[“Both men and women respond with anger when another person acts in critical, aggressive, and controlling ways, but many men exhibit those behaviors as a function of being adequately masculine. The behaviors that women say cause them to feel intense anger are often those that men display as aspects of traditional masculinity. In women, on the other hand, the controlling and aggressive behavior that men might find enraging indicates that a woman is not conforming to traditional norms.
A similar justifying pattern is evident in how anger can affect relationships between women of color and white women. “To hold somebody else’s anger involves being able to hear and listen without being defensive,” explained psychologist Robin Cook-Nobles in 1977. “Since a great deal of black women’s anger is directed at white women, both past and present, this can be hard for white women to do.” This is no less true today than it was forty years ago.
On average, people are angered by the same things: unfairness, perceptions of injustice, and threats to safety, family, and status. But men get angrier when challenged by women than they do by other men—in other words, when their “natural” higher status is questioned. Studies show that men are particularly bothered when women do not prioritize their needs, for example, and, instead, express their own needs or discomfort or desire for change. Men report feeling the greatest anger when women display negative feelings, have angry reactions, and make “selfish” demands. Men describe the problem in terms of women’s “moodiness” and “self-absorption.”
Even when tropes of masculinity are obliterating men’s personal lives, many men will not consider sexism a legitimate issue. For a couple, the more the husband believes in gender stereotypes that generate male privileges and the less the wife does, the more likely they are to divorce. As discussed earlier, women are significantly more likely to initiate divorce. For men, the institution of marriage comes with the assumption of certain privileges. It seems to generate male confidence in gendered and ultimately sexist roles that the insecurity of cohabitation doesn’t. Women cite inequality in their personal relationships as the reason why they seek to end their relationships, a reality verified multiple times over by surveys and studies.
In 2017, for example, a Minitel study found that 61 percent of British women are very happy being single, compared with 49 percent of men. Women cite onerous demands of domestic and emotional labor as the reasons why they would rather not be in relationships. Many men are brought up to expect this labor. A 2015 survey of heterosexual American men revealed that only 34 percent wanted a romantic partner who is “independent,” compared with the 66 percent who said the same of daughters. Men also favored intelligence in daughters more than in spouses. In other words, they want wives who are more dependent, obedient, and less self-sufficient, but daughters—extensions of themselves in ways that wives aren’t—to be smart, ambitious, and independent.”]
soraya chemaly, from rage becomes her: the power of women’s anger, 2018