Overheard on social media:

“I’m a divorce attorney, and you’ll never be able to convince me that someone is your soulmate once I find out that they’ve punched a hole in your wall.”

My first reaction: Hard agreement. That’s not your lover, that’s an assault and battery that hasn’t landed on you yet. Get out now.

My second reaction: First of all when she said “someone” I heard “a man” and you did too. We’ve all seen plenty of fist-holes in drywall and thin door panels. I’ve never seen one put there by a woman’s fist. But I, myself, have never punched a wall. Asking only somewhat tongue-in-cheek: am I a defective man? Is the patriarchy gonna toss me out for imperfect performance of masculinity?

I’ve never even bruised my knuckles. I’ve been super mad, I have hit stuff (although not people, not as an adult) with my open hand and thrown things and broken things and made very loud noises, but punching stuff is apparently not in my automatic go-to toolbox of shit a man does.

meme about putting a cape on an angry person and calling them super mad as a joke

I’m afraid people will look at this and see a free-floating “not all men” response to a question nobody asked me. But that is emphatically not my intention. Remember the first thing I said: hole-in-wall punching is very much a pattern we all recognize as man stuff. But I’ve never even been tempted to do something so obviously painful and stupid. Sometimes I genuinely wonder whether I’m a singular weirdo, but I’m not singular; there are plenty of peaceable men with smooth knuckles like mine, running around loose out here.

This is what I suspect is closer to the truth: the wall-punchers are a large defective subcategory of men, ones who attract way more attention than they deserve to our gender, by means of the damage they do and the fear they cause. I can’t even accuse them of poor impulse control, because I’ve never so much as had the impulse to punch architecture. It’s hard to see as an anger management deficit, because I’ve never been that angry. I don’t understand their malfunction, but they obviously have one, and it’s not rare.

I’m not, however, stupid. My working theory must be that the wall-punching results from some state of overwhelm I’ve never experienced where negative emotions (which I have experienced) exceed self-control and the ability to foresee immediate negative consequences. But another theory is that the wall-punching is deliberate, controlled, and performative. In other words, it’s a threat. Not overwhelm, but evil. “Look what just accidentally happened to this wall; sooth and placate me, or…”

No real man would. No conception of masculinity I recognize allows it. But just like I said at the top of the essay, it does sometimes feel like me and the patriarchy do have beef about masculinity, and how to perform it.

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