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Throughout history, semen has been revered as a magical substance – a totem of literal and symbolic potency. The project In Posse aims to rewrite this cultural narrative; to use art and science to collaboratively disrupt the patriarchy by making semen from “female” cells. The project is being developed in three parts – firstly, In Posse is on a journey to grow spermatozoa (sperm cells) from Charlotte’s body in collaboration with Prof. Susana Chuva de Sousal Lopes. At the same time, a female form of seminal plasma (the fluid part of semen) has been developed using material donated by multiple women, trans and gender non-binary people. Finally, the “female” semen is used a series of re-enactments of the ancient Greek women-only festival of Thesmophoria.

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Throughout history, semen has been revered as a magical substance – a totem of literal and symbolic potency. The project In Posse aims to rewrite this cultural narrative; to use art and science to collaboratively disrupt the patriarchy by making semen from “female” cells. The project is being developed in three parts – firstly, In Posse is on a journey to grow spermatozoa (sperm cells) from Charlotte’s body in collaboration with Prof. Susana Chuva de Sousal Lopes. At the same time, a female form of seminal plasma (the fluid part of semen) has been developed using material donated by multiple women, trans and gender non-binary people. Finally, the “female” semen is used a series of re-enactments of the ancient Greek women-only festival of Thesmophoria.

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In a room on the seventh floor in a cold city, two people are waking up. They hug each other hard, still, it’s not enough to be able to forget where one body starts and the other ends.

Neither of them has a sex or a face and they both wear more layers of skin than they ought to. Old disappointments and badly healed wounds have turned them into this. The hardened skin makes them ask for help to remember the sensation of heat. With a pair of scissors they ask each other for permission to expose, rip up and get in.
This is an inquiry to get rid of what’s been long since dead. It’s surgery. Something forgotten turns into a memory that later transforms into fingers, and finally a hand. Hair begins to smell and the sweat is pouring.

In close-ups about closeness we see the longing for something new. Art meets porn in a ripping horniness without censorship.

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In a room on the seventh floor in a cold city, two people are waking up. They hug each other hard, still, it's not enough to be able to forget where one body starts and the other ends.
Neither of them has a sex or a face and they both wear more layers of skin than they ought to. Old disappointments and badly healed wounds have turned them into this. The hardened skin makes them ask for help to remember the sensation of heat. With a pair of scissors they ask each other for permission to expose, rip up and get in.
This is an inquiry to get rid of what's been long since dead. It's surgery. Something forgotten turns into a memory that later transforms into fingers, and finally a hand. Hair begins to smell and the sweat is pouring.

In close-ups about closeness we see the longing for something new. Art meets porn in a ripping horniness without censorship.

Skin is a part of the Dirty Diaries collection and in distribution at

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In a room on the seventh floor in a cold city, two people are waking up. They hug each other hard, still, it's not enough to be able to forget where one body starts and the other ends. Neither of them has a sex or a face and they both wear more layers of skin than they ought to.

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Mary Beth Edelson was an American artist and pioneer of the feminist art movement, deemed one of the notable "first-generation feminist artists". Edelson was a printmaker, book artist, collage artist, painter, photographer, performance artist, and author.

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Bernstein Gallery, Robertson Hall Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs

March 28 - May 7, 2015
Panel & Reception: Monday, April 13 starting at 4:30pm

Gallery hours: M-F, 9 – 5 p.m. Call 609.497.2441 for appointment on weekends

This month the Bernstein Gallery is highlighting the work of Mary Beth Edelson who is internationally recognized as a founder of Feminist art, and for her social and political activism, which began in the 1960s and continues today. Edelson's artwork comes in various media: painting, prints, sculpture, photo-based work, video and performance. The works on display at the Bernstein Gallery focus on her drawings and prints.

There will be a panel at 4:30pm at Bowl 016 with the reception at the Bernstein Gallery directly following at 6pm.

Panelists include: Eve Aschheim, Artist and senior lecturer in the Visual Arts Center at the Lewis Center for the Arts, Princeton University; Judith K. Brodsky, Artist, Professor Emerita in the Department of Visual Arts at Rutgers University, and co-founder of the Rutgers University Institute for Women and Art; Jill Dolan, the Annan Professor in English, Professor of Theater in the Lewis Center for the Arts, and the Director of the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies, Princeton; Stanley N. Katz, moderator, Professor of Public and International Affairs, Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University.

Through her work Edelson provokes with sassy wit and visually re-writes Hollywood scripts by appropriating images of actresses such as Judy Garland, Marilyn Monroe and Mae West. These film stars are taken out of the context for which they are best known and re-imagined as wily, independent women. For example, The Young Judy Garland series depicts the actress as a caricature of herself with a big head and small body surrounded by text that urges women to challenge the male authority in their lives.

Edelson's work has been featured in more than 90 books and is widely reviewed in the United States and abroad. Her work is in the permanent collection of many museums including: the Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minn.; National Museum of American Art, Washington, DC; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Ill.; Detroit Institute of Art, Indianapolis, Ind.; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Seattle Museum of Art, Seattle, Wash.; Malmo Museum, Sweden; and the Sammlung Verbund, Vienna, Austria.

The Woodrow Wilson School's Bernstein Gallery and Annex are part of the Bernstein Lobby, dedicated in 1991 to the memory of Marver Bernstein, first dean of the Woodrow Wilson School, and his wife and collaborator, Sheva Bernstein. The space presents four to six exhibitions a year which stimulate thinking about contemporary policy issues ranging from human rights, world health and education to war, national security, poverty and politics.

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Mary Beth Edelson, Feminist Humor as Political Device at Princeton University

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Accola Griefen Gallery presents exhibitions by emerging and mid career artists working in a variety of genres within the mediums of painting, sculpture, photography, work on paper, installation and performance. Through solo and group exhibitions and parti

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Through her work, Leeson explored the constructed nature of feminine identity, molding her own hybrid being through the costumes, technologies and borrowed behaviors all women adopt.

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Stark poses for Total Performance (1990) after setting a motorcycle land speed record at the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah at twenty-one years old.

Frances Stark's work is in theorizing relationships. Sometimes these relationships are human, sometimes even sexual, but on other occasions they are the relationships between things, between events, between institutions. This is clear in many of Stark's most well-known works; her video pieces My Best Thing (2011) and Nothing is Enough (2012) focus on the sexual-psychological, post- coital intimacy of internet conversations between her and unknown Italian men she meets on Chatroulette, while the body of work associated with her installation, Bobby Jesus's Alma Mater b/w Reading the Book of David and/or Paying Attention is Free (2013), was sourced from her then-unfolding relationship with her assistant, Bobby Jesus, and their mutual exchange of ideas and inspirations.

A pseudo-self-portrait by Frances Stark titled Drawing from a Study of Bobby Jesus (2013).

Yet despite the fact that conversation is so blatantly at the core of Stark's work-or even the literal material of the work itself-it is often described critically as the work of a narcissist, a position that woefully misses the point. Stark's work, if that of a narcissist, demonstrates that the narcissist's satisfaction is dependent on others; even when the self is at the center, it is a self resplendent in, and indeed indebted to, the gaze of those around it. This observation alone negates the work of narcissism and thus, Stark's work could more aptly be described as that of the anti-narcissist. Instead, it is a deep dependency on and even collaboration with others that seems to be the core of her practice, a fact consistently elided in art writing on Stark. When she discusses the men in her Chatroulette series, Stark says, "they were making the work with me," a similar sentiment to that which she expressed regarding her friendship with Bobby Jesus: "I offered Bobby something akin to free schooling and he offered me free schooling in return." Yet these collaborations are never accomplished simply-they are messy, incomplete, productive of unlikely results, outcomes impossible to capitalize on: mutual sexual satisfaction; friendships delegitimized by art (and other) institutions; empathy for uncouth men; shamelessness in self-expression; or as Stark calls it, "free love." Easy to intuit, difficult to comprehend: the connections between people in Stark's work lace it at the seams.
I have so many people to keep satisfied*
But Stark's focus on relationships, on the in- betweenness of everything, takes shape in other objects too, beyond human forms. "What I'm doing in a lot of my work is having a kind of love affair with an artist's voice," Stark told Dennis Cooper in 1997. This was a reflection on Untitled (Goethe), one of many pieces in which Stark uses literary texts as resources for imagery, sometimes copying single words or letters from a text, other times recreating physical copies exactly, including annotations left by previous readers as in the works: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1993) and I Hate Language (1995). As Stark wrote in 2007, "Whether spontaneous thoughts or ready-made insights delivered from a teacher, marginalia shows a reader perching intermittently on the body of a text, leaving reminders to 're-enter here' or summaries to say 'no need to cover this ground again.'" It's clear that in Stark's world, what's worth honing in on are the unexpected ways we, objects and art are connected. And in this world, once entered, the relationships multiply. The marginalia of a used book offers a glimpse into the conjunction between reader and text, its reproduction that between original and copy- the notes serving as waymarkers on the trail for future readings (and readers), each annotation a relationship between past and future. Yet this seems to be another site where art writing on Stark goes astray, often hovering instead around the question: "is this language or image?" as if to say the two are separable. I wonder why, it doesn't feel like the work is interested in interrogating questions regarding the distinctions of language versus image-instead, Stark presumes their inextricability. As a de facto ontology through Stark's oeuvre, this presupposition about forms of meanings (and their inseparability) makes room for other questions-questions more provocative, ostentatious, perverse.

"I don't think it's possible to return from such audaciousness, do you?"

Lately, Stark has taken her reflections on the world to the informal spaces of social media, through her Instagram @therealstarkiller. But this practice is not surprising; for years, she has displayed a notable prescience when it comes to technologies of communication. Perhaps this prescience is also unsurprising: both of Stark's parents worked in communications, her father as an electrical engineer for a printing company and her mother for a phone company. Her series, "Cat Videos," (1999-2002) featured home recordings of her cats each set to its own soundtrack-from Black Flag's Jealous Again to live recordings of Throbbing Gristle-years before the genre of YouTube videos, not to mention the platform itself, had emerged. The foresight of this series was made even more explicit in a drawing from 2004 that included the text, "Hopefully all of my cat videos will be available soon in a more practical and technologically advanced format for easier distribution and viewing."
you are the artist n.1 I fucked in internet
Years later, in her Chatroulette videos, Stark would highlight the kind of internet exchanges which today have become not only naturalized (such as FaceTime) but monetized as key forms of neoliberal capital (e.g. cam girls; Patreon; OnlyFans, etc.). At the time, the inability to capitalize on the connections she formed on Chatroulette was central to Stark's interest in the platform. She describes the experience as "initiated from this thing where you could see into anybody's room who would let you in... it was the utopian perverse aspect of mass surveillance." The sexual energy and even compulsion for sexual transaction (the constant flashing of genitals) that drove the site forward problematized how to capitalize on the individuals who used it, creating instead "strange forms of anti-capitalist labor," as well as "safety in the common ground of needing to jerk off." Beyond voyeurism, My Best Thing and Nothing is Enough illumine a surprising space where, as the result of a strange, illicit tourism, visitors can "see each other in a dignified way."
It feels equally good and equally bad
While working on her most recent show, " US Greatest Hits Mixtape: Volume 2," at her London gallery, greengrassi, another moment of eerie prescience occurred. The show featured a series of paintings, each juxtaposing a historical moment of US invasion or involvement in international coups with lyrics from the number-one pop song of the time. In the midst of work on these paintings, the regime change in Venezuela, which many cited as resulting from US involvement, took place. Stark had been choosing one event per decade to include in the show, not expecting that the one for our current decade would occur while the show was in progress. The painting that resulted shows the shock of this realization with a reflexivity typical of Stark; unlike the other paintings in the series that feature only text, Venezuela 2019 (2019) shows Stark herself at work on the painting, perched on a ladder and wearing a Karl Marx sweatshirt, etching in the lyrics to "7 Rings" by Ariana Grande. Rather than weaken the political sensibility of the series, Stark's ease towards automatic reflexivity exposes the crux of political reasoning in all of us; only when we come full circle, when we see our own embeddedness in the struggle, does the significance dawn on us. This requires humility, another thread through much of her work-the humility to admit, as Stark says, "the paradoxes we face, the difficulty of dealing with being complicit, the discomfort about where power lies."
She lives on top of her cage

Stark's Venezuela 2019 (2019) from "US Greatest Hits Mixtape: Volume 2" at greengrassi.

Yet sometimes Stark herself features as the central figure of power, even in her earliest pieces. In her application to study with Mike Kelley at the Art Center College of Design, she included Total Performance (1990), a photo in which she appears in a green bikini and heels astride the Suzuki motorbike she had just raced across the Bonneville Salt Flats, breaking the land speed record. The piece is demonstrative of the straightforward feminism that runs through Stark's work; a strength and sexuality that is not derivative of any particular feminisms or feminist texts. Of course, these moments of autonomy and strength are never left uncomplicated, as Stark is quick to admit her struggle with the desire to disappear once attention has been gathered. In two works titled E mergency Exit and Exhibitionist's Venue (both 2009), Stark envisions through collage and simple modeling an "exhibitionist's venue repurposed to entertain the possibility of a way out for a performer between acts," a sentiment that drives at the core of her practice. For just as soon as she takes space for her own body, her own voice, she admits the fear that inheres in such a position. The work becomes inseparable from the experiences that ignite the work; the vision is totalizing, suffocating. Rather than "step up" to the task, she asks the more embarrassing question: how, when it is all so self-encompassing, do we escape? Are we allowed to disappear? These are the fair questions, for Stark's world is total performance; in it, art does not begin and end-it continues.
Instead of feeling bad after, I just don't have an after *Italic lines from Nothing is Enough (2012)

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Relationship Status: Frances Stark Investigates Where We Begin and End

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Frances Stark's work has long investigated the ins, outs and in-betweens of intimacy, in real life and online. When positioning ourselves in relation to others, and to the world around us, where do we end and begin?

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"Erin M. Riley’s (b. 1985) meticulously #crafted, large-scale tapestries depict #intimate, erotic, and psychologically raw imagery that reflects upon r#elationships, memories, #fantasies, #sexual #violence, and #trauma. Collaging personal photographs, images sourced from the internet, newspaper clippings, and other ephemera to create her compositions, the Brooklyn-based weaver exposes the range of women’s lived experiences and how trauma weighs on the search for self-identity (https://www.ppowgallery.com/artists/erin-m-riley#tab:thumbnails)"

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Why #AndreaDworkin is the #RadicalFeminist, visionary feminist we need in our terrible times

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can't come here as a friend, even though I might very much want to." These are the words of Andrea Dworkin, addressing an anti-sexist men's organisation in 1983, in her acclaimed speech I Want a 24-Hour Truce in Which There Is No Rape. "The power exercised by men, day to day, in life is power that is institutionalised. It is protected by law. It is protected by religion and religious practice. It is protected by universities, which are strongholds of male supremacy. It is protected by a police force. It is protected by those whom Shelley called "the unacknowledged legislators of the world": the poets, the artists. Against that power, we have silence."

Dworkin, who died of heart failure in 2005 at the age of 58, was one of the world's most notorious radical feminists. She wrote 14 books, the most famous of which was Pornography: Men Possessing Women (1981). Now her work is being revisited in Last Days at Hot Slit, a new collection of her writing.

Many of the articles written about her claimed Dworkin personified hate. The media often said she hated men, hated sex, hated sexual freedom and absolutely hated the left. In 1998, a writer in the London Review of Books saw fit to give his view on her appearance ("overweight and ugly") and how her "frustration" at not having enough sex "has turned her into a man-hater". Another wrote after her death that Dworkin was a "sad ghost" that feminism needs to exorcise and that she was "insane".

I knew the real Dworkin, and our decade-long friendship taught me far more about love than hate. "I keep the stories of the women in my heart," she would tell me when I asked how she did the work she did and stayed sane. "They urge me on, and keep me focused on what needs to be done."

She was motivated by an innate desire to rid the world of pain and oppression. Had more of us listened to Dworkin during her decades of activism, and taken her work more seriously, more women would have signed up to an uncompromising feminism, as opposed to the fun kind, the sloganeering sort you read on high-street T-shirts, that is all about individual "girl power" and being able to wear trousers, rather than a collective movement to emancipate all women from the tyranny of oppression.

We met in 1996. I was one of the organisers of an international conference on violence against women, and Dworkin was a keynote speaker. We hit it off immediately, as we had a similar sense of humour and a number of friends in common. A group of conference speakers went to dinner on the first night and we were raucously discussing our various wishlists of ways to end patriarchy. "Did you notice that we were 'ladies' when we came in, 'guys' when our order was taken," said Dworkin the following morning, "and probably banned for life by the time we left?"

Feminist writer Andrea Dworkin. Photograph: Jodi Buren/The Life Images Collection/Getty Images

In the early 1970s, Dworkin spoke of her own experiences of sexual abuse and violence at a time when few did. And in today's climate of #MeToo revelations, we can see how far ahead of her time she was. "In the 1980s and 1990s, reading Dworkin became, for many, a discomfiting and exhilarating collegiate rite of passage," reads a recent piece in the New York Times. "Her writing is a strident and raw look at the systemic bias affecting the everyday experiences of women."

Dworkin's 1983 book, Right-Wing Women, could have been about how Trump came to power. Although I doubt she would have been so quick to lay the bulk of the blame for Trump's election on white women, her razor-sharp analysis of why so many women are attracted to a politics that despises their rights is more relevant today than ever. Her central theory is that the right exploits women's fear and offers us a chivalrous protection. It reassures us that we do not need to change the status quo, but accept it, and take whatever access to power is available to us. Dworkin despaired at what has come to be known as "lean-in feminism" which focuses on the ability of individual, privileged women to climb to the top, and always said that until women at the "bottom of the pile" were liberated, none of us could be.

How refreshing her style of speaking and writing - intoxicating and unapologetic - is compared with the "fun-feminist" prose we see so often on modern bookshelves. Much of this writing focuses on self-help for disgruntled individuals, such as Caitlin Moran's How to Be a Woman, which concentrates on laughing at sexism and having lots of larks. This, Dworkin would have said, is just another distraction from how women live "inside a system of humiliation from which there is no escape".

We are living in terrible times for women. Thankfully, our resistance to the global pandemic of sexual and domestic violence is growing. But this resistance is being curtailed by a concerted attempt to silence women - just look at the inexorable rise of non-disclosure agreements to gag women speaking out about discrimination or harassment.

Dworkin would never be silenced. Reading her piece Dear Bill and Hillary, published in this newspaper in 1998, makes me wonder how we could not have seen that a man like Donald Trump would end up in power, and that sexual abuse scandals would dominate the media.

The new pornography is a vast graveyard where the left has gone to die. The left cannot have its whores and its politics, too."

Andrea Dworkin

Decades ago, Dworkin spoke out vociferously against liberal feminists who defended Clinton against allegations of sexual abuse and misconduct simply because he claimed to support the US anti-violence-against-women movement. "Male politicians' policies in respect of women are important, but sexual harassment is an issue, too. You don't say it's OK for the leader of your country to be having his cock sucked, by someone half his age, while he is in the people's house," she wrote. "I care about how men in public life treat women." How prophetic that is when 20 years later we have a president who talks openly about how his fame means he can "do anything" to women - even "grab them by the pussy".

And then there is the thorny issue of pornography. Alongside the legal scholar and feminist author Catherine MacKinnon, in 1983 Dworkin came up with the Dworkin-MacKinnon Anti-Pornography Civil Rights Ordinance, which would have given those directly harmed by pornography a right to civil recourse, enabling the victims to sue porn producers and distributors. The inspiration for the approach was Linda Lovelace, the star of Deep Throat, who had announced that she had been forced into making the film and raped during its production.

The ordinance, while supported by anti-pornography feminists in the US, UK and elsewhere, proved generally unpopular and eventually died a death. But, says the anti-porn author Gail Dines: "Dworkin's work takes on greater significance in light of the #MeToo movement, which has made visible the routine sexual violence that has long been kept under wraps ... [It] was more accurate than even she could have known: the dominant culture still avoids facing the reality of pornography's role in making men's sexual domination of women 'hot'."

Dworkin was the first second-wave feminist to write in detail about how beauty practices both came from and feed into women's oppression. "Plucking the eyebrows, shaving under the arms ... learning to walk in high-heeled shoes," she wrote in Woman Hating, "having one's nose fixed, straightening or curling one's hair - these things hurt. The pain, of course, teaches an important lesson: no price is too great, no process too repulsive, no operation too painful for the woman who would be beautiful."

So-called feminist pornographers are a fairly recent phenomenon, but Dworkin would have had no patience with the notion that porn could be made in an ethical way. I imagine she would have seen it much like the leftist arguments that porn should be protected as "free speech". "The new pornography is a vast graveyard where the left has gone to die," she once said. "The left cannot have its whores and its politics, too."

Media critic ... Andrea Dworkin. Photograph: Bettmann/Bettmann Archive

Months before she died, I introduced Dworkin to some Guardian editors, as she was becoming increasingly distressed by being unable to get her work published in the US. One of the pieces commissioned as a result of that meeting was about living with pain and disability. In the last email I received from Dworkin, she told me how positive her experience was dealing with those who recognised her worth. "I have never - I mean never - had the experience of editors I work with treating me with this kind of respect. I appreciate it so much."

Dworkin was sadly prophetic about heterosexuality. The campaigner Caroline Criado-Perez (described recently as "the acceptable face of feminism") cited Dworkin's analysis of sexual relations between men and women. "There is a brilliant Dworkin quote about this," she said. "Women are the only ... group that shares a bed with their oppressor."

In 1988, Dworkin was widely pilloried for describing sexual intercourse as "mandatory", arguing that men claim an inalienable right to penetrate women during sex, and that this is one of the tools of patriarchy. Just last month, however, during a case in the high court, a judge was asked to consider imposing an order preventing a man from having sex with his wife because she now lacked the mental capacity to give consent. He said: "I cannot think of any more obviously fundamental human right than the right of a man to have sex with his wife."

We had many a conversation about her earlier life. Although admirable, it always made me feel sad that Dworkin felt she owed such a debt of gratitude to the women's movement, because feminists had helped her in her early days to escape a very violent marriage. Although I kept it from her, some feminists were deeply unkind about Dworkin, with one high-profile writer once telling me: "Andrea does the movement no favours - she's a loose cannon and looks awful."

The visceral hatred towards Dworkin acted as a warning to women not to engage with a radical type of feminism. However, we need it more than ever right now. Rape convictions are as rare as hen's teeth; revenge porn is a daily reality for many women and girls; and trafficking of women into the sex trade is endemic. One investigation into major pimping gangs in England found that police were happy to blame the victims for their fate. The soft feminism most prevalent today is inadequate for the climate of misogyny that women are being forced to endure. The focus, particularly of young and university-based women, on individual identity and lifestyle choice will not withstand the onslaught of the men's rights movement.

The truth about Dworkin is everywhere, but so is the distortion of her work and of her politics. In 1998, I visited Dworkin in her Brooklyn home. We were talking about the latest attack on her by pro-pornography feminists, which had clearly upset her. "I have a feeling that after my death I might be finally understood." I asked what she meant. She did not expand.

Our lengthy conversations, which I miss more with every passing year, would be full of laughter and passion, but always with the cloud of impending doom hovering. Dworkin got it so right when she told me, only months before she died: "Women will come back to feminism, because things are going to get far, far worse for us before they get better."

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Why Andrea Dworkin is the radical, visionary feminist we need in our terrible times

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She was labelled a man-hater, anti-sex and ugly. But she predicted both the ascent of Trump and #MeToo - and her unapologetic attitude is more relevant than ever

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#AndreaDWORKIN #PornographyMenPossessingWomen#1981

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In this paper I will primarily employ the work of the postmodern theorist, #JeanBaudrillard, as a vehicle by which to advance contemporary debates on #pornography. By placing his work in conversation with the texts of other writers, I will attempt to extend this debate into a broader political, social and cultural context than in which it is usually addressed; one which situates the #PornographyIndustry within the potentially totalising effect that other industrialised technologies and markets have on the #consumer.

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#AndreaDworkin (September 26, 1946 – April 9, 2005) was an American #RadicalFeminist writer and activist best known for her analysis of #pornography.

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Post 5:
"The Iliad, or #ThePoemOfForce" (French: L'Iliade ou le poème de la force) is a 24-page essay written in #1939 by #SimoneWeil. The essay is about Homer's epic poem the Iliad and contains reflections on the conclusions one can draw from the epic regarding the nature of #Force in human affairs.

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The true hero, the true subject, the center of the Iliad is force. Force employed by man, force that enslaves man, force before which man's flesh shrinks away. In this work, at all times, the human spirit is shown as modified by its relations with force, as swept away, blinded, by the very force it imagined it could handle, as deformed by the weight of the force it submits to. For those dreamers who considered that force, thanks to progress, would soon be a thing of the past, the Iliad could appear as an historical document; for others, whose powers of recognition are more acute and who perceive force, today as yesterday, at the very center of human history, the Iliad is the purest and the loveliest of mirrors.

To define force - it is that x that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing. Exercised to the limit, it turns man into a thing in the most literal sense: it makes a corpse out of him. Somebody was here, and the next minute there is nobody here at all; this is a spectacle the Iliad never wearies of showing us:

The hero becomes a thing dragged behind a chariot in the dust:

The bitterness of such a spectacle is offered us absolutely undiluted. No comforting fiction intervenes; no consoling prospect of immortality; and on the hero's head no washedout halo of patriotism descends.

His soul, fleeing his limbs, passed to Hades,
Mourning its fate, forsaking its youth and its vigor.

Still more poignant - so painful is the contrast - is the sudden evocation, as quickly rubbed out, of another world: the faraway, precarious, touching world of peace, of the family, the world in which each man counts more than anything else to those about him.

Far from hot baths he was indeed, poor man. And not he alone. Nearly all the lliad takes place far from hot baths. Nearly all of human life, then and now, takes place far from hot baths.

Here we see force in its grossest and most summary form - the force that kills. How much more varied in its processes, how much more surprising in its effects is the other force, the force that does not kill, i.e., that does not kill just yet. It will surely kill, it will possibly kill, or perhaps it merely hangs, poised and ready, over the head of the creature it can kill, at any moment, which is to say at every moment. In whatever aspect, its effect is the same: it turns a man into a stone. From its first property (the ability to turn a human being into a thing by the simple method of killing him) flows another, quite prodigious too in its own way, the ability to turn a human being into a thing while he is still alive. He is alive; he has a soul; and yet - he is a thing. An extraordinary entity this - a thing that has a soul. And as for the soul, what an extraordinary house it finds itself in! Who can say what it costs it, moment by moment, to accommodate itself to this residence, how much writhing and bending, folding and pleating are required of it? It was not made to live inside a thing; if it does so, under pressure of necessity, there is not a single element of its nature to which violence is not done.

A man stands disarmed and naked with a weapon pointing at him; this person becomes a corpse before anybody or anything touches him. Just a minute ago, he was thinking, acting, hoping:

Soon, however, he grasps the fact that the weapon which is pointing at him will not be diverted; and now, still breathing, he is simply matter; still thinking, he can think no longer:

Thus spoke the brilliant son of Priam
In begging words. But he heard a harsh reply:
He spoke. And the other's knees and heart failed him.
Dropping his spear, he knelt down, holding out his arms.
Achilles, drawing his sharp sword, struck
Through the neck and breastbone. The two-edged sword
Sunk home its full length. The other, face down,
Lay still, and the black blood ran out, wetting the ground.

If a stranger, completely disabled, disarmed, strengthless, throws himself on the mercy of a warrior, he is not, by this very act, condemned to death; but a moment of impatience on the warrior's part will suffice to relieve him of his life. In any case, his flesh has lost that very important property which in the laboratory distinguishes living flesh from dead - the galvanic response. If you give a frog's leg an electric shock, it twitches. If you confront a human being with the touch or sight of something horrible or terrifying, this bundle of muscles, nerves, and flesh likewise twitches.

Alone of all living things, the suppliant we have just described neither quivers nor trembles. He has lost the right to do so.

As his lips advance to touch the object that is for him of all things most charged with horror, they do not draw back on his teeth - they cannot:

No one saw great Priam enter. He stopped,
Clasped the knees of Achilles, kissed his hands,
Those terrible man-killing hands that had slaughtered so many of his sons.

The sight of a human being pushed to such an extreme of suffering chills us like the sight of a dead body:

But this feeling lasts only a moment. Soon the very presence of the suffering creature is forgotten:

It was not insensibility that made Achilles with a single movement of his hand push away the old man who had been clinging to his knees; Priam's words, recalling his own old father, had moved him to tears. It was merely a question of his being as free in his attitudes and movements as if, clasping his knees, there were not a suppliant but an inert object. Anybody who is in our vicinity exercises a certain power over us by his very presence, and a power that belongs to him alone, that is, the power of halting, repressing, modifying each movement that our body sketches out. If we step aside for a passer-by on the road, it is not the same thing as stepping aside to avoid a billboard; alone in our rooms, we get up, walk about, sit down again quite differently from the way we do when we have a visitor. But this indefinable influence that the presence of another human being has on us is not exercised by men whom a moment of impatience can deprive of life, who can die before even thought has a chance to pass sentence on them. In their presence, people move about as if they were not there; they, on their side, running the risk of being reduced to nothing in a single instant, imitate nothingness in their own persons. Pushed, they fall. Fallen, they lie where they are, unless chance gives somebody the idea of raising them up again. But supposing that at long last they have been picked up, honored with cordial remarks, they still do not venture to take this resurrection seriously; they dare not express a wish lest an irritated voice return them forever to silence:

He spoke; the old man trembled and obeyed.

At least a suppliant, once his prayer is answered, becomes a human being again, like everybody else. But there are other, more unfortunate creatures who have become things for the rest of their lives. Their days hold no pastimes, no free spaces, no room in them for any impulse of their own.

It is not that their life is harder than other men's nor that they occupy a lower place in the social hierarchy; no, they are another human species, a compromise between a man and a corpse. The idea of a person's being a thing is a logical contradiction. Yet what is impossible in logic becomes true in life, and the contradiction lodged within the soul tears it to shreds. This thing is constantly aspiring to be a man or a woman, and never achieving it - here, surely, is death but death strung out over a whole lifetime; here, surely is life, but life that death congeals before abolishing.

This strange fate awaits the virgin, the priest's daughter:

I will not give her up. Sooner shall old age come upon her
In our house in Argos, far from her native land,
Tending the loom and sharing my bed.

It awaits the young wife, the young mother, the prince's bride:

And perhaps one day, in Argos, you will weave cloth for another,
And the Messeian or Hyperian water you will fetch,
Much against your will, yielding to a harsh necessity.

It awaits the baby, heir to the royal scepter:

In the mother's eyes, such a fate is, for her child, as terrible as death; the husband would rather die than see his wife reduced to it; all the plagues of heaven are invoked by the father against the army that subjects his daughter to it. Yet the victims themselves are beyond all this. Curses, feelings of rebellion, comparisons, reflections on the future and the past, are obliterated from the mind of the captive; and memory itself barely lingers on. Fidelity to his city and his dead is not the slave's privilege.

And what does it take to make the slave weep? The misfortune of his master, his oppressor, despoiler, pillager, of the man who laid waste his town and killed his dear ones under his very eye .... This man suffers or dies; then the slave's tears come. And really why not? This is for him the only occasion on which tears are permitted, are, indeed, required. A slave will always cry whenever he can do so with impunity - his situation keeps tears on tap for him.

She spoke, weeping, and the women groaned,
Using the pretext of Patroclus to bewail their own torments.

Since the slave has no license to express anything except what is pleasing to his master, it follows that the only emotion that can touch or enliven him a little, that can reach him in the desolation of his life, is the emotion of love for his master.

There is no place else to send the gift of love; all other outlets are barred, just as, with the horse in harness, bit, shafts, reins bar every way but one. And if, by some miracle, in the slave's breast a hope is born, the hope of becoming, some day, through somebody's influence, someone once again, how far won't these captives go to show love and thankfulness, even though these emotions are addressed to the very men who should, considering the very recent past, still reek with horror for them:

My husband, to whom my father and respected mother gave me,
I saw before the city transfixed by the sharp bronze.
My three brothers, children, with me, of a single mother,
So dear to me! They all met their fatal day.
But you did not allow me to weep, when swift Achilles
Slaughtered my husband and laid waste the city of Mynes.
You promised me that I would be taken by divine Achilles,
For his legitimate wife, that he would carry me away in his ships,
To Pythia, where our marriage would be celebrated among the Myrmidons,
So without respite I mourn for you, you who have always been gentle.

To lose more than the slave does is impossible, for he loses his whole inner life. A fragment of it he may get back if he sees the possibility of changing his fate, but this is his only hope. Such is the empire of force, as extensive as the empire of nature. Nature, too, when vital needs are at stake, can erase the whole inner life, even the grief of a mother:

But the thought of eating came to her, when she was tired of tears.

Force, in the hands of another, exercises over the soul the same tyranny that extreme hunger does; for it possesses, and in perpetuo, the power of life and death. Its rule, moreover, is as cold and hard as the rule of inert matter.

The man who knows himself weaker than another is more alone in the heart of a city than a man lost in the desert.

Force is as pitiless to the man who possesses it, or thinks he does, as it is to its victims; the second it crushes, the first it intoxicates. The truth is, nobody really possesses it. The human race is not divided up, in the Iliad, into conquered persons, slaves, suppliants, on the one hand, and conquerors and chiefs on the other. In this poem there is not a single man who does not at one time or another have to bow his neck to force. The common soldier in the Iliad is free and has the right to bear arms; nevertheless he is subject to the indignity of orders and abuse:

Thersites pays dear for the perfectly reasonable comments he makes, comments not at all different, moreover, from those made by Achilles:

Achilles himself, that proud hero, the undefeated, is shown us at the outset of the poem, weeping with humiliation and helpless grief - the woman he wanted for his bride has been taken from under his nose, and he has not dared to oppose it:

... But Achilles
Weeping, sat apart from his companions,
By the white-capped waves, staring over the boundless ocean.

What has happened is that Agamemnon has deliberately humiliated Achilles, to show that he himself is the master:

... So you will learn
That I am greater than you, and anyone else will hesitate
To treat me as an equal and set himself against me.

But a few days pass and now the supreme commander is weeping in his turn. He must humble himself, he must plead, and have, moreover, the added misery of doing it all in vain.

In the same way, there is not a single one of the combatants who is spared the shameful experience of fear. The heroes quake like everybody else. It only needs a challenge from Hector to throw the whole Greek force into consternation--except for Achilles and his men, and they did not happen to be present:

He spoke and all grew still and held their peace,
Ashamed to refuse, afraid to accept.

But once Ajax comes forward and offers himself, fear quickly changes sides:

A shudder of terror ran through the Trojans, making their limbs weak;
And Hector himself felt his heart leap in his breast.
But he no longer had the right to tremble, or to run away ....

Two days later, it is Ajax's turn to be terrified:

Zeus the father on high, makes fear rise in Ajax.
He stops, overcome, puts behind him his buckler made of seven hides,
Trembles, looks at the crowd around, like a wild beast ....

Even to Achilles the moment comes; he too must shake and stammer with fear, though it is a river that has this effect on him, not a man. But, with the exception of Achilles, every man in the Iliad tastes a moment of defeat in battle. Victory is less a matter of valor than of blind destiny, which is symbolized in the poem by Zeus's golden scales:

By its very blindness, destiny establishes a kind of justice. Blind also is she who decrees to warriors punishment in kind. He that takes the sword, will perish by the sword. The Iliad formulated the principle long before the Gospels did, and in almost the same terms:

Ares is just, and kills those who kill.

Perhaps all men, by the very act of being born, are destined to suffer violence; yet this is a truth to which circumstance shuts men's eyes. The strong are, as a matter of fact, never absolutely strong, nor are the weak absolutely weak, but neither is aware of this. They have in common a refusal to believe that they both belong to the same species: the weak see no relation between themselves and the strong, and vice versa. The man who is the possessor of force seems to walk through a non-resistant element; in the human substance that surrounds him nothing has the power to interpose, between the impulse and the act, the tiny interval that is reflection.

Where there is no room for reflection, there is none either for justice or prudence. Hence we see men in arms behaving harshly and madly. We see their sword bury itself in the breast of a disarmed enemy who is in the very act of pleading at their knees. We see them triumph over a dying man by describing to him the outrages his corpse will endure. We see Achilles cut the throats of twelve Trojan boys on the funeral pyre of Patroclus as naturally as we cut flowers for a grave.

These men, wielding power, have no suspicion of the fact that the consequences of their deeds will at length come home to them - they too will bow the neck in their turn. If you can make an old man fall silent, tremble, obey, with a single word of your own, why should it occur to you that the curses of this old man, who is after all a priest, will have their own importance in the gods' eyes? Why should you refrain from taking Achilles' girl away from him if you know that neither he nor she can do anything but obey you? Achilles rejoices over the sight of the Greeks fleeing in misery and confusion.

What could possibly suggest to him that this rout, which will last exactly as long as he wants it to and end when his mood indicates it, that this very rout will be the cause of his friend's death, and, for that matter, of his own? Thus it happens that those who have force on loan from fate count on it too much and are destroyed.

But at the time their own destruction seems impossible to them. For they do not see that the force in their possession is only a limited quantity; nor do they see their relations with other human beings as a kind of balance between unequal amounts of force. Since other people do not impose on their movements that halt, that interval of hesitation, wherein lies all our consideration for our brothers in humanity, they conclude that destiny has given complete license to them, and none at all to their inferiors. And at this point they exceed the measure of the force that is actually at their disposal. Inevitably they exceed it, since they are not aware that it is limited. And now we see them committed irretrievably to chance; suddenly things cease to obey them. Sometimes chance is kind to them, sometimes cruel. But in any case there they are, exposed, open to misfortune; gone is the armor of power that formerly protected their naked souls; nothing, no shield, stands between them and tears.

This retribution, which has a geometrical rigor, which operates automatically to penalize the abuse of force, was the main subject of Greek thought. It is the soul of the epic. Under the name of Nemesis, it functions as the mainspring of Aeschylus's tragedies. To the Pythagoreans, to Socrates and Plato, it was the jumping-off point of speculation upon the nature of man and the universe. Wherever Hellenism has penetrated, we find the idea of it familiar. In Oriental countries which are steeped in Buddhism, it is perhaps this Greek idea that bas lived on under the name of Kharma. The Occident, however, has lost it, and no longer even has a word to express it in any of its languages: conceptions of limit, measure, equilibrium, which ought to determine the conduct of life are, in the West, restricted to a servile function in the vocabulary of technics. We are only geometricians of matter; the Greeks were, first of all, geometricians in their apprenticeship to virtue.

The progress of the war in the Iliad is simply a continual game of seesaw. The victor of the moment feels himself invincible, even though, only a few hours before, he may have experienced defeat; he forgets to treat victory as a transitory thing. At the end of the first day of combat described in the Iliad, the victorious Greeks were in a position to obtain the object of all their efforts, i.e., Helen and her riches - assuming of course as Homer did, that the Greeks had reason to believe that Helen was in Troy. Actually, the Egyptian priests, who ought to have known, affirmed later on to Herodotus that she was in Egypt. In any case, that evening the Greeks are no longer interested in her or her possessions:

What they want is, in fact, everything. For booty, all the riches of Troy; for their bonfires, all the palaces, temples, houses; for slaves, all the women and children; for corpses, all the men. They forget one detail, that everything is not within their power, for they are not in Troy. Perhaps they will be there tomorrow; perhaps not. Hector, the same day, makes the same mistake:

For I know well in my entrails and in my hearts,
A day will come when Holy Troy will perish,
And Priam, and the nation of. Priam of the good lance.
But I think less of the grief that is in store for the Trojans,
And of Hecuba herself, and of Priam the king,
And of my brothers, so numerous and so brave,
Who will fall in the dust under the blows of the enemy,
Than of you that day when a Greek in his bronze breastplate
Will drag you away weeping and deprive you of your liberty.

But as for me, may I be dead, and may the earth have covered me
Before I hear you cry out or see you dragged away!

At this moment what would he not give to turn aside those horrors which he believes to be inevitable? But at this moment nothing he could give would be of any use. The next day but one, however, the Greeks have run away miserably, and Agamemnon himself is in favor of putting to the sea again.

And now Hector, by making a very few concessions, could readily secure the enemy's departure; yet now he is even unwilling to let them go empty-handed:

His wish is granted; the Greeks stay; and the next day they reduce Hector and his men to a pitiable condition:

In the course of the afternoon, Hector regains the ascendancy, withdraws again, then puts the Greeks to flight, then is repulsed by Patroclus, who has come in with his fresh troops.

Patroclus, pressing his advantage, ends by finding himself exposed, wounded and without armor, to the sword of Hector.

And finally that evening the victorious Hector hears the prudent counsel of Polydamas and repudiates it sharply:

The next day Hector is lost. Achilles has harried him across the field and is about to kill him. He has always been the stronger of the two in combat; how much the more so now, after several weeks of rest, ardent for vengeance and victory, against an exhausted enemy? And Hector stands alone, before the walls of Troy, absolutely alone, alone to wait for death and to steady his soul to face it:

Alas, were I to slip through the gate, behind the rampart,
Polydamas at once would heap dishonor on me ...
And now that through my recklessness I have destroyed my people,
I fear the Trojans and the long-robed Trojan women,
I fear to hear from some one far less brave than I:
"Hector, trusting his own strength too far, has ruined his people." ...
Suppose I were to down my bossed shield,
My massive helmet, and, leaning my spear against the wall,
Should go to meet renowned Achilles? ...
But why spin out these fancies? Why such dreams?
I would not reach him, nor would he pity me,
Or respect me. He would kill me like a woman
If I came naked thus ...

Not a jot of the grief and ignominy that fall to the unfortunate is Hector spared. Alone, stripped of the prestige of force, he discovers that the courage that kept him from taking to the shelter of the walls is not enough to save him from flight:

Wounded to death, he enhances his conqueror's triumph by vain supplications:

I implore you, by your soul, by your knees, by your parents ....

But the auditors of the Iliad knew that the death of Hector would be but a brief joy to Achilles, and the death of Achilles but a brief joy to the Trojans, and the destruction of Troy but a brief joy to the Achaeans.

THUS violence obliterates anybody who feels its touch. It comes to seem just as external to its employer as to its victim. And from this springs the idea of a destiny before which executioner and victim stand equally innocent, before which conquered and conqueror are brothers in the same distress. The conquered brings misfortune to the conqueror, and vice versa:

A single son, short-lived, was born to him.
Neglected by me, he grows old - for far from home
I camp before Troy, injuring you and your sons.

A moderate use of force, which alone would enable man to escape being enmeshed in its machinery, would require superhuman virtue, which is as rare as dignity in weakness.

Moreover, moderation itself is not without its perils, since prestige, from which force derives at least three quarters of its strength, rests principally upon that marvelous indifference that the strong feel toward the weak, an indifference so contagious that it infects the very people who are the objects of it. Yet ordinarily excess is not arrived at through prudence or politic considerations. On the contrary, man dashes to it as to an irresistible temptation. The voice of reason is occasionally heard in the mouths of the characters in the Iliad. Thersites' speeches are reasonable to the highest degree; so are the speeches of the angry Achilles:

But words of reason drop into the void. If they come from an inferior, he is punished and shuts up; if from a chief, his actions betray them. And failing everything else, there is always a god handy to advise him to be unreasonable. In the end, the very idea of wanting to escape the role fate has allotted one - the business of killing and dying - disappears from the mind:

We to whom Zeus
Has assigned suffering, from youth to old age,
Suffering in grievous wars, till we perish to the last man.

Already these warriors, like Craonne's so much later, felt themselves to be "condemned men."

It was the simplest trap that pitched them into this situation. At the outset, at the embarkation, their hearts are light, as hearts always are if you have a large force on your side and nothing but space to oppose you. Their weapons are in their hands; the enemy is absent. Unless your spirit has been conquered in advance by the reputation of the enemy, you always feel yourself to be much stronger than anybody who is not there. An absent man does not impose the yoke of necessity. To the spirits of those embarking no necessity yet presents itself; consequently they go off as though to a game, as though on holiday from the confinement of daily life.

But the first contact of war does not immediately destroy the illusion that war is a game. War's necessity is terrible, altogether different in kind from the necessity of peace. So terrible is it that the human spirit will not submit to it so long as it can possibly escape; and whenever it can escape it takes refuge in long days empty of necessity, days of play, of revery, days arbitrary and unreal. Danger then becomes an abstraction; the lives you destroy are like toys broken by a child, and quite as incapable of feeling; heroism is but a theatrical gesture and smirched with boastfulness. This becomes doubly true if a momentary access of vitality comes to reinforce the divine hand that wards off defeat and death. Then war is easy and basely, coarsely loved.

But with the majority of the combatants this state of mind does not persist. Soon there comes a day when fear, or defeat, or the death of beloved comrades touches the warrior's spirit, and it crumbles in the hand of necessity. At that moment war is no more a game or a dream; now at last the warrior cannot doubt the reality of its existence. And this reality, which he perceives, is hard, much too hard to be borne, for it enfolds death. Once you acknowledge death to be a practical possibility, the thought of it becomes unendurable, except in flashes. True enough, all men are fated to die; true enough also, a soldier may grow old in battles; yet for those whose spirits have bent under the yoke of war, the relation between death and the future is different than for other men. For other men death appears as a limit set in advance on the future; for the soldier death is the future, the future his profession assigns him. Yet the idea of man's having death for a future is abhorrent to nature. Once the experience of war makes visible the possibility of death that lies locked up in each moment, our thoughts cannot travel from one day to the next without meeting death's face. The mind is then strung up to a pitch it can stand for only a short time; but each new dawn reintroduces the same necessity; and days piled on days make years. On each one of these days the soul suffers violence. Regularly, every morning, the soul castrates itself of aspiration, for thought cannot journey through time without meeting death on the way. Thus war effaces all conceptions of purpose or goal, including even its own "war aims." It effaces the very notion of war's being brought to an end. To be outside a situation so violent as this is to find it inconceivable; to be inside it is to be unable to conceive its end. Consequently, nobody does anything to bring this end about. In the presence of an armed enemy, what hand can relinquish its weapon? The mind ought to find a way out, but the mind has lost all capacity to so much as look outward. The mind is completely absorbed in doing itself violence. Always in human life, whether war or slavery is in question, intolerable sufferings continue, as it were, by the force of their own specific gravity, and so look to the outsider as though they were easy to bear; actually, they continue because they have deprived the sufferer of the resources which might serve to extricate him.

Nevertheless, the soul that is enslaved to war cries out for deliverance, but deliverance itself appears to it in an extreme and tragic aspect, the aspect of destruction. Any other solution, more moderate, more reasonable in character, would expose the mind to suffering so naked, so violent that it could not be borne, even as memory. Terror, grief, exhaustion, slaughter, the annihilation of comrades - is it credible that these things should not continually tear at the soul, if the intoxication of force had not intervened to drown them? The idea that an unlimited effort should bring in only a limited profit or no profit at all is terribly painful.

But actually what is Helen to Ulysses? What indeed is Troy, full of riches that will not compensate him for Ithaca's ruin? For the Greeks, Troy and Helen are in reality mere sources of blood and tears; to master them is to master frightful memories. If the existence of an enemy has made a soul destroy in itself the thing nature put there, then the only remedy the soul can imagine is the destruction of the enemy. At the same time the death of dearly loved comrades arouses a spirit of somber emulation, a rivalry in death:

It is the same despair that drives him on toward death, on the one hand, and slaughter on the other:

I know it well, my fate is to perish here,
Far from father and dearly loved mother; but meanwhile
I shall not stop till the Trojans have had their fill of war.

The man possessed by this twofold need for death belongs, so long as he has not become something still different, to a different race from the race of the living.

What echo can the timid hopes of life strike in such a heart? How can it hear the defeated begging for another sight of the light of day? The threatened life has already been relieved of nearly all its consequence by a single, simple distinction: it is now unarmed; its adversary possesses a weapon.

Furthermore, how can a man who has rooted out of himself the notion that the light of day is sweet to the eyes respect such a notion when it makes its appearance in some futile and humble lament?

I clasp tight your knees, Achilles. Have a thought, have pity for me.
I stand here, O son of Zeus, a suppliant, to be respected.
In your house it was I first tasted Demeter's bread,
That day in my well-pruned vineyard you caught me
And sold me, sending me far from father and friends,
To holy Lemnos; a hundred oxen was my price.
And now I will pay you three hundred for ransom.
This dawn is for me my twelfth day in Troy,
After so many sorrows. See me here, in your hands,
Through some evil fate. Zeus surely must hate me
Who again puts me into your hands. Alas, my poor mother, Laothoe,
Daughter of the old man, Altes - a short-lived son you have borne.

What a reception this feeble hope gets!

Come, friend, you too must die. Why make a fuss about it?
Patroclus, he too has died - a far better man than you are.
Don't you see how handsome I am, how mighty?
A noble father begat me, and I have a goddess for mother.
Yet even I, like you, must some day encounter my fate,
Whether the hour strikes at noon, or evening, or sunrise,
The hour that comes when some arms-bearing warrior will kill me.

To respect life in somebody else when you have had to castrate yourself of all yearning for it demands a truly heartbreaking exertion of the powers of generosity. It is impossible to imagine any of Homer's warriors being capable of such an exertion, unless it is that warrior who dwells, in a peculiar way, at the very center of the poem-! mean Patroclus, who "knew hew to be sweet to everybody," and who throughout the Iliad commits no cruel or brutal act. But then how many men do we know, in several thousand years of human history, who would have displayed such god-like generosity? Two or three? - even this is doubtful. Lacking this generosity, the conquering soldier is like a scourge of nature. Possessed by war, he, like the slave, becomes a thing, though his manner of doing so is different--over him too, words are as powerless as over matter itself. And both, at the touch of force, experience its inevitable effects: they become deaf and dumb.

Such is the nature of force. Its power of converting a man into a thing is a double one, and in its application double-edged. To the same degree, though in different fashions, those who use it and those who endure it are turned to stone. This property of force achieves its maximum eflectiveness during the clash of arms, in battle, when the tide of the day has turned, and everything is rushing toward a decision. It is not the planning man, the man of strategy, the man acting on the resolution taken, who wins or loses a battle; battles are fought and decided by men deprived of these faculties, men who have undergone a transformation, who have dropped either to the level of inert matter, which is pure passivity, or to the level of blind force, which is pure momentum.

Herein lies the last secret of war, a secret revealed by the Iliad in its similes, which liken the warriors either to fire, flood, wind, wild beasts, or God knows what blind cause of disaster, or else to frightened animals, trees, water, sand, to anything in nature that is set into motion by the violence of external forces. Greeks and Trojans, from one day to the next, sometimes even from one hour to the next, experience, turn and turn about, one or the other of these transmutations:

As when a lion, murderous, springs among the cattle
Which by thousands are grazing over some vast marshy field...
And their flanks heave with terror; even so the Achaians
Scattered in panic before Hector and Zeus, the great father.

As when a ravening fire breaks out deep in a bushy wood
And the wheeling wind scatters sparks far and wide,
And trees, root and branch, topple over in flames,·
So Atreus' son, Agamemnon, roared through the ranks
Of the Trojans in flight ....

The art of war is simply the art of producing such transformations, and its equipment, its processes, even the casualties it inflicts on the enemy, are only means directed toward this end - its true object is the warrior's soul. Yet these transformations are always a mystery; the gods are their authors, the gods who kindle men's imagination. But however caused, this petrifactive quality of force, two-fold always, is essential to its nature; and a soul which has entered the province of force will not escape this except by a miracle. Such miracles are rare and of brief duration.

THE wantonness of the conqueror that knows no respect for any creature or thing that is at its mercy or is imagined to be so, the despair of the soldier that drives him on to destruction, the obliteration of the slave or the conquered man, the wholesale slaughter - all these elements combine in the Iliad to make a picture of uniform horror, of which force is the sole hero. A monotonous desolation would result were it not for those few luminous moments, scattered here and there throughout the poem, those brief, celestial moments in which man possesses his soul. The soul that awakes then, to live for an instant only and be lost almost at once in force's vast kingdom, awakes pure and whole; it contains no ambiguities, nothing complicated or turbid; it has no room for anything but courage and love. Sometimes it is in the course of inner deliberations that a man finds his soul: he meets it, like Hector before Troy, as he tries to face destiny on his own terms, without the help of gods or men. At other times, it is in a moment of love that men discover their souls - and there is hardly any form of pure love known to humanity of which the Iliad does not treat. The tradition of hospitality persists, even through several generations, to dispel the blindness of combat.

Thus I am for you a beloved guest in the breast of Argos ...
Let us turn our lances away from each other, even in battle.

The love of the son for the parents, of father for son, of mother for son, is continually described, in a manner as touching as it is curt:

Thetis answered, shedding tears,
"You were born to me for a short life, my child, as you say ... "

Even brotherly love:

My three brothers whom the same mother bore for me,
So dear ....

Conjugal love, condemned to sorrow, is of an astonishing purity. Imaging the humiliations of slavery which await a beloved wife, the husband passes over the one indignity which even in anticipation would stain their tenderness. What could be simpler than the words spoken by his wife to the man about to die?

Not less touching are the words expressed to a dead husband:

Dear husband, you died young, and left me your widow
Alone in the palace. Our child is still tiny,
The child you and I, crossed by fate, had together.
I think he will never grow up ...
For not in your bed did you die, holding my hand
And speaking to me prudent words which forever
Night and day, as I weep, might live in my memory.

The most beautiful friendship of all, the friendship between comrades-at-arms, is the final theme of The Epic:

... But Achilles
Wept, dreaming of the beloved comrade; sleep, allprevailing,
Would not take him; he turned over again and again.

But the purest triumph of love, the crowning grace of war, is the friendship that floods the hearts of mortal enemies. Before it a murdered son or a murdered friend no longer cries out for vengeance. Before it--even more miraculous - the distance between benefactor and suppliant, between victor and vanquished, shrinks to nothing:

These moments of grace are rare in the Iliad, but they are enough to make us feel with sharp regret what it is that violence has killed and will kill again.

However, such a heaping-up of violent deeds would have a frigid effect, were it not for the note of incurable bitterness that continually makes itself heard, though often only a single word marks its presence, often a mere stroke of the verse, or a run-on line. It is in this that the Iliad is absolutely unique, in this bitterness that proceeds from tenderness and that spreads over the whole human race, impartial as sunlight. Never does the tone lose its coloring of bitterness; yet never does the bitterness drop into lamentation. Justice and love, which have hardly any place in this study of extremes and of unjust acts of violence, nevertheless bathe the work in their light without ever becoming noticeable themselves, except as a kind of accent. Nothing precious is scorned, whether or not death is its destiny; everyone's unhappiness is laid bare without dissimulation or disdain; no man is set above or below the condition common to all men; whatever is destroyed is regretted. Victors and vanquished are brought equally near us; under the same head, both are seen as counterparts of the poet, and the listener as well. If there is any difference, it is that the enemy's misfortunes are possibly more sharply felt.

So he fell there, put to sleep in the sleep of bronze,
Unhappy man, far from his wife, defending his own people ....

And what accents echo the fate of the lad Achilles sold at Lemnos!

And the fate of Euphorbus, who saw only a single day of war.

Blood soaked his hair, the hair like to the Graces' ...

When Hector is lamented:

... guardian of chaste wives and little children.

In these few words, chastity appears, dirtied by force, and childhood, delivered to the sword. The fountain at the gates of Troy becomes an object of poignant nostalgia when Hector runs by, seeking to elude his doom:

The whole of the Iliad lies under the shadow of the greatest calamity the human race can experience - the destruction of a city. This calamity could not tear more at the heart had the poet been born in Troy. But the tone is not different when the Achaeans are dying, far from home.

Insofar as this other life, the life of the living, seems calm and full, the brief evocations of the world of peace are felt as pain:

With the break of dawn and the rising of the day,
On both sides arrows flew, men fell.
But at the very hour that the woodcutter goes home to fix his meal
In the mountain valleys when his arms have had enough
Of hacking great trees, and disgust rises in his heart,
And the desire for sweet food seizes his entrails,
At that hour, by their valor, the Danaans broke the front.

Whatever is not war, whatever war destroys or threatens, the Iliad wraps in poetry; the realities of war, never. No reticence veils the step from life to death:

Then his teeth flew out; from two sides,
Blood came to his eyes; the blood that from lips and nostrils
He was spilling, open-mouthed; death enveloped him in its black cloud.

The cold brutality of the deeds of war is left undisguised; neither victors nor vanquished are admired, scorned, or hated.

Almost always, fate and the gods decide the changing lot of battle. Within the limits fixed by fate, the gods determine with sovereign authority victory and defeat. It is always they who provoke those fits of madness, those treacheries, which are forever blocking peace; war is their true business; their only motives, caprice and malice. As for the warriors, victors or vanquished, those comparisons which liken them to beasts or things can inspire neither admiration nor contempt, but only regret that men are capable of being so transformed.

There may be, unknown to us, other expressions of the extraordinary sense of equity which breathes through the Iliad; certainly it has not been imitated. One is barely aware that the poet is a Greek and not a Trojan. The tone of the poem furnishes a direct clue to the origin of its oldest portions; history perhaps will never be able to tell us more. If one believes with Thucydides that eighty years after the fall of Troy, the Achaeans in their turn were conquered, one may ask whether these songs, with their rare references to iron, are not the songs of a conquered people, of whom a few went into exile. Obliged to live and die, "very far from the homeland," like the Greeks who fell before Troy, having lost their cities like the Trojans, they saw their own image both in the conquerors, who had been their fathers, and in the conquered, whose misery was like their own. They could still see the Trojan war over that brief span of years in its true light, unglossed by pride or shame. They could look at it as conquered and as conquerors simultaneously, and so perceive what neither conqueror nor conquered ever saw, for both were blinded. Of course, this is mere fancy; one can see such distant times only in fancy's light.

In any case, this poem is a miracle. Its bitterness is the only justifiable bitterness, for it springs from the subjections of the human spirit to force, that is, in the last analysis, to matter. This subjection is the common lot, although each spirit will bear it differently, in proportion to its own virtue. No one in the Iliad is spared by it, as no one on earth is. No one who succumbs to it is by virtue of this fact regarded with contempt. Whoever, within his own soul and in human relations, escapes the dominion of force is loved but loved sorrowfully because of the threat of destruction that constantly hangs over him.

Such is the spirit of the only true epic the Occident possesses. The Odyssey seems merely a good imitation, now of the Iliad, now of Oriental poems; the Aeneid is an imitation which, however brilliant, is disfigured by frigidity, bombast, and bad taste. The chansons de geste, lacking the sense of equity, could not attain greatness: in the Chanson de Roland, the death of an enemy does not come home to either author or reader in the same way as does the death of Roland.

Attic tragedy, or at any rate the tragedy of Aeschylus and Sophocles, is the true continuation of the epic. The conception of justice enlightens it, without ever directly intervening in it ; here force appears in its coldness and hardness, always attended by effects from whose fatality neither those who use it nor those who suffer it can escape; here the shame of the coerced spirit is neither disguised, nor enveloped in facile pity, nor held up to scorn; here more than one spirit bruised and degraded by misfortune is offered for our admiration. The Gospels are the last marvelous expression of the Greek genius, as the Iliad is the first : here the Greek spirit reveals itself not only in the injunction given mankind to seek above all other goods, "the kingdom and justice of our Heavenly Father," but also in the fact that human suffering is laid bare, and we see it in a being who is at once divine and human. The accounts of the Passion show that a divine spirit, incarnate, is changed by misfortune, trembles before suffering and death, feels itself, in the depths of its agony, to be cut off from man and God.

The sense of human misery gives the Gospels that accent of simplicity that is the mark of the Greek genius, and that endows Greek tragedy and the Iliad with all their value. Certain phrases have a ring strangely reminiscent of the epic, and it is the Trojan lad dispatched to Hades, though he does not wish to go, who comes to mind when Christ says to Peter: "Another shall gird thee and carry thee whither thou wouldst not." This accent cannot be separated from the idea that inspired the Gospels, for the sense of human misery is a pre-condition of justice and love. He who does not realize to what extent shifting fortune and necessity hold in subjection every human spirit, cannot regard as fellow-creatures nor love as he loves himself those whom chance separated from him by an abyss.

The variety of constraints pressing upon man give rise to the illusion of several distinct species that cannot communicate.

Only he who has measured the dominion of force, and knows how not to respect it, is capable of love and justice.

The relations between destiny and the human soul, the extent to which each soul creates its own destiny, the question of what elements in the soul are transformed by merciless necessity as it tailors the soul to fit the requirements of shifting fate, and of what elements can on the other hand be preserved, through the exercise of virtue and through grace - this whole question is fraught with temptations to falsehood, temptations that are positively enhanced by pride, by shame, by hatred, contempt, indifference, by the will to oblivion or to ignorance.

Moreover, nothing is so rare as to see misfortune fairly portrayed; the tendency is either to treat the unfortunate person as though catastrophe were his natural vocation, or to ignore the effects of misfortune on the soul, to assume, that is, that the soul can suffer and remain unmarked by it, can fail, in fact, to be recast in misfortune's image. The Greeks, generally speaking, were endowed with spiritual force that allowed them to avoid self-deception. The rewards of this were great; they discovered how to achieve in all their acts the greatest lucidity, purity, and simplicity. But the spirit that was transmitted from the Iliad to the Gospels by way of the tragic poets never jumped the borders of Greek civilization; once Greece was destroyed, nothing remained of this spirit but pale reflections.

Both the Romans and the Hebrews believed themselves to be exempt from the misery that is the common human lot.

The Romans saw their country as the nation chosen by destiny to be mistress of the world; with the Hebrews, it was their God who exalted them and they retained their superior position just as long as they obeyed Him. Strangers, enemies, conquered peoples, subjects, slaves, were objects of contempt to the Romans; and the Romans had no epics, no tragedies.

In Rome gladiatorial fights took the place of tragedy. With the Hebrews, misfortune was a sure indication of sin and hence a legitimate object of contempt; to them a vanquished enemy was abhorrent to God himself and condemned to expiate all sorts of crimes - this is a view that makes cruelty permissible and indeed indispensable. And no text of the Old Testament strikes a note comparable to the note heard in the Greek epic, unless it be certain parts of the book of Job.

Throughout twenty centuries of Christianity, the Romans and the Hebrews have been admired, read, imitated, both in deed and word; their masterpieces have yielded an appropriate quotation every time anybody had a crime he wanted to justify.

Furthermore, the spirit of the Gospels was not handed down in a pure state from one Christian generation to the next. To undergo suffering and death joyfully was from the very beginning considered a sign of grace in the Christian martyrs - as though grace could do more for a human being than it could for Christ. Those who believe that God himself, once he became man, could not face the harshness of destiny without a long tremor of anguish, should have understood that the only people who can give the impression of having risen to a higher plane, who seem superior to ordinary human misery, are the people who resort to the aids of illusion, exaltation, fanaticism, to conceal the harshness of destiny from their own eyes. The man who does not wear the armor of the lie cannot experience force without being touched by it to the very soul.

Grace can prevent this touch from corrupting him, but it cannot spare him the wound. Having forgotten it too well, Christian tradition can only rarely recover that simplicity that renders so poignant every sentence in the story of the Passion.

On the other hand, the practice of forcible proselytization threw a veil over the effects of force on the souls of those who used it.

In spite of the brief intoxication induced at the time of the Renaissance by the discovery of Greek literature, there has been, during the course of twenty centuries, no revival of the Greek genius. Something of it was seen in Villon, in Shakespeare, Cervantes, Moliere, and - just once - in Racine. The bones of human suffering are exposed in L'Ecole des Femmes and in Phedre, love being the context - a strange century indeed, which took the opposite view from that of the epic period, and would only acknowledge human suffering in the context of love, while it insisted on swathing with glory the effects of force in war and in politics. To the list of writers given above, a few other names might be added. But nothing the peoples of Europe have produced is worth the first known poem that appeared among them. Perhaps they will yet rediscover the epic genius, when they learn that there is no refuge from fate, learn not to admire force, not to hate the enemy, nor to scorn the unfortunate. How soon this will happen is another question.

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Simone Weil The Iliad, or The Poem of Force 1945

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#WomenOnTheVergeOfANervous Breakdown (Spanish: Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios) is a #1988 Spanish black comedy film written and directed by #PedroAlmodóvar, starring Carmen Maura and Antonio Banderas. The plot follows actress Pepa, who, after her lover Iván leaves without explanation, sets out to find the reason, and comes across an array of eccentric characters, including Iván's son from a previous relationship and her best friend Candela, who has been held captive by a Shiite terrorist cell.

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Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown ( Spanish: Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios) is a 1988 Spanish black comedy film written and directed by Pedro Almodóvar, starring Carmen Maura and Antonio Banderas. The plot follows actress Pepa, who, after her lover Iván leaves without explanation, sets out to find the reason, and comes across an array of eccentric characters, including Iván's son from a previous relationship and her best friend Candela, who has been held captive by a Shiite terrorist cell.

The film brought Almodóvar to widespread international attention: it was nominated for the 1988 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, and won five Goya Awards including Best Film and Best Actress in a Leading Role for Maura. It debuted at the 45th International Venice Film Festival and was released on 11 November 1988 in the United States.

Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown received acclaim from critics and audiences alike, and is often considered one of Almodóvar's best films. A stage musical opened on Broadway in 2010, adapted by Jeffrey Lane with songs by David Yazbek.

The actual Spanish title refers to an (attack of the nerves), which is not actually well translated as " nervous breakdown" (). are culture-bound psychological phenomena during which the individual, most often female, displays dramatic outpouring of negative emotions, bodily gestures, occasional falling to the ground, and fainting, often in response to receiving disturbing news or witnessing or participating in an upsetting event. Historically, this condition has been associated with hysteria and more recently in the scientific literature with post-traumatic stress and panic attacks.

Television actress Pepa Marcos is depressed because her boyfriend Iván has left her. They are voice actors who dub foreign films, notably Johnny Guitar with Joan Crawford and Sterling Hayden. Iván's sweet-talking voice is the same one he uses in his work. About to leave on a trip, he has asked Pepa to pack his things in a suitcase he will pick up later.

Pepa returns home to find her answering machine filled with frantic messages from her friend, Candela; she rips out the phone and throws it out the window onto the balcony. Candela arrives; before she can explain her situation, Carlos (Iván's son with Lucía, his previous lover) arrives with his snobbish fiancée Marisa. They are apartment-hunting, and have chosen Pepa's penthouse to tour. Carlos and Pepa figure out each other's relationship to Iván; Pepa wants to know where Iván is, but Carlos does not know. Candela tries to kill herself by jumping off the balcony.

A bored Marisa decides to drink gazpacho from the fridge, unaware that it has been spiked with sleeping pills. Candela explains that she had an affair with an Arab who later visited her with some friends. Unbeknownst to her, they are a Shiite terrorist cell. When the terrorists leave, Candela flees to Pepa's place; she fears that the police are after her. Pepa goes to see a lawyer whom Carlos has recommended.

The lawyer, Paulina, behaves strangely, and has tickets to Stockholm. Candela tells Carlos that the Shiites plan to hijack a flight to Stockholm that evening and divert it to Beirut, where they have a friend who was arrested. Carlos fixes the phone, calls the police, hangs up before (he believes) they can trace the call, and kisses Candela. Pepa returns; Lucía calls and says that she is coming over to confront her about Iván. Carlos says that Lucía has recently been released from a mental hospital. Pepa, tired of Iván, throws his suitcase out (barely missing him); he leaves Pepa a message.

Pepa returns to her apartment and hears Carlos playing Lola Beltrán's "Soy Infeliz". She throws the record out the window, and it hits Paulina. Pepa hears Iván's message, rips out the phone and throws the answering machine out of the window. Lucía arrives with the telephone repairman and the police, who traced Carlos' call. Candela panics, but Carlos serves the spiked gazpacho. The policemen and repairman are knocked out, and Carlos and Candela fall asleep on the sofa; Lucía aims a policeman's gun at Pepa, who figures out that Iván is going to Stockholm with Paulina and their flight is the one the terrorists are planning to hijack. Lucía says that she faked being sane when she heard Iván's voice dubbed on a foreign film. She throws the gazpacho in Pepa's face, and rushes to the airport to kill Iván.

Pepa chases her in a cab with her neighbour, Ana. At the airport, Lucía sees Iván and Paulina at security and aims her gun at them. Pepa thwarts the murder attempt by rolling a luggage cart at Lucía, before fainting. Iván rushes to Pepa's aid and apologises for the way he has been treating her, offering to talk things out with her. Pepa, however, declares it is now too late and leaves. She returns to her home, which is a mess. Pepa sits on her balcony, where Marisa has just awakened. The women chat, sharing a moment of tranquility, and Pepa finally reveals what she wanted to tell Iván: she is pregnant.

The film was the highest-grossing Spanish film of all-time in Spain with a gross of 1.1 billion pesetas, surpassing La vaquilla (1985), equivalent to US$8 million. It was also the most successful Spanish movie in the United States at the time, with a gross of $7.2 million.

On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 92% based on 36 reviews, with an average rating of 7.8/10. The website's critics consensus reads, " Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown finds writer-director Pedro Almodóvar working in a distinctly feminist vein, with richly rewarding results." Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 85 out of 100, based on 12 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".

The film was ranked number 78 on magazine's "The 100 Best Films of World Cinema" list in 2010.

Nils Gollersrud comments that "Almodóvar's signature formula of gaudy, ironic, genre-bending storytelling had achieved a symbiosis of sorts, presenting a more confident and satisfying version of his unique cinematic vision that his earlier, rougher films had not yet achieved".

United States

United Kingdom

Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown has been adapted into a musical by Jeffrey Lane ( book) and David Yazbek (music and lyrics). The production opened on Broadway in previews on 5 October 2010, and officially on 4 November 2010, at the Belasco Theatre. The cast included Patti LuPone, Sherie Rene Scott, Laura Benanti, Brian Stokes Mitchell, Danny Burstein, Mary Beth Peil, Justin Guarini, de'Adre Aziza, and Nikka Graff Lanzarone, with direction by Bartlett Sher.

The production was a limited engagement that was scheduled to end 23 January 2011, but due to low grosses and ticket sales, closed early on 2 January 2011. At the time of closing, the show had played 30 previews and 69 regular performances.

The show later ran in London's West End at the Playhouse Theatre, with television star Tamsin Greig in the leading role.[citation needed ]

In January 2022, it was reported that Apple TV+ will be adapting the film into a television series with Gina Rodriguez set to star and executive produce.

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Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown - Wikipedia

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Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown ( Spanish: Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios) is a 1988 Spanish black comedy film written and directed by Pedro Almodóvar, starring Carmen Maura and Antonio Banderas.

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#TaylorSwift new song #MadWoman reflects upon a sexist trope which has followed women from medieval witch trials, to the #Feminist movement, and into #ContemporaryPolitics.
#EmmaEllingwood

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Written by Emma R. Ellingwood (she/her)
Taylor Swift's new song "Mad Woman" reflects upon a sexist trope which has followed women from medieval witch trials, to the feminist movement, and into contemporary politics.

If you are a woman, chances are that you have your own experience with being labeled "crazy," "hysterical," or perhaps "over-dramatic." While this trope was once linked to having a uterus, it has morphed into an idea which permeates our modern-day society: from sports, to politics, and in our everyday lives.

Like so many issues related to language in media and pop-culture, the trope of the mad or crazy woman is a double-standard. Similarly to how women are called "bossy" while men are called "leaders," women are called "emotional" or "crazy" while men are called "passionate" or "bold."

While this language is indeed sexist, it is also ableist. Although this article focuses more on the misogynistic history behind women's supposed "hysteria," it is also a loaded term in relation to mental illness. It is never okay to call a person crazy or hysterical. However, as I will explain, these terms have inherited a sinister history of misogyny. In fact, hysteria was once a diagnosable condition for women.
The development of the "hysterical woman"
The language of hysteria in relation to women comes from Ancient Greece. In fact, the word hysteria comes from the Greek root word , meaning uterus. In Ancient Greece, up until the development of modern medicine, the common belief was that "hysteria" and its symptoms were related to a defect in the uterus. Thus, given the binary Ancient Greek conceptions of gender identity in relation to one's sex, hysteria was forever linked with womanhood. Today, it is an idea which impacts all women: cisgender and transgender alike.

Helen King, author of Hysteria Beyond Freud, writes extensively about the way in which these antiquated beliefs of the uterus led to generalizations about women's behaviour. A supposed illness of the uterus referred to as hysterike pnix was believed to be the culprit behind the unwanted behaviour of cis-women.

Thus, King argues that the usage of the word "hysteria" or "hysterical" developed into a term used in reference to any woman who does not conform to the societal expectations of womanhood. Due to the origins of the word, and its usage throughout history, hysteria continues to have the same connotations of being diseased, troubled, and psychologically unwell.
Salem witches and mass hysteria
The correlation between calling a contemporary woman "hysterical" or "crazy" and the Salem witch trials may not seem clear upon immediate thought. However, the ideas of hysteria and the burning of women accused of witchcraft are highly linked in history.

According to the Puritanical fear of the unknown in 1690s Massachusetts, those who did not fit into the society's accepted roles were subjugated to wild accusations, interrogations, and burning at the stake in the most extreme cases. The majority of those impacted by the witch trials were women who did not fit into the Puritan's view of what the ideal woman looked like. Older women, enslaved Indigenous woman, and women who were rumoured to have had premarital sex, are some examples of the "types" of women who were accused and tried as witches.

The Salem witch trials are one example of an event viewed as one of mass hysteria. Given what we know about the lingering history of the word hysteria in its relation to womanhood, the fact that witch trials have been blamed on hysteria should not be surprising. These trials were times when women who did not fit into their expected role in society were scapegoated and punished.

Two young girls - Betty Parris and Abigail Williams - are sometimes blamed for inciting the mass hysteria, because they were the ones to accuse a first woman of witchcraft. It is striking that a series of criminal trials deeply tied to Puritanical beliefs about women, witchcraft, and conformity can be blamed on two young girls, rather than on the society at large. This shows how the stereotype of the hysterical woman has permeated our history.
The Victorian "new women"
During the 19th century, powerful and bold women were sometimes called "witch" as a derogatory term - something which continues to happen in our contemporary world - linking them to the violent accusations of witchcraft in the past. On this matter, suffragette Matilda Joslyn Gage, said that the persecution of witches was deeply tied to the history of women. As Madeline Miller writes for The Guardian: "their histories . . . run hand in hand."

As women began to demand equality during the latter half of the 20th century, once again, their sanity was called into question, just as the sanity of the women accused of witchcraft had been. This era saw the depiction of the "New Woman": an independent, free, educated woman who threatened the conventional Western ideals of what a woman ought to be. In our contemporary era, the New Woman trope is held up as a feminist icon by some; however at the time, she was shrouded in controversy, and viewed as crazy and brash.

Elaine Showalter, an American academic and one of the founders of feminist literary criticism, says in a 2017 New York Times article that the politicization of the term "hysterical" finds its origins around 1890, as the suffrage movement began to rise.

At this time of political action by women in much of Europe and North America, their push for legal gender equality and the right to vote was viewed by many men as an attempt at overthrowing the political establishment and status quo. To many men, the New Woman and suffragettes were a threat to their power and dominance in society. Thus, in an attempt to silence the increasingly political voices of women, their opinions were pinned down as "hysteria" and their ideas as "crazy."
Where we stand today
A quick Google search can show you that powerful women in various occupations and walks of life are still called "crazy" or hysterical." From Serena Williams, to Hilary Clinton, to Kamala Harris, powerful women are still referred to using this outdated, misogynistic language.

For Black women, not only are they subject to misogyny, but they are also subject to racist stereotypes in the media, such as that of the " angry Black woman." Similarly, women of colour, LGBTQ+ and transgender women are faced with their own intersectional experiences of womanhood, which make them targets for more stigmatized language than white, cisgender, heterosexual women.

Since Ancient Greece, womanhood has been linked to what has been perceived as a lack of sanity. These beliefs led to women being burned at the stake for not conforming to patriarchal values; for women in the 1890s, their wish for the same rights as men was viewed as part of women's hysterical nature; and it was not until the 1950s that hysteria was no longer considered a mental illness.

Today, women and feminists are referred to as crazy because we wish for equal treatment in society, or overdramatic because we are passionate and outspoken about our opinions. Women in politics are particular targets of these sexist statements.

Powerful women throughout history, for thousands of years, have been viewed as hysterical, over-emotional, dramatic, and crazy. As Taylor Swift says best in "Mad Woman": "every time you call me crazy, I get more crazy, what about that? And when you say I seem angry, I get more angry."

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The "Mad Woman" Trope - from Salem to Politics

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Taylor Swift's new song "Mad Woman" reflects upon a sexist trope which has followed women from medieval witch trials, to the feminist movement, and into contemporary politics. If you are a woman...

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Emerging at a time of intense #Anti-feministBacklash, #FatalAttraction is one of the most #Misogynistic films ever made. But as Paramount releases a TV reboot, we ask whether the #Vengeful, #ScornedWoman at its heart deserves a reappraisal

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Emerging at a time of intense anti-feminist backlash, Fatal Attraction is one of the most misogynistic films ever made. But as Paramount releases a TV reboot, we ask whether the vengeful, scorned woman at its heart deserves a reappraisal

You could summarise the plot of Fatal Attraction as "bitches be crazy". The film, released in 1987, follows a torrid love affair between family man Dan Gallagher (Michael Douglas) and unmarried career woman Alex Forrest (Glenn Close) - when Dan attempts to call things off, the relationship descends into obsession, stalking and animal cruelty (giving rise to the expression "bunny-boiler", which is still used today). It is a suspenseful, well-paced and entertaining erotic thriller, and Close's performance is captivating. As a story about the nightmarish spectre of the single career woman, it is also of the most misogynistic films ever made - the vanguard of a wider cultural backlash against feminism which took hold in the late 1980s.

This week, Paramount has launched a TV reboot of the film, which attempts to right some of its wrongs, shedding light on Alex's perspective and fleshing out her backstory with a litany of explanatory traumas. I'll be honest, I tried watching it last night and found it so boring I couldn't make it past the first episode. And the reviews have not been kind: The Guardian 's Chitra Ramaswamy, for example, dismissed it as "not as sexy as the original, and, on its own terms, just as sexist". It seems like the screenwriters gave it their best shot, but maybe it's just not possible to write a progressive, post-MeToo version of a story that is effectively about a deranged single woman trying her utmost to destroy the nuclear family. Instead, we should look back to the original. Even if it is irredeemably tainted by misogyny, I still think it's possible to defend the character of Alex, a woman who is fucked around by a feckless man who assaults her on multiple occasions and attempts to coerce her into having an abortion. Because she is a fictional character, we can do this without condoning her more outrageous actions (boiling a bunny rabbit is never OK, even if Michael Douglas had it coming).

Let's start by considering the context in which Alex was created. During the late 1980s, there was a widespread preoccupation with the idea that feminism, which had made significant gains in the previous decade, was making women miserable, lonely and unfulfilled. Those who prioritised their careers, in particular, were said to be facing an epidemic of depression, burnout and even infertility, and this shaped the way that such women were portrayed in the media. As Susan Faludi writes in Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women , "Hollywood restated and reinforced the backlash thesis: American women were unhappy because they were too free; their liberation had denied them marriage and motherhood." One 1986 study , which was published in Newsweek and went on to become a cultural phenomenon, found that an unwed, college-educated woman of 30 had a 20 per cent chance of getting married: by the time she reached 40, that figure was said to plummet to 1.3 per cent. It became a popular cliche to suggest that single women over the age of 40 were more likely to experience a terrorist attack than find a husband.

These findings were based on extremely flawed, speculative methodology and were conclusively debunked. Far from there being a 'man drought', as was commonly reported, men vastly outnumbered women in dating services, matchmaking clubs and personal columns, while research showed that single men were faring more poorly than their female counterparts across almost every single metric. But despite being nonsensical, the study helped to create a cultural anxiety around lonely, desperate and embittered single women. This archetype made its way into countless films and TV shows, but Fatal Attraction remains the most notorious example: upon discovering she is pregnant with Dan's child, Alex wails that she is 36 years old and facing her last chance at becoming a mother. One executive of 20th Century Fox even described it as "the psychotic manifestation of the Newsweek marriage study".

Fatal Attraction is, above all, a cautionary tale about the emptiness of life as a professional woman - despite her glittering career in publishing, seductive wardrobe and chic (if bleakly austere) downtown apartment, Alex is miserable to the point of being driven to madness. After she breaks into the family home, she is eventually killed by her mirror image: Dan's saintly, virtuous stay-at-home wife. The Mother triumphs against The Whore and the nuclear family is restored to its position of rightful dominance. The film's wild success (it was the second highest-grossing film of 1987 and nominated for six Oscars) can't separated from the era's prevailing anti-feminist zeitgeist - as a contemporary New Yorker review put it , "The film is about men seeing feminists as witches, and the way the facts are presented here, the woman is a witch." As such, the reaction to Alex's death bordered on ecstatic: cinema employees reported that men would scream things like " kill the bitch ", "punch the bitch's face in", and "kick her ass", while the women in the audience sat there in silence. The scene I find most heartbreaking comes after Alex buys Dan tickets to the opera and he ghosts her to go bowling with his oafish friends: she's sitting on the floor in the dark, listening to Madame Butterfly with a crestfallen expression and switching a light on and off (we've all been there). Close's performance imbues this moment with a sense of real pathos - but upon its release, men in the audience often just laughed. The small scraps of humanity afforded to Alex were met with ridicule.

It's precisely because the studio pandered to and anticipated these impulses that the film ended up the way it did. The script was adapted from a short film, Diversion , by English screenwriter James Dearder, and its earlier iterations were far more subtle: it was not about a 'crazy' woman but, in Dearden's words, "a moral tale about a man who transgresses and pays the penalty". Prior to filming, Close consulted with psychologists in order to give the character a sense of veracity; she saw Alex as being flawed but worthy of empathy. But studio executives were concerned that audiences would struggle to sympathise with a man who cheats on his wife, and Michael Douglas refused to play a "weak, unheroic character". So, with each successive rewrite, Dan became more likeable and Alex became more poisonous. It didn't help matters that both Douglas and the film's director, Adrian Lyne, were fond of publicly railing against feminism (Douglas announced he was "sick" of feminists and their "unreasonable demands"; Lyne suggested that women could never be fulfilled without getting married and having children).

The film originally ended with Alex killing herself and Dan being wrongfully arrested for her murder, but test audiences found this unsatisfying - suicide wasn't a severe enough punishment. Close said in a recent interview with People magazine, "The audience wanted to believe that that family might be able to survive, so they got their catharsis by shedding my blood." When the studio decided to change the ending and turn Alex into a murderous psychopath, Close was so unhappy that she almost refused to reshoot the final scenes. Years later, Dearden said that persuading her to do this was one of his most "shame-inducing recollections".

So it's clear that a more nuanced version of the film could have existed, and that the process of Alex becoming a monster was a calculated one, driven by two apparently sexist men. Close has said she would love to see the story told again from Alex's point of view, which is what the new season is trying to do. If it had been done well, maybe Alex could have earned her place in the ironically-valorised, 'she had a point' canon of anti-heroines. But in the wake of the Amber Heard trial, when women are still being smeared as 'crazy' to undermine their credibility in the face of abuse, a reboot of Fatal Attraction feels like the last thing the culture needs. Would a gender-swapped version have been better? Maybe, but men stalking women who reject them is in reality so commonplace that it would be an unremarkable, even banal premise for a film. The vast majority of stalking victims are women, one in five of whom experience it at some point in their lives. Fatal Attraction is a projection of male violence - what if feminism made women so crazy and twisted that they started behaving like us? Instead of trying to redress its failings, we should accept it for what it is: an entertaining but flawed film which emerged at a particularly ugly time.

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Why it's time to forgive the villain in Fatal Attraction

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Emerging at a time of intense anti-feminist backlash, Fatal Attraction is one of the most misogynistic films ever made. But as Paramount releases a TV reboot, we ask whether the vengeful, scorned woman at its heart deserves a reappraisal

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Once upon a time, women showing their #anger was frowned upon. But the #GenderAngerGap is widening, and women’s wrath is on the rise, about everything from police brutality to #DomesticInequality
#GabyHinsliff

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here is a jar of severed heads sitting on the windowsill of Gemma Whiddett's waiting room. China heads, to be precise, that customers have gleefully smashed from the shoulders of figurines she finds in charity shops. She drops the latest head into the jar, with a satisfying clink: all ready for the next session.

Whiddett manages Rage Rooms in Norwich, where customers can make an appointment to smash up heaps of unwanted crockery, small electrical appliances and miscellaneous jumble, using scaffolding poles. The concept first caught on in Japan as a way of working off stress, before spreading across the US and Europe, and is promoted as a fun, liberating means of venting everyday frustrations. And in Norwich around two-thirds of the customers are women.

"We had a group of little old ladies come in and I did wonder if they knew what they'd booked. But they absolutely got stuck in," says Whiddett, a cheerful 40-year-old who reckons the most satisfying smashables are breadmakers ("They last for ages"). They get a lot of primary school teachers, she says, but this afternoon's booking is for three impeccably mannered teenagers.

Maddie's parents have driven her up from Suffolk for a belated 18th birthday celebration with friends Annabel and Kitty. The girls, fresh from trawling Norwich's vintage clothes shops, explain that they've never done anything like this before. But they all know the episode of the Netflix series Sex Education where a bunch of teenage girls cathartically smash cars in a scrapyard, and they've all seen rage room videos on TikTok, where they're often pitched as the antidote to relationship angst. "Block his number and smash up a printer instead," as TikToker @vickaboox urges her almost 800,000 followers.

Seventeen-year-old Annabel, who recently did her A-level mocks, admits being "a bit nervous" as they're ushered off to don protective boiler suits, boots and masks. Minutes later, she is hurling plates at the wall and pulverising a toaster as everyone else watches on camera in the waiting room. "It feels weird at first because you know everyone's watching you, but once you get into it, it's great," she enthuses as Whiddett sweeps up the remnants. Later, the rubble will be carefully sorted for recycling.

Once upon a time, women showing anger in public might have been deemed unladylike, even shameful. Yet ours is increasingly an age of rage. Last December, the BBC crunched data from the Gallup World Poll - an annual snapshot of emotional reactions across 100 countries - and found that while both sexes reported similar anger and stress levels in 2012, women's were on average six points higher than men's by 2022. The gap widened significantly during the pandemic.

Female wrath can be a powerful catalyst for change, channelled into movements such as #MeToo, the protests against sexual violence in India and Pakistan, and the recent Iranian women's uprising against the regime's "morality police". But not all anger is so productive. It's harder to know what to do with the blind fury that often accompanies grief, hot menopausal rage, or the everyday stresses of work and parenting.

Smashing crockery, punching pillows or communal screaming - as practised by a group of Massachusetts mothers, whose film of themselves howling across an empty football field went viral last year - may feel cathartic. But it doesn't solve the root causes of stress, and some psychologists question whether hitting things might strengthen the association between anger and aggression for some people. Kevin Bennett, professor of psychology at Pennsylvania State University, has argued that "if you have aggressive tendencies to begin with, going to a rage room seems counterproductive".

But in Norwich, Whiddett maintains she has never had to stop a customer getting too overheated; they get lots of hen dos, and lately she's noticed more people using their visit to process emotions. "Perhaps they've recently gone through a breakup or they're grieving. We've had a lot of people who have lost someone close to them." They regularly see NHS and "blue light" workers, professions that have had a particularly difficult time during the pandemic, and sometimes, she says, it can be oddly moving. "Some people will come out and cry. Some will come out hysterically laughing. Some get really shaky because it's a rush of adrenaline. It's a total release." Is that what many women crave?

n casual conversation with Lia, a good-humoured 50-year-old of British and Ghanaian heritage, you might never guess she was angry about anything. But she has a private list of things that infuriate her, from racism to lockdown. When the order came in March 2020 to stay at home, one of her three adult daughters was pregnant. Lia was furious at being separated from her new grandchild and her elderly mother. "To me, it felt really dangerous telling people what to do for the greater good. The overwhelming majority of people I knew were very happy to go along with that narrative. It was like, 'We're doing as we're told - if you don't, you're selfish.' That made me so angry," she says. "As an intelligent woman, I didn't feel I needed a man telling me how to live my life and run my family. I thought it should be down to individual families to assess the risk."

In retrospect, she suspects that lockdown triggered memories of growing up as a teenager, resenting the police. "I felt very angry with authority then. When I became a mum I tucked all that way." The murder of George Floyd by a Minnesota police officer in May 2020, sparking Black Lives Matter protests worldwide, only heightened those feelings. "My daughters were all sending messages and videos, and talking about racism. I knew they'd experienced racism at school, but they were suddenly talking about the pressure to look a certain way, to straighten their hair," Lia recalls. Her job involves providing equalities training and she was swamped with emails from people anxious to respond to Black Lives Matter. "Some were wanting me to work for free - 'Can you just look at this?' - some just saying, 'I hope I never did anything to upset you.' I'd been doing this work for 20 years and these people never once reached out to me before."

But what brought the strands of Lia's anger together was the murder of 33-year-old Sarah Everard by a serving police officer in March 2021, and the heavy-handed policing of a vigil for her. Again and again when researching this piece, I hear women identify that as a catalyst that unlocked anger about how men had treated them in the past.

Jess, an occupational therapist from London who mainly treats women in their 20s and early 30s, says that after Everard's death she noticed an increase in the number of clients raging at everyday misogyny, whatever their original reason for seeking help. "Young women were coming to me saying, 'I can't go for a run because this has happened. I get these comments on the street.' It was like the scab had been knocked off and everyone was bleeding," she recalls. She's also noticed a broader backlash at feeling lied to, strung along or abused by men on dating apps. "During lockdown there seemed to be this boom in horrible behaviour - just using women for lockdown relationships, then binning them off afterwards," she says. "There's a lot of anger, but where does it go? Because men don't want to hear it."

Meanwhile, Lia remembers spending the Mother's Day after Everard's death furious. "It really hit me for the first time: I am black, I am a woman - the duality of that, the misogynoir. It's good that these things have a lot of media attention; it opened people's eyes. But it seemed to really take over - the feelings of anger and not knowing what to do with them."

If we tell girls to be quiet, not to shout loudly, not take risks, we're telling them that's what we expect from them

Lia says that among her left-leaning friends she can open up about that now. But there are still things she feels she can't raise because they contradict the "acceptable" left view. On the subject of lockdowns, she says: "I still don't feel safe to say what I really think online, and it's also like that with the whole transgender conversation. I would never say to my female friends what I really think - which is not that I want to discriminate against anyone, far from it, but I do want to see women's rights kept safe." Her frustration with feeling silenced or scolded is widely echoed by gender-critical women on the left, with the Labour MP (and domestic violence survivor) Rosie Duffield saying it felt like being in an "abusive relationship" with her party. Yet there is arguably female anger on both sides of this issue, with YouGov polling last year showing women more supportive overall than men of trans rights.

Lia follows arguments on social media but holds back from commenting publicly. In real life, too, she avoids confrontation, wary of being stereotyped as an "angry black woman", especially in the very white rural area where she lives. "I try to be nice, because they may never have met a black person before." Towards the end of our conversation she confides: "I'm scared of expressing my feelings, so I can't get them out of me." She has previously experienced anxiety attacks, and in lockdown sometimes felt depressed.

Anger, as John Lydon sang, is an energy. Or, put more scientifically, it serves an important biological and social purpose. Fear of angering our peers makes humans follow social norms - perceived injustice or rule-breaking is a classic trigger for anger - and rage also primes us physically to counter threats. It makes hearts beat faster, blood sugar levels rise, breathing quicken and senses sharpen. But preparing for fight or flight isn't much help when the trigger is a traffic jam or Twitter spat, and unnecessarily raising your blood pressure may have downsides. Chronic anger and stress are linked to increased risk of heart disease and stroke, as well as depression and self-harm (the latter are more commonly reported by women). Anger is a tool most of us could benefit from learning to use better, according to Boiling Point, a landmark 2008 report from the Mental Health Foundation, and doing so would help people "achieve goals, solve problems and nurture social relationships" as well as improve mental and physical health.

Anger is surprisingly little studied compared with sadness or fear, says the foundation's head of applied learning, David Crepaz-Keay, perhaps because it doesn't have a lucrative market in treatments. But research suggests that men typically project rage outwards while women are prone to turning theirs in against themselves. "One of the reasons why you see higher levels of reported self-harm in women than men, if you control for other things, is that women have internalised it and men have gone out fighting," he explains. "That is a form of self-harm, too, but it's not pathologised as such." His hunch, however, is that younger generations are "less gendered" about emotions, accepting more readily that men can be sad or women boiling mad.

hen Pragya Agarwal was growing up in India, she remembers repeatedly being told she was too "emotional". That sparked a lifelong curiosity for the behavioural scientist, who is visiting professor of inequities and social justice at Loughborough University, and author of Hysterical: Exploding the Myth of Gendered Emotions. "I always wondered about those boundaries on emotional expression," she says cheerily over Zoom from Ireland, where she's researching another book. "When do you become 'too angry' or 'too sensitive'? I was always told, 'Girls aren't angry' or asked, 'How will you ever get married?'"

In fact, she says, there's little evidence of biological differences in men's and women's capacity for anger. But anger often involves confronting or demanding something from others, which makes it a "high status" emotion associated with power. Lower-status individuals, who risk being punished for asserting themselves, learn to mask it. Research shows that girls are encouraged to regulate their emotions from babyhood, she says. "It's the implicit and explicit messages parents give: you shouldn't shout loudly in a supermarket or use your outside voice," she says. "But if you tell girls to be quiet, or reward them for being quiet, tell them not to shout loudly, not to take risks, we're telling them that that's what we expect from them.

"So women internalise that anger, and it's expressed in terms of despair or sadness. We learn that crying is seen more sympathetically." That's especially true, she says, for women of colour. When she first moved to Britain more than two decades ago as a student, Agarwal remembers feeling that she "needed to be a 'good person' to fit in" and not to create a fuss.

Now, she tries not to rebuke her six-year-old twin daughters for getting angry, encouraging them instead to reflect on why they feel that way. "What I'm trying to do is not to judge the emotion but say, 'Why are you feeling angry at the moment? Do you want to change the situation or do you want to express it in the right way - how can you do that without hurting yourselves or anybody else?'" Would a fairer society, in which women felt freer to let rip, inevitably be an angrier one? Not quite, she says:"I suppose an equitable society would be one where emotions are not gendered or generally labelled, but where all of us can learn to navigate different emotional thresholds without being judged or penalised for it."

Gallup's female and male anger scores first began diverging in 2017, the year the American actor Alyssa Milano tweeted: "If you've been sexually harassed or assaulted write 'me too' as a reply to this tweet." The outpouring of experiences that followed exemplifies the power of what Agarwal calls "collective anger" in driving change. In mass social media, with its global reach and algorithmic preference for highly emotive content, female anger found the perfect vehicle to spread virally. But #MeToo also perhaps reflected a growing sense, after Donald Trump won the 2016 US presidential election despite being caught boasting about "grabbing" women, that playing nicely wasn't working. Hillary Clinton had made herself stay calm and measured when debating Trump, to avoid being called shrill or emotional, and much good it did her. The unashamed anger of #MeToo, however, seemingly got results. In her 2018 bestseller Rage Becomes Her, the American activist Soraya Chemaly argued that the shaming of female anger had silenced too many women for too long; a Ted talk she gave that year arguing that anger could not remain "the moral property of boys and men" has been viewed almost 2.5m times. That autumn, when the US senator Elizabeth Warren was branded overly aggressive while running for the Democrat presidential nomination, she embraced it. "Over and over we are told women are not allowed to be angry," she wrote. "It makes us unattractiveto powerful men who want us to be quiet." She lost to a man, but her words resonated, particularly with younger women.

If you lift the lid you end up with this well of rage. Women are afraid to express it but the relief when you do is huge

To generation Z, it is anger that increasingly looks authentic, while suppressing it is deemed, at best, bad for mental health and, at worst, complicit with injustice. Unlike their mothers, young women have grown up seeing anger portrayed as empowering in popular culture: Beyoncé joyously smashing car windows with a baseball bat in the 2016 video of Hold Upor the Disney comedy She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, which reinvents the angry green monster as a hotshot female lawyer enraged by mansplaining. Naomi Alderman's sci-fi novel The Power, about women discovering the ability to electrocute people at will, has been adapted for an Amazon Prime series this month, and even the #anger on Instagram is full of inspirational quotes about "honoring" rage because "if your anger isn't flowing out of your body, it's probably turned inward on to yourself".Butfor a generation that grew up watching angry women portrayed on screen as bunny boilers, letting it flow may take rather more practice.

n a grey afternoon in January, a small group of women gathers outside the anonymous black door of a Georgian townhouse in Marylebone, central London. Ranging from their mid-20s to early 60s, they have been drawn together by word of mouth or Instagram messages. Having started out as strangers, what they are about to do is curiously intimate. The only clue to what connects them is the discreet white badges some wear stamped with the words Anger Ambassador.

This is only the second meeting of the Women Are Mad (Wam) group, which seeks to normalise conversations about anger. It was brought together by Jennifer Cox, a psychotherapist. She insists this isn't therapy, even though the conversations do go deeper than venting to friends over a glass of wine. "Therapy is about releasing the pressure so you can carry on and feel, 'Well, I'm not the only one,'" she explains, offering shortbread biscuits baked by a Wam member in the shape of the group's initials. "Whereas this group is more about sitting with the pain of this and getting into the sources of the anger."

She created the group and its @WomenAreMad Instagram rallying point after realising how often she saw patients in her private clinic with symptoms ranging from anxiety, depression and eating disorders to migraine and eczema, who turned out to be furious and whose conditions seemingly improved after exploring that anger. "If you lift the lid, you very quickly end up with this kind of well of rage. And women are very frightened of expressing it or calling it anger, but the relief when you do is huge." Could more women benefit, she wondered, from that relief? When she opened the group's first meeting by asking what made them angry, answers varied from the brutal crushing of Iran's anti-hijab protests to matters more domestic.

Jenny Berglund, a freelance executive coach, says that since joining she has become more conscious of infuriating workplace incidents she might previously have brushed off - citing a colleague who declared that Sarah Everard "should have learned self-defence". But expressing anger in professional settings is difficult, she points out. "Work is a place where anger is taboo. You don't want to be Dominic Raab-ing it all over the place and shouting at people."

When Cox mentions women being encouraged to self-soothe with meditation and yoga rather than explore what is actually bothering them, the group nods vigorously. "Yoga makes me angry," groans Juliet Cowan, 49, an actor and single mother of three who prefers writing as an outlet. The standup show she's performing at London's Vault festival this month, covering midlife challenges, from menopause and parenting teenagers to her divorce, is called Fuck Off and Leave Me Alone. Yet even this group struggles with the idea that expressing anger makes you a witch, a nag, a "crazy bitch". What do they think would happen if women everywhere were truly honest about why they are furious? "I think most of us would feel in physical danger," Cowan says. "You would be pariahs in the community," Cox agrees. "You wouldn't have any sex ever again," says Olivia Lee, 43, a comedy writer whose work regularly explores maternal anger and whose personal flashpoint is invisible domestic load (her children are seven and two).

"I feel that what's happening now is we're working, we're paying half the bills - why are we still doing so much more at home? It's almost like feminism has got us to that point and it's stalled. We need to make the balance fairer so we can work and not go mad, not be furious and overwhelmed." Her husband constantly volunteers to help, she says, but she still carries the mental list of everything that needs doing. "I'm like, 'That's the whole problem - I need everything that's in my head to be in your head.' That for me would be equality." She can't remember feeling so angry five years ago, so what changed? "I thought I had it sorted: we both work, we both have good careers, this is equal. And then you have kids, and you realise that it's not." A 1996 study from the US that Agarwal unearthed for her book found anger levels increased with every child added to a household, more so for mothers than fathers.

he idea that small children can occasionally drive you mad is not new. Sixty years ago in her feminist classic The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan described frustrated suburban housewives swallowing tranquillisers like cough sweets to numb their feelings. But parenting through lockdown brought it alive again, with a government study of mental health under Covid finding women more likely than men to have significantly adapted their lives to accommodate childcare and housework, linking this to higher levels of psychological distress.

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Anna Mathur's children were five, three and one when lockdown began, and she was in the middle of trying to write a book. She vividly recalls "a bubbling sense of rage" rising up. "Something would fall out of the cupboard and I'd find myself wanting to scream and shout and throw things," she says. Everyone's patience snaps occasionally, she reasoned, but this felt different. "That's where the shame comes in - am I just a bad person, have I changed? The archetype of motherhood is that patient, loving maternal figure, and I was feeling more like I wanted to run away from my kids." When Mathur, a trained psychotherapist, started discussing anger on her website and her podcast The Therapy Edit, responses flooded in from women saying they'd never been on such a short fuse.

Even in normal times, she points out, the pressure on mothers can be explosive. "I remember talking about self-care once and encouraging mothers to think of what tiny little acts you can put in the day that you could devote just to yourself, and people were saying things like 'Brush my teeth' or 'Have a shower'. Those are basic fundamental acts of self-respect. Even people in prison get those." While her book The Little Book of Calm for New Mums offers advice for managing stress, she says women shouldn't be shamed for feeling it in the first place. "If your boss was screaming in your face, you'd walk out. Just because it's your child doing it doesn't mean you're not going to have a physiological reaction."

But while maternal rage is increasingly acknowledged, the frustrations of daughters in caring roles is more taboo. When Nasreen's widowed elderly father had a heart attack in 2007, she was living in America, where she had built a career she loved. Nonetheless, she dropped everything to return to London and nurse him.

"I had a life where I was able to do things that I probably would never have done here, but also just being able to be me," she says over the phone. "Then suddenly I was at home looking after him. There was anger then, definitely."

Her father recovered from heart surgery, but then broke his hip, and a stroke has left him unable to speak. A decade and a half later, Nasreen, 63, is still his live-in carer. She hasn't had a holiday for six years and, although she pays care workers so that she can hold down a job working with children with disabilities, looking after her father consumes almost all her free time.

He was always a difficult man, she says, and illness has made him very frustrated. "I have lost it with him a few times, and a few home truths have come out. But all that stress - if I kept it in, it would probably have repercussions. I try not to lose my temper with him, I try to walk away, I try to use strategies we use at work. But I don't feel nice about it."

A Carers UK spokesperson says it's "understandable to feel frustrated" looking after a loved one, advising people to set aside time for themselves, not bottle up feelings and join its online meetups, or see their GP if they're worried about their own mental health.

For mothers at the end of their tether, Mathur suggests burning off stress with exercise and apologising in an age-appropriate way to children if you do shout. If you really feel yourself losing it, she says, "literally step away" for a moment; take deep breaths, or focus on something outside the window. "Another little thing is just to look at their eyelashes or their little hands. Look at your teenager and think, 'I remember when you were a baby.' Try to re-engage with that maternal feeling. They're just a child trying to negotiate the world and you're a grownup."

But what if you get so angry that deep breaths aren't enough?

Three years ago, psychotherapist Julia Pegg was running a men-only anger management programme for the mental health charity Mind in Sheffield when she found herself increasingly fielding inquiries about places for women. Her first female-only course filled up so quickly that Sheffield Mind now runs several a year, with a waiting list. Some people seek help voluntarily, but others are referred by police, probation officers and social workers, including after incidents of domestic violence. "Studies show that a lot of women's anger is more directed towards loved ones - their partner, the kids," Pegg says over Zoom from Sheffield with her colleague Dovile Vilkeviciute, who recently took over running the course. "Historically, public displays of anger aren't something we see as often in women."

The course covers deeper drivers of rage, including childhood experiences, and aims not to eliminate anger but to help clients channel itso that it doesn't emerge as aggression. Techniques involve slowing down and interrupting the thought process leading to rage, so that you can engage more rational thinking instead. "It's a skill - it takes practice," Pegg says.

Clues that it might be time to consider an anger management course include loved ones "starting to walk on eggshells" around you, Vilkeviciute says. Another red flag is stewing over things: are you still thinking about someone who cut you up in traffic last week? Passive-aggressive behaviour, Pegg says, is still a form of anger: "People say, 'At home if somebody upsets me I will give them the silent treatment' - is that something that lasts for days and days? How often are you losing it - every other day or once a month?"

lex was 29 when she realised she needed help controlling her temper. She had always been fiery, she explains over the phone, lashing out verbally if she felt rejected or criticised. "I just thought, 'That's how I am and if people are too sensitive to deal with it, that's their problem.'" She rowed with her landlord, walked away from relationships and was "making enemies" at work. The final straw, she says, was getting into a screaming argument with a stranger in Tesco. "I knew it wasn't a normal reaction to somebody being a bit rude to me in the milk aisle."

Looking for help, in 2020 she stumbled across the Mind course. With sessions shifted online due to Covid restrictions, Alex initially kept her camera off, nervous about introducing herself to strangers as a "crazy angry person". She cried at times, reflecting on what anger had cost her in the past: "You might say or do something that's really bad or hurtful, and someone else just doesn't want to put up with it, or with you ... It's really painful."

But anger was never demonised on the course, she says, which felt like a "very safe space". She still uses the techniques she was taught, including identifying the early sensations of anger building up and walking away or asking to get back to the person later. Today, Alex sees anger in a more positive light. "I used to see it as: 'This is what protects me and it makes me scary and brave.' Now I definitely still really value anger, but I see it more as: 'How do I want to use it?'

"We would joke about it on the course - will we ever be Zen and completely at peace? No. But I definitely think anger is a real motivating force. I want to use it for passion projects, for drive and for being brave." But if control is what matters most to Alex, for many women the magic is in sweet release. Back in Norwich, Whiddett says she thinks that smashing stuff takes people back to being kids again, the last time they felt this free to let loose. She has cleared the last shards of Annabel's session and resets the room for Maddie, who emerges exhilarated after breaking up a hairdryer. But it's Kitty, the quietest of the three, who seems to find her turn most cathartic. "It was just feeling like everything's coming out," she says. "I feel a lot lighter." And, with that, the girls gather their shopping, thank everyone politely and exit into the unexpectedly warm February sunshine.
Some names have been changed.
@WomenAreMad is planning a Scream on the Green on 26 March in London.

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'Lift the lid, and there's a well of rage': why women are mad as hell (and not afraid to show it)

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Once upon a time, women showing their anger was frowned upon. But the gender anger gap is widening, and women's wrath is on the rise, about everything from police brutality to domestic inequality

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#SukanyaShaji We need more #AngryWomen in fiction, because fiction is an essential tool in making the political feel personal.

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I remember reading about the concept of private histories, quite recently. History that is documented often pertains to external events - happenings in public spaces. The wisdom, wealth of experience and private agonies that transpire within our interior lives remain undocumented other than in our memories. Since public spaces have predominantly been occupied by men, the available documented histories that we have, are also largely about male lives. The histories of women who live and operate chiefly within intimate spaces are thereby private, save a few scattered efforts. Though women are very active in the oral culture they remain in the background when it comes to documenting their thoughts.

Turkish-British writer Elif Shafak calls women "transmitters of memory" while addressing her conversations with her grandmother and mother, thereby bringing out the closed nature of the inner worlds of women. Indian author Kamala Das in her memoir about growing up in Malabar (Kerala) mentions at length about the many tips for survival, nourishment and self-care that are passed down from women to women through generations within their private interactions.

The many original thoughts and voices of women are consequentially unavailable in their original forms for the world to know other than through other women who carry them in their hearts. This is largely because women's dialogues always have repercussions. They always feel conscious of the image that may befall them if they open up about their lives. This has held women back from being honest in documenting their lives for the longest time. Therefore, it is fair to say that the bulk of the representations that we have about the inner worlds of women are appropriated voices and imaginative constructions from the male perspective.

In fiction, this is particularly true because for the longest time, the ratio of female authors to that of male authors has been considerably low. Early women writers often adopted male pen names to put their thoughts in the public domain without judgment. The prototypes of women we have been encountering through fiction are male versions of femininity that are removed from the original. Even if they are inspired by real women, we have no documented histories of the internal lives of women to compare and contrast.

This is also perhaps why we see very few angry women in fiction, because the male imagination has seldom been besotted with angry women, if not for the possibility of taming them at some point in the narrative. This takes away the focus from the deep-rooted, socio-political triggers of female rage, depriving it of its legitimate expression and human truth. This also in turn influences the female psyche at large, creating a behavioural mould for readers to follow. It continues, cyclically.

However, with more and more female authors being published and read, there has been a significant change in the nature of the representation of female rage in fiction. Slowly and steadily, women are able to dismantle the male narrative of female fury. The initial character arcs of women created by women were also not entirely free from the patriarchal idea of suppressive angst. Women who supress their agonies and ultimately vanish from existence without making much noise like Esther Greenwood in Sylvia Plath's Bell Jar, show us that female rage was perhaps not valid in the author's psyche itself. Women were expected to be modest in their expressions in life as well as fiction.

The initial character arcs of women created by women were also not entirely free from the patriarchal idea of suppressive angst. Women who supress their agonies and ultimately vanish from existence without making much noise like Esther Greenwood in Sylvia Plath's Bell Jar, show us that female rage was perhaps not valid in the author's psyche itself.

Today, the context has changed. Our political conscience has become more accommodating of women and their original voices. Female rage is no more subtle or inconvenient. Women writing about women are raw, real and relatable. The private worlds of women are being put out for us to take stock of by female authors who understand that the anger of a woman is not to be suppressed and that, while we hail the wrath of men as transformative, heroic and even natural, women too are entitled to being open about their emotions.

Hot Milk by Deborah Levy and Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn are two recent examples of books authored by women that present angry women protagonists who stand closer to the emotional truths of womanhood. Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2016, Hot Milk is the story of an anthropology student Sophia and her aging, paralysed, wheel-chair user mother Rose. The duo travel to a Spanish clinic seeking medical treatment for Rose's paralysis. Gone Girl on the other hand, is the story of a woman's seething revenge towards her failing matrimony. Both these novels subvert the popular idea of female rage. They explore the layered, cultural, gendered triggers of untapped, unexpressed female anger in eye-opening ways.

The Negation of Glory in Sacrifice

A striking, radical similarity in both these narratives is the absence of the glorification of sacrifice. It is a common practice to glorify the ability of women to take on more than they can and project it as their strength or establish it as their inherent capacity for nurture. Deborah breaks that narrative and weaves a nuanced plot about the situational necessities of women that force them to take on more than they can. The mother-daughter relationship is as dysfunctional as it comes. Rose's disability is not explained in the book. Sophie often feels that it is Rose's pretense to make sure Sophie is forever bound to her.

Rose on the other hand, is unwilling to acknowledge the pauses she creates in her daughter's life and seems almost vengeful in her dependency on Sophie. Neither characters assign unnecessary piety to their relationship and are blunt about their inconveniences. The chapter where Sophie imagines leaving her mother in her wheel chair in the middle of the road, is a stark contrast to the typical, all enduring, male narrative of maternal love and its universality.

Gillian Flynn skillfully uses her protagonist Amy's anger to critique matrimony and its structural hostility towards women. Unlike most other male narratives where the woman's grace and integrity of character rest in her silent exit from the unfaithful man's life, Flynn's protagonist is chillingly human. She does not internalise her anger, or try to be the "the better, bigger person" at the cost of her sanity like most women are expected to. Her rage is rooted in the grave emotional absence of her spouse and its slow, lethal erosion of her self-esteem. It is perhaps for the first time that we are exposed to the inner workings of an emotionally abandoned woman's escalating anger and corrosive grief. She decides to avenge herself violently.

Though Flynn does not entirely validate criminality, what she offers is an insight into the human vulnerability of a woman who is driven to her edge. While it is easy for us to accept the self-sabotaging and violence of male protagonists in similar circumstances, a woman like Amy is new and therefore perhaps difficult to digest. But that is definitely on us; our conditioning as readers and individuals who live in a world that offers men more privilege to vent and take their own emotional course on things.

Sacrifice is not presented as something inherent to women, in either of these novels, as against the bulk of literature that treat sacrifice as a woman's ultimate destiny. Both the novels brim with the rousing frustrations of women who refuse to water down their rage for social acceptance.

Also read: Sharp Objects Review: Imperfect Women And Female Rage

Male Absence as a Trigger for Female Rage

While most other novels place a killer like Amy, Flynn's protagonist in unilateral, villainous light, Flynn simultaneously presents her as a victim of the emotional violence of matrimony. Amy refers to herself as "easy cargo that can be jettisoned" in her marriage. Her monologue about the "cool girl" stereotype is radical, relatable and transformative. She says that men often prefer 'cool girls', girls who listen to them without question, admire and facilitate their illusion of grandeur about themselves, laugh at their jokes and are available for intercourse when they so desire. When Amy's husband Nick finds a younger lover, Amy decides to go to great lengths to account for her emotional abandonment. She refuses to let Nick have it all, after escalating her insecurities with his infidelity and indifference towards her mind and body.

Flynn tells women that being who a man wants them to be in order to receive love, is carefully constructed nonsense. She brings out the grey shades of a woman's rage, apathy and self-destruction that is deep rooted in patriarchal triggers. Amy says that once Nick is punished, she will fill her pockets with stones and jump into a river to float away like most other "inconvenient" women. This reminds us of Virginia Woolf's death. The use of the word "inconvenient" is indicative of Flynn's awareness about the typical male slotting into which women and their fury fall.

Deborah Levy adequately juxtaposes her plot with poetic metaphors of the sea in which Sophie swims despite the stings of the Medusas that hurt her and burn for days, to signify the lasting scars of male abandonment in women's lives. The mother and daughter are characters who derive their frustrations from the inescapable imbalances in social, moral and political norms for women. Men, their absence and lack of emotional sensitivity as a predominant trigger for female rage is very present throughout the plot. Sophie's complex dynamic with her father and his conspicuous absence from Rose's life is very telling of the repercussions of male absence on women.

The prosecution of men for their lack of emotional accountability is a relevant thread that both these novels explore. Women are taught to depend on the men in their lives from early on and when they are faced with its lack thereof, it confuses them. This combined with the already existing pressure of confirming to gender roles, marriage, and social acceptability put women in a place of absolute emotional isolation and struggle for self worth. A lot of it manifests as passive aggressive outbursts of constant irritability. This is a theme that is often unique to female writing because it comes from a space of experience and is therefore strikingly original.

Both Deborah Levy and Gillian Flynn treat female rage as a natural consequence of micro aggressions, inequalities and dominant male privilege. They break the popular idea that a woman's anger should be private and mellowed, a condition that men seldom have to follow. In their writing, female fury finds original expression. It is not on women to be graceful all the time, or to not make a scene to be respected and loved. We need more angry women in fiction, because fiction is an essential tool in making the political feel personal. Female rage is a cumulative outcome of generations of suppression and it has to be understood with a deeper sense of complexity.

Also read: Book Review: Rage Becomes Her: The Power Of Women's Anger By...

This not only normalises the fact that women, like everyone else are entitled to raise their voices and vent their anger, but also helps to address the social, economic and gendered triggers of female rage.

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We Need More Angry Women In Fiction: 'Female' Rage And Her Inner Worlds

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We need more angry women in fiction, because fiction is an essential tool in making the political feel personal in our society.

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The Functions of #FemaleRage

On the 50th anniversary of the #RoeVWade ruling, #MeganNolan analyses how #Women'sAnger has been fetishized in film and literature

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Women#Rage#Minorities

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nger is typically defined as a strong feeling of displeasure, hostility or aggression. Mainly, we think of it in terms of individual feelings, and we associate those feelings with isolating behaviours that cause discomfort or fear in ourselves or in others.

Anger is, however, also a critically useful and positive emotion - one that is, contrary to being isolating, deeply social and socially constructed. Anger warns us, as humans, that something is wrong and needs to change. Anger is the human response to being threatened with indignity, physical harm, humiliation and unfairness. Anger drives us to demand accountability, a powerful force for political good. As such, it is often what drives us to form creative, joyous and politically vibrant communities.

So, which one is it? The answer depends, like most things, on context and on who you are in relation to the people around you. How we feel about feelings and respond to them in others depends on the way that our culture distributes emotion, often in relation to status and identity.

At the earliest stages of childhood socialisation, anger becomes firmly associated with masculinity and manhood. Studies show that by the time most children are toddlers they already associate angry expressions with male faces. "Softer" emotions, such as empathy, fear and sadness, are less emphasised and sometimes actively discouraged in boys. These are seen, by many, as feminising weaknesses, whereas anger is considered a marker of masculinity.

Girls and women are subtly encouraged to put anger and other 'negative' emotions aside, as unfeminine

Girls and women, on the other hand, are subtly encouraged to put anger and other "negative" emotions aside, as unfeminine. Studies show that girls are frequently discouraged from even recognising their own anger, from talking about negative feelings, or being demanding in ways that focus on their own needs.

Girls are encouraged to smile more, use their "nice" voices and sublimate how they themselves may feel in deference to the comfort of others. Suppressed, repressed, diverted and ignored anger is now understood as a factor in many "women's illnesses", including various forms of disordered eating, autoimmune diseases, chronic fatigue and pain.

As we move from the intimacy and privacy of the home into institutions, this emotional gender divide compounds and is compounded by other forms of bias. In schools, for example, girls are expected to exert greater self-control, to be more polite, and not to use strong or obscene language. All of these also limit the expression and display of anger. Educators and psychologists studying these dynamics note that in girls, assertiveness, aggression and anger are often conflated so that girls who defend themselves, hold strong opinions and are competitive and verbally self-assured are frequently pegged by adults as rude, belligerent, confrontational and uncooperative. However, in boys, the same behaviours are often seen as signs of leadership, confidence and creative disruption.

Social and biased regulation of emotional expression also results in black and minority ethnic children being held to different and higher standards of behaviour. Black students are seen by adults as less innocent and in need of patience or care. Starting in pre-school, black boys are three times as likely to be disciplined as white boys. Black girls, however, held to both racial and gender expectations, are six times more likely than white girls to be suspended or expelled, disciplining that serves as the beginning, in the US, of a well-documented school-to-prison pipeline.

Brett Kavanaugh gets agitated in front of a Senate judiciary committee confirmation hearing in Washington. Despite the intemperate outburst, he went on to be appointed to the US supreme court. Photograph: Andrew Harnik/AFP/Getty Images

However, within peer groups, by adulthood, anger is most commonly associated with power for and by men and with powerlessness for and by women. This is because anger in men confirms gender role beliefs and expectations, but anger in women confounds them. Anger in women is still considered a sign of mental or hormonal imbalance, whereas in men it is perceived as "normal" and associated with masculine control, leadership, authority and competence. The difference isn't truly one of gender, but of status. Black and minority ethnic men are often subject to the same biases as girls and women broadly, and black and minority women experience both indivisibly.

Men who display anger at work, studies find, gain influence, whereas their female peers lose influence. A typical study, conducted in 2018 by the Center for WorkLife Law, asked lawyers if they were free to use anger at work when a case merits it and if they felt they were punished for displaying aggression. White men felt much freer to express anger at work than any other group, including minority men. While 40% of minority women and 44% of white women said they were free to express anger, 56% percent of white men said the same. An even higher percentage of white men, 62%, said they were not penalised for anger or aggression, compared with fewer than half of all women, with scant racial differences. Disparities like these affect women and minority men in professional and political life. In the law and elsewhere, emotional expression can be an essential factor of success.

In politics, the bind is treacherous. The double standard became a running joke during Barack Obama's presidency after Comedy Central's Key & Peele featured a character named Luther who stood behind an Obama doppelganger translating calm and measured Obama statements into outbursts of unbridled rage. The routine was comedic gold, but, in fact, the issue is a profoundly serious one. Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders could express and display anger as political conviction, leveraging populist rage in a way that minority and women candidates cannot. The need women feel to appear reasonable, calm and competent often leaves them open to criticism that they are "inauthentic", "not charismatic", and amorphously "less likable".

These regulations of anger are a powerful way to enforce inequality and buttress status quo hierarchies. White masculinity has been tied, often through the freer use of anger, to notions of citizenship and the responsibilities of adult manhood: providing, protecting and holding power. Anger's entanglement with masculinity, to asset power or control, is a patriarchal entitlement routinely denied to subaltern men who, on the basis of race, ethnicity or class, are effectively "feminised" as a way to oppress them. Sometimes that feminisation comes from limiting opportunities to work, to vote, to protect or to lead. Other times, it comes from punishing anger as a means of seeking dignity, fairness or self-defence.

Several recent public incidents provide striking illustrations of these dynamics.

Aggrieved and entitled anger is now practically synonymous with the US supreme court justice Brett Kavanaugh's name. Kavanaugh's overwrought and viscerally angry performance during his confirmation hearing is now the stuff of legend. His indignation at having to answer to Christine Blasey Ford's assertion that he had sexually assaulted her as a teenager left him red-faced and sputtering, in marked contrast to Blasey Ford's studied, calm and almost deferential mien. Kavanaugh's anger was not weaponised against him, but rather, despite his behaviour clearly contradicting the notion of judicial equanimity, was understood by his supporters as righteous masculine self-defence in the face of insult and threat.

Public acceptance for men's angry behaviours and, conversely, penalty for women's, even tilts into material compensation. Only weeks before the Kavanaugh hearings, the tennis superstar Serena Williams angrily confronted the chair umpire Carlos Ramos during the US Open final. Williams was angry but was also, in fact, self-aware and measured in her critique of the umpire, who failed to de-escalate the exchange.

As many commentators made clear, male players, who happen to be almost all white, have been glorified as charismatic, passionate "bad boys", rewarded with magazine covers, corporate sponsorships and highly paid media roles. For her efforts, Williams was given the highest ever fine for "verbal abuse" in the history of the US Open. She was penalised for language far less profane than male champions have ever used.

Sport often puts these double standards regarding the uses and abuses of anger and aggression into sharp relief. The American football star Colin Kaepernick famously encouraged NFL players to "take a knee" during the national anthem in protest against police brutality. His action, peaceful, measured and respectful, catalysed rage-filled screeds against him, Black Lives Matter and the movement to end police brutality. He continues to be reviled as unpatriotic and castigated for"ruining" the sport by "politicising it", as though it is not already a radically politicised cultural phenomenon.

Colin Kaepernick, right, and Eric Reid kneel during the national anthem before an NFL football game in protest against police brutality. Photograph: Mike McCarn/AP

After Kaepernick opted out of one NFL contract in search of another, he was left unsigned, undoubtedly a direct result of being blackballed. While open public anger was one outcome of Kaepernick's activism it was not, despite how he himself may have felt about the brutalisation of black bodies, how he chose to, or could most effectively, express himself in a fight involving overlapping white male fraternities - the NFL, the Fraternal Order of Police, the US president and the criminal justice system - all of which have historically held powerful monopolies on people's bodies, the law, regulated violence, material resources ... and righteous rage.

Knowing how angry society sees you, forcing yourself into the proper comportment is a calculation many black men have all too much experience with

"Black men expressing rage in public has the potential of getting them shot and killed by police," explained the journalist Joshua Adams in a 2018 post-Kavanaugh-tantrum article on Medium. Black men, he continued, "can't afford any illusions about how the world views black masculinity. Knowing how angry society sees you, forcing yourself into the proper comportment is a calculation many black men have all too much experience with."

Again, context, relationships and status matter, however. Identity, like emotion, is complex and complicating. Consider, as an example, the R&B singer R Kelly's explosive behaviour during an interview in March with the journalist Gayle King. The interview was the first since Kelly was officially charged with the sexual abuse of four women, three of whom were between the ages of 13 and 17 when their alleged attacks took place. During the interview, King sat calmly and almost completely still as Kelly stood, paced, ranted, yelled into a camera, and even pounded his chest. A viral photo of their exchange, which took place in a studio decorated like a living room, looked like a searing portrait of intimate violence. Kelly's behaviour could not be separated from the fact that King, a woman, was his interviewer. In 2015, he stood over and shouted at the journalist Caroline Modarressy-Tehrani, as she questioned him about the same allegations. It is almost inconceivable he would have acted in this way if his interviewers had been men.

R Kelly rages at the seated and serene TV presenter Gayle King. It's inconceivable that he would have behaved in the same way towards a man. Photograph: John Paul Filo/CBS

Gender is a defining element, but it is also a dimension of the complex fabric of context, status, and social understanding. During the past several years - marked by widespread technological, social and political disruption and tumult - rage has been a defining aspect of our culture. Women have been more openly and actively expressing anger, an allowance that typically coincides with social unrest and then, typically, subsides with stability.

Today, we see girls and women at the forefront of movements fighting for climate change and resisting authoritarianism. They are demanding an end to institutional tolerance of corruption, sexual violence and discrimination. They are, significantly, taking the risks that come with the open, public and political claim to anger.

Whether or not their anger and activism will be publicly and politically respected and rewarded has yet to be determined.

Soraya Chemaly is the author of Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women's Anger, published by Simon & Schuster at £16.99

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How women and minorities are claiming their right to rage

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Why do many think it acceptable for the white judge Brett Kavanaugh to lose his cool in public, but not the black tennis champion Serena Williams?

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#TheGirlsGuideToSurvivingABreak-Up#KrisDrewry

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One Woman’s Guide to Breaking Up (Published 2019)

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Rule No. 1: Don’t ask all your friends for advice. Why? They are probably just as clueless as you are.

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#SorayaChemaly#WomenAnger#Rage

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***A BEST BOOK OF 2018 SELECTION*** NPR * The Washington Post * Book Riot * Autostraddle * Psychology Today ***A BEST FEMINIST BOOK SELECTION*** R…

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Post 3:
#Feminism #Rage #Anger #Breakup

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Post 2:
#Medea is an ancient #GreekTragedy written by #Euripides.

The plot centers on the actions of Medea, a former princess of the kingdom of Colchis, and the wife of Jason; she finds her position in the Greek world threatened as Jason leaves her for a Greek princess of Corinth. Medea takes vengeance on Jason by murdering his new wife as well as her own two sons, after which she escapes to Athens to start a new life.

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Medea ( Ancient Greek: Μήδεια, Mēdeia) is an ancient Greek tragedy written by Euripides. It is based upon the myth of Jason and Medea and was first produced in 431 BC as part of a trilogy; the two other plays have not survived. The plot centers on the actions of Medea, a former princess of the kingdom of Colchis, and the wife of Jason; she finds her position in the Greek world threatened as Jason leaves her for a Greek princess of Corinth. Medea takes vengeance on Jason by murdering his new wife as well as her own two sons, after which she escapes to Athens to start a new life.

Euripides' play has been explored and interpreted by playwrights across the centuries and the world in a variety of ways, offering political, psychoanalytical, feminist, among many other original readings of Medea, Jason and the core themes of the play.

Medea, along with three other plays, earned Euripides third prize in the City Dionysia. Some believe that this indicates a poor reception, but "the competition that year was extraordinarily keen"; Sophocles, often winning first prize, came second. The play was rediscovered with Rome's Augustan drama; again in the 16th-century; then remained part of the tragedic repertoire, becoming a classic of the Western canon, and the most frequently performed Greek tragedy in the 20th century. It experienced renewed interest in the feminist movement of the late 20th century, being interpreted as a nuanced and sympathetic portrayal of Medea's struggle to take charge of her own life in a male-dominated world. The play holds the American Theatre Wing's Tony Award record for most wins for the same female lead character, with Judith Anderson winning in 1948, Zoe Caldwell in 1982, and Diana Rigg in 1994.

Medea was first performed in 431 BC at the City Dionysia festival. Here every year, three tragedians competed against each other, each writing a tetralogy of three tragedies and a satyr play (alongside Medea were Philoctetes, and the satyr play ). In 431 the competition was among Euphorion (the son of famed playwright Aeschylus), Sophocles (Euripides' main rival) and Euripides. Euphorion won, and Euripides placed third (and last). Medea has survived the transplants of culture and time and continues to captivate audiences with its riveting power (Tessitore). The play's influence can be seen in the works of later playwrights, such as William Shakespeare.

While Medea is considered one of the great plays of the Western canon, Euripides' place in the competition suggests that his first audience might not have responded so favorably. A scholium to line 264 of the play suggests that Medea's children were traditionally killed by the Corinthians after her escape; so Euripides' apparent invention of the filicide might have offended, as his first treatment of the Hippolytus myth did. That Euripides and others took liberties with Medea's story may be inferred from the 1st century BC historian Diodorus Siculus: "Speaking generally, it is because of the desire of the tragic poets for the marvellous that so varied and inconsistent an account of Medea has been given out." A common urban legend claimed that Euripides put the blame on Medea because the Corinthians had bribed him with a sum of five talents.

In the 4th century BC, South-Italian vase painting offers a number of Medea-representations that are connected to Euripides' play - the most famous is a krater in Munich. However, these representations always differ considerably from the plots of the play or are too general to support any direct link to Euripides' play.[clarification needed ] But the violent and powerful character of Medea, and her double nature - both loving and destructive - became a standard for later periods of antiquity. Medea has been adapted into numerous forms of media, including operas, films, and novels.

With the text's rediscovery in 1st-century Rome (the play was adapted by the tragedians Ennius, Lucius Accius, Ovid, Seneca the Younger and Hosidius Geta, among others); again in 16th-century Europe; and with the development of modern literary criticism: Medea has provoked multifarious reactions.[clarification needed ][citation needed ]

The form of the play differs from many other Greek tragedies by its simplicity. Most scenes involve only Medea and someone else. The Chorus, here representing the women of Corinth, is usually involved alongside them. The simple encounters highlight Medea's skill and determination in manipulating powerful male figures. The play is also the only Greek tragedy in which a kin-killer makes it unpunished to the end of the play, and the only one about child-killing in which the deed is performed in cold blood as opposed to in a state of temporary madness. Medea's "rebellion" is that which shakes the very world everyone must inhabit...her rebellion tells of her past history, the goddess-like figure denigrated and ultimately dethroned gives lead to why she would act the way she does. Euripides displays Medea as an archetype. As a result, he reinforces the modern stereotype as a woman to be the devourer of men and children, instead of Medea- The great mother wronged.

Euripides' characterization of Medea exhibits the inner emotions of passion, love, and vengeance. The character of Medea has variously been interpreted as either fulfilling her role of "mother and wife" and as acting as a "proto-feminist". Feminist readings have interpreted the play as either a "sympathetic exploration" of the "disadvantages of being a woman in a patriarchal society", or as an expression of misogynist attitudes. In conflict with this sympathetic undertone (or reinforcing a more negative reading) is Medea's barbarian identity, which some argue could antagonize[need quotation to verify ] a 5th-century BC Greek audience.

It can be argued that in the play Euripides portrays Medea out to be an enraged woman who kills her children to get revenge on her husband Jason because of his betrayal of their marriage. Medea is often cited as an example of the "madwoman in the attic" trope, in which women who defy societal norms are portrayed as mentally unstable. Although, Medea is not the only character in the play to use deception; other characters, such as Jason and Creon, also use lies and manipulation. A competing interpretation is that Medea kills her children out of kindness because she cares and worries for them and their well-being. Once Medea commits to her plan to kill Kreon and Jason's new bride, she knows her children are in danger of being murdered. Medea is not paranoid. In another version of the myth, the people of Korinth kill her children to avenge the deaths of Kreon and his daughter Glauke. At this time in myth and history, helping one's friends and hurting one's enemies was considered a virtue. Thus, by this ethic, the Korinthians will do right by avenging their king and princess. Conversely, a focus on Medea's rage leads to the interpretation that "Medea becomes the personification of vengeance, with her humanity 'mortified' and 'sloughed off'" (Cowherd, 129). Medea's heritage places her in a position more typically reserved for the male in her time. Hers is the power of the sun, appropriately symbolized by her great radiance, tremendous heat and boundless passion. In this view Medea is inhuman and her suffering is self-inflicted just as Jason argues in his debate with her. And yet, if we see events through Medea's eyes, we view a wife intent on vengeance and a mother concerned about her children's safety and the life they can be expected to live. Thus, Medea as wife kills Kreon and Glauke in the act of vengeance. Medea as a mother thinks that her children will be better off killed by her kind hand than left to suffer at the hands of an enemy, intent on vengeance. And so, Medea saves her children from this brutality and a worse fate by killing them herself, providing them with as peaceful an outcome as she can.

Medea is centered on Medea's calculated desire for revenge against her unfaithful husband. Medea is of divine descent and had the gift of prophecy. She married Jason and used her magic powers and advice to help him find and retrieve the golden fleece. The play is set in Corinth some time after Jason's quest for the Golden Fleece, where he met Medea. The play begins with Medea in a blind rage towards Jason for arranging to marry Glauce, the daughter of king Creon. The nurse, overhearing Medea's grief, fears what she might do to herself or her children.

Creon, in anticipation of Medea's wrath, arrives and reveals his plans to send her into exile. Medea pleads for one day's delay and eventually Creon acquiesces. In order to be accepted Medea must become trickier and must totally conceal her position. Crouching at Creon's feet, she begs him in the name of her children to allow her only one day. At this Creon is moved and grants to her one more day in Corinth. Medea's unexpected power of persuasion or even of fascination lies in her change of attitude: instead of preaching to Creon about the unpopularity of the sophoi she plays the role of a desperate mother, needing one day to prepare for exile. Medea is aware of the humiliating quality of this tactic, but she justifies it on the grounds of a gain and of her need to remain in Corinth: "Do you think that I would ever have flattered that man unless I had some gain to make or some device to execute? I wouldn't have even spoken or touched him with my hands". In the next scene Jason arrives to explain his rationale for his apparent betrayal. He explains that he could not pass up the opportunity to marry a royal princess, as Medea is only a barbarian woman, but hopes to someday join the two families and keep Medea as his mistress. Medea, and the chorus of Corinthian women, do not believe him. She reminds him that she left her own people for him ("I rescued you [...] I betrayed both my father and my house [...] now where should I go?"), and that she saved him and slew the dragon. Jason promises to support her after his new marriage ("If you wish me to give you or the children extra money for your trip into exile, tell me; I'm ready to give it with a lavish hand"), but Medea spurns him: "Go on, play the bridegroom! Perhaps [...] you've made a match you'll one day have cause to lament."

In the following scene Medea encounters Aegeus, king of Athens. He reveals to her that despite his marriage he is still without children. He visited the oracle who merely told him that he was instructed "not to unstop the wineskin's neck". Medea relays her current situation to him and begs for Aegeus to let her stay in Athens if she gives him drugs to end his infertility. Aegeus, unaware of Medea's plans for revenge, agrees.

Medea then returns to plotting the murders of Glauce and Creon. She decides to poison some golden robes (a family heirloom and gift from the sun god Helios, her grandfather) and a coronet, in hopes that the bride will not be able to resist wearing them, and consequently be poisoned. Medea resolves to kill her own children as well, not because the children have done anything wrong, but because she feels it is the best way to hurt Jason. She calls for Jason once more and, in an elaborate ruse, apologizes to him for overreacting to his decision to marry Glauce. When Jason appears fully convinced that she regrets her actions, Medea begins to cry in mourning of the exile. She convinces Jason to allow their two sons to give gifts to Glauce in hopes that Creon to lift the exile against the children. Eventually Jason agrees.

Forgive what I said in anger! I will yield to the decree, and only beg one favor, that my children may stay. They shall take to the princess a costly robe and a golden crown, and pray for her protection.

Medea kills her son, Campanian red-figure amphora, c. 330 BC, Louvre (K 300).

In the next scene a messenger recounts Glauce and Creon's deaths. When the children arrived with the robes and coronet, Glauce gleefully put them on and went to find her father. The poison overtook her and she fell to the floor, dying horribly and painfully. Creon clutched her tightly as he tried to save her and, by coming in contact with the robes and coronet, was poisoned and died as well.

Alas! The bride had died in horrible agony; for no sooner had she put on Medea's gifts than a devouring poison consumed her limbs as with fire, and in his endeavor to save his daughter the old father died too.

While Medea is pleased with her current success she decides to take it one step further. Since Jason brought shame upon her for trying to start a new family, Medea resolves to destroy the family he was willing to give up by killing their sons. Medea does have a moment of hesitation when she considers the pain that her children's deaths will put her through. However, she steels her resolve to cause Jason the most pain possible and rushes offstage with a knife to kill her children. Determined to stop Medea, the chorus runs after her only to hear the children scream. Jason then rushes onto the scene to confront Medea about murdering Creon and Glauce, and he quickly discovers that his children have been killed as well. Medea then appears above the stage with the bodies of her children in a chariot given to her by the sun god Helios. When this play was put on, this scene was accomplished using the mechane device usually reserved for the appearance of a god or goddess. She confronts Jason, reveling in his pain at being unable to ever hold his children again:

I do not leave my children's bodies with thee; I take them with me that I may bury them in Hera's precinct. And for thee, who didst me all that evil, I prophesy an evil doom.

Although Jason calls Medea most hateful to gods and men, the fact that the chariot is given to her by Helios indicates that she still has the gods on her side. As Bernard Knox points out, Medea's last scene with concluding appearances parallels that of a number of indisputably divine beings in other plays by Euripides. Just like these gods, Medea "interrupts and puts a stop to the violent action of the human being on the lower level, ... justifies her savage revenge on the grounds that she has been treated with disrespect and mockery, ... takes measures and gives orders for the burial of the dead, prophesies the future," and "announces the foundation of a cult."

She then escapes to Athens in the divine chariot. The chorus is left contemplating the will of Zeus in Medea's actions:

Manifold are thy shapings, Providence! / Many a hopeless matter gods arrange / What we expected never came to pass / What we did not expect the gods brought to bear / So have things gone, this whole experience through!

This deliberate murder of her children by Medea appears to be Euripides' invention, although some scholars believe Neophron created this alternate tradition. Her filicide would go on to become the standard for later writers. Pausanias, writing in the late 2nd century AD, records five different versions of what happened to Medea's children after reporting that he has seen a monument for them while traveling in Corinth. The play's popularity in ancient Greece may have been due in part to its portrayal of a strong, independent woman who defies patriarchal norms.

Olivia Sutherland stars in MacMillan Films' Medea

Catulle Mendès adapted Medea into his play Medée in 1898, in three acts and in verse. Alfons Mucha drew a poster for a performance of this play starring Sarah Bernhardt.

Jean Anouilh adapted the Medea story in his French drama Médée in 1946

Robinson Jeffers adapted Medea into a hit Broadway play in 1947, in a famous production starring Judith Anderson, the first of three actresses to win a Tony Award for the role. It was directed by John Gielgud, who co-starred as Jason, Medea opened on Broadway at the National Theatre on October 20, 1947, transferred to the Royale Theatre on December 15, and closed on May 15, 1948, after 214 performances. At the 2nd Tony Awards on March 28, 1948, Judith Anderson shared (with Katharine Cornell and Jessica Tandy) the Award for Best Actress in a Play. Another staging, produced and directed by Guthrie McClintic at the City Center, premiered on May 2, 1949, and closed, after 16 performances, on May 21. A staging in 1982, at the Cort Theatre, brought a Tony win for Zoe Caldwell, who played Medea, and a Best Featured Actress in a Play nomination for Judith Anderson as Nurse.

Ben Bagley's Shoestring Revue performed a musical parody off-Broadway in the 1950s which was later issued on an LP and a CD, and was revived in 1995. The same plot points take place, but Medea in Disneyland is a parody, in that it takes place in a Walt Disney animated cartoon

Canada's Stratford Festival staged an adaptation of Medea by Larry Fineberg in 1978, which starred Patricia Idlette in the title role.[26]

Angelique Rockas as Medea, Theatro Technis directed by George Eugeniou

Yukio Ninagawa staged a production called Ohjo Media（王女メディア）in 1978, followed by a second version in 2005[27]

In 1982, George Eugeniou at Theatro Technis London, directed Medea[28] as a barefooted unwanted refugee played with "fierce agility "[29] and "dangerous passions" by Angelique Rockas[30]

In 1983, kabuki Master Shozo Sato created Kabuki Medea uniting Euripides play and classical Kabuki storytelling and presentation.[31] It debuted at Wisdom Bridge Theater in Chicago.[32][33]

The 1990 play Pecong, by Steve Carter, is a retelling of Medea set on a fictional Caribbean island around the turn of the 20th century

The play was staged at the Wyndham's Theatre in London's West End, in a translation by Alistair Elliot.[34] The production opened on 19 October 1993.[34]

Chrysanthos Mentis Bostantzoglou makes a parody of this tragedy in his comedy Medea (1993).[35][36]

A 1993 dance-theatre retelling of the Medea myth was produced by Edafos Dance Theatre, directed by avant-garde stage director and choreographer Dimitris Papaioannou.

John Fisher wrote a camp musical version of Medea entitled Medea the Musical that re-interpreted the play in light of gay culture. The production was first staged in 1994 in Berkeley, California.[37]

Christopher Durang and Wendy Wasserstein co-wrote a sketch version for the Juilliard School's Drama division 25th Anniversary. It premiered 25 April 1994, at the Juilliard Theater, New York City.

In November 1997 National Theatre of Greece launched a worldwide tour of Medea, a critically acclaimed production directed by Nikaiti Kontouri, starring Karyofyllia Karambeti as Medea, Kostas Triantafyllopoulos as Creon and Lazaros Georgakopoulos as Jason. The tour included performances in France, Australia, Israel, Portugal, United States, Canada, Turkey, Bulgaria, China and Japan and lasted almost two years, until July 1999.[38][39] The play opened in the United States at Shubert Theatre in Boston (18 and 19 September 1998) and then continued at City Center Theatre in Manhattan, New York City (23 to 27 September 1998), receiving a very positive review from The New York Times.[40]

Neil Labute wrote Medea Redux, a modern retelling, first performed in 1999 starring Calista Flockhart as part of his one act trilogy entitled Bash: Latter-Day Plays. In this version, the main character is seduced by her middle school teacher. He abandons her, and she kills their child out of revenge.

Michael John LaChiusa created a Broadway musical adaptation work for Audra McDonald entitled Marie Christine in 1999. McDonald portrayed the title role, and the show was set in 1890s New Orleans and Chicago respectively.

Liz Lochhead's Medea previewed at the Old Fruitmarket, Glasgow as part of Theatre Babel's[41] Greeks in 2000 before the Edinburgh Fringe and national tour. 'What Lochhead does is to recast MEDEA as an episode-ancient but new, cosmic yet agonisingly familiar- in a sex war which is recognisable to every woman, and most of the men, in the theatre.' The Scotsman

In 2000, Wesley Enoch wrote and directed a modern adaptation titled Black Medea, which was first produced by Sydney Theatre Company's Blueprint at the Wharf 2 Theatre, Sydney, on 19 August 2000. Nathan Ramsay played the part of Jason, Tessa Rose played Medea, and Justine Saunders played the Chorus. Medea is re-characterised as an indigenous woman transported from her homeland to the city and about to be abandoned by her abusive social-climbing husband.[42]

Tom Lanoye (2001) used the story of Medea to bring up modern problems (such as migration and man vs. woman), resulting in a modernized version of Medea. His version also aims to analyze ideas such as the love that develops from the initial passion, problems in the marriage, and the "final hour" of the love between Jason and Medea

Kristina Leach adapted the story for her play The Medea Project, which had its world premiere at the Hunger Artists Theatre Company in 2004 and placed the story in a modern-day setting.[43]

Peter Stein directed Medea in Epidaurus 2005

Irish playwright Marina Carr's By the Bog of Cats is a modern re-telling of Euripides' Medea.

In November 2008, Theatre Arcadia, under the direction of Katerina Paliou, staged Medea at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina (University of Alexandria, Egypt). The production was noted (by Nehad Selaiha of the weekly Al-Ahram) not only for its unexpected change of plot at the very end but also for its chorus of one hundred who alternated their speech between Arabic and English. The translation used was that of George Theodoridis.

US Latina playwright Caridad Svich's 2009 play Wreckage, which premiered at Crowded Fire Theatre in San Francisco, tells the story of Medea from the sons' point of view, in the afterlife.

Paperstrangers Performance Group[44] toured a critically acclaimed production of Medea directed by Michael Burke to U.S. Fringe Festivals in 2009 and 2010.

Bart Lee's interpretation of Medea, renamed 'Medea, My Dear', was performed in Surrey and later toured the south of England from 2010 to 2011.

Luis Alfaro's re-imagining of Medea, Mojada, world premiered at Victory Gardens Theater in 2013.

Theatre Lab's production, by Greek director Anastasia Revi, opened at The Riverside Studios, London, on 5 March 2014.

The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea by Cherríe Moraga takes elements of Medea and of other works[45]

14 July - 4 September 2014 London Royal National Theatre staging of Euripides in a new version by Ben Power, starring Helen McCrory as Medea, directed by Carrie Cracknell, music by Will Gregory and Alison Goldfrapp.

25 September - 14 November 2015 London Almeida Theatre a new adaptation by Rachel Cusk, starring Kate Fleetwood as Medea, directed by Rupert Goold.

17 February - 6 March 2016 in Austin at the Long Center for the Performing Arts starring Franchelle Stewart Dorn as Medea and directed by Ann Ciccolella.

May 2016 - MacMillan Films released a full staging of the original Medea which was staged for camera. The DVD release shows the entire play. complete with the Aegis scenes, choral odes and triumphant ending. Directed by James Thomas and starring Olivia Sutherland, the staging features Peter Arnott's critically acclaimed translation.

Chico Buarque and Paulo Pontes, Gota d'Água (musical play set in 1970s Rio de Janeiro, based on Euripides, 1975). Several times revived, including a 2016/2017 production starring Laila Garin (celebrated for her title role in the highly regarded musical biography of Elis Regina, staged in Brasil in 2015).

February 2017: the play was staged in South Korea, directed by Hungarian theatre director Róbert Alföldi, with Lee Hye-young in the titular role.[46]

In some editions of the theatrical play, Medea would be played as a man instead of a woman to show a unique and perhaps more culturally accepted point of view.

In some play adaptations, Jason is played as a sympathetic figure who is manipulated by Medea, rather than a conniving opportunist.

Television

Edward P. Coleridge, 1891 - prose: full text

Arthur S. Way, 1912 - verse

Augustus T. Murray, 1931 - prose

Countee Cullen, 1935

R. C. Trevelyan, 1939 - verse

Rex Warner, 1944 - verse

Robinson Jeffers, 1946 - verse

Peter D. Arnott, 1961 - verse

John Davie, 1996

James Morwood, 1997 - prose

Paul Roche, 1998 - verse

Ruby Blondell, 1999 - verse

George Theodoridis, 2004 - prose: full text

Stephen Esposito, 2004 - verse

Joseph Goodrich, 2005 - verse: full text

Graham Kirby, 2006 - verse (The Bloomsbury Theatre)

Diane Arnson Svarlien, 2008 - verse

Robin Robertson, 2008 - verse

J. Michael Walton, 2008 - prose

Tom Paulin, 2010 - full text

Judith Mossman (classicist), 2011 - prose

Brian Vinero, 2012 - verse: full text

Diane Rayor, 2013

Alan Chriztopher R. Aranza, 2015 - prose

Rachel Kitzinger, 2016 - verse

Charles Martin, 2019

Richard Swanson, 2020 - prose

Michael Ewans, 2022 - verse

Haralu, L. (2017). Madwomen and Mad Women: An Analysis of the Use of Female Insanity and Anger in Narrative Fiction, From Vilification to Validation. ProQuest Dissertations Publishing. (Accession No. 10643100)

Lootens, Barbara J. "Images of Women in Greek Drama." Feminist Teacher, vol. 2, no. 1, 1986, pp. 24-28. JSTOR, JSTOR 25680553. Accessed 27 Mar. 2023.

Mastronarde, Donald (2002). . Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-64386-4.

Pucci, Pietro. "Survival in the Holy Garden." The Violence of Pity In Euripides' "Medea," vol. 41, Cornell University Press, 1980, pp. 91-130. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7591/j.cttq44w0.6. Accessed 27 Mar. 2023.

Rabinowitz, Nancy S. (1993). Anxiety Veiled: Euripides and the Traffic in Women. Cornell University Press. ISBN 0-8014-8091-4.

Tessitore, Aristide. "Euripides' 'Medea' and the Problem of Spiritedness." The Review of Politics, vol. 53, no. 4, 1991, pp. 587-601. JSTOR, JSTOR 1407307. Accessed 27 Apr. 2023.

Tigani, Francesco (2010), Rappresentare Medea. Dal mito al nichilismo, Aracne. ISBN 978-88-548-3256-5

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Medea ( Ancient Greek: Μήδεια, Mēdeia) is an ancient Greek tragedy written by Euripides. It is based upon the myth of Jason and Medea and was first produced in 431 BC as part of a trilogy; the two other plays have not survived.

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#PamelaAnderson reputation was tainted when a #SexTape was released against her consent. Almost 30 years later, as she tries to move on, Hulu claims the right to Pamela’s body and story through their hit series ‘Pam and Tommy’.
In #2018, production began on a television show that should never have been made: a dramatisation of Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee’s sex tape scandal, that would reignite personal trauma for Anderson

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Pamela Anderson's reputation was tainted when a sex tape was released against her consent. Almost 30 years later, as she tries to move on, Hulu claims the right to Pamela's body and story through their hit series 'Pam and Tommy'.

In 2018, production began on a television show that should never have been made: a dramatisation of Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee's sex tape scandal, that would reignite personal trauma for Anderson, as well as reintroduce the sex tape into the popular culture of an entirely new generation. The show, which was made entirely without Anderson's consent, premiered in February 2022 on Hulu. A compelling and immersive watch, its cast featuring a range of prominent actors such as Lily James, Sebastian Stan and Seth Rogan made it a hit success. However, the series and its production was detrimental to Anderson herself, as well as being damaging to women both in and out of the spotlight. The creation of the show against Anderson's will, about a sex tape that was released against her will, reinforces the already apparent belief held by the media that Anderson's body, along with the body of any woman in the public eye, is public property.
Pam's rise to fame
In 1989, when Pamela Anderson was just 22, she was scouted during a football game, whilst wearing a Labatt's t-shirt, in her home country of Canada. This jump-started her modelling career, first with Labatt's, then to a contract with Playboy where she appeared on the cover of the infamous magazine that same year. This was the first of 14 Playboy cover issues for Anderson, who holds the record for the most number of features on the front page of the magazine. Three years after that, she began her television role in 'Baywatch', and before long became known as the 'blonde bombshell' of her generation, marrying Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee in 1995.

A year into Anderson's marriage to Lee, a safe was stolen from their home, containing many personal possessions of the couple, including guns, expensive jewellery and the bikini which Anderson wore at her wedding to Lee. There was also a videotape, which contained 54 minutes of home footage, taken on Anderson and Lee's honeymoon -including, fatefully, eight minutes of the couple having sex.
The Sex Tape
Anderson and Lee's sex tape was stolen from their home by their former electrician Rand Gauthier, and by the time the couple realised it was missing, it was already too late. Bootleg copies of the videotape were being sold, and although this was the early days of the internet, a move towards making online copies had already begun. The couple discovered that Bob Guccione, the founder of Penthouse, possessed a copy of the tape, and they filed a lawsuit and a restraining order against the pornographic magazine and several others whom they believed to be involved with the release of the tape. This included Rand Gauthier and Milton Ingley, a pornographer who was Gauthier's accomplice in the releasing of the tape.

Anderson and Lee's lawsuit and restraining order against Penthouse were rejected. The magazine's lawyers argued that due to Anderson's previous work posing nude for Playboy, as well as the fact that the couple were open about their sex lives, that Anderson had lost the rights to privacy over her own body. At her deposition, the opposition used naked pictures of her to support their case. A further kick in the teeth: Penthouse's 1996 issue, printed during the lawsuit, included stills from the tape and even featured Anderson on the cover. This was deemed acceptable by Judge Stephen W. Wilson, who argued that the images were " news-worthy"; a further sign of the media's belief that Anderson's body is public property, and stopped belonging to her once she consensually decided to pose nude. It is evident that there exists a huge disparity between anyone deciding to partake in nude modelling of their own free will, and having private pictures and footage released without consent. Penthouse 's attorney defended the magazine, stating that the release of the tape itself was the couple's own fault for recording it, and taking "insufficient care" with the tape (despite the fact it was stored inside a giant metal safe in their home). The lawsuit and its failure led to even more media attention, meaning that the tape became a trending topic throughout the media, including both celebrity and mainstream platforms. The tape reached more than $81m in pay per views within a year, and Anderson's public image was dominated by the scandal.
The 2018 Hulu series: 'Pam and Tommy'
It goes without saying that Anderson was distraught when she found out that Hulu were producing a dramatisation of this scandal, which she told The Guardian made her feel "violated". 'Pam and Tommy', available to stream in the UK on Disney+, was made entirely without her consent or even consideration - the former Baywatch star expressed her upset at the creation of the show, particularly for the fact that she wasn't even consulted before the series received the green light for production. In Anderson's Netflix documentary, the actress said that she refused to watch 'Pam and Tommy', but found it hard to avoid due to the inescapable promotion of the show. Billboards, featuring lead actors Lily James and Sebastian Stan in full Pam-and-Tommy get-up, were highly publicised. In the series, not only is one of the most traumatic incidents of Anderson's life recreated (and further profited off), but parts of the real-life tape are recreated on camera, something which should never have been seen by the world in the first place, let alone recreated on television for millions to watch. The producers of this series continue to perpetuate the ongoing trend of exploiting women who are comfortable with their sexuality and viewed as 'sex symbols' or 'bombshells', attempting to cash in on them by arguing that they are public property.

'Pam and Tommy' became the 10th most watched original series in the US. The series coined the hypocritical tagline 'the greatest love story ever sold' - making a show about how Anderson was exploited, while further exploiting her. The impact of the show was not only upsetting for Anderson to know it was being made, but also it introduced an entirely new generation who would have been unaware, let alone born at the time, of the tape. This led to a resurgence in popularity of the tape and discussion of Anderson - some of this we can see through Halloween 2022, the year that the show premiered.

Halloween

Anderson described James' and Stan's attire in the series' promotional posters as looking like a "Halloween costume", in a recent Variety interview. Indeed, she was not far from reality - the Evening Standard named Anderson and Lee as " the celebrity couple's costume of choice at parties " for Halloween 2022, with high profile pairs such as Megan Fox and Machine Gun Kelly dressing as the famous couple from the 90s, as well as Jesy Nelson from Little Mix with her friend, and Liam Payne and his girlfriend. Undoubtedly, this sudden re-emergence into pop culture and the public eye has stemmed from the production of the Hulu series.

The Prosthetics

Unlike the celebrity Halloween looks, the costumes of the series itself took an immense amount of work to put together, with James and Stan spending hours every day to be decked out in various prosthetic body parts. James spent four hours daily being laden with prosthetics: breasts, nose, forehead, lips, eyebrow appliqués, teeth dentures, contact lenses, tattoos, false birthmarks, wigs - the list goes on. On top of this, Stan received tattoos, contact lenses, prosthetic pierced nipples and a prosthetic penis. David Williams, head of the makeup department on the 'Pam and Tommy' team, said of the process of transforming Lily James for her role: "we were turning one beautiful woman into another beautiful woman," in an interview, blatantly stating that James's role as Pamela Anderson was literally to become her. This is miles away from any traditional acting role, as James was entirely physically altered, to the point where she was unrecognisable as herself. The nude scenes (recreating the tape) feature disturbingly accurate prosthetic copies of Anderson's breasts, rather than James's own. The trailers of the costume and makeup teams were "surrounded and covered in pictures of Pam" to ensure accuracy in their portrayal.

Due to the prosthetic breasts, James's nude scenes in the show have no vulnerability or sacrifice as an actor - she is wearing Anderson's body as a costume, therefore protecting and retaining her own dignity whilst continuing to demolish Anderson's. In an interview with The Mirror, Lily James said that she hopes she did Anderson "justice", but that as an actor "you just have to trust your instincts and know your intentions are good in shaping a story." Anderson has spoken out saying that she is not upset with James saying that "it's just a job", which clearly is how James views it: as telling a story. However, some stories are not meant to be exploited - this story has been stolen from Anderson just like the sex tape.
Portrayal of Tommy
The portrayal of Lee is overly glamorised for someone who went to jail for 6 months for spousal violence towards his then-wife Anderson. Unsurprisingly, Lee was on board with the ideas of the show and involved with the production; much of the show was informed by his autobiography 'Tommyland', such as the scenes with his talking penis. Speaking of his penis, the sex tape scandal wasn't as much of a scandal for Lee as it was a promotion of himself and his endowment - as written in the 2014 Rolling Stone article which the series was majorly based on, the sex tape's release helped to "cement the musician's legacy, letting the world know he had one of the biggest dicks in rock & roll."
Pamela's Voice
Anderson, now 55, candidly chatted about this and her life in her new documentary 'Pamela: a love story', sharing her side of the story in a life that has been taken from her. The documentary, which has a rating of 98% on Rotten Tomatoes, was released in January 2023 and is available to stream in the UK on Netflix. The documentary doesn't just enlighten us to the not-always-pretty realities of Anderson's life, such as abuse she has suffered, or tell us her feelings about the Hulu show, but also informs us of her much-overlooked philanthropy. Anderson has been an animal rights activist since the 90s, beginning a partnership with People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), using her role as a sex symbol in order to support their anti-fur campaign by posing in a bikini under the slogan 'all animals have the same parts,' as well as agreeing to participate in a televised 'roasting' challenge on Comedy Central in order to raise money for PETA. Furthermore, Anderson's website, linked below, "supports organizations and individuals that stand on the front lines in the protection of human, animal, and environmental rights."

As well as her documentary, which was produced by one of her sons (both of whom encouraged her to make it), Anderson has written a memoir. 'Love, Pamela' is available to buy now and can also be listened to as an audiobook on Audible. Anderson has also recently starred in a Broadway production of Chicago, returning to her love of acting and theatre after many years.

Hopefully, it goes without saying that a woman's choice to use or display her body publicly in a consensual and self-empowering way is completely different from having her most intimate private moments exposed to the world without any choice or control. The sex tape of Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee never should have been stolen or released, but some put it down to it being the 90s, where it was acceptable to publicly shame women for their bodies and the choices they make with them. In a post-MeToo world, it is unbelievable that producers not only were allowed to make this television show, but, more shockingly, even thought to do it. Despite this, at least one positive has come from the making of the show - Anderson's return into pop culture and discussion has introduced her to a new generation, leading to her gaining a young fan base who differ from her fans of the 90s, appreciating her personality and philanthropic qualities over her physical appearance.

If you have watched, or are tempted to watch, the series, please do so with balance - it is worth the while to do your research and extend your understanding of Pamela's side of the story. Her documentary is a great place to start.

Court case information: Tommy Lee v Penthouse
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/10442584/tommy-lee-v-penthouse-intl-ltd/
Rotten Tomatoes, Pamela: a love story
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/pamela_a_love_story
Pamela Anderson Foundation
https://www.pamelaandersonfoundation.org

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Hulu's 'Pam and Tommy': How The Media Stole Pamela Anderson's Body - The Oxford Blue

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Olivia Ekdawi explores the impact of Hulu's 'Pam and Tommy', from its origins, creation and fallout into a new generation.

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#PamAndTommy

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Pam & Tommy is an American biographical drama television miniseries chronicling the marriage between actress and model Pamela Anderson and Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee, played by Lily James and Sebastian Stan, respectively, during the period their unauthorised sex tape was made public. Based on the 2014 Rolling Stone article "Pam and Tommy: The Untold Story of the World's Most Infamous Sex Tape" by Amanda Chicago Lewis, the series was created for Hulu by Robert Siegel, and is produced by Point Grey Pictures and Annapurna Television.

The series development was announced in 2018, with James Franco attached to direct the miniseries and play Lee. It was given a series order in December 2020 by Hulu, announcing James to play Anderson and Stan to replace Franco following the latter's departure from the project. Casting announcements were made throughout 2021 and filming took place in Los Angeles between April and July 2021.

The first three episodes of Pam & Tommy premiered on Hulu on February 2, 2022, and were directed by Craig Gillespie, with the rest of the episodes debuting weekly. The miniseries received generally positive reviews from critics, with praise going towards the cast's performances. It received ten Primetime Emmy Award nominations, including Outstanding Limited Or Anthology Series and acting nominations for James, Stan, and Rogen.

Pam & Tommy depicts the turbulent 3-year marriage between Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee, with particular emphasis on the theft and illegal distribution of an infamous sex tape the couple recorded privately during their honeymoon.

The series was first announced in 2018, with Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg developing the project under their production company Point Grey Pictures and James Franco attached to direct the miniseries and play Tommy Lee. By December 2020, Franco had left the series and it was announced that Hulu had greenlit the project with an eight-episode limited series order. Craig Gillespie was set to direct with Robert D. Siegel writing and Rogen and Goldberg executive producing the miniseries. Tatiana S. Riegel, a frequent collaborator of Gillespie's, was attached as editor. Pamela Anderson refused to get involved, expressing disbelief that "people are still capitalizing off that thing" that "was painful enough the first time around", even declining to read a letter Lily James sent asking for her blessing; Lee was also not involved with the series but he supported it. The series is based on a 2014 Rolling Stone article describing the story of how Anderson and Lee's sex tape was stolen and released. Siegel found it hard to believe the events had not been the subject of a film or series previously, with the producers optioning the rights to the article to serve as the basis of the series. Co-showrunners Siegel and D.V. DeVincentis noted that most of the "basic plot beats" came from that article and "the basic mechanics" of the events "was pretty much what happened", with the conversations between the characters dramatized.

Alongside the series order announcement, Lily James and Sebastian Stan were cast to play the titular characters, with Rogen also cast in a main role. In April 2021, Nick Offerman and Taylor Schilling were announced as main cast members, with Pepi Sonuga, Andrew Dice Clay, Spenser Granese and Mozhan Marnò in recurring roles. In June 2021, Fred Hechinger was announced as a part of the cast in a recurring role. In January 2022, it was revealed that Jason Mantzoukas was voicing Tommy Lee's penis.

The series began filming on April 5, 2021, in Los Angeles and finished on July 30, 2021. The two main actors went through long make-up processes to closely resemble their characters. Lily James wore a prosthetic forehead, chest, dentures, blue contact lenses, and a blonde wig. Sebastian Stan spent hours getting up to 30 tattoos painted on him, grew out and dyed his hair, and wore brown contact lenses, a prosthetic penis, and pierced nipples. Their wardrobe was not custom made, but purchased second-hand based on the clothes Anderson and Lee wore during that period of 1995-1998.

In her 2023 Netflix documentary Pamela, a Love Story, Anderson revealed that she was not consulted about the production of the series. Critics, journalists, and academics posited that the series was profiting off of Anderson's trauma without her consent, and likely doing further harm to her. Pamela, a Love Story verified those claims, in Anderson's own words.

Producers of the series were able to develop the series without her participation, permission, or consent by optioning the rights to an article published by Rolling Stone in 2014. Some critics felt that this was a similar violation of privacy that mirrored the sex tape originally being stolen and distributed without Anderson's and Lee's consent.

Further, the web series is marketed as "the incredible true story" of the sex tape but much is fictionalized, according to Anderson.

Pam & Tommy premiered on February 2, 2022, on Hulu, with the first three episodes and the rest debuting on a weekly basis. The series was also released simultaneously internationally on Disney+ under the Star hub (including Hotstar in India), and on Star+ in Latin America.

According to Parrot Analytics, which looks at consumer engagement in consumer research, streaming, downloads, and on social media, Pam & Tommy was the 4th most in-demand new show during the week of March 12, 2022, to March 18, 2022. According to Whip Media, Pam & Tommy was the 10th most watched original series across all platforms in the United States during the week of February 6, 2022, and the 6th during the week of March 13, 2022.

Pam & Tommy received positive reviews from critics. The review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes reports a 78% approval rating based on 102 reviews, with an average rating of 7.3/10. The site's critical consensus reads: " Pam & Tommy sometimes undercuts its own critique of cultural voyeurism with lurid stylization, but Lily James' performance gives this sleazy opus an undeniable heart." On Metacritic, the series has a score of 70 out of 100, based on 42 reviews, indicating "generally favorable reviews."

James Poniewozik of The New York Times found the show "consistently entertaining" and praised the performances of the actors, calling James' portrayal a "sneakily complex performance," and complimented the narrative alongside the practical effects. Alison Foreman of praised the performances of the whole cast, especially James and Stan, complimented the soundtrack and pace, and stated that the show keeps "the entertainment value high." Inkoo Kang of The Washington Post stated that the transformation of James and Stan is a "casting and makeup coup," while saying that the production is admirable due to its "madeleine-esque needle drops to its relish in the baggy tackiness of so much '90s fashion.," although claiming that the show exploits Anderson's story. Alec Bojalad of reviewed Pam & Tommy positively, stating that James as Anderson and Stan as Lee are "excellent choices," praising the development of the characters, and saying that "it transports viewers into the mind of a real woman enduring real internet-era trauma."

Lucy Mangan of The Guardian rated the miniseries 4 out of 5 stars, saying that Pam & Tommy is a "warm, funny, intelligent and rather moving drama," while calling the performances from Lily James as Anderson and Sebastian Stan as Lee "astonishing," stating that "each achieve the feat of uncannily resembling - aesthetically, vocally, and in every mannerism - the real-life people, without descending into mimicry." Abhishek Srivastava of The Times of India rated the series 4 out of 5 stars, praised the performances of the actors and Craig Gillespie's direction, and stated that the miniseries manages to provide a captivating story. Martin Brown of Common Sense Media rated the series 3 out of 5 stars, writing, "In real life, Anderson and Tommy Lee came off as slightly more sympathetic than they do in this version of the story, which focuses more on the sensational aspects of the story and characters than on why they might be relevant to viewers nearly 25 years later."

Clint Worthington of RogerEbert.com rated the series 2.5 out of 4 stars and said that the series is entertaining, called the performances of the actors "strong" and the direction "stylish," but found that the show is a violation of privacy that is "filtered through the glossy lens of prestige TV." Laura Martin of rated the show 2 out of 5 stars, complimented the performances of James and Stan, and found some scenes amusing, but stated that the show exploits the traumatic personal life of Anderson.

Hollywood Critics Association TV Awards

Best Streaming Limited or Anthology Series

Pam & Tommy

Nominated

Best Actor in a Streaming Limited or Anthology Series or Movie

Sebastian Stan

Nominated

Best Actress in a Streaming Limited or Anthology Series or Movie

Nominated

Best Supporting Actor in a Streaming Limited or Anthology Series or Movie

Won

Best Directing in a Streaming Limited or Anthology Series or Movie

Lake Bell (for "The Master Beta")

Won

Primetime Emmy Awards

Outstanding Limited Or Anthology Series

Megan Ellison, Sue Naegle, Ali Krug, Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg, James Weaver, Alex McAtee, Robert Siegel, D.V. DeVincentis, Craig Gillespie, Dylan Sellers, Dave Franco, Chip Vucelich, and Sarah Gubbins

Nominated

Primetime Creative Arts Emmy Awards

Outstanding Casting For A Limited Or Anthology Series Or Movie

Mary Vernieu and Lindsay Graham Ahanonu

Nominated

Set Decorators Society of America Awards

Best Achievement in Décor/Design of a Television Movie or Limited Series

Nya Patrinos, Ethan Tobman, and David Batchelor Wilson

Nominated

Make-Up Artists and Hair Stylists Guild Awards

Best Period and/or Character Make-Up in a Television Series, Television Limited or Miniseries or Television New Media Series

David Williams, Jennifer Aspinall, Dave Snyder, Bill Myer

Won

Best Period and/or Character Hair Styling in a Television Series, Television Limited or Miniseries or Television New Media Series

Barry Lee Moe, Erica Adams, George Guzman, Helena Cepeda

Nominated

Writers Guild of America Awards

Limited Series

Brooke Baker, Matthew Bass, Theodore Bressman, D.V. DeVincentis, Sarah Gubbins, and Robert Siegel

Nominated

Lewis, Amanda Chicago (December 22, 2014). "Pam & Tommy: The Story of the World's Most Infamous Sex Tape". Rolling Stone. Penske Media Corporation. Archived from the original on September 19, 2020.

McNeil, Legs; Osborne, Jennifer; Pavia, Peter (2005). The other Hollywood : The Uncensored Oral History of the Porn Film Industry (1st ed.). New York: Regan Books. ISBN 978-0-06-009659-5.

Fred J. Lincoln, Oral History Interview, Leather Archives & Museum

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Pam & Tommy is an American biographical drama television miniseries chronicling the marriage between actress and model Pamela Anderson and Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee, played by Lily James and Sebastian Stan, respectively, during the period their unauthorised sex tape was made public.

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We talked about different things. You showed me some works and the research you have done. You like to work with language in relation to material. Your poetic sentences seem to be quite direct. The sentence and choice of material create an interesting tension. You use research in your work, like your research on the development of porn and how this changed over the years, how it turned people into objects due to among others mass consumption and capitalism. Maybe the American biographical drama television miniseries Pam & Tommy is interesting (see post 1), chronicling the marriage between actress and model Pamela Anderson and Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee, played by Lily James and Sebastian Stan. Respectively, during the period their unauthorized sex tape was made public. The series is also a reflection on the effect of the internet and how Tommy and Pamela both become objects, and at the same time it also zooms in on their breakup and how both fight after their breakup the image that has been created about them. You could also go into classical plays concerning break up like Medea (see post 2). Euripides's 5th-century BCE tragedy Medea depicts the ending of her union with Jason, when after ten years of marriage, Jason abandons her to wed King Creon's daughter Creusa, and Medea and her sons from Jason are to be banished from Corinth. In revenge, Medea murders Creusa with poisoned gifts.

Gradually in our talk, we talked about the theme of a breakup, also in relation to rage and anger. We were thinking that we could take this as a perspective, how for instance breakups are expressed in certain poems, movies, and so on. With also a special interest in anger and rage (see post 3). Like you did your research on porn (see post 4/Dworkin) you could also do research on the relation between breakup, (female) rage, or something else.

Maybe you find the article about Force/Violence by Simone Weil also interesting (post 5),  she was intrigued by the effect of violence on people, how they turned due to this in things, also the ones that use or exploit violence (in English it is translated in Force but I think you can also use the word Violence) see post 5.