Prophets of Rage

How I Found a Healthy Outlet

Before you start reading this, this is my content warning for this article. This deals with sexual assault, misogyny, r*pe, racism, misanthropy and many other parts of modern American culture.

Also, there are a lot of links embedded in certain sentences. Just be mindful of that if you want further reading, this is a personal essay so I have some supporting documentation, but a lot of this is anecdotal. Now, on with the show…

I was talking online with a college acquaintance, someone who attended UNC Charlotte a little after I did. He is currently airing his personal ideologies on social media and we had a brief conversation about intersectional feminism. I told him that intersectional feminism saved my life. And it did.

I’ve had a lot of things that saved my life. Because saving happens in many different forms. Music saved my life. My wife did too. So have my friends. I have a lot to say about feminism, good and bad for me personally and just the hurdles of misinformation I was given in my life.

I could write novels about it. Feminism is one of the most intentionally misrepresented philosophies in modern culture. I’m going to write about it. I’ll write about Racism, Sexism, Religion. The hard thing, for me at least, when writing about culture, philosophy and politics is that they all bleed together. There’s so much overlap, so much nuance. How do I address one topic without addressing them all?

Sometimes I try to, and the posts get out of hand. Sometimes, I narrow my focus too tightly and I miss important information. These are muscles that have lied dormant for decades at this point, or at least have atrophied considerably in the days since I actively wrote.

How did intersectional feminism save my life? Why did my life need saving? And, as is the case in many things, what else contributed?

Let’s start with the why…

If Your Anger Fills You, It Will Proceed To Kill You

I was an angry child. I listened to music that allowed me to channel my anger. Metal and Hardcore in particular gave me a positive outlet for some really negative feelings. There are stories you can hear, me throwing a Tonka Truck against my bedroom door for hours until I wore myself out. Chasing my sister with a butcher knife. How I would get so mad I’d turn red. I was a berserker. I didn’t feel pain, I inflicted it.

The only times I cried publicly were when I was mad. It was the only emotion I was allowed to show, as a young man, that was socially acceptable. So I let my anger flag fly freely. I was, and am, an emotional person. And anger has been something I carried deep inside me for a very long time.

Anger powered my cruelty. My justice. My friendships, my opinions, my day to day life. I lead with anger. What made me mad. I snapped a stack of CDs once because I was mad. Not a healthy outlet. I got into fist fights constantly until I was in high school. I still got into them sometimes in high school, but nowhere near the frequency I did in my youth.

Anger also fueled my misogyny. I was angry at women who didn’t want me. Boy, what a lousy person to be. Anger also fueled my self-loathing. I was mad at myself for things I could control and mad at myself for things I couldn’t. I was mad that people liked things I didn’t and mad that people didn’t like things I did.

I was mad that life was unfair. For me, for my friends. Anger fueled my misanthropy. I hated people because of the way they treated other people. And when I was one of those people I hated, that made me mad too.

I grew up loving almost all sports. Sports culture embraces and celebrates anger. I think sports fanship was a place where I found kinship in the worst parts of myself. People loved cruelty when it was directed at opposing teams and their fans. People loved alcoholism, nihilism and antipathy. Sports fans live in misery. Well, I did too.

Sports culture is also extremely misogynistic

CW: Sexual Assault

"The nature of the vitriol is so different for what men get compared to what women get. Men get ... you're an idiot because you feel this way about Sam Bradford. Women get, 'I'm going to rape you because you don't like Sam Bradford.' There is a big difference and it's about entitlement to our bodies. Men who disagree with us can comment about our bodies, and what they want to do with them, and how they have the right to because they're mad at us. Men don't say that to other men they disagree with on the internet." -- Andrea Hangst, Sports on Earth

I can’t even begin to apologize for so many of the terrible things I said when I was a younger person. The harm I contributed to. The terrible ideas I had fostered in me and encouraged by friends. In college, I learned that r*pe jokes are taken seriously by r*pists. Seriously. And roughly 3% of men attempt or commit sexual assault.

That’s the sort of thing that makes me angry today. I look at incel culture and I see a world I could have lived in my whole life. I was dangerously close to being redpilled. If I were 10 years younger, maybe I would have been indoctrinated into that culture of white supremacy, misogyny and violence.

I was angry, disaffected. I was vulnerable. It was feeding my need to drink. It fed off of drinking. It might have started as a seed in my stomach, but it was fully blossomed by the time I got to college. I was at peak anger and in an environment that was also extremely misogynistic.

I can’t be the one you want me to 'Cause I'm nothing like you

Intersectional feminism is something that was shared with me early in my post college days. I came to it through class theory and race theory, not really from a place of feminism. What that means is, some of those lessons were hard learned. It forced me to confront a lot of things about myself that I didn’t like.

I will write about intersectionality in depth and my journey there one day. But this is about my anger. There are still a ton of socially acceptable comedians, bands and artists in general that trade on anger. Bill Burr isn’t going to be cancelled anytime soon. Daniel Tosh is still working. Glassjaw gets paid a lot of money to play shows. Republican talking heads trade on anger.

Look at the anger that surrounds Star Wars, Marvel, any article on any subject with the littlest bit of controversy. Race draws anger from all sides in America. How can you not be angry? People are murdered in America daily due to preventable gun violence. We are the world’s leader in incarceration, especially against minorities. Let’s not forget that some states still utilize slave labor.

Religion makes people frothy. Political division is at a peak. A lot of people disconnect instead of confronting the realities of the world, but being apolitical is an extremely privileged position to take. And I’m going to tell you that you SHOULD be angry. As someone who was addicted to rage, it might seem odd for me to encourage anger.

Anger, in and of itself, isn’t unhealthy. And where intersectional feminism really saved me was giving me a direction for my anger. It gave me the tools for pinpointing what was making me angry in the world and how to address it. It helped me refine my empathy and learn to forgive things that people might not even be aware of in themselves.

I’m still angry. Systemic oppression triggers an anger reflex in me. I get mad at people that are treated unfairly. Capitalism makes me angry. Greed makes me angry. Finding out about another school shooting. Seeing another person die to state violence. Unhoused people. The fact that we can’t have universal health care, even though it would be cheaper than the system we have now.

I’m less mad at individuals now though. Definitely less angry at myself. I’m far more forgiving. Understanding. Less aggressive in my confrontation when someone has crossed a boundary. Holding onto anger at an individual was toxic. Being angry about systemic issues is empowering. It gives you the energy to keep up what feels like a hopeless fight.

Call Me Ishmael

Therapy was the first step for me to overcoming my lifelong issues with anger and rage. Community has been another huge one for me. Friends and love ones holding me accountable has forced me to be better if I want to keep those people in my life.

My anger has irreparably damaged relationships I’ve had in the past. I have grieved those losses and accepted them. I grew from it, but it doesn’t change the way those people feel about me. Rightfully so. I hope people have been able to move on from the pain I caused. I have dedicated my life to creating a better path forward for people who don’t have the tools or direction in their life to address the world that we currently live in. Sometimes it’s successful, a lot of times it isn’t.

In college, I read a book that has done more to change the way I approach the world than any other single piece of media I’ve ever consumed. My professor, Ronald Lunsford, made us read Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. At least, if we wanted to pass the class. It was the first time I’d ever had to read a book for a class. In part, because it hadn’t been dissected online a million times before I got to it. In part because he forced us to engage with the text. He asked real, meaningful questions.

I can never repay the kindness that was bestowed upon me that day. Ishmael put into words so many of my issues with western culture. It is mostly about religion and how cultural myths impact our understanding of the world. Daniel Quinn’s philosophy has issues, but I find that most philosophies are imperfect.

Instead, what his book did for me was give me a new way to approach so many of the issues I had with the world and with myself. It helped me fight against the original sin ideology that allows for so many atrocities. It helped me give language to all the trends I saw in media. Copaganda. Class Warfare in Media. It allowed me the space to navigate a lot of complicated thoughts in my head.

The Question (ID Number 373)...

• New interest in ISHMAEL, as I'm sure you know, has been spawned by the band Pearl Jam in the last year. Do you have any thoughts about their use of the book as inspiration for the production of their album YIELD and more specifically the song "Do the Evolution"? Just wondering if you'd heard it and what you thought.
  

...and the response:

• YIELD sits on my desktop and I often give it a listen (in fact, writing this answer gave me an excuse to play it again). A teacher once told me that even though he wasn’t teaching ISHMAEL or the material in ISHMAEL, the book had changed the WAY he teaches. This pleased me more than if he’d said he was teaching my ideas. Another went to a lot of trouble to try to capture all the ideas in my books in a ninety-minute “motivational” speech. I told him he shouldn’t just try to capture my ideas in his words, he had to go BEYOND my ideas to find his OWN ideas, his OWN way of motivating people. This is what Eddie Vedder has done. He hasn’t tried to express my ideas in his songs. Changed by reading my work, he’s written songs he wouldn’t have written two years ago—but his own songs, not any songs I would ever write (if I were a song-writer). Inspiration is very different from recapitulation. The credits of he movie INSTINCT say it was “inspired” by ISHMAEL, but it makes no effort to recapitulate ISHMAEL. Of the songs in YIELD, “Do the Evolution” comes closest to being an expression of my ideas, but I suspect Vedder would find many other, more subtle connections. Two or three writers have changed my life forever in works I haven’t read for decades. I’m certainly not writing anything they would write---but the “inspiration” they gave me never goes away.

It would be easy for someone to call him pretentious. And, he probably is. But, I can also relate to what he’s saying here. His writing DID change my ideology. It hardened it. It helped me start to deconstruct the anger in my heart. I also find it ironic that he has a cult of personality around him, something I’ve never really prescribed to. I haven’t even read any of the other Ishmael books. I didn’t need to.

But I will encourage you to read Ishmael. Even if it’s just to tell me how stupid you think it is.

Here’s an hour of music for you to rage to, in a healthy way -