Mike Bloomberg has proposed to buy American votes with $400 million (and counting) in advertisements. Elizabeth Warren walked onto Wednesday’s debate stage proposing to buy American votes with the body of Mike Bloomberg. It was quality television. It was “Big Dick Energy.” And it could mark the end of an era in American politics.

Four years ago, pundits were blaming Hillary Clinton’s poor early primary showings on her overly cerebral, pragmatic approach. There were many substantive differences between the two candidates, but a surprising amount of criticism focused on Clinton’s detachment, in contrast with Bernie Sanders’s passion and dynamism. Rebecca Traister, writing in New York magazine, took the pundits to task for this stylistic critique. It was gendered, she argued, and hardly fair: If Clinton were to be as “grumpy” and aggressive as Sanders, voters would like her less, not more.

“Here is a truth about America,” she wrote. “No one likes a woman who yells loudly about revolution.… This is a paradigm; it’s why Mom is the disciplinarian and Dad is the fun guy, why women remain the brains and organizational workhorses behind social movements while men get to be the gut-ripping orators, why so many women still manage campaigns and so many men are still candidates.”

Traister was not the first to point out that female aggression is often perceived as shrill, which has created something of a bind for female candidates: One has to attack one’s opponents at some point. But how can one do that—against a male opponent in particular—without being seen as undesirable to voters (and pundits)?

Warren’s unbridled bellicosity Wednesday night offered an unconventional answer to that question. Some saw her performance as an act of desperation: a flagging candidate seeking discount media coverage with a parade of quotable moments. Or it may have been more strategic: driving a stake through the heart of the revenant stop-and-frisk architect, as a televised show of devotion for progressive and black voters. Either way, as countless postdebate write-ups have already pointed out, it was a return to the “fighter” identity that Massachusetts voted for in 2012. But that’s underselling its novelty.