The image was instantly iconic: President Donald Trump sits at a long table in the White House, flanked by more than a dozen powerful men in suits. Directly across from him, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the only woman at the table and his greatest political opponent, is on her feet and holding the floor. Her face is calm, her body language assertive but measured. Trump’s brow is furrowed, his mouth agape. She points a finger at the president as she speaks—the first face-off between Pelosi and Trump since the House launched an impeachment inquiry under her leadership.

Both Trump and Pelosi emerged from that meeting on Wednesday, each accusing the other of having had a “meltdown.” Trump offered the photo as proof of his case. “Nervous Nancy’s unhinged meltdown,” he tweeted, seemingly certain that this image of a woman speaking up in a meeting depicted some kind of psychotic break.

Perhaps it’s so foreign to Trump, who formerly owned two beauty pageants and notoriously bragged about grabbing women “by the pussy,” to be legitimately challenged by a member of the opposite sex that any woman’s assertion of power, to him, looks like a descent into madness. What everyone else saw was an image of a woman literally standing up to a president that more than half of the country wants impeached and removed from office. The photo was so flattering to Pelosi, and so widely celebrated on Twitter, that she made it her cover photo across social media platforms.

“Ok, maybe I am a feminist,” conservative commentator Bill Kristol tweeted alongside the photo.

“We are all feminists today,” added George Conway, husband of Trump adviser Kellyanne.

The fact that Pelosi continues to show Trump respect and conduct herself with measure and restraint around him is becoming almost hard to fathom, considering how justified she would be in having a rage fit at that meeting. Trump’s hasty foreign policy decision this week greenlighted Turkey’s deadly attacks on the Syrian Kurds, who have long fought alongside the U.S. against ISIS, drawing strong rebukes from both parties. He openly asked foreign countries to investigate his Democratic political opponents and blatantly used his office for financial gain. And, on a more personal level, he’s been referring to Pelosi as “Nervous Nancy” for months, which is certainly not a professional, mature, or respectful way for the president to address the Speaker of the House.

But Pelosi knows better than to “melt down” in public. She rose to prominence in a world where women, especially female politicians, do not get to show anger—and are even accused of it when they are perfectly composed. Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson called Senator Kirsten Gillibrand “positively unglued” in 2017 when she spoke out against military sexual assault. Trump campaign adviser Jason Miller characterized Senator Kamala Harris as “hysterical” after she questioned Attorney General Jeff Sessions in her signature tough, prosecutorial way about the Russia investigation. (The word “hysteria,” tellingly, comes from the Greek word “hystera,” meaning uterus, and was once thought to arise from a literal defect in women’s wombs.)

When Senator Elizabeth Warren delivered a passionate speech about the future of the Democratic Party after Trump’s election in 2016, Morning Joe host Mika Brzezinski described it as a meltdown. “There’s an anger there that was shrill, a step above what it needed to be, unmeasured and almost unhinged,” she said on her show.

Trump’s misreading of the Pelosi photo reflects an old cultural anxiety around women’s ambition. Harvard researchers found in 2010 that voters felt contempt, anger, and disgust toward “power-seeking” women, while they see power-seeking men as tough and competent. Women who even calmly exert power are seen as threatening and unlikeable, an affront to traditional gender roles.