One of the discussion points to have come out of the Brett Kavanaugh hearings has been the question of anger and what women do with it – specifically, where and how they manage to stuff it down low so it doesn’t spill out and get them labelled as lunatics. Lindsey Graham can go the full Foghorn Leghorn; Kavanaugh can howl like a kid with his head stuck in railings; but to be heard, a woman must be demure and unthreatening.

I watched the Kavanaugh hearings with horror and a certain amount of detachment. While female friends texted to say they were in tears, I believed I had it under control; there is simply too much bad news to be undone by it daily. Well, ha. On Tuesday night, Trump addressed a rally in Mississippi and in one of his extemporised asides, poked fun at Christine Blasey Ford. “I had one beer, that’s the only thing I remember!” he jeered, citing her testimony, while behind him the crowd hooted and cheered. And there it was: the kind of adrenaline surge that in movies can only be illustrated by someone putting their fist through a wall.

Anger is not a useful destination, but it is, in some circumstances, supposed to be a useful galvanising agent for political change. And that is surely beginning to happen; in the US midterms, more women are running for office than at any time in the country’s history and female voters are predicted to be “highly motivated” to turn out. American friends are spending their weekends canvassing in marginal seats, and most of the women I know are angrily revisiting their own traumatic experiences, questioning the extent to which they were made to feel culpable.

All these actions are good, and right, as is posting angrily on Twitter. (Well, maybe not that.) But in my experience, rage needs to find more visceral outlets and they are never particularly rational.

In this alone, perhaps, one can identify with Trump. Part of his viciousness in Mississippi on Tuesday is assumed to have come from his anger at the New York Times, which that morning ran its investigation into the wealth he inherited from his father and the alleged tax fraud Fred Trump got away with. The president couldn’t get at the Times, so he said something that would mortify those who agreed with it, like the guy who has a bad day at work and kicks the dog, or his wife, on his way in through the door.

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We know this. And there have been countless other, equally horrendous, examples of Trump’s sociopathic meanness. But this was the one that deranged me and, as I sat alone on the sofa watching the speech on my phone, I briefly cried, then felt a violent surge I had nowhere to put. That came out, uselessly, the next day on the subway, when a guy slammed into me on the platform and I yelled, “Hey, douche-wank”, whereupon we both looked surprised because douche-wank isn’t even a saying.

It is personal, of course. There are those who can whip themselves into outrage on behalf of the marginalised everywhere – milder versions of what Larissa MacFarquhar, in her book Strangers Drowning, categorises as people living in a state of “moral extremity”, that is those who feel strangers’ pain as keenly as their own family’s.

Most of us don’t function this way. When Republican men engage with sexual assault by citing concern for their daughters, they are disparaged for lack of imagination, but I have always thought it an unfortunate political consequence of a universal tendency: we feel things more strongly the closer they are to home. As I watched Trump mock Ford, my brain fired an image of my daughters sleeping in the next room, or survivors of sexual abuse in my family, and within seconds there was murder in my veins.

And so women are livid this week. Statistically, it is likely that even if we ourselves have escaped, every single one of us knows someone who has been sexually or physically assaulted, and who – for all this talk of witch hunts and the downfall of men – has watched the perpetrator go unpunished or, worse, lauded or rewarded.

What are we supposed to do? Go kickboxing? Eat another biscuit? Or, for what feels like the first time in history, take up the option of being rabidly, implacably furious in public?

Anger is corrosive and not a nice place to live for too long. But, right now, it feels cleansing.

• Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist