“Any woman who has lived with male rage at close range has a better chance of understanding the vulnerability that fuels it than your average bro. She learns firsthand how the ways in which men are damaged determine their need to wreck damage on others.”
- Emily Wilson, translator of Homer’s Iliad, New Yorker, Sept. 18, 2023
In graduate school six decades ago, I became very close to my mentor’s assistant, a woman through whom everything for him passed. She had become a good friend; we shared information even her boss (and lover) did not know we shared, sometimes very personal information.
In her office one day, I saw a new print on her wall – a wild, proud, standing rooster – red, yellow, green – on a white background. “Why the rooster,” I asked her? “It reminds me of you,” she answered; “full of rage and arrogance.”
I was not shocked; we were close enough for that comment. But it took decades of work with therapists and analysts to get to the bottom of my rage (and my arrogance). Both came from fear and insecurity. Today, those fires are embers, occasionally glowing.
The reality, persistence, and toxicity of masculine rage and the consequences for individuals and for American society interests me a lot, especially as I transition to the trans/gender fluid person I am becoming and welcome my inner feminine.
The broader problem of male rage, especially in America, is compelling. I wrote a recent post on the link between masculinity, fear, and war, especially the wars we just left: Iraq (almost gone; the war a disaster) and Afghanistan (lost and chased out). On January 6, 2021, hundreds of enraged white males, many of them veterans of those wars, assaulted the Congress, red-faced screaming with rage that they would get, even kill, our political leaders. They were whipped to this act by an enraged, bloated charlatan who knows instinctively how to blend fear into rage and set it loose.
In our streets, the wartime masculine rage has morphed into drug use, homelessness, spousal abuse, misogyny, trauma and mental illness. I see this on the streets of Portland every day. Mostly male homeless people rage at full voice from their encampments that dot the city, hurling epithets and aggression at passers-by, their ids unleashed by madness, drugs, or both. America’s social and economic insecurity has literally driven these men mad. (I know, there are angry, drug-riddled, mad women in their ranks, but, count them, the homeless are largely male).
American culture fosters this masculine rage. My own ancestry is full to the brim with it, handed down as karma from generation to generation. I call it “settler rage,” in my case. Male anger, with ancestral origins, growing from the fear of indigenous people, fear of the risks of living in wild territory, fear of the patriarchy-enforcing God my ancestors worshipped in the Mormon church, fear that the religion would fall apart as apostates rejected the patriarchal, polygamous doctrine.
It is the masculine rage and manipulation of fear that led my great-great grandfather to decide to massacre a wagon train of 140 non-Mormon men, women, and children in southeastern Utah in 1857 – the Mountain Meadows Massacre. This karmic, ancestral, masculine rage showed up in his son-in-law, my great-grandfather, when he wrote about his encounters with indigenous peoples. A rage that turned cold, hard, and preachy in my Mormon grandfather, as he made the decisions about the lives of his children, a patriarch at work.
My father’s rage deeply buried, stern and non-communicative. An anger so threatening my friends called him “the judge” and would not come to my home. The anger he once told me, when I was ten, he had “learned to control.”
The cold rage and anger I could feel in myself, once I recognized at 30 that I actually had feelings. Rage I channeled into academic combativeness instead of seeing it for a cover over my fear and insecurity. The cold hard place I went only a few weeks ago when my sister told me she “did not want to make any decisions” about what to take and what to abandon when she sold her house after 60 years.
Instead of acknowledging the validity of her feelings, I felt myself go to that cold, walled-in space where I would not tolerate challenge, and start to argue the facts, the family pattern. It had nothing to do with the facts. As I went cold, I began to hear a small voice in my head saying, “this is not very skillful; you need to walk out of this.” Took me about 15 minutes to leave that plac and acknowledge what she had said.
My response was the karmic inheritance of generations of expressed and buried masculine rage. I had been challenged; I responded with defense, not awareness. The shadow was mine, not hers.
For eons, masculine rage has come from this fear and insecurity. Instead of walking into the fear and understanding it, masculine people externalize it as rage. The rage that excuses, even justifies violence, rape, and pillage, street fights, gang wars, misogyny, spouse and partner abuse and much more. The voice driven ahead by drill sergeants shouting in soldiers’ ears. The voice given fantasy-reality by masculine characters in Marvel Comics movies. The voices of policy makers playing domination games as they undid the personal life of J. Robert Oppenheimer, as the recent movie reveals. The rage that led a middle-aged male to call me a “f——-g faggot,” as I entered my condo today.
I am stymied about the cure for this ancestral illness. If men do not recognize it, it is unlikely to change. I place some hope in the next generation, young people for whom gender is more fluid, gender roles less pre-determined. Some hope in the shift in the balance of men and women in positions of influence. Hope in the expansion of mindfulness and Buddhist practices in America. But it is a very deep-rooted illness, so my hope is tentative. If I can change it in my own family and social relations, maybe that is the best place to start.
You nailed it Abbey, I absolutely agree. 15 minutes? Brilliant. Good catch. You have come a long way. (Your sister must be very patient. ;-)) I hope so.
Every one of us that takes responsibility helps the collective, I personally think. A rising tide lifts all boats. Keep writing!
So beautifully written, such vulnerable information, well spoken. Thank you so much Abby for all that you share publically of your new and budding self. I am very fortunate to know you in the later stages of your life! 😌Keep meditating. Catching the mind being agitated at it’s very beginning of intention, is a wonderful way of uprooting unwholesome thoughts.🙏🏽