In the second episode of Furious, Hulu’s 2026 series about a survivor of childhood sex trafficking seeking revenge on the men who abused her, Catherine Grace (Lola Pettigrew) is standing in a kitchen, preparing raw chicken breasts, when a man at the edge of the frame begins commando crawling across the floor toward her. He seizes her aggressively by the ankle, a move that in most stories would signal she was in imminent danger.
But in Furious, Catherine overpowers him easily, forcing his head back to the floor. In the next scene, he is lying helpless in bed while she stands over him with a syringe. It is a startling reversal of the way the show presented the pair only an episode earlier: him, tall, middle-aged, powerful, and physically imposing; her, young, working-class, and small enough to be almost engulfed by him.
Now, his size is irrelevant. She has rendered him powerless and is deciding what will happen to his body. It is in this transformation—from apparent prey to the most dangerous person in the room—that much of the satisfaction of Furious lies. In real life, women are overwhelmingly the victims of violence rather than the perpetrators of it. An average of 24 people per minute in the United States are victims of rape, physical violence, or stalking by an intimate partner, according to the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, with women experiencing such violence at three times the rate of men.
The Epstein files and associated legal battles have
Meanwhile, the Epstein files and associated legal battles have shown both the scale of sexual abuse against girls and young women and its penetration into the national and international elite, alongside the paucity of consequences for powerful men. In the face of such impunity, many women are incandescent with rage—a rage intensified by how little power we have to correct the injustices that provoke it.
As such, Furious offers a potent fantasy: a woman who does not wait for justice she knows won’t arrive, but appoints herself as its arbiter. Of course, stories trading in that fantasy are neither new nor particularly rare. In Aleshea Harris’s Is God Is (2026), adapted from her play of the same name, twin sisters set out to avenge the cruelties of their estranged father. In last year’s The Housemaid, Sydney Sweeney plays Millie, a formerly incarcerated young woman hired to work in the home of Nina (Amanda Seyfried) and her abusive husband, Andrew, and the two women ultimately join forces against him.
Emerald Fennell’s Promising Young Woman, released in the aftermath of #MeToo, followed a woman seeking revenge on the men who enabled the assault of her best friend. Naomi Alderman’s 2016 novel The Power imagined a world where women suddenly became the physically dominant sex. And in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the tiny teenager who would be destined to die in a dark alley in most horror movies was instead the person powerful enough to kill the monster.
These stories wield a particular force now, after
But these stories wield a particular force now, after the overturning of Roe v. Wade and amid abortion bans that have made the state itself an instrument of control over women’s bodies, forcing women to remain pregnant against their will and, in some cases, preventing doctors from providing urgently needed medical care. They resonate differently in a political climate where some on the Right speak explicitly about restoring male authority over women and restoring a patriarchal family where men are providers and women are dependent on them.
At the same time, more than 845,000 women have left the US labor force since January—more than twice the number of men—amid job losses in female-dominated sectors that have hit Black women particularly hard. In such an environment, many women are understandably exhausted and, yes, furious. We can call our representatives and campaign for the midterms, but we can’t actually stop the administration from pursuing its agenda.
We can read every page released in the Epstein files, but we can’t bring the powerful men named inside them to justice. Shows like Furious—and even Prime Video’s forthcoming adaptation of Stephen King’s Carrie, the story of a bullied teenage girl who is transformed into a force of terror and retribution—offer a temporary entry into a world in which women can do what so often feels impossible in reality.
Novelist Sarah-Jane Collins’s forthcoming novel Slayers (Gallery) follows
Novelist Sarah-Jane Collins’s forthcoming novel Slayers (Gallery) follows two best friends who set out to get revenge on the morally bankrupt men of New York City, including a sexual predator, an abusive police officer, and a CEO engaged in Epstein-style sex trafficking. She says it grew out of the frustration “of watching #MeToo unfold in such an unsatisfying way, and seeing that men are never held accountable.
Women as a collective group have a lot of rage that we haven’t dealt with or had an outlet for.”
She believes that narratives in which “the ‘bad guy’ is getting his due for what he does to women and girls” have always appealed to women—we just haven’t always been given the opportunity to tell or consume them. But now, Collins says, “we’re seeing a large crop of women directors, writers, and actresses like Reese Witherspoon, Shonda Rhimes, and Margot Robbie, who now have a lot of power and are using it to create the things they want to see.”
Neither the women of Slayers nor those of Furious are written as role models.
Nor do these stories construct a clean opposition between predatory men and innocent women. In Furious, female characters protect perpetrators, maintain abusive systems, and sacrifice other women to preserve their own proximity to power—just as women in real life can traffic girls, defend abusive partners, or help institutions discredit victims. Female power, the series suggests, is no guarantee of righteousness.
Still, the vision the show presents is striking. Furious imagines a world in which a woman’s anger can produce consequences, and where the powerful can be made physically afraid of someone they once regarded as disposable. Its popularity may tell us less about women’s appetite for brutality than about our collapsing faith in systems of justice. When the powerful act with impunity, revenge can feel like order restored.
Source: www.vogue.com
