Why women are so damn angry with men.
Women have reason to be mad, and we need you to listen. And care.
People don’t seem to understand why the female gender in America is so damn angry, so I thought I’d help explain it.
As an example, a few years back, my colleague and best friend from graduate school, a male, came to visit, and we went to Hot Springs National Park, which, back in the 1930s, was a gangster haven and famous spa and rehabilitation area. Widely known for hot thermal springs bubbling out of the ground and its therapeutic bathhouses where you could soak in that amazing water, we went inside one of the vintage buildings now maintained as a national park to check it out. To the left of the entry was the area where men were tended to. It was huge and had ornate marble details, sculptures, and luxurious appointments. It included a prominent statue and fountain in the middle where a beautiful native American female was on her knees serving a man who looked like a Conquistador a drink. Every man’s dream, I guess.
When we moved over to the female side, it was small, sparse, and looked fit to be an asylum, with uncomfortable, minimalist areas designed to get the job done and nothing more. After touring both sides, I turned to Allen and said, “If you want to know why women are so damn angry with men, this bathhouse explains it.”
Hot Springs, Arkansas’s historic Fordyce Bathhouse Museum. The fountain rubbed me the wrong way. There was no fountain of men rubbing women’s feet in the female section and no fountain at all. Photo by Wil Elrick
Generational trauma
Most of us have had adverse childhood experiences, known as ACES, in the trauma world, and some of our trauma comes from our own negative situations and experiences. Still, others are cultural and passed down from generation to generation. When there is a history in your culture of being marginalized and treated less than, as African Americans have been, for example, you will end up with an entire culture that starts their lives out with that trauma of feeling less-than intact. Think about it this way: Life is a 100-yard dash. White men start out on the 20-yard line line, and people of color, non-heterosexuals, and women start way behind the starting line, in terms of opportunity, economic equity, social and political justice, and more.
All major cultures have operated under a patriarchal system with women being treated as second-class citizens, so it makes sense that most of us grow up with the feeling that we are different in a way that means we will have to be better, work harder, do more, than the prominent culture of white men, to get the same benefits. Luckily, women have long proven they are up to the challenge.
In a 1972 interview with the BBC, while running for President, African American Congressman Shirley Chisolm, the first black woman to hold a Congressional seat, elected in 1968, pleaded to be seen as a person and not a representative of women or blacks. Still, she acknowledged the challenges she faced. “I have certainly met more discrimination in terms of being a woman than being black in the field of politics,” she said. Telling, no?
Since recorded history, women have been traumatized through physical, sexual, emotional, cultural, and economic abuse; though perpetuated mostly by men, men don’t like to talk about it. They prefer to focus on the opportunities they have lost as minority groups have claimed an almost equal place at the table of life. Even when talking to my husband, a reasonable, intelligent, moderate man, he went straight to the point of men losing out. Minorities with lower grades and test scores getting in college, for example. Really? Underlining this topic doesn’t help white men at all, needless to say. They have gotten more than anyone else and pushed people not like them down for thousands of years. (4) Perhaps humility, empathy, and understanding of what has happened might bring healing., but I’m not sure enough men are capable of it.
A brief world history of men and women.
Historically, men have wanted to control women and their sexuality in different ways to ensure that it was their seed that got planted come reproduction time. (1) It’s an evolutionary thing. Long before the United States was a thing, humans were nomad-like, and there was no material wealth, so it was hard to get women in the roaming group to stay, especially because there was little downside to leaving. Sometimes, they left men with their children and went to find something else.
When agriculture began for the first time 12,000 years ago, everything changed. Human behavior now centered around competition over land, crops, and livestock, and thievery became common. Men had to defend their families and were the chosen protectors because they were deemed stronger than women and better at combat – seriously, most women are not wired to want to kick someone’s ass, but will probably do it if push comes to shove. With the land, crops, and livestock, men became wealthy, and as you’ve probably heard, once a person gets money, everything changes.
Much like today, using people like former New England Patriots Bill Belichick as an example, whose girlfriend is 48 years younger than him, men used their wealth back then to attract young women and often had more than one. The more wealthy a man was, the more wives he could afford, and to get the women he desired, men would pay the bride’s family to get the selection edge, while poor men sometimes never did get a mate. Daughters married and often moved far away to live with their husbands. Hence, a bride’s family realized they needed to leave their money to the males, who could create wealth, keep it in the family, and produce more children than their female children, keeping the lineage thriving.
As husbands became more wealthy and gained more power, patriarchy was getting a firm grip on society. Rules of kinship and inheritance became more formalized to prevent family conflicts, and marriages were not about love and romance and were more contractual, creating a very challenging situation for women.
Land, livestock, and children were the property of men, and divorce was almost impossible for women. In these situations, women had no leverage to get what they wanted out of life and were forced to live in a take-it-or-leave-it situation. The best way for a woman to survive in those days was to attract the wealthiest male they could and then conform and behave by fawning and caring for the man, ensuring they’d be kept in the fold. Another evolutionary thing. Women are wired for survival just like men.
Later, the family of a female would be expected to give a potential husband a dowry, which, for a time, led to some families killing their female babies, especially when they had more than one, knowing they wouldn’t be able to afford numerous dowries for their daughters once they reached marriage age.
Over the years, men realized that keeping many women was costly, which led to the idea of having only one wife. With one wife, the male wanted to ensure that all his children were his, so they clamped down and kept their spouses sequestered at home and subject to strict oversight and control. Women who did go out in these cases would be expected to be chaperoned.
Women and men in the USA.
When I was growing up in the early 1960s, women who worked were housekeepers, secretaries, teachers, nurses, retail workers, hairdressers, seamstresses, clerical office workers, and some ran boarding houses. In other parts of the country, women often worked in the textile or garment industry. One-third of college students in the early 1900s were women; today, more women attend college than men. Let’s not discuss how women weren’t allowed to go to school at all or beyond a certain level for many years.
Divorced women, especially single mothers, were considered to be lower class and were often shunned as having something “wrong with them.” Pregnancy outside of wedlock was shameful and usually handled privately, with pregnant daughters being sent away to homes where they could give birth and give their child up for adoption. Breast cancer was also a shameful issue and not discussed, so women with the disease suffered silently and in shame.
I remember stereotypical jokes about women being terrible drivers, dumb, and naive. If a girl in my area wasn’t married by 30, she was considered an old maid or spinster, meaning not selected, unwanted, or undesirable. It was understood that as a woman, things had to go a certain way to be seen as a “good girl” and accepted by the white cultural norm. Saving yourself sexually until married raised a young woman’s value, something my own father made sure to tell me when I was very young. The goal at least with the people I hung around, was to land the best man you could.
Women have been perceived as the weaker sex for eons. Characterized as squeamish and unable to perform work requiring muscular or intellectual development, they were relegated to housework and child-raising, milking cows, and washing clothes, even though research now shows women have higher pain tolerance, live longer and are more resistant to many diseases (2)
In early American history, a man virtually owned his wife and children as if they were material possessions. A man could send his children to the poor house and have his wife committed, and she had no power to defend herself. According to 19th-century psychiatry, female independence was madness; a woman who defied “domestic control” was subject to being sent to an asylum. (5) Medical wisdom at that time said that assertive and ambitious women were unnatural and sick. Women who weren’t solely fulfilled by being wives and mothers were considered to be mentally ill.
In the mid-1800s, women who read or studied were demonstrating “eccentricity of conduct,” which meant they were “morally insane and were to be locked away until they conformed to more natural, feminine behavior.” As I have written before, the word bitch was never used as a pejorative to describe women until they began to assert themselves. Asylums became overcrowded, and women deemed boisterous were chloroformed or put in straight jackets. Overly studious women or those who said they couldn’t stand their husbands were sometimes subjected to surgeries known as clitoridectomy, as doctors had concluded women’s sexual organs were what made them crazy. Once a woman’s clitoris was cut off, doctors claimed they had a 70 percent success rate at getting the woman to submit and conform.
Indeed, today, women’s anger and female rage are rarely viewed in context. Instead, intense emotions and depression are thought to be related to mental health conditions, premenstrual dysphoric disorder, bipolar disorder, borderline personality disorder, intermittent explosive disorder, and PMS, when it rarely occurs to anyone that it might be trauma-related from things women encounter in their daily lives because of their gender and generational trauma.
I could write a book about the injustices women have faced in American history, and many books have been written on the subject already, but you get the idea. The point is, everything we do have, our gender has had to fight to get. We are still marginalized in many ways, and though we have come along way from where we began, conservative white men are trying, and sometimes succeeding, to take rights away again. Now, they have removed women’s reproductive rights, are exerting legal control over women’s bodies, how women conceive children, and even birth control. Without birth control, women don’t have sexual freedom, and just like when women were sequestered at home in early American history, men want to control our sex lives once again. The question is, why?
Women are treated as sexual objects.
Although the Me Too movement was roundly criticized, for many women it was validating. Any woman who has been in public places, whether socially or in business, has experienced being sexually objectified by men. Cat calls from drivers and construction workers, men coming near us on the sidewalk or a public place and whispering nasty comments. I’ve experienced men making sexual noises and comments since I was 18 years old, to the point that at times I felt like a celebrity trying to get away from the paparazzi, when in fact, I was trying to stay away from nasty men who wouldn’t keep their thoughts to themselves. I have been grabbed on the chest by strangers, chased down subway halls, and had men expose their genitals and wag their tongues at me. Every woman I have ever asked has said that they, too, have experienced men at work or wherever saying or doing inappropriate things or hitting on them. This makes a woman feel like prey, feeling on guard when walking alone in public, sometimes like walking on eggshells. If we wear something revealing, guess what? It’s our fault we get treated sexually.
In marriage therapy, sex is a frequent source of consternation, the most common pattern being a worn-out, tired working wife and mother feeling sexual pressure from a husband who negatively emotes when his brain tells him his wife isn’t meeting his sexual quota. These kinds of things aren’t helpful to women or marriages, and again, women feel a sexual cloud hanging over them, as if they are prey.
“Can’t I take a break?” said one wife recently. “Do I get a say, or do I have to do this when I don’t feel like it to keep my husband happy?”
No, you don’t. Sexual boundaries and boundaries in all areas of life mean we get to manage our mental, emotional, and physical health as we choose and need to. The problem is often how the man reacts to his wife when she says not now.
Feminism is a dirty word.
Though defined as advocating for the equality of the sexes, it has long been used by media pundits as a dirty word for ball-busting man-haters. Have you ever heard the term Femi-Nazi? That hasn’t helped. Recent Psychology of Women Quarterly research shows that most women are not man-haters. In truth, most women have positive attitudes toward men despite their long history of being mistreated by the gender as a whole. (3) The real problem, said the research, is that both feminists and non-feminists wrongly believe that feminists hold negative attitudes about men. So yes, you can be a feminist and love men, and most do. I do.
I think if women are angry with men, it does have to do with our past history of being dismissed and marginalized, but I think today, men don’t realize the things they say and do that show us that they still think we don’t deserve what they do. Just recently I dealt with a couple that had owned some apartment buildings. The husband put up the money, and the wife, who also had a full-time job in a different field, managed the units for six years and never received payment for her efforts. The buildings increased in value, and they sold them for a huge profit. Though the husband had insisted all along they were equal partners in the endeavor, when the wife wanted to take a portion of the money and have some plastic surgery, he grudgingly acquiesced. One year later, he made a nasty remark about how she spent “his money” for a facelift.
“Really?” she said. “I thought the money was ours? That we were a partnership? I never got paid for managing them, looking for tenants, getting leases signed, collecting rent, going over there at all hours to fix something, meeting repair people, or doing what was necessary.” He didn’t respond, but as the wife said, the damage was done. “I could see that he never thought of me as his partner. He thought of it as his money. He showed me who he was then, which wasn’t good.”
Women complain to me often about the language their husbands use: My house, my money, my children. Women are extremely sensitive to any language their spouses use that aren’t inclusionary.
Micro-aggressions and unconscious bias continually show women where they stand in the workplace, society, politically, and in their families. These are the “every day, nonverbal, and environmental slights, snubs, or insults, intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative messages to target persons based solely on the marginalized group membership.” (6) You can call it woke, but women call it painful.
Women are losing hope, but only for a short while.
With conservative white men trying to control women again, with reproductive rights and birth control as a starting point, we assume they want to take away more, I can assure you women will not stand by quietly and lose the freedoms they have fought for. If you can’t understand why women are angry, then you are uninformed. Join in the fight. Speak out when you see the blatant marginalizing and microaggressions. Tell people it’s not okay.
(1) https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2022/sep/analysis-how-did-patriarchy-start-and-will-evolution-get-rid-it
(2)http://www.wic.org/misc/history
(4)https://medium.com/verve-up/women-what-we-pass-down-28e25aaae0b6
(5)https://time.com/6074783/psychiatry-history-women-mental-health/
(6)https://www.nationalequityproject.org/responding-to-microaggressions-and-unconscious-bias?gad_source=1&gclid=Cj0KCQjwj9-zBhDyARIsAERjds1VnY7mX9xX4BzRXQNx2xbXT-3b5BsZFEEVRd9mtx4tBZ7BE0FRp18aAvs_EALw_wcB
IF you enjoyed this article, you might enjoy this: https://marriagecrisismanager.com/staging/7172/if-you-want-to-better-understand-women-read-this/
And this: https://marriagecrisismanager.com/staging/7172/things-never-say-wife/
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- Becky Whetstone, Ph.D., is a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in Arkansas and Texas* and is known as America’s Marriage Crisis Manager®. She is a former features writer and columnist for the San Antonio Express-News and has worked with thousands of couples to save their marriages. She can work with you, too, as a life coach if you’re not in Texas or Arkansas. She is also co-host of the YouTube Call Your Mother Relationship Show and has a telehealth private practice as a therapist and life coach via Zoom. To contact her, check out www.DoctorBecky.com and www.MarriageCrisisManager.com. Also, here is how to find her work on the Huffington Post. Don’t forget to follow her on Medium so you don’t miss a thing!
- For licensure verification, find Becky Whetstone Cheairs.
