This is part of Revenge Week, a series about how vengeance runs America, from the White House to cheating spouses to that bad boss who totally deserved it.
In the beginning, the fantasy was simple.
I’d send the incriminating text and voice messages I’d saved, and then hear through the grapevine that she’d been fired. That felt good to imagine—an eye for an eye. Just the thought of it made me feel better. Then I’d remember what she did, and the fantasy would feel too polite. It needed more meat on its bones.
I let myself build it out. It wouldn’t be hard to find court cases and marriage records. I imagined myself furiously typing, tearing through files and data, fingers click-clacking like a hacker in a ’90s movie. Once I got bored of that, I pivoted to her ex. He was dumpy and trusting, the perfect mark. Maybe I’d find him and introduce myself. Maybe I’d gaze a little too long at his mouth while he spoke, the corners of my lips curling into a smile that let him think he was pleasing.
Soon, the fantasy didn’t just have flesh—it walked around on its own. Each time I’d add a limb or an organ to the monster, an intoxicating feeling would surge in my chest like I’d downed a glass of Champagne. Just the idea of revenge was enough to dilate my pupils. All the while, I’d smile inwardly, brushing my tongue across the points of my incisors, feeling the hair rise on the back of my neck. I felt feral, yet safe in my imagined brutality. The serenity after a fantasy was overwhelming, teetering dangerously on the edge of glee.
I was being ridiculous, of course. In my head, I was a vampire, but to everyone else—including my own reflection—I was me: just an astrologically delicate woman who cries at pet food commercials and recently broke her back doing karaoke. None of my muscles heave. I get tired from planning to financially plan. The most evil thing I’ve done was leave a Google review of Jersey Mike’s that said, “They’re trying hard to make those sandwiches, but today, it isn’t working.” Seriously, who was I kidding?
Still, I couldn’t get revenge off my mind. Unwilling (or unable) to fulfill my fantasy, I started to notice vengeance everywhere else. There it was in the news. It was in my city, in the unmarked vans and armored cars sent to make immigrants disappear. I saw it in advice columns. It has spawned endless psychological, behavioral, and neurological research. It’s driving decisions about cutting-edge technology. It’s threatening national security. It’s shaping how we police. It’s driving financial strategies. It’s dominating WikiHow (How to Get Revenge on Anyone—With Pictures!). Taylor Swift made millions of dollars getting it, then paid millions for more.
There are revenge-for-hire websites, A.I. revenge bots, and a multiplying colony of subreddits where people share their revenge stories and advise each other on how to exact their own (not to mention the scores of YouTube channels and social media accounts that retell them in flat, robotic voices). Cancel culture is revenge. People are “revenge quitting” their jobs, whittling their figures into “revenge bodies,” and donning “revenge dresses” designed to make their ex-boyfriends implode. Sports are revenge. Political strategies erupt around vengeance. Countless books, movies, and TV shows depict the satisfying, surgical process of unraveling your enemy. Revenge, I realized in galaxy-brain fashion, is not just an action—it’s a culture. And it’s one we’re consumed with, because it makes us feel good.
In The Science of Revenge: Understanding the World’s Deadliest Addiction—and How to Overcome It, Yale assistant clinical professor in psychiatry James Kimmel Jr. explains why: Revenge releases a whole lot of dopamine. It can quite literally make us feel high, which may mimic patterns of addiction in the brain. To Kimmel, this is not just an interpersonal problem, but a public health crisis—perhaps the deadliest one of all. Forgiveness, he argues, is the only cure. OK, Mother Teresa!
As willing as I am to entertain this very substantiated hypothesis, I think revenge fantasies can be just as useful. I know this because I tried to forgive her, but the exercise felt empty and compliant, like I was condoning what she’d done. I could only focus on it for a moment or two before it felt like wobbling on a tightrope and then falling off. Eventually, I gave up, and the fantasies came flooding back like blood into a cramped vein. That’s when I really started to feel better. In fact, the fantasies seemed to be improving things.
My mind, sharpened from crafting hallucinatory scenarios in quantum 4K resolution, had acquired a newly upgraded imagination. My vocabulary, massaged by hours of binge-reading revenge novels, has become downright literary. I’ve never been more physically active. I am boxing, at a gym, for the first time in my life. Am I training for something? Ew, no! I just know that I’m upset, and sculpted shoulders would make me feel better.
Mostly, though, the fantasies were cleansing. Awash in them, I could rewrite the script of what happened again and again, building myself back into a person who has control, however illusory that may be. So for me, at least, revenge has been hearty and nutritious. It’s like eating oatmeal: not without pain, but nourishing nonetheless.
To his credit, Kimmel has also observed the liminal catharsis of revenge fantasies. He even created a system by which folks can put the people who wronged them on imaginary trial. They get to be heard, hold the party accountable, invent a punishment, and then experience what it would feel like to see it enacted. In one study, he found that this fictitious roleplay decreased the strength of revenge desires and increased their benevolence. Science agrees: Fantasy can be useful.
Real-life revenge, however, can have incredibly high stakes. The current administration seems to have plunged the country into a chaotic and uncharted territory that feels entirely architected by revenge (and not the fun fantasy kind). It can feel helpless, at times, to know we’re left to wait, vote, organize, and imagine what things would be like if history, culture, resources, time, and space were different. But fantasizing about what we’d do to the people who hurt our families and take our rights away does feel good. It’s not dignified—and you definitely shouldn’t always put thought to action—but just the thought of revenge can make us feel just a little less feeble when we’re up against something too big or evil to take down alone. In fact, we have to fantasize if we want things to change. Picturing a better world is what gives us hope.
The upside to both real and imagined vengeance is the inspiration for Slate’s Revenge Week. In this series, we’ll be looking not just at fantasies, but the very real feelings, actions, and consequences of the dish best served cold. In these stories, you’ll see through the eyes of people who got revenge or stopped themselves in the nick of time; who ruin people’s lives for a living; and who’ve dug deep into the brains of people who, like me, can’t quite seem to give up the fantasy. Can revenge be good? Can it look like justice? And how the hell do you hire a guy to send 500 Penthouse magazines to your enemy’s office? We’ve outfitted some stories with an interactive component that allows you to rate how icily cold you think the revenge was served. At the end of the week, we’ll choose a Coldest Revenge winner. As is often the case when revenge is exacted, that person will win … nothing!
Is all of this mature? No. Advisable? Not quite, if you believe Kimmel. But in these trying times, it’s OK to fantasize a little. So take a breath, bare your teeth, and shake your fists at your sworn enemy. It’s probably not going to change much, but isn’t it cathartic?
