![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() We assume, at least about male anger, that it’s an inevitable and normal reaction to unpleasant and insulting things, and that it’s powerful. The sage also shows that the samurai is easily yanked around by what someone else does or says. The sage makes clear that the samurai feels lousy when he’s about to commit a murder. It too often hardens into hate or boils up into violence. … to speak of nonviolent power is actually redundant.”) Equanimity is one of the key Buddhist virtues, and anger is considered a poison in many Buddhist philosophies. (Here I think of Jonathan Schell’s book on the power of nonviolence, The Unconquerable World, which makes the case that even state violence is ultimately weakness, since, as Hannah Arendt wrote, “Power and violence are opposites where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent. Verbal rage and physical violence are weaknesses. The sage says, “That’s heaven.” It’s a story about anger as misery and ignorance, and awareness as the antithesis. The sage says as the blade approaches, “That’s hell.” The samurai pauses, and realization begins to flood in. The latter becomes so enraged in response that he draws his sword and prepares to kill. The sage replies by asking why he should explain anything to an idiot like the samurai. There’s a zen story I heard long ago, about a samurai who demands that a sage explain heaven and hell to him. For all of us this is the conundrum: How, without idealizing and entrenching anger, can we grant nonwhite people and nonmale people an equal right to feeling and expressing it? One of the pitfalls in trying to establish equality is to confuse gaining power with unleashing rage. Much of the anger discussed in all these books comes from being thwarted-from the inability to command respect, equality, control over one’s body and destiny, or from witnessing the oppression of other women. The same feminist transformations that have allowed this outpouring may eventually wear down some of the causes of our anger. “A society that does not respect women’s anger is one that does not respect women-not as human beings, thinkers, knowers, active participants, or citizens.” dictate the degree to which we can use anger effectively in personal contexts and to participate in civic and political life,” Chemaly notes. Women no longer obliged to please men may finally be able to express rage, because we’re less economically dependent on men than ever before, and because feminism has been redefining what’s appropriate and acceptable. These books arrive at a moment when a lot of women have changed and too many men have not-and some are, in fact, retreating into revved-up misogyny and rage against the erosion of their supremacy. (Michael Kimmel’s recent book, Healing From Hate, which examines male fury in global politics, is among the valuable exceptions.) We have until very recently treated it as inevitable that women should adapt to these outbursts with Mace in our purses, self-defense lessons, and limits on our freedom of movement, tiptoeing around men who use their volatility to intimidate and control others. Because we normalize the behavior of men-and of white men in particular-the fact that a lot of far-right movements, such as the American neo-Nazi terror group Atomwaffen Division, are mostly male, is seldom noted. Male anger is a public safety issue, as well as a force in the ugliest politics and social movements of our time, from the epidemic of domestic violence to mass shootings, and from neo-Nazis to incels. Anger is often entangled with entitlement-the assumption, which underlies a lot of the violence in the United States, that one’s will should prevail and one’s rights outweigh those of others. ![]() Add to this all the high-powered, high-profile men-the #MeToo perpetrators-who have been cruel and degrading to women, and the men who went berserk in early August when The New York Times appointed Sarah Jeong to its editorial board, slinging sexualized and racist insults at her because she had dared to criticize them. You would think there would be more literature about why men are so angry-the president, the mob in Charlottesville a year ago, the alt-right generally, the bar brawlers, the wife-beaters, the gay-bashers, the man who got more famous than he anticipated for screaming at a couple of women who were speaking Spanish in a Manhattan restaurant earlier this year. ![]()
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