America Still Hates an Angry Woman

Another round of Hillary vs. Bernie shows us there’s nothing that benefits a man like being seen as a victim to a woman’s anger

Photo: Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images

For a brief moment, in the wake of Donald Trump’s 2016 victory, it seemed that America was ready to love angry women. We lauded the outrage of the Women’s March; we made Maxine Waters go viral every time she ripped Trump a new one; we elected female politicians, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who were blunt and unsparing in their critique of American politics. Some of our best feminist authors published books celebrating women’s rage. Largely-female survivors of sexual assault and harassment brought their abusers to heel with the #MeToo movement.

It lasted just a short while, the feminine-rage thing, and it felt great: Anger may be the least feminine and most female emotion, the feeling that sexism both continually stokes and punishes us viciously for expressing. Finally, we thought, the ability to snap back, to demand a hearing, to be ungenerous with those who had been ungenerous to us, was being allowed into the public consciousness. But what had seemed like a new era was, in hindsight, a blip: The female-rage moment is over, and in 2020, nothing benefits a male politician quite like the impression that he is being assailed by angry, unreasonable women.

Another 2016 grudge match is sure to galvanize Sanders supporters in all the wrong ways, out of a need for vengeance rather than any real desire for a better world.

The most recent example is the ongoing enmity between (pause, deep breath, infinite sighing) Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. Clinton was recently asked about Sanders by The Hollywood Reporter, in advance of her upcoming Hulu documentary. In the documentary, she reportedly said of Sanders: “He was in Congress for years. He had one senator support him. Nobody likes him, nobody wants to work with him, he got nothing done. He was a career politician. It’s all just baloney and I feel so bad that people got sucked into it.” When asked if she would campaign for Sanders as the nominee, Clinton told THR, “I’m not going to go there yet. We’re still in a very vigorous primary season.” She has since stood by her comments.

Within the hour, CNN analysts were predicting that Clinton’s comments would only benefit Sanders in the 2020 race. They undeniably did, and Clinton should have known not to make them. Plenty of Sanders’ supporters were drawn to him less out of an affinity for his ideas than a lingering antipathy for Clinton. Another 2016 grudge match is sure to galvanize those supporters in all the wrong ways, out of a need for vengeance rather than any real desire for a better world. Clinton and Sanders’ mutual dislike is not news (Clinton spent a long passage in her 2016 memoir, What Happened, mocking Sanders for one-upping her plans; Sanders has spent the past four years insinuating that the 2016 primary was rigged against him) and in no way deserves to be reported as a breaking scandal. Yet, in an interview that also features several broader comments on gender politics, ranging from infuriatingly wrongheaded (“How could we have known?” Clinton said of her supporter Harvey Weinstein, whose predatory behavior was Hollywood’s most open secret) to smart and spot-on (on the historic number of women running, Clinton told THR that “I thought that with more than one woman running… it’ll get more normal because you have women on the stage. It’s not just me standing alone up there. And in the very beginning there was reason for hope, but as the campaign has gone on, it does seem to me that people are reverting back to stereotypes, and many of those are highly genderized”) — Clinton’s feud with Sanders was the one element sure to make for a compelling, dramatic narrative. The point is not what the 2016 election can teach us; the point is casting a woman’s anger toward a man she’s had difficult interactions with as automatically petty, cruel, irrational, and — as our president loves to say — “nasty.”

The phenomenon here is not specific to Clinton. On the same day that her comments set Twitter on fire, the Boston Globe published the results of a Suffolk/Globe New Hampshire poll, which found that Elizabeth Warren’s support had dropped by four points since November. Though women supported Warren at roughly the same level as always, she had lost over two-thirds of her support among male voters, dropping from 13 points to four points since November. The reasons those men gave were, to put it mildly, unconvincing: “I don’t like giving away stuff for free,” said Christopher Pembroke, explaining that free college would be “unfair.” In response, Pembroke had switched his support over to the candidate best known for never giving away free stuff: Bernie Sanders.

It seems reasonable to assume that at least some male voters have turned away from Warren in response to her own very public engagement on the questions of sexism. Most of that engagement has also come about through conflict with Sanders: CNN reported that, in a private 2018 meeting, Sanders had told Warren a woman couldn’t win the 2020 election. He claimed he never said it; she confirmed the story. After last week’s debate, when both parties had seemingly committed to remaining civil, CNN caught footage of Warren refusing to shake Sanders’ hand, and soon leaked hot-mic audio of Warren telling Sanders “I think you called me a liar on national TV.”

The handshake moment was strikingly personal, and guaranteed to cause some degree of backlash against Warren. It was an intentional confrontation — even when Sanders showed signs of wanting to disengage, Warren kept going — wherein she expressed clear irritation. It was a refusal to mend fences with a colleague who refused to admit he’d harmed her. It was anger, and no matter how mad Warren deserved to be, when a woman expresses anger in a public setting, she is always the one who takes the blame.

But, of course, Warren did not intend for that moment to be public. She thought her mic was off, and it was CNN’s choice to rebroadcast the audio. She did not leak the account of the conversation herself; she had recounted the anecdote at an off-the-record 2018 dinner with several journalists. There’s quite a lot of daylight between Clinton and Warren here — Warren said “angry” things privately and was forced to deal with them publicly, whereas Clinton made a statement in an interview that was supposed to be about other things — but the one thing they have in common is that difficult, complicated professional conflicts were twisted into a clickable, salable narrative of an enraged woman attacking her helpless male colleague. Their anger was assumed invalid, and cast as unthinkable aggression rather than a normal human reaction to conflict; their reputations suffered, and the man’s did not.

This isn’t a Warren problem, or a Clinton problem; it’s a problem with how women are allowed to behave in public, and how the feminine obligation to seem accommodating and gracious conflicts with the political imperative to be competitive and take a strong stand. Even in a race filled with female candidates, woman after woman has been ruled out on grounds of being a big old meanie, whether that’s Kirsten Gillibrand being unable to shake allegations of “backstabbing” the accused sexual predator Al Franken, or Amy Klobuchar being preemptively cast as a binder-throwing “Mommy Dearest.” Some accusations were more grounded in fact than others: Klobuchar’s behavior toward staff, for example, has been widely confirmed. It’s not unfair to hold it against her, but it is unfair to do so if you still support, say, Bernie Sanders, who has been described as “an asshole” and “unbelievably abusive” by members of his own staff.

Nor is Sanders the only candidate to benefit from the assumption that a woman’s anger is always beyond the pale. Klobuchar tends to fly under the radar when she’s not earning headlines for “attacking” Pete Buttigieg. Sanders recently apologized to Joe Biden for an op-ed written by female surrogate Zephyr Teachout, which, though it repeated more or less the same accusations he’s made against any corporate-backed politician — “Joe has perfected the art of taking big contributions, then representing his corporate donors at the cost of middle- and working-class Americans” she wrote — was seen as an unforgivably personal and mean-spirited attack when it appeared under a female byline.

Men get to be lovable old curmudgeons. Women only get to be bitches.

Men have always had the right to be angry. Bernie Sanders has made a career on his anger, ideological and otherwise. He’s rejected billionaire candidate Tom Steyer brutally and in public often enough for it to become a meme. He’s spent the past four years being vocally bitter about his loss to Hillary Clinton in the 2016 primaries. He’s reportedly not an easy man to work with: Leaving aside accounts from former staff, the consensus that “no one likes him” has been argued by other politicians, most notably Barney Frank, who said that Sanders “alienates his natural allies.” When it comes from Bernie, that rudeness is seen as endearing, a sign of integrity and authenticity. Men get to be lovable old curmudgeons. Women only get to be bitches.

But, of course, politics is about anger. Politics is about conflict, and disagreement, and competition; it is a sphere in which people must express their deepest values, publicly, while coming into contact with people who actively seek to harm their cause. No one can do all that without getting at least a little hot under the collar. If men’s anger is rewarded — or, more frequently, not even noticed — and women’s anger is a sin, we are prohibiting women from engaging in politics at the same level that men do. We are saying that being feminine is more important than being right, and that women do not have a right to be fully human in public. Hillary Clinton is angry at Bernie Sanders. Those of us who cover the race would do better to stop marveling at a female former politicians’ anger, and start asking what female voters are angry about. The answer, as always, is “plenty.”