Ask a Feminist: Soraya Chemaly Discusses Feminist Rage with Carla Kaplan and Durba Mitra

Soraya Chemaly, Carla Kaplan, and Durba Mitra

Ask a Feminist is part of the Feminist Public Intellectuals Project.

© 2019 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.

The following conversation took place on March 29, 2019. An edited transcript is below.

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Carla Kaplan (CK): Thank you so much for being part of our Ask a Feminist podcast series here at Signs. You’ve already been a part of Signs, so it feels like bringing you back in, and were thrilled to have you here, so thank you so much.

Soraya Chemaly (SC): Well thank you so much, I’m really honored that you asked.

CK: The first question we wanted to ask you starts with something that’s pretty obvious, which is that [Durba and I] are both academics, as you know. And as I think you also know, Durba and I are coediting, with Sarah Haley of UCLA,  a forthcoming special issue of Signs on the theme of rage. And for that, we are going to be asking feminist scholars from a lot of different disciplines to think about rage as an urgent feminist issue, vital to feminist scholarship today, and also to reflect on the history of feminist rage. And we wanted to know if you could reflect on the place of rage in feminist scholarship and activism. What I mean there is that Signs as a journal is committed (and this has been part of its move to [Northeastern University in] Boston) to the place of scholarship in feminist practice and committed to creating new forms of exchange and collaboration between scholars and activists. And we wondered what you as a journalist and activist, as a public intellectual, want from scholars. What do you think, here you have scholars, you’ve got feminist scholars, what do you see as the job of scholars in these enraging times? What do you need from scholars? What do you look for from us? It’s a kind of “how can we best be of use?” question.

SC: That’s such a wonderful question. It’s too many gifts to consider. I really set out to work on all of these issues—I did it in college, I did it in my twenties, I stopped for a while, and then I went back to it ten years ago, and very explicitly because I, as a reader and writer, was frustrated that the amazing work being done by academics didn’t seem to go beyond the walls of academia. So, when I started writing, I thought, how can I take all of these ideas that have helped me so much personally and share them, reframe them, tie them to pop culture? But also share them in a way that more people are exposed to them, because those of us who find this work, those of you who do this work, we are led there by some deep personal drive or some profound alienation from the culture. So how, I always thought, do I get that information to people who would not have thought to take a gender or women’s studies class or have very poor impressions of what feminism might be? And so, even before you ask that question, I am so grateful for all of the work.

One of the things that really occurred to me as I was writing this book, Rage Becomes Her—I really tapped into readings and writings and academic analysis of literature and philosophy and science. And what was striking to me and what I think I would love from scholars is more cross-discipline pollination of ideas. One thing that really struck me often was that I’d see a remarkable, well thought out philosophical approach to a problem of emotion, for example, and then I would read a dissection of a Victorian novel, and what I really thought was, “Oh my god, why can’t we have a conversation with those two people in the same room where those academic ideas?” And I think of it as a feminist version of chaos theory principles, where you have a cross-disciplinary, interdisciplinary sharing of ideas that somehow enhances everything, if that makes sense. I still think there are lots of silos, and that those silos hinder us as a movement.

CK: So, one of the ways we can be most useful to you is break down the silos, and work to create inter- and transdisciplinary work that you can use more effectively.

SC: I mean, I like doing that work of trying to connect those dots. But even as a writer I would so gladly sit and listen to you do that kind of connecting, because you’re just immersed in it in a way that I can’t be.

CK: So much of what you just described is very much part of the mission of Signs, which really believes that in a way gender studies created interdisciplinarity. It’s the one field where you do see a lot of that crossing over. But at the same time, so much of the public microphone gets seized by people who speak in our name, speak for feminism, but who we do not recognize as our spokeswomen. I mean I think about Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In, for example, and the way in which that got touted as some kind of work of feminism. So, I really appreciate what you said as a way to be mindful of how feminists can make work that’s accessible and useful to one another.

SC: There’s one other thing now that you mention that, because I think of what you just described as the very typical anointing by mainstream media of an acceptable woman in the narrative, to be “the feminist” that has been chosen to be in the limelight. And one thing that I also have found over and over and over again, particularly in the studies of rape and narratives around rape and the framing of rape stories, is this deep, deep, deep distrust of feminist academics. Rooted in the idea that women, certainly, and feminists, absolutely, can’t be “objective,” but everyone else is. And newsrooms, I think, went down that path for a very, very long time, and either they would quote a feminist, but in that tried and true false-equivalence way, quote an “antifeminist” who had no credentials to talk about a topic. So, you would end up with a feminist academic person who had really studied rape and war and then a man who had an opinion about rape. Literally that was the comparison. So, to the degree that some academics might be comfortable pushing against that in public discourse, it would be really helpful because I still think that continues.

Durba Mitra (DM): I mean the thing that’s so striking is that rage, the subject itself, is so contradictory—it brings out exactly the contradictions you are describing, which is that a person who is enraged doesn’t have the right to expertise. And so, you take an object, this question of rage, and you bring expertise to it, which I think is so brilliant. And that’s what is so interesting about being called a feminist who is talking about rage as an expert and raging at the same time.

SC: But also, I think it also really does combine in this idea that rage is irrational. And I disagree entirely with that. To me, anger is—and I know we could talk about the nuances for different words for anger and rage—but anger is a really rational response. And many people think much more clearly and coolly and methodically and logically when they feel this emotion. And they have a different path to decision making, you know? But still, because of the tying together of the ideas of femininity, women, and emotion, it’s as though that’s not even possible. You can’t possibly be saying that.

DM: That’s very interesting, to bring up the question of the rationality of rage. Because I might ask you a little bit about another dimension of rage, which you spoke a little bit about in our Short Takes. Over the last year, and of course before that, there have been multiple videos and accounts of people of color, and women and girls of color in particular, experiencing aggrieved rage as a form of privilege against them. For example, the eyewitness who records a white woman experiencing deeply racialized rage: calling the police to report a young black girl who is working at a lemonade stand, or calling the police on a man of color who enters [his] own residence. So, as we know, the so-called “stand your ground” laws made white fears of black and brown people not only normative but legal grounds for violence. And now of course the president, newly emboldened, constantly tries to ramp up a kind of violent rage and resentment. So in your Signs Short Takes response to the forum on Rage Becomes Her, you said that you had regretted, a little, not being able to devote more time to resentment anger in the book, the anger as you described, which I think is such a beautiful phrase, as “aggrieved entitlement.” This resentment rage, or racialized rage, is often based in the complicated position of privileged women who carry and enforce strong racial prejudices, people who are enforcing white supremacy.

SC: Absolutely.

DM: So, I wondered whether you’d be willing now, after the release of your book, to think with us about what this aggrieved entitlement looks like.

SC: I think we see examples of this all the time. The phrase came from some of those first discussions of white male shooters in Columbine, and Michael Kimmel, who also had a coauthor, whose name eludes me, but it comes from the analysis of basically that terroristic lone-wolf shooter, but I think it’s much more broadly applicable. And one of the interesting aspects of what I delineate in the book as “resentment,”—there’s the anger of looking back, the perceived loss, the aggrieved entitlement that is all over Trump and his campaign. It’s all about what we lost and “Make America Great Again” and this mythology that you are owed something because of your identity, which of course is not referenced at all—we’re just not going to talk about that identity—is the way that political narrative goes.

But then there’s the anger of looking forward, and that’s not resentment. That’s what I describe as the “anger of hope.”

In these instances, which we have seen over and over again, with all of these cutesy nicknames that get appended to the women who enact them, is what I think of as a microcosm of the larger issues of toxic, border-patrol masculinity. We see that too, right? We see that men have this political power. They talk about building walls, and enforcing borders, and they refer to one country “raping” another country. And the language of nationalism and national borders is infused with a lot of toxic masculinity and a lot of white supremacy, too. But women don’t have that power. They don’t actually have that level of institutional power. Instead they’re literally policing sidewalks and lemonade stands and gated communities and local pools, and they’re doing the exact same thing. They’re enforcing the same kinds of rules but they’re using their authority where they can.

DM: I wonder, though—because so much of your book is about women harnessing rage. What does that prescriptive idea look like? When we’re talking about differentiating what you’re saying and harnessing power from jingoistic, nationalistic power.

SC: So, it’s interesting. The subtitle of my book is “the power of women’s anger,” and there were a lot of suggestions that we qualify that with “positive power”, “revolutionary power”—there was a list of twenty-five qualifiers that I rejected. And I said, “It’s going to get too long if I try and explain that that power is both positive and negative, that it’s corrosive and constructive. Like there was another list of twenty-five, and what I try to explain in the book is, and this is what I regretted because there wasn’t enough space (I cut 40,000 words from the book), there is this dangerous, corrosive rage, there is this rage that fuels contempt and disgust and xenophobia and racism and misogyny. I remember one of the parts I took out is about the powerful historic influence that women on the Right had in shaping the American GOP, because they were responding in anger to the feminist movement, which they felt was disdaining their choices to be homemakers. So, they really focused their rage on anti-abortion, “pro-family” politics, and that transformed the Republican Party.

That’s why Rebecca [Traister’s] book is so important. Brittney Cooper wrote her book Eloquent Rage, it was released about six months before mine. And then mine came out, and then about a month later, Rebecca Traister’s Good and Mad came out. You know, the three of us wrote very different books about anger, but they’re very complimentary in many ways. We were sitting individually, separately, not having talked to each other writing this collection of ideas. But yeah, I [do] think its powerfully negative too.

CK: Is that quality something that we can help mainstream people recognize, so that when they hear your rage, and they hear somebody like Sarah Sanders or Kellyanne Conway raging, that they can hear that difference? That they can hear—not just that there’s different content being expressed, because of course we can differentiate feminist rage and the rage of aggrieved entitlement by content—but is there something about the authoritarian quality of their rage that we can help people listen to, so that they can hear that difference? So that we don’t all sound the same?

SC: So that there’s not this equation.

CK: And should I not worry about that? Should that not be something I worry about?

SC: So, I actually think that that’s one dimension of this much bigger problem of, just, education. You know, I had a conversation the other day about—I think the question posed was, “How do we fix democracy?” And I kind of laughed and said, “Well, you’re just assuming it ever worked. What kind of assumption is that?” Because, in fact, it’s always been broken, and in fact, we’ve always had authoritarian tendencies, and in fact, slavery was authoritarianism, and yet we refuse to look at our history honestly and to have that kind of open discussion. So being able to get to the point that you’re describing, it seems to me, would be the natural outcome of educating people in our own history, from the perspective of oppressed people and minority people and indigenous people and women, and all that popular history, social history, that often still I think is sometimes disdained. So, it’s almost, I don’t know—what’s that expression about a cart and a horse? I don’t know that we can get people to understand the distinction that we’re making between those two forms of anger without the larger context of that.

CK: There are many people who don’t see the difference between Serena Williams’s rage and Brett Kavanaugh’s rage.

DM: And your response is about education, which is an interesting response because I think you’re saying, “Let’s think about one form of rage, which is about outrage at being marginalized and minoritized and subordinated and what that looks like.” But I think that what’s interesting is that the rage of, as you’re saying, the cutesy names that they give the white woman who calls [the police on] the lemonade stand, is the same language of being minoritized or marginalized.

SC: Yes, and they feel that deeply.

DM: Right, exactly. So, in fact, there is parallel language being used about historical aggrievements, and I think that’s a more complicated question. Because then there is the ethical question of how do we differentiate?

SC: So, this is really interesting. Two things occurred to me when you said that. The first is that I think that that might be an example—I reserve judgment because I don’t think there’s been enough time—but it might be an example of backlash leveling up. So, you know, when Phyllis Schlafly did her thing, she never would call herself a feminist. But Christina Hoff Summers calls herself a feminist and has to use the language of feminism and the structures and intellectual framework of feminism. So, while the content of her words might strike some people as profoundly antifeminist, in fact the entire structure of the debate has shifted ground, and that’s a kind of hopeful step forward. It mirrors things to me like climate denial and evolution, and words like “intelligent design” being used because, in fact, the principles of science have to be respected. And in the last thirty years, the principles of feminism have taken hold, so you can no longer mock them or walk away from them. So, maybe there is some of that going on in that what you’re identifying, which is a conservative, xenophobic, racist person enacting this border patrolling. She’s now using language that she probably didn’t even have before. That’s the difference, you know.

The other thing that struck me about the Serena Williams and Brett Kavanaugh discussion—because still, even seven months after those events, I keep being asked why they’re not the same thing, which is striking to me. I just can’t— in my brain I’m like, “how can you … ?” The only thing that remotely brings those things together is the use of the word “court”: like a “court” of law and a tennis “court.” That is it. As far as I can tell, that is it, right? But what happened with the Serena Williams situation, I think points to this issue of education. Some people looked at that and they saw two people, a ref and a player, a man and a woman; there was this exchange, they didn’t think it was very civil, and she should be punished for behaving in a bad way, like any other tennis player. Other people looked at it and they saw that incident in a giant context bubble. They saw all of the discrimination that she had faced over the course of her experiences, including six months before, with her compression suit, and a whole host of other issues. They saw him exercising very nuanced, but a familiar kind of power, in their exchange. He did not choose to deescalate. He seemed very put out by her in a specific way. I mean lots of people were watching and just having a very different experience. It just came down, to me, to whether you had a sense that the context and the history and the experiences mattered. And of whether you had any idea of why microaggressions can be so stressful, why they would accumulate, why she would put a stake in the ground. It is very clear that Serena Williams is exquisitely aware of every word that she speaks; she has to be. Whereas he was not; he just acted the way he felt. So, I do think that that issue of education is paramount. And I think we are seeing a shift in public knowledge happening right now in all of these conversations.

CK: A good shift or a bad shift? I mean, I can see a good shift. There was a lot of complexity to the fight and the discussion about Serena Williams, and in some instances, I think feminist voices were heard and voices of minoritized people were heard, about microaggressions in context. But insofar as it seems that aggrieved entitlement is part of the election of “45,” is part of this nightmare moment of Kavanaugh and others. I mean, what is this moment? Everybody has asked this same question: how we can have 45 (I can’t even say his name) and #MeToo at the same moment? How we can have both 45 and the Women’s March? I mean, it does seem a really peculiar moment.

SC: I find it very hard to think of this in terms of the United States alone. I really think it’s global. We can see this rending of the social fabric, and I think some of it is just pure economics—just the extreme disparities in wealth, the physical burden of poverty that so many people bear that makes it impossible to function, really, at all. So, I just think we’re seeing the stresses that come with that. At the same time, we’re seeing a global backlash that’s enduring. I don’t think it’s new; I think it’s been the case, now for decades, but it’s really coming to a head because people are demanding more. They are demanding a safety net, they’re demanding that someone address oligarchy, they’re demanding and demanding and demanding. That’s what I think we’re seeing.

CK: One of the questions we wanted to ask you was also a subtitle question, not about the word “anger” but about the word “women’s.” In the Short Takes, which we were so fortunate to have with you in Signs, one of the areas that some of the scholars and activists raised questions about was your use of the large category of “women” or “woman,” and even the phrase “women’s anger.” And I wondered if you had more to say about any of that pushback or how you look at the category of woman right now—where you think it’s useful to generalize and where you think it’s dangerous?

SC: So, this is I think really important because my first instinct was to say “feminine anger.”

CK: Really? “Feminine” not “feminist”?

SC: Yes, “feminine anger.” And actually, saying “feminine anger” makes it seem a little more academic. Because you would need to have an understanding of the difference between “feminine” and the category “woman” and the category “feminist.” And in publishing this book, we didn’t want it to come off as an overly academic book. So, even people who identify as men or nonbinary or queer, if they have a more feminine affect, and if they are experiencing anger in a specific way, I would say that they are experiencing feminine anger, that they are experiencing anger as a feminine person. So what I’m describing here, overwhelmingly, does actually affect a category of people, “women.” Virtually anywhere in the world, there are certain things like the threat of male violence that provoke a certain response in people. But, in fact, what I am talking about is feminine. It is the construction of that gender identity and gender role expectations being imposed on children that are being so policed, that are being so regulated. For us, I think were immersed in these ideas, so being able to delineate between a person who is born and called a “girl” and a person who is “feminine,” whether it’s a six-year-old girl or boy or a fifty-year-old trans person—that’s hard for some people, still. They are not separating gender from sex or gender from sexual identity, and trying to explain that in a subtitle is impossible. You can’t explain that in a subtitle, really. So, at every turn I try, at least when available (and there’s not a lot available), to introduce and include the studies that really talk about “masculinity” and “femininity” as opposed to “here are some boys and men” and on the other, oppositional, binary end, “here are some girls and women.” It’s hard. I mean, the category…

This is interesting because I too am fascinated by this question of “women,” but I want to know why we aren’t asking about men. Why is the question always about whether women as a category is a legitimate category? Because if you ask that, you have to ask the same question of men. And I don’t see those conversations happening.

DM: To bring up the question of power, I think the other question—and this will bring me to thinking about what the vision of politics is…. You know, we can talk about the category “woman,” and of course feminists have talked about it for decades. And of course some of the most stringent and important critiques have been about the fact that “black women” is maybe not the same category. “Woman” maybe doesn’t include them.

SC:  That’s right, it doesn’t include black women in America.

DM: Right, and so much of your book thinks about the racialization of rage, which is such an interesting idea—that if “feminine” had been in the subtitle, the racialization of femininity…. That’s a very interesting idea.

SC: Yeah, you can’t—you literally cannot capture the scope of complexity that just a few words brings. That are really limiting words. All of them are limiting words.

DM: And yet, we have to work with them.

SC: And this is interesting: the difficulty of challenging a system whose language is the only tool you have. You know, feminist linguistics has grappled with that for decades. Certainly, as a writer, I feel acutely aware of it every day.

DM: I think that brings us to our next question, which is, thinking about that category, whether it’s “womanhood” or “femininity”—about the relationship between the individual who experiences rage and what you describe toward the end of your book, [which is] what the action is supposed to be, feminist action. You have suggested that women harness rage. It’s about a kind of collective action. As you describe, working with the words, those limiting words with which we live and with which power is organized in our society. Are you advocating, then, for some version of an idea of consciousness around these particular concepts—consciousness raising—and is it time to bring back consciousness raising? What do you think consciousness looks like then for us today?

SC: So: many questions. I do think that anger is a form of consciousness raising. I think we’re socialized to deal with anger in a way that is deliberately isolating, that isolates us. I’m, in my book, suggesting that that’s unhealthy—because over and over and over again we see ways in which it is physically unhealthy, mentally unhealthy—and that instead of thinking of anger as this overwhelming and crushingly negative experience or emotion, that we learn to make meaning of it in a way that builds constructive community.

But specifically, what I try to talk about is this idea of epistemic justice and the role that anger plays in achieving it. Because without the information, as Audre Lorde said, that is in anger—without the knowledge and experience that anger brings—our societies cannot understand these experiences that we have as individuals or as communities and as a society. And so, to me, the recognition and acknowledgement and meaning of anger, is a way of achieving epistemic justice, because it both confronts testimonial injustice and addresses this second quality of hermeneutic injustice. There is literally ignorance about our experiences because they are cloaked in silence or shame or punishment and penalty. We need that not to be the case.

So, the consciousness raising that I think is really already happening today tends to happen as a result—the positive result—of these technologies that we use. You know, if you think about free-bleeding movements and #ShoutYourAbortion and body positivity movements—there are a lot of things you can say about those that are critical. But overwhelmingly, they are antistigmatizing, and I think that they’re revolutionary because now people who are supporting those movements can reach out to each other across borders, across neighborhoods—they’re no longer isolated. It was just always possible to isolate a rebellious girl or woman—lock her in a house, lock her in a church basement, you know, punish her or starve her or do whatever you were going to do. And that’s virtually—that’s not impossible, clearly that’s still happening. There are terrible things that are happening to girls and women and children, but you can’t do that the same way. You actually gain this momentum that we see in these hashtags. And each hashtag builds on the next. There is a real genealogy to them. So #MeToo didn’t happen in a vacuum. It came out of ten earlier hashtags. Each one of them shared more information. The only bad thing to me about that is the self-flagellation involved, the outpouring of trauma and sadness and pain that so many people have to go through just to have the society acknowledge it.

CK: One of the things I so appreciate both about your book but also the conversation that it has generated, as well as the group of books that have come out about rage, is your attention to the particularities of this moment. It struck us that there is a bit of a double bind for some of us right now: that were faced on the one hand with the need to very strongly defend civility—we have a president who is not only a bully but who keeps giving power to other bullies, keeps modeling all kinds of forms of bullying. We have to respond to that by arguing for civility at the same time that were also trying to argue for the positivity of anger and the need to express anger.

SC: I really wrote the book in large part because I felt that only a particularly narrow type of anger was recognized, and that was the anger that you most typically see in an enraged, violent man, usually publicly a white man. And that was not good enough, right? That should not be our standard for what anger is, because it’s a piss-poor standard. And it is, in fact, an example of the most disfunction you can imagine by the time someone has gotten to that point of violence or rage or destruction, and you don’t want anybody to get to that point.

So, one of the things I really wanted to do was say, “Look at all this other anger that we refuse to acknowledge. Look at the anger that results in people being very sick, or the anger that’s resonant in this notion that women report twice as much stress, or the anger that clearly has fueled what the Right hates, which is the dissolution of the nuclear family.” (I mean, the irony of that is that the best solution for the Right would be to adopt feminist principles of relationships and egalitarianism because 70 percent of divorces in the country are initiated by women because of intimate inequality, right?) So, I’m saying, “Look at all of this different anger and acknowledge that it exists, and also look at the different ways that anger can be expressed that is not destructive and violent.” You can be civil and firm; you can be civil and stubborn; you can have a very straightforward and calm conversation; you can take your anger and have it be joyful and creative and explosive.

And most of the feminist activist women that I know—and men, too, but it’s overwhelmingly women—have come together in communities and made change, and they did that because they were mad. The starting point is almost always the perception of injustice and the desire to do something about that injustice. A lot of people won’t say “I was angry” unless they think back. If you actually prod them, they will say, “Well, yes, actually, I was angry.” But before they say “I was angry,” they’ll say “Well, I was just tired of that happening” or “I didn’t like what I was seeing.” But you just push a little more, like, “Well, how did that make you feel? It didn’t really make you feel warm and fuzzy in a good way.” And they all say, “I was angry.” So, I just think there is a much broader diversity of the experience of anger and also the expression of anger.

DM: I mean, I love that idea, right? Which is that utilizing rage is not in the domain of incivility, but it’s actually civil. What we should be calling “incivility” is the woman who suffers two times as much pain or five times as much pain. But we don’t call that incivility.

SC: That’s exactly right. It’s like, “Well, she’s not saying anything because she’s being polite.” I had a very funny thing happen last month. It was a very interesting exchange. I was on a plane. And this is such a specifically “not-problem” problem, but I think it illustrates the issue. It was very late, I had missed a plane, and I had finally gotten on a plane. There was a man sitting behind me, and I had pushed back my seat when we took off, and two flight attendants came over and asked me to put my seat up. And I wasn’t sure why. And I said, “Well, we’re not about to land. Why do I need to put my seat up?” And the woman said, “The man behind you is uncomfortable,” and I said, “Oh, um, well, it’s my understanding that I purchased this seat with that button and I have right to push my seat back. It is sort of the social contract of the airplane, and he has the same ability.” But I’m smiling, right? But I was really angry because I thought, “Seriously?” The person in front of me also has their seat back. And she said, “Well, we just thought it would be nice if you could move your seat up.” And I smiled broadly and I said, “It would be.” And I didn’t say anything else. At that moment she looked extremely upset and flustered, and I think that’s when she perceived that I was really angry and she didn’t know what to do about this. But I was being really civil, and I was very conscious that I wasn’t raising my voice, and I was also very conscious that I wasn’t in the United States and I wasn’t a black person. There was like all of this swirling through my head. She said, “Well, there are three empty seats back there, and if you need more space, you could sit there.” I said, “I’m fine, I don’t need more space. Why don’t you ask the gentleman behind me? They’re actually opposite his seat.” So, she asked him, and he said no, he wouldn’t move. And halfway through the flight, she loudly came barreling down the aisle, or another flight attendant, and gave him a monetary credit for his forbearance.

CK: No?! He was the aggrieved party?

SC: And he refused to move.

DM: And he got money! I mean its monetary. He got paid.

CK: He got paid for being the white aggrieved man.

SC: And so, when I got off—it was late when I got off that plane. I was really angry, because it made me of course seem like the bitch and the not nice person and the not accommodating person—everything! All of the expectations.

DM: And I think what your book does in addition to pointing out that your anger was seen as the completely illegitimate in that circumstance, and his was not only legitimate but could produce capital, was that I imagine when you got off that plane your shoulders were tight, your neck was tight, right? So, the bodily, you know, that’s so important in your book.

SC: That’s right. And I walked up to the man at the gate, and he was very nice. But I said to him, “You know, we both had equal rights to be in that airplane, and that is not how we were treated. I don’t really understand what happened here.” And he said, “Well, it shouldn’t have happened.” And I said, “Well, it happens all the time.” And it’s such a microaggressive interaction because you think, “I don’t want to make a big fuss, it’s not a big deal,” but that’s how they work.

CK: And part of what you’re pointing to would’ve been our last question—I think we’re pretty much out of time. But we were interested in what you would say about the times when women’s anger doesn’t seem like it was powerful, right? When women’s anger doesn’t seem able to effect change. But that’s exactly what happened on the plane.

We had been talking, getting ready for this interview, about how incomprehensible it was to both of us that all of our rage over [Christine] Blasey Ford didn’t stop Kavanaugh, right? He is now Supreme Court justice. It seems incredible to me that Emma Gonzalez’s—again, somebody who so carefully manages her anger, right?—that her rage over those massacres didn’t enact changes in gun laws. But that’s exactly what you’re pointing to in this story on the airplane. You’re pointing to the ways in which our rage gets disempowered, while his request—he doesn’t even have to get angry—gets not only empowered but compensated. It gets monetized! And your book, I think, has been very helpful in pointing to where our rage can be powerful but actually where it gets disempowered.

SC: And most women—this is the important thing, I think—most women associate anger with powerlessness because that is how we experience it. And how we experience it is not a matter of our individual natures or qualities or feelings. It really points to this deep structural and systemic problem of power, and people don’t like talking about power in their intimate relationships, they don’t like talking about power among their friends or in their social lives or in their professional lives. They can barely talk about it in terms of politics. You know, this morning I was laughing because I think NPR did a segment on male politicians and the fact that maybe for the first time they have to directly address their race and their gender. And it is 2019 and that is a conversation, you know?

CK: But of course, part of the heartbreak of your airline story is that the female flight stewards who monetized him and disempowered you are directly analogous to the white female voters in this election, right? Because in fact this reproduction of the systemic inequality you’re talking about, women have played a very uncomfortable role in, and they do in your airlines story.

SC: Oh, for sure. I do have a good ending though.

CK: Oh good, we’ll end with that.

SC: Well, it was interesting, because I did an event in Sydney called All About Women. This happened while I was flying there, and so I used this as an example of the idea of anger taking up space. This was just a metaphor for the way the space ends up being portrayed and, because of the systems that we build, ends up seeming like zero sum: there is so much space and you’re going to claim some space and when you claim space, that person has less space, right? Anger is this space emotion; it’s the emotion that blows the air out of the room. So I told this story, and afterwards a woman approached me who happened to be on the board of the airline and she said, “Can we talk? I’d like to use your example because we have a very serious problem in that flight attendants still believe it is their job to make men comfortable on planes.” And I thought that was really interesting.

CK: Will you let us know when this woman who works for the airlines gives you two first-class round-trip tickets and monetizes your experience?

SC: I was like, “Oh man, you don’t want to be doing this to me! I’m just going to write about it! I’m just going to use it!”

CK: It’s too good. Well, I think we’re going to wrap there. Thank you so much.

DM: Thank you so much.

CK: This was a hoot.

SC: I know! We could do this forever.