Masculine Rage

When I think of love, I think of the women in my life, and my eyes well to feel my heart swell. I was raised by women. They held me when things hurt. When I walk, I see my mother’s shadow, and when I speak, I hear her voice rattling in my ears. We didn’t always talk, and sometimes women hurt me too. But nothing has ever scared me like a man. Sometimes shadows in the night trigger me more than any lion, tiger or bear could.. All my girlfriends say so too. All I have ever wanted is for them to feel safe. I felt anger strike my stomach and knot it, to remember certain things, to rewatch the men in my life make the same decisions, over and over. Some mornings they’d sink me into my bed and anchor me there. Fear is a drug that bites. To wait patiently until your turn. I try, sometimes, to explain that anxiety to my male friends. We sit there and beg and plead with anyone who will listen. But with no known natural predators, how naïve must we be to expect their empathy? From someone as ignorant as they are entitled, how could we ever expect even sympathy? 

The men’s violence crisis is as unsurprising to me as it is terrifying. When Anthony Albanese stood up and branded domestic violence a national crisis earlier this year, we were dumbfounded. Not only has men’s violence been an ongoing crisis since colonisation, women have always functioned in crisis mode. For as long as men have held our autonomy before us like carrots. I run for it still. From the moment we enter society like debutants in a Netflix period piece, plastered up on the market like cattle, we are watched, chastised, critiqued and gawked at. I have only ever lived in fight or flight. I have only ever felt life-threatening panic in the face of faceless men in the night. My puppeteer, please have mercy.

Still, sometimes the monsters live right under our beds. Sometimes we let them in. The NSW Police said it responded to nearly 150,000 domestic violence-related calls for help last year. The Australian Institute of Criminology reported an almost 30% increase in women who were killed by an intimate partner in 2023 compared with that of 2022. And of course, I never fail to be reminded that men can be victims too, and of course, anybody can. But to what extent are women killing men, in the same fashion that women are belittled, othered, and murdered, by men? To what extent do they, as a majority, on average, fear for their lives walking down the street, or talking back to a spouse twice the size of them?

My neighbour was always preoccupied. Her mind raced so quickly I swore it must have hurt. I liked her from the first words she ever said to me. “Hi beautiful.” She was with a man, shorter than her, just, but not quite as slim. He was old, considerably older than her. His deep-set eyes were warm, and he made these awful jokes you couldn’t help but laugh awkwardly at. I imagined him in those first moments as a kind of crack junkie Santa Claus. With a padded red suit, I’d almost be smitten too. I guess that’s what she saw in him. The wrinkly smile and rosy cheeks were slick with sweat, and dirt sunk into his eyebrows. He worked in a factory and as a labourer? Or something, somewhere else. I didn’t like his language but I knew how tradies could be. Nothing about their relationship flagged any alarms to me then, even as he picked up a mangled pair of glasses from the concrete and gave them to Anna. “Who did that then?” She giggled bashfully and whispered to me that they’d argued the night before, and she’d tossed them out the window in a fit of rage.

I was out one night and I got a call from her, crying – she needed money. Almost immediately I started receiving messages from her at all times of the night. She told me how scared she was of her husband…

How she’d been hurt. What he’d said. Who he really was. She told me about the six times she’d called the police that fortnight. Then for the first time, I saw the miserable guy beneath the Santa costume. He was a loser. And he wanted to kill his wife. 

The first time I had her in my house I was scared, my parents had warned that offering a victim refuge might just make our home the next target. I imagined his hands over my mouth in the middle of the night.

The first time she had me in her house I texted ahead to make sure he wasn’t home. It was a one-bedroom unit with massive furniture and a phenomenal television. A cat stretched out in the sunshine on an armchair. There was hardly a square inch of empty wall space, let alone carpet visible, and there were files everywhere, neatly piled up and organised, but everywhere you looked nonetheless. 

She told me about Christine, his first girlfriend. She was a heroin addict and he used to kick the syringes away from her as she lay writhing on the ground, collapsing into seizure. He said he liked the power he felt over her. 

I hated that man. I hated him for ruining her life. I hated him for fucking up mine. It’s the type of hatred that runs through your veins, lord, the anger that courses through my body. It’s a burning restless kind of fear that culminates from nights spent home alone shaking. My prickled arms are cold now, and I’ve got this knot in my throat like smoke. I keep an eye on the door at all times. Not mine, theirs. And as I try not to let myself be seen, I listen for their voices. Every night. Praying they don’t stop arguing for too long. That silence doesn’t bring sirens or screams. I want to tell her to leave but I don’t. I want to tell her to run and take the fucking cat. But I don’t. And she still hasn’t.

I sat a few weeks ago in a circle of chairs surrounded by sixteen year old girls. I remember being sixteen almost better than any other age. Hating myself. Hating my mother for having me and the world for existing. I couldn’t breathe without crying and I cried without breathing. I listened to these girls, these young girls, complain about the boys in their classes. “They were rating us. All the girls. They were rating how girls give head.” They heard the boys in the class behind them mimicking and squealing and laughing. “We get to class first now so we can sit in the back. So they can’t look at us.”

We speak about the stabbing in Bondi Junction and how we were nearby around the time it happened. Weird. One woman every four days to me just seems so unfathomable. Two a week... And I could count the women I love. I’m triggered because I imagine myself there. I let my nervous system copy the feeling. I let myself remember every minute I’ve shivered in cold dark suburban streets, tripping over cement, almost running, crossing the street every few streets down, just because the guy behind me hasn’t slowed down in a couple of turns, and I’m picturing him on top of me, or my head hitting the curb. My heart races until I’m in my kitchen. “Lit streets only Rebekah!” Head shake. Hands shaking. Every last bus I miss home ages me. 

Instead of teaching our girls not to what? Walk alone? Drive alone or park alone or meet anyone strange in any strange place ever? Not to wear the wrong thing or drink too much? Instead of telling us what to do all the time, maybe we should all just be listening harder. 

The girls told me about how they went to a teacher. A few of them told her they felt unsafe. And she sat on her fucking hands. After all, how can you really make a group of girls feel safe from transparent threats? How can you stop something from happening before it happens? And here, my friends, from a soapbox like no other, I bring to you, common sense. Teach consent. Teach it properly. Drill it into the brains of babies from birth. Women are no longer breeding monsters. We cannot condone cyclical, generational hatred, nor fear. We cannot keep losing our girls. 

Can’t you hear our sisters? As rivers poured in, of muffled voices and blood into the sea, we ignored the cries of the Palestinian women who are today being denied menstruation pads, food and medicine, are being severely threatened, beaten, raped and assaulted, by the IDF. There is no feminism in genocide. There is no equality or compassion, there is only pain. On all fronts, governments let these innocent women and children die, and we hear only what we are told. I remain as angry as I am scared. 

Feminine rage is the culmination of that feeling. Our desperate attempt at punching back. To feel helpless and so damn tired of asking for help. To let out a scream so deafening we might forget for how long we were silenced. 

I get angry these days. Angry at men who tell me that I probably just shouldn’t have put myself in that position. That I’m a flirt at the best of times. Angry at the people who won’t stand in the same room as me when I say slut, but whose sons scream it at me from car windows. I am so angry at the people that turn away. I am so angry at the boys who would rather wring my neck than confess to the inner workings of their mind. But unlike them, I will be heard. 

Because masculine rage has fucking nothing on a woman scorned.