Friends, a quick note. A few weeks ago,
sent me a message asking if I might like to contribute a piece for her just-launched series “Seeing Red” which she describes in excellent detail below. As someone who has not always had a comfortable relationship with my own anger for a million reasons I wrote about in this essay, I could not say yes quickly enough.I was taught to swallow my rage. It was not welcome in the households where I grew up, and generationally speaking (Gen X in the house, woot woot) enraged women were certainly not the women you wanted to be when you grew up. But now that I’m grown, what I want to be is real, and what I know is that rage is good fuel. So here is my first cross-post, the essay I wrote for Pinkubator that was published there this morning. I hope you’ll hit the subscribe button because I happen to know some of the people who will be publishing pieces there soon, and you won’t want to miss them. Rage on.
What to do with a culture of predation
C. Weil and Ally Hamilton
Jul 25, 2025
Happy Friday, Pinkubabes!
Thank you for joining me for a very special installment of Seeing Red, a weekly reflection on something that pisses me off and an antidote that turns me on.
Y’all. I cannot overstate my excitement. I have been itching to collaborate with
Ally Hamilton since the moment I engaged with her work for the very first time, just shy of a year ago. It immediately became clear to me that she was one of the most vital Substack-voices to cut through the smog of what I came to think of as brat summer open season on women-identified people.
I had, over the course of three months, received so many unsolicited DMs from aggrieved creeps that I made my account private, and almost any direct communication impossible. Once the U.S. general election was visited upon us, I nearly left the platform for good, confronted with more hostility and unchecked misogyny than ever.
I retreated. Don’t get me wrong, taking space from socials is, more often than not, the sane and reasonable choice—but I allowed my writing practice to wither on the vine and nearly stopped sharing myself altogether.
Nevertheless, Ally persisted.
Her voice has only strengthened over time, and every week she blesses Substack with some of the most salient critiques and commentary on American misogyny it’s seen thus far. If you haven’t already subscribed to her newsletter, a gorgeous two-pronged offering of both written word and audio, I’m not sure what you’re waiting for.
Ally Hamilton is the author of two books, Open Randomly and Yoga’s Healing Power: Looking Inward for Change, Growth and Peace. She’s a yoga teacher and the founder of YogisAnonymous.com, one of the first online yoga studios on the inter webs. She’s the mother of two teenagers and one rescue dog named Rufus. She’s currently finishing a memoir about what mothers are passing down to their daughters aside from genes.
Take it away, Ally. —xo, C.
Content Warning: this installment of Seeing Red includes references to sexual assault, domestic violence and generally predatory behavior perpetrated by men, including private citizens and public figures. Please take care of yourself and proceed with caution.
I still have faith and I still have hope. I’m not sure I would if I didn’t let myself seethe.
Most of us who grew up Gen X were raised with parents who said things like:
“Don’t be angry” (variations included: “Don’t be sad” and “Don’t be scared”) “Hug Uncle Henry because I said so”
“Don’t talk back”
“Do what I say, not what I do” … and,
“You have no idea how good you have it”
Of course I’m generalizing, there are always going to be those people who lucked out and had parents who encouraged them to feel all their feelings no matter the era, but by and large when I meet people from my generation, we speak the same post-therapy,
I-had-to-figure-out-how-to-feel-things-too, language. Basically, we were told not to have messy emotions, or if we had messy emotions, to put them somewhere convenient so we would not be hassling our very seventies-but-also-stressed-out parents who were dealing with a lot of things already.
This was all somewhat strange, because we were the generation that grew up hearing about men in white vans, razor blades in apples, the Tylenol murders, the Cold War, the Jonestown mass suicide, Eton Patz, and Chernobyl - and that’s just off the cuff. Plus, we were allowed to watch Jaws - I saw it at five years old - my mom thought it would “go over my head” and I didn’t sit on the toilet seat for six months because I was scared a baby shark might come up the pipes and bite my ass. Later, as preteens we read books like Flowers in the Attic. Iykyk.
You see what I’m saying, yeah? You’re picking up what I’m putting down? It’s pretty weird for a generation of kids to know there are horrific, scary, confusing things happening in the world, people who can’t be trusted, disasters that can befall any of us, and the ever-present threat of nuclear annihilation - whilst at the same time being told not to be scared, angry or sad.
What I took away from all this was…don’t express anger, fear, anxiety or confusion while you avoid apples at Halloween, mushroom clouds at all times, and men who expose themselves (or worse) when you’re out moving around the city by yourself. Cool. Also, you’re a girl so you’re supposed to be helpful, kind, polite, pretty, thin, and smart (but don’t show off, and definitely don’t think too much of yourself).
Girls in particular were taught to be giving and thoughtful, to go down the “pink aisle” and pick the sparkly things, the baby dolls, the fake ovens and princess costumes. So that was the “big picture”, and then there were whatever messages you were getting at home. I had two households after I was four, my mom’s and my dad’s.
My mom and my dad both had tempers. My dad had textbook flash rage. He could go from neutral to furious in 0.5 seconds. He was a yeller, and when he yelled, it sounded like it was coming from the depths of his soul, or the gates of hell. It was loud, and he was tall. It would make my heart race and my jaw clench.
It was very strange to have a man who erupted like that tell me not to be angry - I think even when I was little this seemed incongruous to me, though of course if I wouldn’t have been able to say it then. It’s like someone yelling at you to relax, or Mike Johnson telling you he’s Christian as he sends Congress home to protect an adjudicated rapist, it just doesn’t work.
It was especially egregious because my dad had also decided I was going to be the sounding board for all of his very grown-up problems with fidelity. Who better to listen to you sob about your inability to keep your dick in your pants, after all, than your adoring four, five, six, seven, eight - well, you get the idea - your very young, very adoring daughter who is sure to take your side?
So he would unburden himself about his relationship issues and tell me it was the women in his life who were the problem (subtly turning me against my mother and my stepmom in the process, making me a co-conspirator and keeper of his secrets). Also, making it impossible for me to relate to kids my own age or have any semblance of a normal childhood.
But sure, tell me not to be angry, Dad.
(Side note: this is rhetorical, not some weird passive-aggressive thing where my dad might read this and I’m involving you in my present-day anger, which is such a cringe thing to do and why do writers do this and please don’t ever do this - my dad is dead, and I’m not angry with him anymore, I’m neutral. Funny how that worked out.)
My father’s outbursts were infrequent and generally based around perceived betrayals. Once when I was sixteen he misheard me and thought I’d said something disrespectful, and in one swoop he hit me upside the head so hard my ear was ringing for thirty minutes. When I repeated what I’d actually said, he grunted, did not apologize and continued on as if nothing happened.
What’s worse - I felt sorry on his behalf that he’d made a mistake like that, and allowed him to carry on like nothing happened even though I was in pain physically and emotionally. But I was always a good student, and by sixteen I knew how to swallow my feelings whole.
My mother, on the other hand, was frequently enraged. It was like the rage ran through her veins along with her blood. This is not to say that she was always angry, because that would be overstating the case.
It’s simply that the potential was ever-present, and her moods were a slippery thing you had to ride carefully if you knew what was good for you. Well, me. I had to ride them carefully.
Other people got the fun-drinking side of my mother. Maybe she’d start slurring a little, maybe she’d wobble on her way to the cab, but she would not unleash her fury on anyone the way she unleashed it on me, in the privacy of our apartment. In the confines of the four walls of my bedroom, usually.
It was a scary and unfortunate thing that I don’t want to write about much in this moment, but it hurt, and it confused me as a child, and continued to confuse me as I grew older - and there are probably parts of me that will always hurt a little, even though I’m a grown woman now, and understand her so much more than I did even ten years ago. Even five years ago. And even though I miss her every day, and would give anything for one more conversation.
Growing up, my mother would not tolerate any backtalk from me, any anger, any questioning of her behavior at all. She could rage at me on any night, and I was expected to act like it didn’t happen the next day. Get up in the morning with a smile on my face, pack my little lunch for school, go get those straight A’s and not cause her any stress. No credit for the good things, that stuff was expected, but wow did I hear it if I fell short of her expectations in any small way.
There was to be no “airing of dirty laundry” no telling anyone what was happening - that would have been a betrayal. My mother would not admit she was an alcoholic - and when I questioned her - which I did as I got older, I was told I was sensitive and dramatic. It was my perception that was the problem, not her drinking, not her violence, not the way she came after me.
You can imagine that coming out of my generation, and also these two particular households, I did not turn into a grown woman who felt like it was okay to be angry. Go watch some commercials from the seventies and eighties if you have any doubt about the way women were being trained to behave. My god, the perfume, shampoo and jeans commercials alone are enough to make you want to hurl.
Women who did express their anger were often described as “shrill”, “hostile”, or, “frigid” - women who had the gall to be angry were called “bitch” or worse.
Those tides are turning. I’d like to think I’m part of the generation of women that’s started to break the fucking dam if you want to know the truth.
I’m angry about so many things. I’m angry that I was taught not to express my anger, because holding it in made me physically sick for so long. I used to grind my teeth as a kid so loudly I’d wake my mom in the next room, and my dad on the next floor.
I got migraines so blinding I ended up in the hospital many times as a teenager and an adult. I struggled with body dysmorphia and disordered eating for years. It’s not like the rage disappears if you repress it - it comes to the surface in other painful and debilitating ways, and you are the one who pays the price in exchange for what? The comfort of the people around you? The keeping of the status quo? No thank you.
I pushed down my feelings so hard, I didn’t even know how I felt anymore, or if I could trust my own perception. I grew into an adult who began far too many conversations with the words, “Is it just me, or does this seem - not okay/strange/wrong/messed up - to you, too?” Because pushing your feelings down and prioritizing everyone else’s needs and comfort levels gets you to a place where you don’t trust your own judgment about anything anymore. It turns you into someone who has to do a lot of reality testing and second-guessing, and that is exhausting. Life is too short.
I’m angry because women and children are not safe in this world. I’m going to talk about what it’s like growing up as a girl because I know that experience from my bones out. It’s not okay that the first time a man exposed himself to me I was eight years old, sketching a tree with my third grade art class in Central Park.
It’s not okay that another grown-ass man did the same thing on a public bus when I was ten. Or that a man grabbed me in the stairwell on my way to ballet class when I was thirteen years old, and put his hand over my mouth and told me not to move, scaring me until I was nothing but my own racing heartbeat inside my eardrums.
It’s as if girls are just there for the taking, there for the using and abusing. As if we exist for men to do with us what they will.
If you didn’t know any better, you’d think a group of men got together a long time ago and wrote a book about an all-powerful man who made Woman from the rib of a man, for the pleasure and companionship of a man - and that narrative stuck. Almost like we are not our own full, embodied creation in and of ourselves. Huh. I’ve got news for you if you’re confused about this.
It’s not okay that guys used to get right up on me in the subway or on public buses to rub their hard-ons into the back of my leg at rush hour, when I couldn’t tell if it was on purpose or not - when I was a kid just trying to get to school - or that a grown man would not take no for an answer when I was sixteen, even though I begged.
It’s the worst betrayal of all that when I finally went to my mother and told her what happened, she believed him, a relative stranger, over me, her daughter. It was probably less painful to believe that I’d consented, but it made me feel dead inside and lost to myself.
It’s not okay that men yell the most disgusting crap when girls and women walk by construction sites and other people walk by like it’s normal - and no decent men nearby even look at you and say hey, that’s bullshit, they should not talk to you like that, I’m sorry. It’s not okay that two weeks ago a man chased me and my sixteen-year-old daughter up the front path of our house, onto the porch, and that we just made it inside our front door. When you put a predator in the White House, you embolden all the other predators, that’s how it works.
It’s not okay that there are Robert Chambers, Andrew Lusters, Brock Turners, and Jeffrey Epsteins in the world, and they don’t pay a fucking price, not really. Jeffrey Epstein paid with his evil waste of a life, finally, but that’s only because he could have taken down so many powerful and disgusting men with him - the bloodless, soulless president being only one of them - and that’s only after he devastated so many lives and raped so many girls.
It would be really strange not to be angry. Maybe the saddest thing about being taught to separate yourself from your rage is that rage is good fuel. I used to be scared of it, and I’m speaking generally. I was scared of my father’s rage, and my mother’s. It scared me because I knew I wasn’t safe in the presence of it, and I hated the way my mother’s beautiful face twisted into something wild and ugly when she was in a fury.
I hated the way her rage made her turn on me and forget she loved me. There have been other people whose anger scared me in my life. I can’t have people like that close to me, I’ve had enough of that.
When you have a healthy relationship with anger there’s nothing to be worried about. It took me some time to understand I could trust myself. It took me some time to figure out a lot of things. I know there was a point when I worried my rage would be like my mother’s, that it would overtake me and burn through me, and twist me into something terrifying, but it just doesn’t show up like that these days - it never did.
When I first started letting it out, it would exhaust me. These days it’s like any other emotion, when it arises, I use it. If I’m enraged about something, it’s because I care about whatever that thing is, deeply. It’s good to care about things deeply - people, this country, the world, the planet, the way we treat each other.
Angry people - people who are defined by their anger so much that you can feel it vibrating when you get near them - are people who are holding onto their anger. They’re the ones who keep pushing it down or feeding it - dwelling on ways they’ve been wronged, or that crappy thing someone said or did five years ago or five months ago. And listen, some things are enough to decide someone should not be in your life, but no need to dwell.
People who allow themselves to feel outraged or enraged or to rage…to use those feelings or to express them or alchemize them and make art…well, they aren’t angry anymore because they used the fuel.
Right now, for example, I feel light. I’m enraged a lot these days, but if we met for coffee (we’re not meeting for coffee, calm down, but if we did) you would not find me to be an angry person. I’m pretty upbeat by nature.
It’s been rough lately, but I still believe there are more people who want the world to be kind than there are a-holes who just want to burn through all the resources and head to Mars. I still have faith and I still have hope.
I’m not sure I would if I didn’t let myself seethe.
I hope you care about something enough to be outraged about it, and that it causes you to see red. I hope you take that red and write with it or paint with it or dance with it. I hope you splatter red across the sky, or send a river of rage toward a dam that needs breaking.
I hope you trust in the power of your own emotion, and the way intense feeling spurs on action. It’s the only thing that ever does.
The thing that’s getting missed by the men like Ken Paxton and Gregg Abbott who pass legislation that deny women and girls bodily autonomy, is that we already know bleeding is always part of creation. They want to control us, to make us produce babies they refuse to protect at school.
There, they don’t care who bleeds or when. They want to make us bleed and die, but we will bleed red and create something beautiful. Small men can never take that away from us.
Seeing Red Fridays are a Substack exclusive offering in which I feature a brilliant non-male identified writer to explore their relationship with healthy anger. If you’d like to be considered for a Friday post, fill out the form I’ve linked here. If you’d like to learn more about my selection process, please refer to this article. If you know any women/femme artists who you’d like to nominate for a Pinkubator feature, or have additional questions, my DMs are open.
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Subscribed to Pinkubator. Can fully understand your anger. Sometimes outrage is my finest source of energy. I'm convinced that it took me forever to accept myself because I also grew up with the Gen X doctrine of "Be pleasant, men don't like you when you're complicated and needy". Needy as in HAVING NEEDS. A lifetime of autoimmune illness woke me up enough to stop declaring war on myself. I also don't come off as an angry person, but expressing anger, frustration, sadness is normal and healthy. When people eye roll me about babies crying on the airplane, I tell them "they're just expressing their frustration in a way we all would if it were socially acceptable" Because babies are telling you that being in a pressurized tube packed with strangers sucks nuts. They're too young to realize this what we have to do to see Grandma or whatever. Thanks for the reminder to stay in touch with your emotions regardless of your hardwired settings. Love + hugs.
Hi Ally. Thank you. I, too, rage like only a GenX woman can, and much like many it spills over in sardonic commentary made soft around the edges with witticisms and winks.
I don't believe I've broken any dams, but I fervently hope I've been that rainy day, the kind they didn't predict, that extra hard rain they hoped wouldn't come because the water level was so near the top and the spillway is still under repair, so they're scared it can't handle the overflow. They know the controls in place are insufficient and they're terrified we know that, too.
I think, that on occasion and in retrospect, I've been the leaf on the surface that displaces just enough to commence the fall.