Coming of age, into consciousness, in the late 80s and early 90s, I’ve always seen anger as a positive emotion. The end of Apartheid, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet Union were all, on some level, driven by the collective anger of ordinary human beings. 

When I turned 16 I came to understand the power of my own anger. I fought against the pseudo-liberalism of my high school, disgusted by the thinly veiled racism in evidence everywhere in post-Apartheid Cape Town.  I wrote and published pieces in the school paper calling out parents and teachers for their performative progressiveness, and I started a petition to ban school uniforms – which we won. 

Later, as I started work in a male-dominated industry and saw (felt) first hand the multitude of inequities that exist/ed, I turned my anger towards clearing a path for female advancement in the workplace. I became a proud feminist, was promoted and in turn promoted the women around me. I cheered from the sidelines as #MeToo spread like wildfire and recently, as Gisele Pelicot completely flipped the narrative on abuse, power and shame.  

Sustained anger, expressed repeatedly and constructively, is a force for good. 

But since the election of Donald Trump and his merry men, I have found my erstwhile dependable, energising anger turn into white-hot rage. I, along with billions of women the world over, have stood helplessly by while the work of previous generations of women is undone in the matter of a few months: Roe vs. Wade overturned, DEI ‘cancelled’, and empathy labelled as western society’s greatest scourge. 

Meanwhile, the convicted felon Donald Trump, chainsaw wielding Elon Musk, rapist and human trafficker Andrew Tate, and school-yard bully JD Vance are living their best lives.  

I am apoplectic with rage, even more so because a part of me feels as though I have no right to be upset with something happening so far away, when we have many of our own issues to deal with in South Africa. As the men in my life continue to tell me: stay away from the news, you can’t control it anyway, what’s the point of getting upset. But as Jennifer Cox, British psychotherapist and host of the podcast Women are Mad, says: “What happens to other women is happening to us. There is shared outrage. Also, if it’s happening in America, what the hell does that mean for countries where women’s rights are already on the floor? America is the super-power, and its top-down culture will inform the conversation. If we don’t keep this conversation alive, women’s rights will keep getting squeezed around the world.”

Unlike many other women I know, I have never had a problem expressing my anger and channelling it where it belongs: into constructive change. But with the advent of Trump, for the first time in my life, I feel hopeless, powerless and utterly exhausted. I feel as though the many battles women have fought, and seemingly won, have all just been lip service. The patriarchy humoured us for a few decades, but now it’s time for the big boys to take over again. 

My ambitious, successful, super competent friends and I have started texting each other stay-at-home-mom (SAHM) fantasies with increasing frequency. Earlier this week, during a particularly infuriating meeting at work, I wrote down how I would have spent my day as a SAHM, and it was glorious. 

The TradWife life, which had its origin in ultra-Christian, conservative parts of American society is entering the mainstream, and young women from Nigeria to the Nordic countries are extolling the virtues of the ‘soft girl’ life. A life of gentle pilates, daily acts of self-care and ‘slow-living’ sound very appealing right about now. The system doesn’t take us seriously so we may as well opt out and do what we do best: skip through fields of daisies in pastel-coloured dresses carrying picnic hampers filled with home baked bread - our beautiful, happy children in tow.  

Contrast this with the militant, almost desperate approach women in South Korea and China have taken, which is to do away with men completely. The 4B movement, which started in South Korea in 2017, sees more and more women refusing heterosexual marriage, childbirth, dating men and heterosexual sexual relationships. South Korea has the world’s lowest birth rate, and since Trump’s win, 4B is starting to spread in the USA too, all while men the world over are moaning about the burgeoning ‘male loneliness epidemic’. No shit sherlock! 

The TradWife / Soft Life vs. 4B may be at opposite ends of the spectrum, but they are both a reaction to the dawning on all of us that perhaps the equality we had assumed was a given, is, in fact just a pipe dream. One that has be shattered in an instant with the election of an orange-tinted buffoon. 

Meanwhile, my rage keeps raging, but unlike anger, there is something destructive and pointless about rage. It is so overwhelming that it is impossible to focus and therefore impossible to use it to take aim. 

The implicit and explicit permission Trump and his boys club are giving men around the world to disrespect and disregard women is staggering. And what they have dismantled in a few months, will take many years to rebuild when the world finally rights itself again. But right itself it will. Until then, I’m going to scream under water, hit some pillows, and wait patiently for the egos that rule the world to implode. I am also going to learn to bake bread.