This [what Jesse Lemisch describes as "male rage"] is a phrase I've heard used before, and I've always found it a little puzzling. Is the implication that rage is an exclusively male vice or prerogative -- that women don't rage? I have seen a counterexample or two, in my time. Or does it mean that male and female rage are different in kind, somehow? If so, how?
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Interesting question.
Once upon a time, back when pants flared like rocket nozzles and television programs proudly boasted of being displayed "in color" earnest people talked about "Black rage".
This seemed to make some sense, after all, there were ample opportunities to achieve a pissed-off state if you were Black and living in the troubled US but calling this 'Black Rage" implied that, like gravity, it was a force of some sort, a phenomena worthy of extensive study, important books and sincerely furrowed brows.
I'm going to (angrily, in an XY chromosome sort of way) put down my sinister cup of tea and Google the phrase to see what turns up.
Just a moment...
Hmmm:
<http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=male+rage&btnG=Google+Search>
Now here's something intriguing...an excerpt from an essay titled "This Frozen Male Rage Within Us All" by Ann Kreilkamp:
<snip>
I tell Terry what I am thinking. Tell her how I see that incident as symbolic of something much more insidious. That underneath, way down deep, William hates women! Tell her I see this not just in him, but in men generally. That this male rage against the female is all-pervasive, constituting the very texture of everyday life, only we don't know it, so busy are we females in unconsciously colluding with their unconscious hatred of us.
[...]
link (pdf) - http://www.celestialnavigations.net/openpdfs/MaleRage.pdf
Well, this brings it into sharper focus - "male rage" is defined as a hatred of women, the primary object of the "rage".
Of course, an immediate problem appears: precisely who gets to decide what's "male rage" and what's just plain old, situational en-pissedness? And like "Black rage" which, as I recall, was tossed around to dismiss any Black person who got hot under the collar about anything, isn't "male rage" liable to be cavalierly applied when it suits the cavalier?
Oh well, back to evil.
.d.