Men and Their Fucking Anger Issues

And the price that women pay for them

Hey, fuckers.

Let’s talk about the specific exhaustion of being the only adult in a room full of grown men routinely losing their shit.

Not metaphorically. I mean the actual experience of watching someone copy twenty people on a message at work because he didn’t get his way, watching him get loud and confrontational and petty in front of an audience, and then watching everyone around him go “yeah, that’s just him” and move on with their day. No consequence. No conversation. Just a shrug that we’re fucking expected to absorb and move on from.

If he does this shit, he’s passionate. If I do it, I’m difficult. If he escalates, he’s advocating hard for his side. If I escalate, I’m creating conflict and not being “collaborative”. If he’s rude in a room with his boss watching, nothing happens. If I so much as raise my voice, I’ve become a walking HR problem.

So I don’t give into the immature fuckery. I stay composed. I take the high road so many times I should get fucking frequent flyer miles for it. And nobody puts that on an invoice. There’s no line item that says “cost of being the one everyone trusts not to make a scene.” But it’s not free and it never fucking has been.

Some days you pick your battles at work because you’re smart. Some days you pick your battles because the game is rigged and you know it and you’re tired of pretending you don’t. What I do know is I’m done acting surprised when the guy who acts like a toddler gets a pass and the woman who stays quiet gets the consolation prize of just not getting a fucking reputation for being a bitch.

And this isn’t just a me problem. I look around right now at all the ostensibly grown fucking men—in our workplaces, our government, in our society, hell even in our own fucking families and friend groups—and feel like I’m fucking screaming internally at all times because there has yet to be a single fucking substantive consequence for everything from being a continuous dick in every meeting all the way through raping children to sexually assaulting women in ICE concentration camps to violating the Constitution with impunity and defying court orders.

I just posted this week on Threads about this fucking horror show, where a former humanitarian aid worker talks about the fact that the biggest danger to women in the middle of a natural disaster or a war isn’t the disaster itself, it’s the fucking men. Men who prioritize committing sexual violence against women and taking advantage of the chaos because those women are vulnerable and who immediately move to traffic and violate fucking children because they can.

@sarahwiththeplotThe whole poem 'In Love and In War' by Warsan Shire is just two lines. To my daughter I will say, 'when the men come, set yourself on fire'. It hit me in the face like a brick. #women #woman

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I don’t have a bow to put on this one. And I know its been a minute since you’ve heard from me, but in part it’s because DF started as a lighthearted funny way to get out my petty rage, but my rage isn’t fucking petty these days. It’s absolutely incendiary.

I’m also so fucking angry that we are sitting in the midst of a society where men continue to act fools at work and break every law imaginable and the people with the power to do anything about those things sit and wring their hands and say how awful and stupid and angering it is and then cite some bullshit about high roads and going high and stoicism.

Women continue to pay the price for no one being willing to check the men who are hoarding power, committing violence against women and children, bullying, harassing, and throwing tantrums from our living rooms to our workplaces to the entirety of fucking society.

And I don’t know what the answer is, but I do know that the righteous anger you are likely feeling too isn’t wrong, and it isn’t petty, and it isn’t something you need to apologize for or soften.

I don’t know what happens next. I don’t know when the shrug and explaining this shit away in the hands of fucking cowards stops being the answer to men behaving badly, at work or anywhere else. But I know I’m not interested in performing calm and rational about it anymore just so someone else can stay comfortable. I’m not the fucking thermostat for everyone else’s avoidance.

So if you’re angry too, good. Stay angry. Just don’t let it make you smaller. That’s the part they’re actually counting on.