Cue the Feminist Outrage

Some #MeToo feminists are so outraged, so consumed with boundless hate, that they are making complete fools of themselves. Somewhere in a pre-feminist era, men considered women to be overly emotional. Most of us happily agree that such is not the case. But, why are the #MeToo feminists working so hard to convince us that, indeed, women are too emotional to think straight?

When hatred is that consuming, it must continually find new triggers and new targets. Hate does not stay strong forever. It needs to be fed. To do so you need to expand the vast right-wing conspiracy: the bigger it is the more justified your hate seems?

Among those who became targets was Katie Roiphe. A while back someone said that Roiphe was going to out the creator of the list of male media predators. The reaction was ferocious. It was so ferocious that most of the women she contacted to research her Harper’s piece refused to talk on the record. 

The first consequence of limitless outrage is to run for the exits and to refuse to speak in public. This means that we tend to avoid people who are consumed by hatred; they are best shunned from polite society. Of course if yours is an impolite society, like a coven, you can all congregate and compete to see who is most outraged. Anyway, too much anger and hatred shuts down conversation, deliberation and debate.

Roiphe wrote:

Can you see why some of us are whispering? It is the sense of viciousness lying in wait, of violent hate just waiting to be unfurled, that leads people to keep their opinions to themselves, or to share them only with close friends. 

Roiphe explained her experience:

No one would talk to me for this piece. Or rather, more than twenty women talked to me, sometimes for hours at a time, but only after I promised to leave out their names, and give them what I began to call deep anonymity. This was strange, because what they were saying did not always seem that extreme. Yet here in my living room, at coffee shops, in my inbox and on my voicemail, were otherwise outspoken female novelists, editors, writers, real estate agents, professors, and journalists of various ages so afraid of appearing politically insensitive that they wouldn’t put their names to their thoughts, and I couldn’t blame them. 

Of course, the prepublication frenzy of Twitter fantasy and fury about this essay, which exploded in early January, is Exhibit A for why nobody wants to speak openly. Before the piece was even finished, let alone published, people were calling me “pro-rape,” “human scum,” a “harridan,” a “monster out of Stephen King’s ‘IT,’?” a “ghoul,” a “bitch,” and a “garbage person”—all because of a rumor that I was planning to name the creator of the so-called Shitty Media Men list. The Twitter feminist Jessica Valenti called this prospect “profoundly shitty” and “incredibly dangerous” without having read a single word of my piece. Other tweets were more direct: “man if katie roiphe actually publishes that article she can consider her career over.” “Katie Roiphe can suck my dick.” With this level of thought policing, who in their right mind would try to say anything even mildly provocative or original? 

The anger! The anger! Men are preternatural beings who deserve every ounce of hatred. Again, as I often mentioned, the fact that feminism has ruled the media narrative for decades now does not seem to matter. It certainly does not seem to have produced any of its desired outcomes.

Anger at men is one thing. Anger because one has failed is quite another. Roiphe suggests that the gale of anger and rage are making it impossible to engage with feminists. No kidding:

One thing that makes it hard to engage with the feminist moment is the sense of great, unmanageable anger. Given what men have gotten away with for centuries, this anger is understandable. Yet it can also lead to an alarming lack of proportion. Rebecca Trais­ter, one of the smartest and most prominent voices of the #MeToo movement, writes:

The rage that many of us are feeling doesn’t necessarily correspond with the severity of the trespass: Lots of us are on some level as incensed about the guy who looked down our shirt at a company retreat as we are about Weinstein, even if we can acknowledge that there’s something nuts about that, a weird overreaction.

Too much anger, Roiphe continues, makes rational thought far more difficult:

Perhaps Traister should consider that “I am so angry I am not thinking straight” is not the best mood in which to radically envision and engineer a new society. 

If you want to feed your outrage you need but declare every bad sexual experience to be akin to rape. If you want to distinguish among the different bad sexual experiences, then you need to think rationally:

I am not trying to suggest that the list makers don’t understand the difference in scale between leering and assault, but rather that the blurring of common (if a little sleazy) behavior and serious sexual harassment reveals a lot about how they think. For them, the world is overrun with leering monsters you have to steer around, as if in a video game. And if some of us seem overly occupied with problems of scale, with separating small gross moments from larger criminal ones, it is because we think the very idea of women’s power is at stake.

Women’s power is not at stake. But, if it is at stake, launching a movement that will make it more difficult for women to function in the business world does not seem to be the way to go.

As for the ethics of how to express anger, we turn, naturally enough, to Aristotle. The choice is not between being so angry that your message gets lost and not expressing any anger at all. Aristotle counseled temperance, moderating your expression of anger. He meant that he needed to be suited to the occasion and that it was more likely to accomplish something. By his formula, slightly changed, you should express your anger at the right time in the right place to the right person for the right reason in the right circumstances in the right way.

When it comes to expressing emotion, there are right and wrong ways. Not expressing it at all is wrong. Expressing in promiscuously and uncontrollably is also wrong. When  you want to show your anger, ask yourself whether your expression will accomplish something or will make you look like an incontinent fool.