holding space for male anger
on feminist conversations, my own fear and the difference between angry men and dangerous men
As bell hooks writes in The Will To Change (which you should absolutely read!!) women are socialised to see male feelings as a sort of female responsibility. Therefore, whenever someone speaks up about the ways in which society neglects men, the discourse rapidly fills with a bunch of women who feel personally attacked: the assumption (sometimes imagined by weirdos on Twitter, sometimes straight up verbalised in deranged think pieces) is that if men have a “crisis”, it’s because women (and women alone) have failed them in some way. I reject this logic, and I’m frankly kind of tired of think pieces and video essays that imply that the “loneliness crisis” that men are (undeniably, like the rest of us) going through is because women don’t lower their standards for dating and fucking. Men are not our responsibility more than any other group of people is.
With this premise out of the way, I want to explore a shift in my feminist perspective that I went through: in the last few years I have learned to hold space for male feelings, specifically for male anger, and the discussions that I can have as a result of this are infinitely better and deeper. This was absolutely not an easy task for me, because the idea that anyone, regardless of gender, is mad at me for any reason is already very upsetting, and I’m on double damage if that person is a friend or a partner. On top of that, I’ve had some experiences in which male anger -coming from strangers, friends and one time from a partner- led to unsafe and scary situations, so my ears used to be permanently perked up for any sign that I upset any guy, for any reason. However, one thing I realised is that I wasn’t discerning at all in my fear. This is kind of how fear works: fear -the so called fight-or-flight response- is meant to hijack your brain, to sharpen your reflexes and shut down the rational and calm part of your brain, and get you out of a dangerous situation. There’s a tiger, run, NOW. But once I had worked on myself a lot, once I stopped living in fear anymore all the time, I was able to recognise that in a lot of situation I felt unsafe when I probably wasn’t. And a lot of these situations, weirdly enough, were discussions and debates around the topic of gender politics.
Feminism is, as you probably already know, a very sensitive topic for people of all genders. I have a feeling that very little of us know what to do, very little of us know what it means to be a good man, a good woman, a good person, and what is supposed to be the difference (if any) between those three. Feminist teachings trickle down from academia into the mainstream, they are completely twisted and watered down in the process and they get mixed up with all the patriarchal teaching that we have all been completely immersed in since the day we were born. This is an incredibly confusing cocktail for everyone: we have to navigate healing our own hurt (which sometimes runs so deep that it makes us hurt other people) while we try to understand the hurt of “the other side”, all of it while figuring out what we want from life, love, sex, friendships and romantic relationships. Throw puberty into the mix, and maybe some good ol’ fashioned bullying and unhealthy family dynamics, maybe a sprinkle of unresolved hurt from past relationships, and it’s not difficult to see why conversations around feminism and gender roles are more often than not very heated. Emotions run extremely hot on all sides, and it becomes very hard to have discussions that are actually fulfilling and enriching, even when we’re talking to friends and partners.
A key realisation was that gender roles color the way our emotions are expressed. As a (person who is read by society as) a woman, my anger is not perceived as dangerous, and my sadness is not seen as a threat to my identity. I can cry in public and still be seen as “a real woman”. I’m not punished or shamed for being emotional, or at least not as much as the average guy is. If a discussion is very heated, and my emotions get out of control, that usually ends up in me crying, and that is treated by the world as a sort of emotional safeword: if I’m crying the situation becomes game over, the debate is done, and the room’s mission is now to care for my needs. This is a very good thing and we should not change it, because crying is usually a pretty good sign that someone is very upset, absolutely not in the condition to have a productive discussion, and their needs should be prioritised in that moment. But I am also acutely aware -as a feminist, but also as person who cares deeply about the men in my life- that men are usually deeply shamed for crying since an early age. The messaging that “real men don’t cry” is drilled into the brains of young boys with bullying, parental shaming, laughter from partners and weird subconscious messaging from movies and advertisement. Terrence Real calls this “psychological patriarchy”, which is a terrible name for a very real phenomenon: the way men internalise the teachings of patriarchy, sometimes so deep they’re not aware of it themselves at all. Throw in a bunch of testosterone, and it’s easy to see why men are much less likely to cry, and if they do, why they are much less likely to receive the care that crying deserves. When I’m having a heated discussion with a man, there is an imbalance in our right to openly cry: I have a safeword, but my “opponent” doesn’t.
The solution in an ideal world would be for men to be openly able to cry just as much as women, but that requires a massive amount of work on a giant systemic level. So for the men who are alive today, for the friends and partners with which I have these important but often heated discussions, the reality is that high emotionality will probably manifest as anger. Women cry, men get angry. Not always, but enough that there is an imbalance in expectations, and I had to learn the nuance that comes with that imbalance. I think feminist theory can have a lot of value for both men and women, but I can see why men feel sometimes alienated from it. I don’t think it’s a responsibility of “women” or “feminists” to cater to male feelings (mostly because we, frankly, have much bigger fishes to fry) but I do genuinely want to provide a space for my male friends to explore these topics safely. But for a long time, I wasn’t really successful in that: at the slightest hint of anger from them, I would get defensive and feel attacked and in extreme cases, where they really weren’t capable of reading the room and the discussion got very heated, I would start crying, which was obviously not “wrong” of me but it did mean that my feelings were being prioritised, that night.
Now, it is very important to set some healthy and strong boundaries, because I recognise that what I am saying sounds an awful lot like the sentences that people use to justify disrespect, neglect and sometimes abuse. Narratives like “if he gets angry it’s because of something you did” or “his anger is your responsibility” are very dangerous, and I don’t think I have to explain why. So I am absolutely and categorically NOT implying that women and/or feminists should just put up with male aggression in any of its form. I won’t accept shouting during a discussion, no matter what: a firm tone is fine, but shouting either at me (or at some imaginary woman) is not ok, and if the person I’m discussing with starts raising their voice above an acceptable threshold, I will tell them “you need to speak in an appropriate tone and volume or we are done with this discussion”. If my boundary is not respected, I will either change the subject or go to the bathroom or pretend to go for a smoke or disengage or leave the situation entirely, depending on the context. This is not a form of tone policing (which is when the tone of a perfectly normal sentence is criticised as a way to deflect from their content) because it is perfectly reasonable to expect people to not yell at me, and I encourage you to have a similar boundary if you’re upset or annoyed by shouting. Another boundary that I have is that I don’t tolerate any form of physical aggression: if the person I’m discussing with starts being physically violent towards anything in the environment (kicking a chair or slamming their fist on the table or punching a wall) that is a HUGE red flag and I will disengage. Rage and aggression are absolutely not the same thing, there’s plenty of occasions in which I am capable of being furious without damaging the objects and people around me, without being aggressive and without treating others like garbage, so it’s perfectly reasonable to expect that of someone else if they want to have a discussion with me. And finally, personal attacks are off the table: I will not put up with being called stupid, narcissistic, crazy or any other hyperbolic insult during a discussion, no matter how heated it gets and no matter what I say. If they use personal attacks, I will politely but firmly call them out, and if they refuse to apologise immediately I will disengage. These are all, by the way, boundaries that I also have in my personal life outside of political discussions, and I think they are very reasonable.
The goal of boundaries is to remind ourselves that we have (some) agency on the world around us: a boundary is in the form of “if you do X, I will Y” and that reminds us that we always have the agency to do Y. Boundaries, however, don’t just determine the limits of what is unacceptable, they also show us what we are actually comfortable tolerating: I won’t put up with disproportionate aggression and name calling, but I can definitely handle the tone getting heated. I can handle the frustration of my friends, I can handle their rage and their complaints and their confusion, and I think there is a strong need for a space in which my male friends can be vulnerable. Feminists often tell men that a big part of undoing patriarchal teachings is to be more vulnerable, but I don’t think we spend enough time reflecting on what that vulnerability looks like for a category of people that is taught from birth to suppress any emotion except anger.
In the same way that women are told that male feelings are their responsibility -as I was saying before- men are taught that women’s safety is their responsibility. I am concerned about the way we treat male anger as inherently dangerous, because men often internalise the idea that their own anger is something that they must hide, something that other people need to be protected from. I’ll quote bell hooks again:
“Emotionally abandoned by their parents, many boys are angry, but no one really cares about their anger unless it leads to violent behaviour. if boys take their rage and sit in front of a computer all day, never speaking, never relating, no one cares. If boys take their rage to the mall, no one cares, as long as it is contained. When it comes to boys, neglect is more common than abuse.”
- bell hooks, The Will To Change
Because of this societal fear of male anger, men often internalise narratives like “I can’t be myself around others or I will scare them” and “if I show others who I truly am, they will be hurt” and “my real emotions will make people run away from me”. This is very painful, and not fair. It’s not something that I want my male friends to feel, it’s not something that I want my partner to feel. Crucially, this is not something that I want my son to feel, if I ever end up having one: if we want to raise emotionally healthy boys who will make one day for good and safe and happy men, we need to be able to meet their emotions with curiosity and empathy, and that includes anger. Anger is a natural emotion, it usually tells us when we feel like we’ve been wronged, and it’s very important to give to the men in our lives (be them sons, brothers, comrades, partners and friends) a space where they can work through that anger without the shame of feeling judged. Anger often hides more complicated emotions underneath it, it’s usually there to shield us from hurt or humiliation or sadness or inadequacy or disgust or fear, and if we don’t learn to give men a space to turn that anger into those deeper emotions, we are neglecting the men and boys that we love.
I think that a big reason why I was so unable to engage with male rage was because I was very disconnected from my own rage. I’m a recovering people pleaser, so of course I was disconnected from that one emotion that is there to tell me when I’m feeling disrespected: that’s precisely the thing that I taught myself NEVER to feel. But anger is just a feeling, it’s a normal part of life, and it doesn’t make me unstable or crazy. It definitely doesn’t make me inherently dangerous! Once I got more in touch with the entire spectrum of my feelings, I was able to feel the depth of my anger without immediately judging it, and I’m now much more able to empathise with other people, especially with men. I have felt deep anger many times, and in absolutely zero of those times I have damaged property or hurt someone, and therefore I have to trust that the men in my life are perfectly capable of doing the same.
I want the men that I love to be able to be themselves around me, and sometimes that will include being angry. I think that, as long as they express this anger without aggression, it is my responsibility to work through my fear and discomfort, in order to be able to meet them where they’re at. Men: you deserve to be friend and to date people who will hold space for all of your complex emotional human reality, and that includes your anger. If you’re not showing that anger as aggression or entitlement (and the vast majority of you are not doing that) you are allowed to receive compassion for those feelings. You shouldn’t feel like you have to hold yourself back all the time for people to accept you and hear you, because that is not true. You deserve to not be treated like a threat, when you are not being one.
I’ve been hurt in the past, and as a result of this hurt, for some time I had alarm bells going on in my brain at all sorts of inappropriate times. I felt threatened by situations that were objectively safe, and I have met people’s emotions with terror when it wasn’t needed. I don’t feel guilty over this because it was a very normal response to that hurt, but I do feel a responsibility to have more nuanced responses, now that I have healed. Also, it’s not fun to live in a brain with a broken alarm system, and it’s important (at least for me and my sanity) to differentiate between perceived danger and actual danger: there are times in which I feel threatened, but I am not being threatened, and I have a responsibility to go into the headquarters of my brain and mitigate the pointless panic. I don’t have to be perfect, but I do have to make an effort. Part of this differentiation is to objectively evaluate men’s anger, and meet it for what it is. Is this guy aggressive? Is he physically threatening? Is he shouting? Is he treating me in humiliating ways? Does he show disrespect, contempt, or a violent behaviour? Or is he simply a bit frustrated at the state of the world? Because that last one, dear male comrades, we have in common.