But when an angry woman throws something—whether it’s Scarlett O’Hara hurling a vase across the library at Twelve Oaks; or Hillary Clinton, in the rumor that will not die, heaving a lamp at Bill in the White House; or now Amy Klobuchar, supposedly throwing a binder across her office—the gesture is understood as puny, perhaps even comical. (“You’re cute when you’re angry,” my father would say to my mother in the midst of a fight, providing the escalation they were both seeking.) Politico suggested a series of jokes that Klobuchar could make to transform all these revelations into a bit of humanizing shtick. She’d never do that, I thought to myself, thinking that a strong woman of the modern world would never employ that diminishing old formula against herself, but I was wrong. At the Gridiron dinner on Saturday night, she turned her uncontrolled temper into a fun quirk: “When Jerry called me about tonight, he asked, ‘Do you need a microphone or do you just prefer to yell at everyone?’”
The inevitable impulse to characterize this bad behavior as some kind of feminist badassery has already begun. “Being a bad bitch is a good thing,” Meghan McCain said on The View; “For me, it’s like you’re tough and you’re strong and you’re going to get things done.”
It’s shameful to humiliate and mistreat employees, no matter your gender. It’s unacceptable to be so unable to control your emotions that you throw things toward co-workers, and despicable to do it to subordinates who are afraid of you. Trying to sell cruelty and pathological behavior as a feminist victory is yet another reason that so many women who care deeply about equality don’t identify themselves as feminists.
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