are taught it as patriotic catechism — give me liberty or give me death; live free or die; don’t tread on me. We carve our Founders’ anger into buildings, visit their broken bells, name contemporary political factions after the temper tantrums they threw, dressed in native garb, dumping tea in a harbor. We call these events a revolution.Women’s vehement objections have been typically treated as irrational theater.

This is the anger of white men, of course. Their anger is revered, respected as the stimulus for necessary political change. Because they’ve always been the rational norm, the intellectual ideal, their dissatisfactions are assumed to be grounded in reason — not the emotional muck of femininity.

(This isn’t just in the past. Think about how the anger of white men in the Rust Belt is often treated as politically diagnostic, as a guide to their understandable frustrations: the loss of jobs and stature, the shortage of affordable health care, the scourge of drugs. Meanwhile, the Movement for Black Lives, a response to police killings of African Americans initiated by women activists, is considered by the FBI to pose a threat of “retaliatory violence” and discussed as a “hate group” by Meghan McCain.)

As nobly enraged as the Founders were at being taxed and policed by a government in which they had no voice or vote, they failed, we know, to establish a true representative democracy. Their government was one in which a minority ruled. The few cleared the field of competition by subjugating the many — the enslaved, women — and then built their economic and political power on the labor of those they’d deprived of any say in civic or social life.

But to keep minority rule in place, order must be maintained, as the honorable senator from California was peremptorily instructed. It is order, after all, that throughout our history has worked to suppress the anger of women, to discourage us from speaking it or even feeling it. And when women have gotten mad, they’ve been ignored or marginalized, laughed or blanched at, their vehement objections treated as irrational theater, inconsequential to the important matter of governing the nation. This has always been an error. Look to the start, the germinating seeds, of nearly every major social and political movement that has shaped this nation — from abolition to suffrage to labor to civil rights and LGBTQ rights to, yes, feminism — and you will find near its start the passionate dissent of women.

[T]he point is not that the anger is always righteous; rather, that it is often potent — the stuff of eruptive social movements and thwarted ones — and yet to this day, it continues to be written off as loudmouthed hysteria, or the dubious ravings of pussy-hatted suburbanites with itchy Etsy trigger fingers.

In January 2017, the morning after millions crowded streets around the country (and the world) for the largest single-day political demonstration in US history, George Stephanopoulos didn’t even bring up the Women’s March on his Sunday-morning show. During a 17-minute interview with Trump spokeswoman Kellyanne Conway, he lingered on the details of the president’s inaugural-crowd size, until Conway herself addressed the giant rally against her boss. Even then, Conway had to mention the Women’s March twice before drawing a direct question from her host, who asked, 13 minutes in: “What did the president think of that march?” In Stephanopoulos’s next segment, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer noted that he’d participated in the Women’s March in his home state of New York the day before, and Stephanopoulos responded with only one question, in reference to the profanity in Madonna’s speech: “Were you comfortable with everything you heard?”

And it wasn’t just Stephanopoulos who shrugged off the political significance of this mass outpouring of female rage. On the Monday after, speaking on Morning Joe to Missouri senator Claire McCaskill, who, in discussion with Mika Brzezinski, had just detailed the marchers’ stated commitments to equal pay, women’s health care, defending Obamacare, environmental activism, and their plans to run for office and volunteer for campaigns leading to the midterms, MSNBC analyst Mark Halperin — a man who’d reported extensively on the tea party’s “huge impact on America” — asked her, with suppurating condescension, “Senator, [can I] just ask you to be a notch more specific” about how the marchers might “impact what’s going on in Washington [this week], not running for [the] school board down the road?”

The next week, protesters and public-interest lawyers, the majority of them female, flooded airports to lambaste and subvert Trump’s travel ban; women judges and a female acting attorney general obstructed his path. In the coming months, women flooded congressional phone lines and filled their representatives’ mailboxes with postcards, applying pressure that eventually helped persuade a few key Republicans to vote against the repeal of the Affordable Care Act.

Female candidates signed up to run not just for school boards — though yeah, those too — but for all kinds of elected positions. So far this year, record numbers of women have secured nominations in state legislative, congressional, gubernatorial, and senate races, including more than a hundred teachers who entered primaries from West Virginia to Oklahoma to Arizona, states where teachers, many female, led strikes this spring.

Meanwhile, high-school students, women prominent among them, started a widespread movement for gun control, calling powerful people out on their BS and promising a revolt against a gun lobby that has held America in its grip for too long. On the opening day of the Kavanaugh hearings, it was a Women’s March leader, Linda Sarsour, who was the first to stand and yell — and she and a co-leader, Bob Bland, were among those arrested.

As for Halperin, he no longer works at MSNBC, after some of his former subordinates, joining the angry female crusade against workplace sexual harassment, accused him of pressing his penis against them.