There may be something in this. But what it misses is that women aren’t socialised to suppress anger but, rather, to avoid confrontation. Legitimate anger, in context, is confrontational: oriented toward or against something or someone, with the aim of getting something done, or preventing something being done.

By contrast, a “rage ritual” is empty, goal-less anger: pure emotion with no object. In fact, this is the point of a “rage ritual”. They’re “held in the woods, so participants can make noise without fear of bothering people nearby”. Participants are paying to enjoy a risk-free experience of pasteurised anger, carefully purged of any motive force, that goes nowhere and bothers no one.

In an Instagram video promoting one of her rage retreats, Banducci gestures at the actual, confrontational nature of women’s anger, describing how this “sacred rage” has the power to change the world. But somehow it follows from this that anger should be expressed in a risk-free setting: “it is imperative we give ourselves safe spaces to release this fiery hot emotion” lest it “poison or toxify our inner reality”.

Is it really liberating, or healthy, or detoxifying, to pay thousands to work yourself into a rage in a context that strips the emotion of any meaningful capacity to change anything? Well, if not “healthy” exactly, it may at least be pragmatic. For in the age of viral public shaming, wealthy white women who express their anger through actual confrontation can face ferocious consequences. When such individuals confront strangers in the name of public norms of order, cleanliness, or decorum today, they are routinely shamed on social media as “Karens” — or even traduced as ideological descendants of the Klu Klux Klan.

Banducci does not address this increasingly brutal racial politics of female anger — at least, not directly. But the images she uses in her video, to depict women channelling their anger into changing the world — that is, into activism — are strikingly “diverse”, and the causes on their placards are impeccably right-on. By contrast, the videos of angry, flailing women hitting the ground pointlessly with sticks in her therapeutic retreats suggest a much richer, whiter customer base than these praiseworthy activists: in other words, one drawn from much the same demographic as the one demonised in viral “Karen” videos.

So the video’s overt message may be about liberating women to “fully emote”. But the implicit one concerns where, for whom, and on what grounds anger is legitimate, and comes loaded with subtle caveats concerning race, class, and moral values. The inference could not be clearer: bourgeoise white women are permitted to express confrontational, interpersonal anger, but only within the language of progressive activism. In any other context, this powerful emotion should be suppressed, then redirected toward the closed, inward-facing, inert circuit of “self-care” and therapeutic personal growth.

A “rage ritual”, then, is the opposite of what it claims to be. Retreating into a depopulated woodland to scream isn’t a way of liberating conflict-averse AWFLs to express their anger, in contexts where confrontation would be the appropriate response. Instead, it’s a complicated, expensive, and therapy-coded way of helping such women avoid being publicly pilloried as a viral “Karen” by ensuring their capacity for righteous anger is reserved for morally approved causes, and otherwise left to dissipate into the empty woods.

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Mary Harrington is a contributing editor at UnHerd.

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