When Male Fragility Looks Like Anger

When you respond to anger with anger, all you have is two angry people instead of one.

I know a boy who has not been taught how to process his feelings.

When he was very young, there was a slew of different men featuring in his life, the various men that his mother dated and hung out with. Some of these men were nice to him, some not-so-nice, and some completely indifferent to his very existence. All in all, the only thing there was to learn from these men was the fact that while his mother’s standards for the men she allowed in her life was not very high, the bar she set for him was always just beyond his reach.

It was common for this boy, in his earliest years, to face ridicule for… well, just being a kid. Adults would make ironic, disparaging remarks about his level of intelligence because of the games he would play, the imaginary worlds he made up for himself. To them, he was stupid for being unable to conquer an understanding of the basic physics that govern the Universe by the age of seven; to him, they were stupid for insisting on remaining stuck in one dimension when they could use their minds to imagine anything at all.

But, of course, his mother — the person he loved more than anyone else in the world — agreed with those men who couldn’t see his intelligence through his imagination.

He learned quickly not to cry about it when they hurt his feelings. “Aw, is da wittle baby gonna go cwy in his woom now?” the men teased. If they were in a darker mood, the jabs would be sharper: “I was just playing with you, why do you have to be such a little bitch about it?”

At first, when he was four or five, he did just cry about it. Sometimes his mother would chuckle and give him a quick hug. Often she would tell him to stop being so sensitive. It didn’t take long for those tears to turn into anger.

In elementary school, he was an easy target for other kids to pick on, gang up on, and beat up. He had to learn to take not just a punch, but a beating. He had to grow a thick skin.

If he went home and complained about it, at best he would be told to man up and quit bitching, that’s the way of the world. At worst, he would have to take…

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