Are Modern Women 30% Angry?

by Carl Nelson

I don’t tell my wife what to wear, how to dress or wear her hair, partly because she’s reasonable in her appearance, and partly because I don’t like my wife telling me what to wear.  And also, by the time you’ve been married over thirty years, what difference will it make?  Do you think your wife is going to suddenly look like something crafted by Botticelli – or will she just look like your house painted a different color?  Sure there will be criticisms and comments, but it’s still where you live in all of its essentials.  I mean some days she looks better, sometimes worse.  If she loves to wear something ugly; it’ll wear out eventually, or scuff, or lose a heel.  But the same goes for something nice, and I mourn its passing.

Nevertheless, appearance can matter quite a bit to a woman.  So, like a tar baby, it seems prudent to keep one’s distance from this topic.  (Every male knows this.)  Which is what I did the other day when she asked if she should keep her hair the way it was or go for curly?

It seemed it was already curly.  I didn’t understand how it could get any curlier, but I didn’t want to invite the discussion.  So I said, “I don’t know.”

“Oh you don’t care how I look,” she growled, turning away piqued.

I didn’t respond to that, because I’m sure she would get even angrier if I started detailing the various upgrades she might consider.

Then later that day in a reflective moment, while discussing the soap opera which was our relatives at times, I said, “we go along without any drama, I think.”

“I’m angry a lot.”

“You are?” I said.

“You would know if you would ask how I feel.”

She did appear angry.

“Why would I ask, why you are angry?” I retorted.  “You’d just get angry.  Or, I’d just get angry.”

But it was already too late.

When she had no reply to that, in the interlude, a realization appeared, as if a long oncoming train rounding the bend, because women – everywhere – seem to be about 30% angry all the time.

They’re angry about the glass ceiling; they’re angry because they can’t stay home.  They’re angry about having to birth the baby; they’re angry if they haven’t any.  They want you to know how they feel; but you can’t ever really know how they feel because you’re a man.  They get angry if they said they’d cook dinner and you ask later, where is it?  Or they get made if you expect it; or mad if you don’t and bought your own.  They get angry about how their husband falls short, and fine about all of those other suitors who aren’t even in the game, who wouldn’t even play.  It’s too hot; it’s too cold.  It’s too late; it’s too early.  It seems about 30% of them is perpetually dissatisfied.  It’s incurable.  They are mad because they are expected to wear makeup, uncomfortable shoes, the newest fashions, have stunning hair and skin – all the while men don’t even care, or not enough, or fail to bemoan the labor and time expended!  It’s enough to make a woman shriek!  It’s the best of times and it’s the worst of times, wherever they stand – in sinking sands!  It’s revolutionary France, everywhere.  Quite disconcerting!  But they’re angry.

And they don’t even know why.  And the contradiction means nothing to them.  They just are.  It’s like a feature on those newer cars which all look the same because of a plethora of governmental regulations we all must simply accept.  You have to purchase the car which will come with a catalytic converter, turns off when you are at a stoplight, have a multitude of warning lights, mileage and safety improvements etc, etc, etc…  Likewise, if you marry a modern woman, they are going to come with a preconditioned level of anger of about 30%, like the recommended tire pressure.

They don’t know why – which doesn’t mean they don’t have reasons.  In fact, they are scanning for them constantly.  The culture says that it’s for a smoother ride.  And it does seem like something that is culturally determined.  To not be angry is to be characterized as unaware, naked and barefoot, deplorable and squinting upwards in myopic outlook from a deteriorating trailer park in a depressed fly-over state.  (You have to envy those Appalachians.)

This anger is the little perpetual fire that the modern male is expected to be warmed by.  Seeing a lithe, slender sprite of a pixie snap the necks of 3 or 4 burly male bad guys on TV and shoot the other six (the worst of them in the groin) is evidently supposed to bring out the soft, romantic side of me.  Watching my sex being beat by convention day in and day out throughout the media is supposedly going to bring out my softer qualities.  Or soft romantic interludes are posited, wherein the man somehow is overwhelmed by loving emotions from this PC treatment.

“You just don’t like scenes with feeling,” the wife says.

“I love honest feeling, naturally arrived at,” I disagree.  “But this ad hoc, deux machina sentimentality is emotional intimidation and it also is psychological violence!”  But she guffaws…

…at my “whining.”  What a pussy.

Which is why it is a smoother going, not discussing these things.

Nevertheless, this conclusion keeps bubbling up, that the modern woman is approximately 30% angry – at all times.  I’m not sure of the percentage precision, but I’m fairly certain it’s in the ballpark, because it rears its head about a third of the time.  And more so, since the Democrats cemented the woke tyranny.  Actually, to backstep this a bit, this is mostly so among other women, especially old Democrats and single ones.  They are apt to flare at near any indiscretion.

But not my wife.  She, actually, seems to have been doing some inner soul searching.  Nothing said, but after thirty years of marriage you notice when the gears are turning, and then she acts a bit different, or says something.

The other evening, we were at this boxing event in Parkersburg, and she noted proudly that she used to take martial arts in her after college years.  “We were supposed to practice by hitting this padded board.  My instructor was startled by how hard I hit.  But I had to quit, because I kept breaking the blood vessels in my hands.”  She showed me knuckles.  “But I sure loved it.  I think I was getting my anger out,” she confessed.

Women have been angry for a long time, that they hadn’t the prerogatives of men.  But it’s a bit like jealousy.  You gain the prize, but it doesn’t mean as much after you’ve settled and made your peace with it.  Because you were so wrapped up in becoming what you were jealous of, that it was them you were patterning your behavior after – and not necessarily yourself   …which is something else to get angry about!

I think we’re about in that place where women are headed both ways at once.  Their anger is pointing diametrically.  And women just hate dissension.  It’s got to be confusing.  And my wife probably deserves my sympathy – so I’ll give it to her.

But then, I’m a man, a member of the oppressive patriarchy.  So I probably don’t have any right to be thinking about this at all.

Carl Nelson is a poet/playwright/essayist who publishes regularly in the New English Review.  His upcoming book of poems, “Self-Assembly,” is due out soon.  To see more of his work (and that of his friends) please visit magicbeanbooks.co