Yes. Many of us are angry. Not all the time, not so we can’t manage daily life, not to the extent that we cannot love, not so much that we are on the verge of psychotic actions. But yes, there is cause for anger among today’s men.
We are angry that our children are so easily taken from us, and so easily trained to believe that we abandoned them. We are angry that our sexuality and our anatomy are the butt of constant abusive jokes. We are angry that so few women take us seriously, because, well, they know they don’t have to. We are angry over being blamed for all the evil in the world, evil that harms us as much as anyone else. We are angry at being told for a lifetime that it is our fault that women cannot have everything they demand, and angry that it is never noticed how hard we try to help them with that.
We are angry that, every time one man does something stupid and destructive, he becomes a metaphor for all men, and the entire civilization points at us and says, “see? SEE? We always knew you were all lethal psychopaths!!” But when a woman kills or maims or castrates or abandons, we are told she had good reason, naturally something that is our fault. We are angry that entire programs are funded and administered for the betterment of women, while we are glibly informed that our “male privilege” has already provided us with the same opportunities.
I daresay it would make anyone angry, to live with the constant knowledge that the outright dismantling of our lives, achievements and goals is never more than a 911 call away, and that we probably will never have the chance even to defend ourselves by due process should this occur.
It is insulting when women we’ve never met and to whom we pose no threat, hesitate to share an elevator or accept the help of a stranger. It is degrading when women who know nothing about us try and interfere with our children or tell us what a father is. It is exhausting when every decision we make, every idea we have, every thought we share, is summed up matronizingly as “male” this or “testosterone” that.
All this together, and a lot more, is doing great harm to the future of manhood. Young men are running out of reasons to marry, or work with children, or make contributions to their communities, when at every turn in a young man’s life he is bound to be told that his very nature, his masculinity, his pride, his sense of worth, are dysfunctional holdovers from a bygone age that he must correct in himself so that he will not be perceived as threatening or domineering.
For many, many years I accepted the messages of a feminist education and an emerging female-dominant culture. I believed that men before me had done all the harm I was told they had done, and that the good was not worthy of mention. I believed that women’s grievances were legitimately anchored in male conduct, just like I was taught to, and did my best to be a different kind of man, the kind women would approve of, just like I was taught to.
It was a trap, a lie. We were told we needed to be better fathers, so we made every effort to be a kind of dads we had never even seen ourselves. And they take our children away. We were told that we needed to be more attuned to our feelings, so we learned more about our inner selves, only to find that what we revealed could and would be used against us, across a marital pillow, in front of our children, or in courts of law.
And when we now turn and say, “wait, this has gone far enough”, we are told condescendingly what amounts to “get over it” as we go on coexisting in a world geared more and more for the instant gratification of female desires. We are told “this isn’t just about YOU”, as we have little trouble figuring just who it IS about, and no, seldom is it about us, whatever it is.
There is no patriarchy. Male domination is not an institutional norm. Our hormonal composition does not explain all the wrongs of history. The shape of our reproductive mechanism does not explain war, crime and the arms race. Et cetera, et cetera.
And yes, it bloody well gets on our nerves to be told, constantly, what we are, what we must become, what is wrong with us, and why we must never, EVER try to be in charge of anything, beginning with our own lives.
Male anger is not a crime, nor a mental illness
