Angry Women

Answering the wrong question to find the right one

About that viral video of the US men’s Olympic hockey team laughing at a joke Donald Trump told about the US women’s hockey team… We’ve been through this song and dance before. It almost feels redundant to explain why things went so badly wrong and why people, especially women, are so angry about this. None of it should be surprising to anyone. But apparently it is surprising to a lot of people, and a lot of people are wondering why women are so angry over this, so I guess I’m gonna talk about it. Yes, I’m a bit late to the party. Yes, I’ve been on hiatus from Substack for a lot longer than I planned. I’m here now, and we’re still witnessing the fallout of this video. Better late than never.

The thing that made the laughter during that locker room party so offensive to women was not the joke itself. By Donald Trump’s standards, it’s comparatively mild (“grab ‘em by the pussy” was much more graphic and more blatantly misogynistic). No one is surprised that Donald Trump grumbles about being forced to pretend to respect women, or that people, particularly men, think it’s funny. At least, women aren’t surprised, because we’ve seen the same behavior in our workplaces, in the bars and clubs and restaurants we go to with friends, in conversations at church, at family barbecues, at our kids’ sports practices, at parties once people have had a little too much to drink. We’ve seen men roll their eyes about having to include us in things that used to be “for men.” We’ve heard the thinly-veiled conversations about “lowering standards,” “she’s a DEI hire,” “nobody can take a joke anymore,” and “they’re too emotional.” We know that not all of the men in our lives think this way, but enough of them do that we hear them, even when they don’t think we’re listening. And many of the others aren’t willing to stand up to the ones that are bold enough to say these things out loud.

So it’s not the joke itself that’s made women so angry. We’re used to being treated like the baggage no one wants to carry, even when we’ve proven (as the US women’s hockey team has) that we overperform and are often the ones carrying the rest of the team. We’re sick of it, but we’re used to it too. That’s not what made us angry. What made us angry is that not a single man in that locker room was willing to put a stop to that behavior. Not one of them redirected the conversation away from that joke. Not one of them has offered a genuine apology for enabling that behavior and going along with it. “I’m sorry if you were offended” doesn’t count as a real apology. A real apology would sound more like “I laughed at my teammates and made it seem like what they accomplished didn’t matter, and I’m sorry for the way I acted, and I’m going to do x, y, and z to make it right.”

And to top everything off, not only have the men in that locker room not said they’re sorry, they’re making excuses for themselves. They’re doubling down. They’re talking about how they were just so caught up in their emotions that they couldn’t help themselves. They’re asking why everything “has to be political.” They’re talking about how they “support the women” and how they had a nice time hanging out with their female teammates and felt their teammates supported them. (It’s giving “I have Black friends so I can’t be racist!”) And then those same men went to the White House wearing MAGA hats and Trump merch, and they took smiling pictures with the same man who made fun of their gold-medal-winning Olympic teammates. And they went to his State of the Union address and let him parade them around the room as his guests of honor. Not only did they not bother to stand up for their teammates, they essentially gave them the middle finger in public so they could party with a wealthy politician.

Beyond the very obvious misogyny, in laughing at their teammates and not bothering to apologize or stand up for them when other people made fun of them, the men’s team has displayed a reprehensible lack of sportsmanship. Since when are we supposed to give anyone grace for mocking their own teammates? If this was any other situation where a player denigrated and laughed off the accomplishments of their own teammates, the entire sports world would be in an uproar. Imagine if a New York Yankees player complained about having to share the spotlight with one of his fellow Yankees at the All Star Game, or laughed at a joke that his teammate didn’t deserve to be there. That player would be booed at stadiums across the country; fans would be calling for him to be disciplined, maybe even to lose his spot on the All Star team. And they would cheer loudly for the player he mocked, instead of for the player doing the mocking. That’s essentially what happened here. The athletes of a country’s Olympic team may play different sports, and men and women may play separately, but in the end, they all play for the same team. The men of Team USA’s men’s hockey team are not playing just to earn personal glory and fame, or even just to earn a medal in their chosen sport. They are playing to win for their whole team, for their country, and they are expected to cheer on their fellow athletes on Team USA. The men’s hockey team have not mocked and belittled and refused to apologize to some random person, or even a rival team. They have mocked their fellow Americans and their Olympic teammates. Their actions demonstrated that they don’t view their Team USA teammates as being part of the same team, and they don’t think they should be expected to treat them the way teammates should treat each other.

Why? It’s not that they play a different sport than the women’s team. It’s not that the women’s team performed poorly. In fact, they have historically outperformed the men (which I’ll get into shortly). The women’s team won a gold medal just like the men’s team, and they earned it while playing against the same country and in the same circumstances that the men’s team faced. So why doesn’t the men’s team respect them as the teammates and equals that they are? The only logical conclusion is that it’s the same reason why Donald Trump thought grumbling about inviting the women’s team to the White House was funny. Women in sports are viewed as less competitive, less skilled, less accomplished, and less capable than male athletes. So, in the minds of the people making these jokes, making fun of women is funny and acceptable, because women’s accomplishments in sports just aren’t as impressive, important, and worthy of recognition as men. The men in that locker room felt comfortable disrespecting their teammates because those teammates happened to be women.

None of this is surprising to women. Even the women on the US hockey team, who the men claim they support, don’t seem surprised. Hillary Knight, who scored the tying goal that helped the US women’s team win gold against Canada, and who has now won two Olympic gold medals to become the most decorated female hockey player in US history, spoke about the incident in a press conference after the Olympics. She did not sound shocked or angry, or even all that sad. She just sounded disappointed: “the joke was distasteful and unfortunate… The way women are represented, it’s a great teaching point to really shine light on how women should be championed for their amazing feats, and now I have to sort of sit… and explain someone else’s behavior. It’s not my responsibility.… These women are amazing, and whatever’s going on should never outshine or minimize their work and our success on the world stage.” Even then, she highlighted that the men’s team also won a gold medal and praised them for their success in the Olympic games. She managed to champion the accomplishments of all of her teammates, and she didn’t resort to crude jokes or hostility, even after being made fun of and treated as an afterthought by those same teammates.

And that is why women are so angry about this. It’s not because we want special privileges or kid-glove treatment. All we want is to be included on the team. We want to be recognized as teammates and partners. We want our hard work to be appreciated for its worth. The US women’s hockey team is consistently one of the best Olympic hockey teams year after year. They have earned a gold, silver, or bronze medal in every single Olympic Games since 1998, the first Games where women were allowed to play hockey. This year’s gold medal is their third in the 8 Olympic games that have included women in hockey. Men have played hockey at the Olympics since 1920; this year’s gold medal for the US men’s team was their third gold since that year. They regularly earn medals of all types, but there have been multiple Games where they did not earn a medal at all. In less than half the time that men have been playing hockey at the Olympics, the US women’s hockey team has earned the same amount of gold medals as the men’s team and has had a more consistent record of winning all medal types. They deserve to be recognized for their accomplishments and should be hailed as American heroes. Instead, they were the butt of the president’s joke, and their male teammates laughed at them along with him.

And the thing that most angers me (and I imagine many other women share this feeling) is that it would have been so easy to do literally anything instead of this. It would have been so easy to just not laugh at their teammates. And if they really truly “couldn’t help themselves,” it would have been so easy to apologize afterward. It would have been so easy to say “I messed up” and acknowledge that the women’s team deserved the same praise and respect as the men’s team. Nothing is stopping any of the men who were in that locker room from typing out a message on Twitter right now and taking ownership of what they did. The only thing stopping them is themselves and their egos. And yet, not a single man in that room has worked up the nerve to do it. Not one of them has the guts to do the simplest thing in the world, the barest of bare minimum actions, and offer an apology for laughing at a rude joke.

The men’s team can say all they want to that they “support the women.” They can complain as much as they want about how unfair it is that their visit to the White House while wearing MAGA merch and their appearance at the State of the Union are seen as a political issue. They can say all they want that it was “just a joke.” They can act like they are the real victims and like they are being misunderstood as much as they want to. They betrayed their teammates for five extra minutes of fame. They have dug themselves into this hole. And every woman who has watched them do it knows that their support of women goes only as far as their personal convenience, and it will be easily set aside in favor of their ambition. If they think that they can gain fame, recognition, and proximity to power by throwing the women they say they support under the bus, they’ve proven they will do it. And when people recognized how cowardly that behavior was, these men refused to admit their mistakes, to apologize, or to make any amends to the teammates they made fun of. They have shown no interest in changing their behavior.

So of course women are angry. We’re not surprised, but we are angry. We have been taken for granted and treated like the butt of the joke for so long, even when we match or outperform men while having less support. We’re sick of it. So we’re not putting up with it anymore.

The Professional Women’s Hockey League (PWHL), established in 2023, resumed play last week after going on break while many of its players competed in the Winter Olympics. Many of the members of the US women’s team play in the league. Before the Olympics, the YouTube livestreams of their games normally attracted a few thousand viewers. When their first game after the Olympics was broadcast, over 17,000 viewers watched the livestream as the Montréal Victoire played against the New York Sirens. Multiple games held since the season resumed have been played in front of sold-out crowds with every available seat filled, including in Seattle, Ottawa, and Toronto. The 2/27/2026 game between the Toronto Scepters and the Seattle Torrent broke the PWHL crowd size record, with over 17,000 people filling the stadium. The Boston Fleet will play the New York Sirens at Madison Square Garden in April at a special Takeover Tour game, and tickets to the game have completely sold out. Many of the viewers and attendees are new fans, and the PWHL has taken notice, increasing their social media outreach and posting videos introducing new fans to the teams and the rules of the game. Women have proven we belong in sports, even sports traditionally thought of as “men-only” or “masculine.” And people are noticing. There is a growing market, growing fanbase, and growing interest for women in sports, and women are willing to spend our time and money to drive that growth. No amount of stupid jokes and grumbling old men who wear Cheeto dust as foundation will change that.

One interesting thing I have noticed over the last week, as this situation has unfolded and the public worldwide has reacted, is the reaction of men to the locker room joke and to women’s anger. There’s two main reactions that I’ve seen. One is, unsurprisingly, derision. “It was just a joke,” they fume, and they wonder why we’re making such a big deal out of “nothing.” The other reaction I’ve noticed is one of genuine shock and anger at the way the US women’s team was treated, and at the excuses being made for the men’s team’s behavior. For some, it’s not the first time they’ve become aware of how women are treated in situations like this, but they can’t help being bewildered. For others, this is the first time that they’ve really seen this type of casual misogyny, when men behave this way openly because they know there will be no real consequences. It’s the first time that a lot of men who respect and love women have been confronted with just how “normal” this behavior really is. They are appalled to see the men’s team and so many other men acting like this isn’t a big deal, like they expected this behavior to just be shrugged off. That’s exactly what they expected, and too many men have done exactly that. It leaves men of good conscience confused, angry, and more than a little dumbfounded.

And all of this is happening after the release of the Epstein files, after details of the terrible treatment of the women and girls who were sex trafficked by Epstein became public. People understand that callous jokes, crude humor, and seeing the victims as objects fostered the environment and culture that allowed Epstein to traffic them for as long as he did with no real consequences. The crude jokes are the first step in getting men to look at women and girls as objects instead of seeing them as people. And now that people have made that connection, they can’t watch the men’s Olympic hockey team make those same jokes about the women’s team without seeing that same culture, that same attitude, that makes it so easy for predators like Epstein and the men who made friends with him to abuse women and girls and never face any consequences for it. And they’re right to see it that way. One in five women athletes have reported experiencing sexual abuse as a child while involved in sports. That attitude that tells women they don’t belong in sports, that they are objects to be ogled or baggage to be complained about instead of people and athletes to be celebrated, is the same attitude that allows predators to continuously abuse them, with no real justice for most of those responsible.

It is encouraging for me to see that some men are alarmed and upset by the US men’s team’s behavior. Not because I enjoy watching them be upset by it, but because it means they are realizing, some for the first time, exactly how pervasive that behavior is, and what it does to the women who are subjected to it. And they have made the connection that that behavior has real consequences, even beyond the shame and embarrassment it causes for women. It enables the continued abuse of women and girls in sports and in our society as a whole. And some men are realizing that misogyny isn’t just a bad attitude held by a few men that occasionally forces women to work harder to overcome challenges and barriers to their success. It’s a worldview that creates environments, cultures, and systems that force women to accept abuse and violence, and adapt to rules designed to benefit men in order to survive. That system reminds us regularly that no matter how hard we work or what we accomplish, it won’t be enough to change the system or protect us from abuse unless men are also willing to change that system. And they’ll have to sacrifice their relative privilege, personal comfort, and the good graces of powerful men like Donald Trump to do it.

It’s good that there are more men becoming aware of this, and more men are realizing that if things are going to change, if we want people like Epstein, his friends, and other abusers to be held accountable, the system that protects them needs to change. And there are men who are willing to do some hard work on themselves and sacrifice some of their privilege to make that change possible. The trouble is, as the US men’s hockey team displayed, there are still far too many who aren’t.

Yes, women are angry. And it may feel like that anger is directed at “all men” or most men. Sometimes it is. More often, that anger is directed at a system that enables the worst behavior in men, and that too many men are happy to take advantage of when it benefits them. Yes, that system victimizes men, too; after all, some of the victims of Epstein’s sex trafficking operation are men. Misogyny, like any form of hatred, hurts everyone it touches. But by design, it hurts women the most.

So the question to ask isn’t “why are women so angry?” The answer to that one is obvious. The question we should be asking is, “how do we change the system that made this acceptable?” And in asking that question we are faced with another one: “how do we get more men to realize that they need to be part of solving this problem too?” That’s a much harder question to answer. We can start by making it impossible for them to be unaware of what this system does to women. Everything that has already happened this year has certainly moved us in that direction. Another thing we must do is build an alternative to that system that shows everyone that something better is possible. We have to get people to think outside the box, to imagine a world and a future for all humans that’s better than what misogyny can offer. Maybe we can start by cheering on the women of the PWHL. Their accomplishments, their fight to be recognized and taken seriously, and their skill as athletes who are among the best of the best in their sport, deserve to be celebrated. They are finally starting to get the recognition and praise they have given it their all to earn. And that’s a cause that all of us can get behind.