Anatomy Of Male Rage In Patriarchy
Has patriarchy really empowered men by legitimizing anger as a trait of manhood? Or has it weakened their emotional maturity? A weakened emotional intelligence is damaging both for them and other members of their families and society at large.
Both men and women are victims of the system. Knowingly or unknowingly either they play the role of a perpetrator or a facilitator of this victimhood.
Let me start with a story
I heard about male rage quite early in my life. I also got to know how women got conditioned to put up with their male partners’ unmanaged anger as a regular part of their lives. My grandmother would tell me this story about a woman named Lakshmi, the wife of one of my grandfather’s residential staff. Lakshmi used to come home and chat with her. Sometimes my grandmother would found her little unmindful or low. She would ask her why. Laxmi would sigh and say in a sad tone that she doubted her husband was not in love with her anymore. She would express her concern that he might be getting into an affair. On a little probing about what made her think so, she would confide to my grandmother that her husband had not been beating her as frequently as he used to. She believed that beating was an extended-expression of marital love and a husband’s right to his wife. It fostered intimacy and trust between them. It maintained the marital equation as it was ideally supposed to be. Often, on the same or later nights, the husband would ‘make love’. Soon another bundle of joy would make its way into the family. Strangely, a grieving woman often arouses lust, and not compassion in some men. They find a sadistic pleasure in forcing sex on their wives even before the hapless women could recover from the pain of physical and emotional abuse. Despite feeling uncomfortable and unwilling, women often get carried away. They mistake it for ‘love’. Even so, sex in such scenarios in the pretence of making up for the violence is often nothing but another way of asserting male dominance over women. This way, they do not want to give women the time and space to heal or ponder over what happened. On some occasions, the encounter amounts to marital rape if the woman shows reluctance or resistance. According to Lakshmi, it was a wife’s duty to put up with the torture and abuse. She believed it would help the man release his stress and pain due to the day-long toil he needed to do for his family. She perceived her husband as a guardian, sort of father figure, a master. According to her, he was entitled to his right to ‘fix’ her by scolding and beating her if she committed any mistake. The mistake could be as trivial as putting less salt in a dish or forgetting to stitch a broken button on his shirt. She also believed having sex with her husband right after the violence was necessary to retain the marriage. Because it is a woman’s only power to keep the man hooked on her and not drift away. Years later I heard the same stories during my fieldwork while doing a course in counselling. The NGOs working for women empowerment in slum areas of the economic capital city of Mumbai shared similar experience. That is how the marital cycle of love lost and found again have been maintained forever in many households.
This is just one example. It shows how the ego-centric power play manifests through the male partner’s rage and what it does to a marital relationship.
Tamed elephants, tame others
Lakshmi grew up watching the same cycle of conflict and pacification happening between her parents and other couples. She heard elderly women consoling the anguished younger ones. Those very pieces of advice and worldly wisdom had taken a firm root in her beliefs. She heard them saying that God intended women to maintain balance in their homes and families. If at times it required sacrificing or compromising with their dignity, it was okay. Essentially, women were born to bear the pain to make everyone happy. That is why God entrusted women with a special, sacred capacity to endure sorrow, misfortune and agony. Thus, women were expected to silently put up with their husband’s rage, manipulation, verbal and physical abuse. It helped to retain the marriage and maintain the family’s integrity. The same is expected of women in modern society, even today. Often, women themselves criticize other women revolting against male aggression. They discourage deviating their paths away from this toxic subservience.
It’s a universally prevalent mindset
My grandmother would casually narrate this tale as a funny story. Later, I realized it was not one Lakshmi’s personal story or an anecdote to laugh at. I observed that this was the cultural conditioning and social status of women from all walks of life. It exposed the flawed and malicious tradition of power-play generally exercised by men in marriage. It is present even in non-marital relationships, patronized by patriarchy.
Almost every time I catch up with my friends, I hear a few of them perpetually complaining about their husbands. These men humiliate and abuse them for no reason or for trivial things. They often speak to their wives using foul language and shout at them at the top of their voices. On some occasions, I saw the derogatory way these men talk to their wives. I heard them nonchalantly making sweeping comments about women in their presence.
At some point in their marital lives, many women endure some or other kind of physical abuse. I and many of my friends and relatives are no exception to this. In some cases, it was spanking and beating, forced sex or forced abortion. I know of cases where in-laws forced a woman to go for the removal of perfectly healthy high canine teeth. Her husband found it ugly. But he was smart enough not to go with the wife to the dentist. Instead, he sent his parents. One of my friends suffered forced non-medical removal of an IUD. Another did not receive any treatment, proper diet and prenatal medical care during her first pregnancy. Some I know were forced to do menial household labour during pregnancy. They had a history of miscarriages. Still, their in-laws and husbands forced them to do excessive household labour. One was subjected to coerced consumption of alcohol. Her husband did this to her to have sex with her against her will. Many of them have been putting up with the humiliating behaviour of their husbands almost throughout their 30 plus years of marital life. They hopelessly hope for change. What amazes me about us women is that even after suffering so much, we temporarily sulk and eventually get back to our tamed status. Women end up accepting and submitting to it as their unchangeable and inevitable fate. The incidences I shared just now are from a so-called upper middle class, urban and educated families. But they almost resemble what happens with countless Lakshmis in less privileged sections of society.
Strangely, these women despite regularly being abused and having been severely ill-treated by their husbands in the past, diligently abide by the marital vows. It starts with revering the ornamental signs of marriage they wear on their person. They unfailingly keep special fasts or perform rituals for their abuser husbands’ well-being and long life. They serve them and sometimes their complicit in-laws in all obeisance and dedication. They feel grateful to them for their evolution from a naïve girl to a woman of the marital household. They keep referring to the ‘good training’ their worldly-wise abusing husbands imparted to them. They feel obliged for the good ‘care’ their abusive, controlling yet ‘responsible’ husbands otherwise provide. The food, shelter, medical care, occasional entertainment and gifts, as if they did not do anything to deserve all that. What amazes me the most is the way these women vouch for their ‘love’ for their husbands though being treated like doormats for decades! I try to gauge how deep the conditioning has been within them. It obliterated the sense of self-care and self-worth in them. It blunted their discretionary power to differentiate between what is a healthy marital relationship based on mutual love, respect and understanding, and what is an ‘arrangement of convenience’. This gives rise to the question are women expected to ‘love’ their husbands by default? Especially in arranged marriages, no matter whether their husbands love them or not? I have seen women being superstitious or defensive if they were asked to question themselves about their unconditional love for their abuser husbands. There could be various reasons for that. One of the main reasons is economic dependence. Staying in an abusive marriage is a far better bargain than being a widow or a divorcee for many women. Hence, women are trained by society, or they train themselves as adults to pay the price by compromising with their self-worth and dignity and stay put. I am no exception. Been there and done that. Although eventually, I did free myself from a long, unsuccessful and abusive marriage, I have experienced my fair share of male rage in the family.
Normalization of male rage under social pressure
I have observed how I rationalized the angry outbursts of the male relatives in my family as the manifestation of their inner unresolved issues. Even after being severely verbally abused, I proceeded with a ‘nothing happened’ façade. Partially, the façade helps in protecting myself emotionally. As they say, no one should have the remote control to manipulate your state of mind. But the other reason for doing so is to avoid or prevent further deterioration of the situation in the family. Hence, to keep the façade of normalcy and balance in relationships and family, we women go on with our daily lives with these abusing men around. We interact with them normally, burying all bruised emotions in the recesses of our hearts. Thus, in so many ways we contribute to the normalization of anger and aggression as an integral part of masculinity. We do not let them realize how damaging it is.
Women do not enjoy the entitlement to get angry, yet not misunderstood
Why am I calling it ‘male rage’?
Let us analyse the ‘genderization’ of rage by patriarchy. It is a common phenomenon that when women lose their composure and get into angry outbursts in certain vulnerable moments, it is not tolerated as in the cases of men. People, including both men and women in the family, criticize and condemn it. They judge and label the angry women. There is no attempt to know and understand the underlying reasons behind it. No one sees it in the totality of the matter, as they do for men. They start characterization of the woman for getting into angry fits. People even start doubting women's mental health, unempathetically though, if they occasionally get angry. In some outlandish cases, they believe it to be the influence of certain supernatural or paranormal elements. Not only that. Later, those angry episodes of women are referred to out of context. The men in the family would do that to justify their own irrational and often deliberated rage. It becomes a counterattack or whataboutery technique.
In the case of men, episodes of anger are often considered as freak incidents under stress and duress caused by certain external factors. The faith in their core goodness is retained by parents and others. Not so for women. This is strange. It shows how convoluted is the belief that anger or aggression is a sign of masculinity. It is perceived as synonymous with power and strength. Simultaneously, blaming men’s anger on some external factors indicates their inherent weakness, incapacity, immaturity or failure to handle difficult emotions, people or situations. This paradox nullifies the concept of power or superiority expressed through their anger.
The hard questions men and women need to ask themselves
Why do women not want the men in their lives and in society to be accountable and responsible for their behaviour? Why should men enjoy the liberty and privilege to let loose their toxic states of mind, anytime, anywhere? Why would they use their lousy anger to hide their messed up emotions, stress, internal pain, confusion or trauma? Why would they choose to unleash their anger on the women closest to them such as their mother, sister, daughter or wife? Is it because these women provide themselves as the safest punching bags with the least propensity to hit back? Is it because women are expected to save the semblance of family honour and peace, at least on the surface, by quietly tolerating and hiding it within the four walls of their homes? Why do we allow men to cross our boundaries and howl at us and utter all sorts of nonsense? Why will the onus be on women to provide men with emotional crutches or a hardened back or both at the cost of their own emotional and physical well-being? Why do women let the men in their families unleash their internal demons upon them? Anyway, the relief men get by doing so remains temporary as the root cause is somewhere else and something else. Things come back to square again. What then is the point of women taking the brunt of male rage upon themselves? Does it help in keeping the peace, love and family bond, unscathed and not sabotaged? When will men, especially the so-called educated breed who manifest so much anger, realize and accept that they need help to fix this problem? When will men take responsibility for their malaise and seek professional help or do anything but spare their wives, mothers, sisters, female relatives or subordinates from it?
Is putting up with male rage an arrangement of convenience?
Let women not fool themselves and hide behind the self-glorification of saving family peace and integrity by putting up with male rage. They need to wake up and acknowledge how deeply they have been conditioned to devalue their role in the family and society. They need to question themselves why do they accept such rage? Is it the pound of flesh they barter against the monetary support provided by their husbands or other male relatives? They need to look into the mirror and see. Do they silently put up with male rage in the marriage to hang on to the marital surname, its perks and privileges and a perceived sense of security that comes with it? There is a saying that nothing comes free. So, is the monetary support received from husbands or any other immediate male family members also not free? Rather, are these considered as ‘favours’? Women’s contribution, their legal rights or men’s socially defined duties towards them, nothing matters? A woman’s role and contribution in the family and society as a mother, wife, daughter or sister has been deemed economically void. There is no statutory system of monetary reimbursement for their services in the family. Whatever economic support they receive from the males in the family is thus projected as a favour and not a return they deserve. On top of that are women supposed to reimburse these ‘favours’ by conforming to patriarchal expectations? Upon failing in that area too, are they supposed to compromise with their self-care and accept such abuses in the form of men’s angry outbursts? Are they also expected to own up to the guilt of causing it? Then, should women play any victim card? As in that case, wouldn’t it be women who choose this predicament for themselves? In the process, directly or indirectly, aren't they facilitating patriarchy to spoil the human capacity of compassion, empathy and better emotional maturity in men? Isn’t it high time that society and women themselves unlearn to devalue their roles? Or else, shouldn’t they make economic independence a priority over and above everything else? At the end of the day, isn't money a big and powerful differentiating component in human life? Surprisingly, I have seen even economically independent women putting up with male aggression and abuse. Why? Some of them told me that they did so to retain the ‘image’ society wanted women to have. Some of them are crippled by the fear of what people would say if they take any step to free themselves out of this trap? They are wary of how that would impact their children’s lives? But is it worth it? Isn’t life too big and too precious for this delusional ‘image’ women are fooled into conforming to by society and culture? Isn’t this ‘image’ a sort of blackmailing tactic by patriarchy? Because if a woman loses it or defies it, society makes her life miserable at every step.
Faulty attribution of human traits by patriarchy
Endurance, composure, gentleness, and forgiveness are considered integral qualities of being feminine. But anger, temper tantrums, violence, and rage have been defined as signs of masculinity or power. Both are constructs of patriarchy and both women and men are victims of it.
As a woman, I have heard innumerable times that I should not get angry, raise my voice, say harsh things or use cuss words. Not because these are not the right way to deal with my emotions triggered by someone or something. But because it is unbecoming of women to behave like that. They must always be soft-spoken, shy, understanding and tolerant. Whenever I slipped from this paradigm, I was criticized and called names. My grandfather, a great patriarch himself, enjoyed and endorsed my adolescent brother shouting over me in his cracked teenage voice. He said, “He is a man. He is supposed to roar like a lion. You cannot equal him as you are a woman, you do not even have a strong voice like him.” In reality, none of these traits is gender-specific. Though it is believed from an evolutionary perspective that men are genetically more prone to aggression, violence and combative tendencies, social psychological theories do corroborate the genderization of this supposedly genetic tendency which is misused as a power tool in patriarchy.
Be it aggression or compassion, both are behavioural characteristics of human emotions. It is found both in men and women. In some cases, a role reversal also happens. In such cases, the women resort to anger, temper tantrums, undue domination, manipulation and rage as a defense, offence or simply a power-exerting tool. Thus they camouflage their vulnerabilities, while the husbands or the other men in their family put up with it for the sake of peace. Men submit to such anger management issues of their female partners or family members due to vulnerabilities of their own. However, the cases of male rage over women are always much more. It reflects a general, widespread social trend with innumerable types of manifestations within various layers of social life. It is being increasingly evident.
What needs to be done to de-genderize anger and rage?
First, let us deal with ‘anger’ as it is and without attaching gender identity to it as perceived and propagated by patriarchy.
Let us all evolve, understand and deal with ‘anger’ as an aspect of the human psyche. It is a creation of ego and deep, turbulent emotion of negative nature. It has to be seen in the context of the civilized modern society we live in. Let us not surrender it to the alibi of primate trails still running in our blood. We need to acknowledge that shouting, cursing, beating or any type of verbal or physical abuse are the behavioral manifestations of anger – an internal state of mind indicating unresolved issues. It is never a sign of machismo, strength, maturity, or power. Rather, it exposes one’s vulnerability due to suppressed emotions such as despair, lack, fear, jealousy, false pride, insecurity, a sense of being less or inferior, an urge for superiority, dominance and control. It is a desperate call for attention and help, depression, and above all complete unawareness about one’s true self. Angry outbursts give one a false sense of power, camouflaging the fragility inside.
Be it an individual’s inner thoughts, emotions, belief systems or society’s collective accumulation of the same, anger must be freed from patriarchal genderization. Anger is extremely debilitating and damaging for both men and women. Every individual needs to be aware of the fact that anger is a phenomenon generating out of their internal mental state and their inability to deal with it. Nobody or nothing outside is responsible for their anger. Externalities function as triggers, often inadvertently or unintentionally. Every person must be held accountable for choosing how they would like to deal with such triggers that activate their own raw emotions, ego, psychological wounds and internal issues. They cannot use others as punching bags to hit out in frustration or as garbage bins to dispose of all the rubbish in their minds. Intensive self-awareness and emotional capacity building (EQ) training right from childhood through to adulthood would facilitate mindfulness in identifying anger in its core form and dealing with it without genderisation.
Secondly, women need 360-degree awareness to break free of male rage
Besides both men and women being trained in identifying anger as an emotion, what causes it, how it influences and shapes our behavior and actions, women also need to be made aware of what role they play in normalizing and legitimizing anger as a male trait. They have to recognize the situations, the psychology and cultural conditioning that make them subjugate their dignity, body autonomy, physical and mental well-being to male rage as a weapon of patriarchy. Once they are enlightened with this 360-degree awareness around the issue of male rage in patriarchy, they will have to stop endorsing it and become mentally and financially empowered to break free of this trap.
