With not one but several horrific bangs, President Donald Trump started a new conflict with Iran.
He authorized a series of aerial attacks Saturday evening in concert with Israel – and sans U.S. Congressional approval – designed to take out a number of the Middle Eastern nation’s nuclear facilities. In a brief address late Saturday, Trump threatened that “if peace doesn’t come quickly,” the U.S. will attack again, with “precision, speed and skill.”
The bluster and bravado of the post-attack proclamations brought to mind a conversation I’d had less than one week prior with my friend and colleague, Victoria Flexner. We’d just visited The Ragery in New York City, where folks pay to suit up and safely smash objects – anything from plates and vases to space heaters and computer monitors.
The very physical, very destructive act is meant to be cathartic – a release of both metaphorical toxins and actual endorphins on offer with each swing of a hammer (or baseball bat). Which was why, as we shared beers and discussed the admittedly thrilling experience, we kept revisiting the same question: “Is this what men feel like when they act out against others? When they start wars?”
Indeed, the biggest thoughts we tangled with in the afterglow of our session centered on the act of destruction itself – of combining brute force with an intent to break. And as fun as it was … we still cannot understand the men who’ve led us into battle after battle – the men who’ve led us to where we are right now.
1. It feels uncomfortable to destroy on purpose – until it feels amazing. But there’s a danger here.
It felt wrong, at first, to raise up an instrument of damage and bring it down upon something, with the sole aim of breaking it into pieces. But our initial discomfort soon gave way to giggles – there was a freedom in the physicality of it. The heft of a sledgehammer, the full swing of a bat, the moments of impact.
And then, the mood shifted again. As Victoria put it, “something was unleashed.” Specifically, our anger – an emotion often minimized or ridiculed in women, if not rebranded entirely as hysteria, irrationality or hypersensitivity. But once we opened up, the air became thick with all of the fury we’d repressed, as well as shards of glass.
But here’s the thing: Research into the concept of venting frustration through violence points to potential long-term psychological damage – leaning into destruction for release can, in some, reinforce the notion that aggression serves as a positive way of processing extreme emotions.
Yeah, we get that.
2. That energy should never be visited upon anyone or anything other than discarded home goods.
As Victoria correctly pointed out: “Cathartic violence is weird!”
Look, there’s an appeal to engaging the id – that animalistic, even primal nature of destruction. But we would never direct that energy against another human being. In fact, the mere idea made us decidedly uncomfortable. Not just because women are socialized against expressing anger – though, we very much are. And it’s not about men being socialized to express anger through violence – though, they very much are.
We see men, time and time again, respond to provocations with violence, both in the moment and after careful planning, through verbal assaults, rape, murder and mass shootings – all in numbers far greater than women. Even men’s silence heralds violence. And then, men use the power they continue to disproportionately hold to get away with it all, time and time again. In the case of military deployment, they’re even celebrated for their strikes and kills. Meanwhile, we struggled in the rage room to take the swing that would break a Christmas-themed vase.
This is not to say that women never demonstrate hawkishness – I have, in the past, publicly lamented the times when women politicians enthusiastically called for increased military spending and engagement. But time and time again, it’s most often men who give the orders to fire the bombs – the bombs that cross oceans to level buildings, to kill people.
3. Men have much to answer for – and not just the warmongers, autocrats and oligarchs.
Victoria and I found the mental targets of our anger oscillating between men in power, and men we’ve known.
With each swing, we thought of Trump, his mostly-male administration, and the majority-male ICE agents and wealth-hoarding billionaires, all of them exacting their own harms upon our already-strained populace. And, we thought of the individual men who hurt us intimately, yet in mutually recognizable ways. Gaslighting, insults, manipulation, invalidation…
It’s all destructive. It’s all violent. All of it involves crossing borders and boundaries, be they political or personal, without care for the damage done, and with seeming impunity. And none of it is right.
Victoria said it best: “The structures that keep us small, and the individual males who keep us small, are inherently connected.”
4. The systems they’ve built with the power they’ve held aren’t working. Maybe it’s time we tear them all down. (Hammers are optional. For now.)
Men’s leadership is keeping us trapped in cycles of struggle, destruction and death, sometimes even with eerie symmetry – this new conflict with Iran bears worrying similarities to President George W. Bush’s war on Iraq. Which is why, after Victoria and I finished in the rage room, we wondered if our strength, combined with the right tools, could be used to break other things.
Bigger things.
Maybe we tap into what we felt in that rage room not just to organize and push for progress, as I suggested earlier this year, but also, to level some structures of our own – but in ways that help, instead of harm.
We aren’t the only ones to consider the need for an overhaul – United Nations officials have called for a “radical rethink” of how municipalities are built and run to promote safety for all, women especially. But what might that look like? To break the systems holding us back?
For starters, it’ll likely mean looking to women a lot more. We’re already the leaders of movements, and the world’s caregivers. But we need more of us elected to office and promoted to leadership positions in the business world – because we understand the need for real change through lived experience, but lack the access we need to fix, or destroy, the machines. When we are given that power, we reallocate money; we change policies; we fortify safety nets.
And when necessary, we cause good trouble. In the past, suffragists lit fires. Today, Afghan women speak out against the Taliban and protest oppression even as authorities use fire hoses and stun guns against them. Iranian women burn hijabs when one of their own dies of harm inflicted by the morality police. Mexican women march on Día de Los Muertos, the holiday to honor the deceased, to remember girls and women killed in acts of femicide. American women block roads and risk arrest to fight threats to our right to bodily autonomy.
And when we acquire real power, studies show that we in fact destroy, too. But we break that which is harming others, and without inflicting additional harm. There is a wanton nature to men’s structural and interpersonal violence, an excitement to their declarations of war, and an ease to their destruction that is absent from what women do when we tear things down. When we destroy, it’s not to gain control or eliminate one another – we do it to assist, to rebuild.
So maybe it’s time to shatter what they made – so we can remake it better. ◼️
Victoria Flexner contributed to the reporting of this piece.
