AIBU to wonder why men are so angry

[Moanranger]

Having read a Marina Hyde column in the Guardian about being followed & harassed by an angry man, plus my own recent experience with anger from a male stranger, I am asking this.
Where does this male anger come from? Drugs/meth? Steroid use? Just what?
My own recent experience was a road rage incident. I honked my horn at some boy racer (car with spoilers, low slung) speeding on my narrow, windy, busy lane. He screeches to a halt, jumps out of his car, then turns car around & follows me back to my drive, jumps out again & shouts “I know where you live, c**t”
Such anger over nothing, but v similar to Marina’s incident. This is a key issue, huge problem with male rage & toxic masculinity.

Sayamino, as someone here points out, 'if it was testosterone they’d be unable to control it against their 7ft tall, bodybuilding, cage fighting colleague. And yet they, miraculously, can.'
And someone else describes a man being aggressive towards her and then when her DH returned, he 'stopped shouting and drove off.'

But less anecdotally, the evidence for a biological imperative in men's behaviour is mixed at best.

Very strange isn’t it. A man screamed abuse at me in front of presumably his wife or girlfriend and a small child because I couldn’t fit my car into a small space in a tiny car park. I gave up and let him have the space. Gratifyingly and hilariously he couldn’t fit his car in the space either and sped off with wheel spins etc. I sat there bemused! I did laugh at what a total dick he was though.

A lady drove into the back of me once and was literally cowering in her car as I went over to check no-one was hurt and to swap insurance details all very friendly “accidents happen” vibe she was so relieved. Imagine if she had driven into the back of The man in the car park he would have combusted!

Also, porn.

Entitlement and privilege. If a woman were to get blindingly angry at a man in the street she'd likely end up in a bad state. If it's a man, we brush them off and try to run away.

I believe testosterone can cause it in the same way women who have periods have mood changes? I could be wrong but as testosterone and estrogen are hormones I think they work in similar ways.

But saying that, DH has high levels of testosterone but never gets properly angry. Perhaps it is nature vs. nurture- DH was raised by feminist hippies but if he was raised by a trad wife perhaps it would be different.

@IntermittentParps

Just look at the stats - men commit (by far) the majority of physical crimes (including murder.) This includes male on male violence. So whilst people are currently looking at the issue through the lens of feminism, the reality is it’s altogether more complex. Interestingly, men are also statistically more at risk of encountering violence from another male.

Male aggression is not just aimed at women, but at both sexes, and significantly more at their own counterparts. Given this, the question needs to be reframed. It should be wider-reaching, along the lines of exploring the unique set of biological reasons for male violence, and how society can respond as a whole to support men to become more aware of their differences in this particular way. It’s too easy to frame this in simplistic terms and doing so won’t progress a deeper understanding of the scope of the issue.

I think that it is entitlement but that the backstory to that entitlement is quite complicated. Society has changed quite a lot in the last 3 decades and the way that today's ment were brought up probably didn't quite reflect that. Dh was brought up in a very traditional household his mother worked PT and did all the housework etc. His DF did the DIY and mowed the lawn but also had very extensive "hobbies" and the weekend was his downtime to pursue them, often dragging the family along with him. Much of the house was decorated with items relating to the hobby and it took up a room. When I was at a very academic school a lot of our teachers told us how lucky we were that we would be able to have it all (ie careers that weren't just teaching or medicine). The assumption was that we would be able to afford all the domestic help we needed to have these careers. (That's of course a different level of entitlement....).Obviously, our moving into those careers meant that there were fewer opportunities for men as they could no longer monopolise all the highly paid jobs and some will be angry that the university place/good career they wanted got given to a woman.

More importantly, what no one anticipated was the massive levels of house price inflation that occured when the banks finally accepted that they could take a wife's salary into consideration for a mortgage in the same way as the husbands. SO all of a sudden the working wife couldn't afford to stop when she had children or to pay for the level of domestic help she needed to work full time and still allow her DH to do nothing in the home/with the children that he didn't want to do. SO men are still coming to terms with the fact that women are their equals in the workplace and at home and that they do not get to live the lives their fathers did and they had automatically expected that they could.

I think men being told from an early age to “ keep a lid on it” and “ only babies cry” etc means they literally don’t go through the normal cycle of emotions for heartbreak, sadness, rejection etc because they are taught by their parents it’s not what boys do. My in laws hate what they perceive as “weakness “ they don’t cry at anything. A real hard bunch with little empathy. Testosterone levels are not an excuse. I’ve personally had men be horribly verbally abusive to me then able to switch to charming in a nano second in front of the right person. It proves that they choose this behaviour and allow themselves to harm others

When I worked with male offenders (predominantly violent offences where anger was a obviously a feature), I lost count of the number of times I heard men talk about being expected to be "tough" and "masculine" from a very young age ("big boys don't cry" etc - that sort of message). They spoke about any expression of sadness (eg tears) as a child being disapproved of - they were told you don't cry, you're a boy, don't show weakness, you fight back if someone is upsetting you... etc. It was astounding how many of the guys I spoke to couldn't even recognise or label emotions other than anger - it was just "I felt angry- so I reacted". But when you dug underneath that, there was often a whole host of other stuff - sadness, fear, loss, vulnerability etc. A whole range of emotions that as women we seem much more adept at recognising and expressing. But many of these other emotions were an alien concept to the men I worked with.

I realise my experience is based on a cross section of men who had committed violent offences serious enough to come into contact with the CJS, and many of their early home environments left a lot to be desired (sometimes but not always abusive), so unlikely to be the whole picture and perhaps not representative of men who don't offend. But still, it gave me such an interesting insight to how boys are often raised with such different societal expectations to girls in terms of appropriate emotional expression. As others said on this thread, if you suppress natural emotions enough, anger is all that's left.

I think men being told from an early age to “ keep a lid on it” and “ only babies cry” etc means they literally don’t go through the normal cycle of emotions for heartbreak, sadness, rejection etc because they are taught by their parents it’s not what boys do.

Yes. This. So much.

Sayamino, I'm not sure what is not complex about the way people on this thread are discussing the issue (what I assume you mean by 'the lens of feminism'). There are very nuanced views on show here. You are right that the issue is complex; there are societal and cultural pressures on men that speak to issues like men committing the majority of physical crimes.

Ironically it is your points/contentions that are reductive and simplistic.

Because they keep getting away with it.

PS to Sayamino I also meant to add:
saying 'Just look at the stats' is a non-starter of an argument. 'men commit most of the violent crimes' doesn't automatically mean 'men must by biological imperative be the ones to commit most of the violent crimes'.

To play devils advocate for a moment...

I've had arguments with some knuckle draggers myself and I used to know some of them personally. Their general outlook on life is just sad to be honest. These are not the people who find joy in being a parent or doing a job well, for them their outlook is far more bleak. The mundane cycle of being broke and depressed is their lot for them until the die is the general thing. Their high points are getting drunk and out of their skulls for a few hours.

I am not making excuses and nor would I as I don't agree with this attitude but it is an insidious outlook for them.

When working in London I frequently came across aggressive behaviour towards women on the tube from 'City Gent' types; barging through women to get on and off trains, or power marching up escalators barging past people.

Undoubtedly in their interactions with women they knew they were slightly pompously courteous.

But with unknown women it was as though the mask slipped. A sense of arrogant entitlement showed. The courtesy to known women was fake.

I don't know but in the last year I've been in half a dozen low level situations where a man has expressed anger at me when he definitely wouldn't have done to my husband or if I'd been with my husband. Road rage (over literally nothing in each case I might add) and a weird incident where a man rode his bike past me and dog in a woodland, stopped, shook his fists and accused me of having a dog that 'might bite'. Dog is a golden retriever who I've trained to heel when a bike approaches so literally no threat
I think he just wanted to have a go at someone and I was a soft target.
See there I go, minimising all the cases as nothing. But they're not are they?

Is it the same with all animals? If you put a bunch of males together, there'll usually be a fight. If you put a female in, the males will fight over her. If you have a bunch of females, less fighting, and if you put one male in, he will choose a female and overpower her.

We think we're so evolved.

@IntermittentParps

ok then. So your response to the statistical data that clearly evidences men are the main perpetrators of violent crime (against both sexes) is to call me simplistic? What kind of response is that?

I think you misunderstand me. I am suggesting that the simplistic response here is to view the issue solely through the lens of a feminist issue, as the public consciousness is currently dominated by the very tragic murder that we’ve all seen in the news recently. So people naturally translate the issue from “men are violent and angry” to “men are violent and angry towards women.”

I’m saying this isn’t the case. Men are violent and angry - towards both men and women, and in order to really asses the root causes of this we need to be clear about the scale and depth of the issue.

@LucieStar - interesting points. Violent offenders often harbour resentments and very intense feelings about their parenting. Particularly if they had abusive fathers and passive mothers.

Some anger at women as mother is related to that. Anger that their mothers did not care to prevent them from brutish treatment or exposed them to it repeatedly.

A man raised this is twice hurt. His father can be a brute and the mother fails in the protective role the son needs. The lesson is very hard, be aggressive and macho, for protection is not available.

I think something like 75 per cent of men in prison had domestic abuse or violence in their upbringings. Ignoring its presence seems to affect men strongly.

[quote Sayamino]@IntermittentParps

It’s not ill-informed though is it? Tons of research has been done on the primal (biological) programming of the two sexes. They are fundamentally different, due to the different roles nature requires them to fill.[/quote]
And a lot of other research has debunked it. It is all too easy to find what you are looking for if you design a study a certain way. Society has been shown clearly to have a fundamental influence on human development and social roles. Hardly surprising if you give it more than a moment's thought.

'if it was testosterone they’d be unable to control it against their 7ft tall, bodybuilding, cage fighting colleague

Self preservation trumps all other instincts though. It is possible that I don't resort to conflict or confrontation because I'm small and weak and most people can bash me. It doesn't feel like that and I've fought where I've had to and put myself in dangers way as much as anyone but yeah being aggressive and confrontational? Not gonna result in a long and happy life

I was raised in a very traditional household, mum was a housewife, dad worked hard, I do have at least a million older sisters though who are all very capable people

Because they can

I once saw a TV documentary about literacy programmes in prisons and how the more vocabulary inmates had the less susceptible to violent incidents they were. I know there is a lot more to it than that but I find the idea interesting. If you are able to express yourself in words you have less need for anger.

I once saw a study about emotional expression in primary school kids. It was to do with getting 7 year olds to find synonyms for as many emotions as they could, and explaining them. The girls far outstripped the boys in scores for every single emotion, except anger. The boys were able to describe anger better on average. I remember reading that and feeling really, really sad for those little boys.

@babbaloushka

I once saw a study about emotional expression in primary school kids. It was to do with getting 7 year olds to find synonyms for as many emotions as they could, and explaining them. The girls far outstripped the boys in scores for every single emotion, except anger. The boys were able to describe anger better on average. I remember reading that and feeling really, really sad for those little boys.

Yes. Makes sense. Also partly explains higher male suicide rates.

@SplendidSuns1000

Entitlement and privilege. If a woman were to get blindingly angry at a man in the street she'd likely end up in a bad state. If it's a man, we brush them off and try to run away.

I believe testosterone can cause it in the same way women who have periods have mood changes? I could be wrong but as testosterone and estrogen are hormones I think they work in similar ways.

But saying that, DH has high levels of testosterone but never gets properly angry. Perhaps it is nature vs. nurture- DH was raised by feminist hippies but if he was raised by a trad wife perhaps it would be different.

Just out of interest, how did you find out if your DH has high or low testosterone levels? I've often wondered about mine DH's, he is very mellow and easy going, literally never seen him properly angry, but has a very high sex drive and struggled with porn addiction for a long time