Rage.

I was 15 years old and she was my first real girlfriend-- real in the sense that we spent a lot of time together, we cared for each other and, most importantly, we had sex (and the kinds and variety pretty much spoiled me for life).

She'd a rough time, as long as I'd known her. She'd been raped. Her father was long gone. Her past boyfriends tended to be gangbangers with uncomfortable nick-names (Face-high was the one I recall).

When we'd first met, she'd been called over my house by two friends who were tentatively planning to get her high and "run a train" on her. I had no plans on joining-- I was a virgin at the time and that wasn't how I saw myself stepping off the starting block. She came in, she smoked, she saw what was up and, instead, decided to take a nap in my room.

I came in, put a blanket over her and let her sleep. She wasn't sleeping, of course-- I found that out later. That was the moment, she later told me, that she fell for me. We became friends. We later became more.

She was a good girlfriend. She defended me like a Rottweiler. She wrote me poetry. We had some really great sex, for a 15 year old. All because... I was a nice guy and most people weren't.

It's important you understand that. Because later, when, in a moment of blind rage, I shoved her to the ground and some dark thing crouching in the back of my mind howled for her, when I looked into her eyes it was the nice guy she'd fallen for reflected back at me.

The argument was stupid and petty and involved my little sister: I didn't want her around, she did, and we argued, I suppose; she insisted, I suppose; and, I suppose, I got very, very upset. I barely remember the whys. Only the effect it had on me.

I never wanted a woman to look at me that way, ever again.

Perhaps, in her eyes, I saw my mother.

I have fragmented memories. None of the act, really-- just the fallout. When my mother "fell down the stairs" and had to have stitches in her face. I stayed with my grandmother, that time. The house with blue walls. Memories of screaming, through those walls. The constant, constant fear.

I remember going to school and there being a class on domestic violence and I went home and I told my stepfather to stop hitting my mother. I was in 3rd grade. Gawky. Small. Big headed. Standing up to a monster.

And it stopped, for a while, that's one thing I will never forget-- for a while, God help me, it actually worked.

Until it didn't.

I'm sure at the time I could never fathom why these horrible things had to happen. And then I got older. And I got into an argument. And the chittering, insectile thing perching at the base of my skull hatched from its egg.

I know what it's like to feel a bone deep, monstrous rage. I know it feeds on itself, builds itself, takes off like a run-away train. I know what it's like to want to beat someone you love. Not hit. Beat.

They say that the most common indicator for future violent behavior is a violent environment. I've spent my entire life very much aware that I am a statistic.

I have an affliction, is all. I do my best to keep it under control. Sometimes, it's hard.

I dated a woman who had just left a physically abusive marriage. One night, during an argument, she began pushing me-- she gripped an argument and chewed on it, pushed the topic, backed me into an emotional corner.... She goaded me, almost taunted, and I knew she did it on purpose because she'd done it before... in her marriage. The psychodrama was playing over for her and all I had to do was play my part.

It became physical. She started kicking at me, willing me to hit her. I didn't. I left.

No similar incidents happened. We broke up soon after. She'd later tell her friends I was emotionally abusive-- I suppose the physical was just too big a lie to pull off. See, she was very used to be a victim. Abuse was part of her identity, at that point.

I had a fight with a female friend, one of my best friends. I said some pretty terrible things and I said some pretty honest things but mostly I said things she didn't want to hear. We were shouted, she was emotional and it became physical.

She came at me, scratched me. Left marks. Pushed me further than I've ever been pushed until I grabbed her by the throat and held her against her car and I thought, then, that I would love to see her lip bleeding and tears in her eyes. And then I let her go. And I walked away.

I had a long distance girlfriend I hopped onto a bus to ride 5 hours to see, to repair a break in our relationship. It was a lovely romantic gesture, I thought. She didn't see it that way. We immediately got into an argument, at my hotel room; her pacing, me sitting very, very still.

We get closer and closer to resolution only to break into fighting again until she leaves, refusing to talk to me face to face-- only phone communication, she says, and I'd had enough, I'm frustrated, I'd gone so far and she could only insist on her position, she just wouldn't back down, that bitch, and there I was, outside, in downtown Minneapolis, screaming into a cell-phone, kicking newspaper holders and slobbering like a beast. I'm lucky I wasn't arrested.

I left a voicemail message that probably sealed the deal on our breakup. And made her friends think I was psychotic.

People think that men who commit domestic violence are all just rotten human beings but I know better. They're people like me.

There is a rage that boils up so strong it can take days to come down.

It comes from this little voice that whispers... disrespect. That whispers, she should know better. It's defensive, this voice. It's always their fault. It doesn't like being pushed, it doesn't like it when someone doesn't listen, it doesn't like when someone makes it feel small. It hates to be pushed. Just do what the fuck I say, it hisses. Submit.

It has it's own logic, this rage. And it is intoxicating. That is sad, sad truth.

Do you want to hear horrible thoughts? I once got into such a rage wanted my stepfather back to beat the living fuck out of my mother. I am not proud of that moment. But it was true.

It's made relationships hard. I avoid conflict. I avoid intimacy. I actually fear getting worked up with a loved one. I know what will happen, I know that rage is waiting with it's terrible logic ready to goad me.

It sometimes feels like the safest route is solitude.

All this and I've yet to lose control.

I know both men and women can be guilty of domestic violence but this is largely a male problem. There are ads out there, saying things like "Real Men Don't Hit Women." Real men.

I don't consider myself better than anyone else because I keep myself in check. I consider myself a sick person whose disease is in remission. An alcoholic who hasn't touch the bottle in 10 years.

The rage is there and it will always be there. Waiting.

And I'm a nice guy.

What's a Feminist?

I was out at a bar the other night, having a deep conversation with two ladies, one my own age and the other in her 40s (both of whom seemed to have wildly divergent ideas on what "feminism" means, but call that the generation gap), when we started talking about abuse and (in some disclosure) the experience I had in childhood, growing up in an abusive household.

I spoke of confusion and quite a bit of blame for my mother for putting up with it when the older woman said, "There's the problem. Why are you blaming her? Why are you asking why she put up with it when you should be asking why he did it?"

The question was very clear to me: The reason he did it is that he's an asshole.

To an 8 year old, a 12 year old or a 27 year old, that answer couldn't be clearer: my step-father was an asshole. To even try to understand him was to try and sympathize with him and, in the end, I made my peace by assigning him to that category of "Non-human force of nature with whom I rarely interact." At this point in my life, he's something like a familiar stranger, like someone I see at the bar some times and make a bit of small talk.

The mystery, to me, is in why anyone would ever continue in an environment of abuse.

But again and again, the woman would rebut me-- stop asking why about her and start questioning him. Why would he hit a woman?

This, to me, is an example of one of those confusions of priority and belief when dealing with an older feminist.

I could give dozens of reasons why I'd hit a woman (besides sex). Most of them revolve around power and control and respect-- about the same reasons parents hit their children (if they ever bothered to admit it). While I wouldn't do it, I'd still be able to come up with reasons.

Frankly, I know plenty of women who have come with reasons why they'd hit their man-- and do so.

But to be hit? To be the victim? Why on Earth would anyone put up with that, besides financial reasons (besides divorce, which was discussed a bit in the house-husband post)? It's irrational, therefore interesting.

But to her, questioning the victim is blaming the victim. Sure, I blamed the victim when I was a kid-- because I lived in the mess. Why wouldn't I? But years later, the mystery remains and the questions go unanswered.

The conversation meandered somewhat, veering into ideas about respect and male-female difference-- the younger woman felt she didn't want any help or retraction due to her gender, she felt she was not only just as good as a man but that there was barely a difference between the two. Meanwhile, the older woman spoke at length about the difference between male and female energies, about femininity and it finding a place at the table in the masculine world-- a difference so marked, I couldn't help but respond to it with my own point: they have an identity crisis but, at least, they have an active conversation about the identity in the first place.

Males, on the other hand... and that was where she cut me off. It was as if to say, even the subject, the very idea, of the oppressor trying to find his identity to cope with the cultural shift is too absurd to talk about (to be fair, this lady was good at cutting anyone off- and we were drinking).

There's a sharp line between these generations of feminist and it makes more clear to me the fiasco of the Clinton/Obama primaries and its identity warfare. Older feminists are still living the war, younger one's are coping with the reconstruction and furtherment of their goals--- where the bleeding edge, years ago, involved radical ideas and ideals to battle an overwhelming enemy, the enemy has changed shape and the war has gone subtle. Now the politics truly are personal-- how women carries themselves, self-respect, the question of sex, the question of objectification in the media (which is overwhelmingly used against women but, as with the growing trend of male body dysmorphia, has become a bit more equal opportunity exploitative).

In other words, to even ask the question, "what is male"? is a question for this generation. Just as our fathers before us never had to question it- hence why, in many ways, they are left behind-- neither have our mothers.