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The Patriarchy Will Always Have Its Revenge

I want to burn the frat house of America to the ground.

Anita Hill testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1991. The nomination of her former boss, Clarence Thomas, to the Supreme Court was ultimately approved by the Senate, 52-48.Credit...Paul Hosefros/The New York Times

Contributing Opinion Writer

I was 21 years old in 1991, six weeks into my first full-time job, when Anita Hill testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee, and I saw the way that things were going to be.

I’d just started working as a newspaper reporter, but I’d been working part time, mostly in the service economy, for years. I’d been an intern at a newsmagazine, and a waitress and a babysitter; I’d pushed a lawn mower and pumped gas. I had, for four springs in a row, worked at Princeton’s reunions, waiting on the men who, with their families, returned to a formerly all-male institution and reminisced, loudly and within earshot of me, my fellow alumnae and their own daughters and granddaughters, about its former glory, and how women had lowered the standards, how the university had been forced to change the words of the alma mater, how women had pushed their way into the school’s most sacred spaces, including the eating clubs, how they were ruining the place.

I’d smile, and pretend I didn’t hear, while clearing dirty dishes. Those men were the past. I was heading into the future.

In my newsroom, I was riveted by the hearings, and Professor Hill’s testimony about how her old boss, the Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas, behaved — the references to pornographic movies, to his own sexual prowess, the way he would ask her out, again and again, and not take no for an answer.

I remember her turquoise suit, her red lipstick, her perfect posture, her poise. I remember Justice Thomas’ denials, and the senators’ sneers and the pundits’ dismissals. She followed him from one job to another, they’d say. A few jokes about pubic hairs on Coke cans? Couldn’t have been that bad, right?

I knew why she’d followed him. By 21, like most women, I’d had experience with the way the world makes excuses for young men (and old ones), and instead trains its scrutiny on the women who dare to complain. What’s your problem? Was it really such a big deal? C’mon, it wasn’t like he raped you. Better to tell yourself that the boss who groped you at the office party was just an old goat and the teenage boy who grabbed you at the pool party was just high-spirited and that all the ones in between were just … men. Better to tell yourself that the devil you know is better than the one who might be waiting in the next office. Better to work hard and hope you’ll get an assignment or a promotion or finally end up in a place where men like that have no sway over you.

Except guess what? The joke’s on us. There’s no such place. Clarence Thomas sits on the Supreme Court, and in the White House sits a man who confessed on tape to how he was “automatically” attracted to pretty women and just starts to kiss them when he sees them, and how “when you’re a star, they let you do it.” Now that president has picked his own Supreme Court nominee, a man who, as a young lawyer, worked with Ken Starr to expose President Bill Clinton’s affair with an intern. A man who has now been accused of assaulting a young girl at a party when they were both in high school. A man whom President Trump is defending on social media, tweeting, “I have no doubt that, if the attack on Dr. Ford was as bad as she says, charges would have been immediately filed with local Law Enforcement Authorities by either her or her loving parents.”

As a woman, as a loving parent myself, I am angry. I’m beyond angry. As the spectacle of Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination unfolds, I find myself caught in the undertow of bad memories, stuck in a simmer of rage. My hands furl into fists. My jaw clenches. My teeth grind in the night. I send my daughters out into the world each day, with a wave and a smile, and then I come inside and want to cry out of fury and frustration, because the world has not changed fast enough. It’s one thing to say #MeToo, but if I find out it’s them, too, I can picture myself hunting down the man who hurt them and dismembering him with my fingernails and burning the whole world down.

When Clarence Thomas won his seat, I felt like someone had taken an eraser to the core of my being, and had rubbed a bit of me away. I felt diminished, a little less real, and, certainly, a lot less likely to be believed if I had anything to say about male colleagues.

Watching the #MeToo movement gain traction, as women’s voices were finally heard and powerful men finally, finally experienced consequences, felt like a restoration, as if someone was coloring me in again. Here we are. Yes, we matter. We’re real, just like you.

Bill Cosby was found guilty. Harvey Weinstein is going to trial. Les Moonves lost his job as chief executive of CBS, even if a CBS board member, Arnold Kopelson, said, “I don’t care if 30 more women come forward and allege this kind of stuff.” Things are getting better, I thought. We are on the right track.

Except, even putting Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination aside, over the past few weeks it’s felt like someone fired a starter pistol, one whose report was pitched only for abusers’ ears. One by one, like bad dreams, the #MeToo men have come back from the allegations against them, having suffered — if that’s even the right word — the equivalent of a misbehaving child’s timeout.

Matt Lauer is swanning around Upper East Side steakhouses, reportedly assuring fans that soon he’ll be “back on TV.” Louis C.K. returned to the stage. John Hockenberry is telling his story in Harper’s Magazine, and Jian Ghomeshi is telling his in The New York Review of Books.

Stories matter tremendously. They’re how we learn about who is real and who’s less consequential; whose pain is important and whose, not so much; who is the hero and who is merely the hero’s reward.

“If you poison us, do we not die?” The Jewish moneylender Shylock asked in “The Merchant of Venice,” inquiring whether his humanity matched that of his Christian clients. “And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?”

Women aren’t supposed to want revenge any more than we’re supposed to be angry. It’s not socially approved, not attractive, not ladylike. We swallow our pain and keep our own behavior exemplary while excusing the bad behavior of others, knowing, from examples like Professor Hill’s, what could happen if we speak up, and what we stand to lose.

Do men know how to be sorry? Do they have any notion of how to fix what they’ve broken, or what it would take to repair the damage they’ve wrought? And could women seek revenge? Do we even know how?

When my husband was a teenager, his favorite classic novel was “The Count of Monte Cristo,” where a wrongly imprisoned hero spends hundreds of pages hunting down his tormentors and making them pay. When I was the same age, I loved “Little Women,” where, in a pivotal scene, the adventurous, tomboyish sister, the one with literary ambitions, cuts off her hair and sells it to help provide for her family. Jo gets praised for this act of self-sacrifice. She gets scolded — by her future husband, no less — for writing popular fiction for money. By the end of the book, she’s married, her literary ambitions temporarily shelved in exchange for the life of a wife and a surrogate mother to a household of boys.

There are famous novels, canonical plays, entire genres of movies centered around men seeking revenge (the “Iliad,” “Hamlet,” every western ever). There aren’t many stories about men righting their wrongs; even fewer about women making men sorry.

As my daughters get ready to make their way in a world I wish was different, I’m thinking about narrative, the power of fiction.

I hope they’ll love “Little Women,” but I’ll also give them “Dietland,” a brilliantly subversive dark fantasy where feminist vigilantes toss rapists out of helicopters, where — when college boys march around chanting, “No means yes and yes means anal” — women burn their frat house to the ground. And I’ll give them Fay Weldon’s “The Life and Loves of a She-Devil,” in which large, unlovely Ruth, abandoned and cast aside, remakes herself to punish her husband and his lover, and to exert her will on an unfair world.

“I want revenge,” Ruth says.

“I want power.

“I want money.

I want to be loved and not love in return.”

In the novel, Ruth desexes herself, as surely as Lady Macbeth, going from woman to self-described she-devil. She burns down her home and abandons her children and suffers physical agony as part of her rebirth. Eventually, she wins, and gets everything that she has sought. Real life, I imagine, would be very different. We know how these stories go.

Jennifer Weiner is the author, most recently, of the memoir “Hungry Heart” and a contributing opinion writer.

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A correction was made on 
Sept. 24, 2018

An earlier version of this article misspelled the given name of the author of “The Life and Loves of a She-Devil.” She is Fay Weldon, not Faye Weldon.

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A version of this article appears in print on  , Section SR, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: The Patriarchy Will Always Have Its Revenge. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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