In many ways, I feel that to subscribe to the gender binary is to be trapped in a cage. As I myself do indentify as “man” in our society, I have found that men as a whole are limited in expression. As a man, you do not know any standard language like English. Sure, it may help you communicate in a workplace, but when you get to your true relationships, you only know how to communicate with fear, anger, and violence. Those 3 things will control every aspect of your life, no matter how badly you want it not to and no matter how hard you try to fight it. To identify as a man is to live with the inevitability that you will succumb to one or more of those 3 things at several different points in your life, even if it ends up affecting your closest relationships.
When I was younger, there were a lot of points in my parents marriage where my father had let anger control many of his communications with my mom. They would have disagreements, and I wouldn’t even say my father was wrong in many of them, but he would be too dictated by anger for me to let him be perceived as “a victor”. My relationship with my father is much better now, and we have both grown as people, but unfortunately the means to that end had to be achieved through those 3 things stated previously.
I know many men who desperately wish to not be controlled or have to fall back on those terrible things, but it seems so futile not to. My mom and dad had gotten into an argument one day, that was increasingly ramping up. It was in the basement of my childhood home, where me and all 3 of my siblings were. I don’t even remember what it was about, and at some point my mom had thrown something off the table (not at my father) and in response, my dad got angry and flipped the table over. Now, you are not my therapist, but this story does detail what I am trying to communicate. My mother has always been the victim of an underlying misogyny, no matter how much the members of my family love her, and I have really been the only one to point it out and defend her. She gets teased or even sometimes demeaned by my father, which has led to her not garnering the respects she deserves from my 2 brothers and sister, and even me. At the time their argument was taking place, I was 16 years old. By this age, I had long been the largest in my family, measuring at 5’11 and weighing around 265 pounds, while my father was around 5’9 and 160~ pounds.
In that moment where he let anger control him, I too let anger control myself. I was so frustrated that we as men were only ever angry, and to demonstrate this I just starting destroying a plaster pillar in our basement with my fist. I punched, and punched, and punched until you could see the steel support beam in the wall, and my knuckles were bloody. My parents, both silent, watched until I stopped and yelled at my dad “Is our problem solved now?! Is this how we solve things?!” I consider this to be the moment my dad was in some sense freed from the shackles of being a man and giving into anger, fear, and violence. After this situation, he has not let any disagreements he’s had since then get to that level, which is great, but it is only because he had to watch his 16-year-old son become a violent and angry man.
I would later learn that he had issues with his father when he was a teenager as well, and it is my belief that at that moment he saw himself in me and realized that this vicious cycle would never end if he were not to change. I could be as radical and different from the rest, but nothing would change without him first.
I have freed my father from his shackles, yet I am still growing into a man, I can feel these limits consuming me, I wear the chains so my dad could walk free. His sons are now the victims of this identity of man.
