Emma Goldberg

Opinion contributor

The organizers leading the mass action against Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation moved down the line of protesters with paperwork for those ready to disrupt the hearing. One of them asked whether I was there to do civil disobedience, risking arrest. I told them no, that I had an afternoon bus booked back to New York but that I’d go in to film the arrests.

Ten minutes later I was in the Hart Senate Office Building, watching a suited Kavanaugh reply to the senators’ questions.

What they don’t tell you in your eighth-grade civics classes is that beyond the ballot boxes, so much of American politics is given over to men playing out a well-rehearsed script. In the hearing room, it felt almost as though the other protesters and I were watching a dramatic re-enactment and not a real-life political proceeding — like some dystopic remake of “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.” It makes you realize how easily a political system can slide toward tyranny without so much as a senator raising his voice.

While we sat nervously with our eyes on the officers surrounding us, Kavanaugh seemed to hardly break a sweat. The carpool dad of America’s nightmare.

With so much at stake, protesting isn't a choice

I watched as protesters around me began to spring to their feet and yell their remarks: “Senators, we demand you vote no!" and "Sham president, sham justice!” When I jumped up to disrupt the proceedings, it wasn’t so much a decision as the feeling that I had no other choice. After all, these were our freedoms being coolly dissected. A woman’s right to control her own ovaries. A child’s right to go to school without the fear of being gunned down by an AR-15. A black man’s right to vote into office an official who recognizes his humanity.

What’s so radical about that?

This is not just arrest, rinse, repeat. To say that is to dismiss the way your heart hammers when your arms are pinned behind your back, your belongings dropped into a large Ziploc bag and your body shoved into the back of an unventilated paddy wagon. The way your breath quickens when the officer reads you your Miranda rights. The way your eyes well up when those arrested with you begin to sing: “Woke up this morning with my mind stayed on freedom.”

I had the deep, unshakable sense that this is real politics — unscripted, unrehearsed. It had nothing to do with power and everything to do with truth.

On the first day of the hearings, Sen. Benjamin Sasse, a Nebraska Republican, called the protesters’ actions “hysteria.” He referred to Kavanaugh's critics as “deranged.” In this, he played into a long, tired history.

Taking back female anger

It’s the history of a medical community that saw the uterus as the origin of diseases. It’s the history of suffragettes told that they had a mental disorder. It’s a history captured by the words of 19th century French physician August Fabre: “Every woman carries with her the seeds of hysteria.”

Kavanaugh’s hearing made the irony in this history all too clear. Women were dragged from the hearing room shouting, their unruliness deemed a threat, while Kavanaugh defended a judicial career spent arguably expanding the rights of gun owners. Female rage is policed while the tools of male rage are carefully justified.

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The weekend following Kavanaugh’s hearing, Serena Williams was shamed for her own expressions of authentic emotion at the U.S. Open. In a tense match — a show of Williams’ athletic prowess against a powerful female opponent — umpire Carlos Ramos seemed to need to write himself and his own power into the narrative.

Williams pointed out that she has seen plenty of male athletes throw names at the umpire without points taken away. She has seen umpires called much worse than “thief.” But when insults are tossed out by the female titan of tennis, in a tutu no less, the chair had to protect his masculinity. Which, it happens, was ultimately priced at $17,000.

With Williams asked to pay thousands in fines for the sin of human emotion, I keep returning to Margaret Atwood’s famous words: “Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.” I think of Sen. Sasse dismissively noting that Kavanaugh’s hearing is just another in a long line of confirmation procedures in which protesters have screamed, “Women are going to die.” I’d like to believe that if women are going to die, those screams are well justified.

I think it’s time we de-stigmatize, and reclaim, female hysteria. If Fabre was right that women all have its seeds within us, maybe it’s the moment to water them and let them grow.

In recent years, we’ve watched while babies were ripped from their mothers’ arms at the border and while an innocent black man was choked by police while yelling out “I can’t breathe.” What sort of perverted culture favors calm over rage at a life-or-death moment?

2018 is a time to celebrate the unruly, the off-script, the type of rage that makes us real and deeply human.

Emma Goldberg is a writer and activist based in Brooklyn, New York. She works at the startup initiative Longpath. Follow her on Twitter @emmabgo.