Jennifer Weiner is also interested in women’s anger right now. She remembers the Anita Hill hearings all too well.

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

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

Except guess what? The joke’s on us. There’s no such place. Clarence Thomas sits on the Supreme Court, and in the White House sits a man who confessed on tape to how he was “automatically” attracted to pretty women and just starts to kiss them when he sees them, and how “when you’re a star, they let you do it.”

And Trump is on Twitter saying “why didn’t she report it?!”

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

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

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

They’ve come back and they’re whining about it, and the quality press is publishing their whines, and shrugging indifferently when we ask them why.

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

Women individually are seen as monstrous if we seek revenge. Collectively…that’s rather different. Get mad, and organize.