She is antagonistic to this aggression because she does not understand it. Since she cannot understand or accept her own role, her feminine nature, she feels that male aggression is opposed to her and she takes every opportunity to prove to herself that this is so. His strength, his ability to master the outside environment make her feel personally nullified, a drab, a slavey. She endlessly contrasts his essential quality of aggression with woman’s essential traits, to her detriment.
Now if men were out to enslave them, women would be very justified in fearing, hating, envying man’s central strength, his aggressiveness. But is he?
A re-examination of this single point can put the whole basic attitude of the frigid woman (once she has allowed herself to feel the negative power of her emotions) back into proper perspective, to correct her fundamental distortion of view. We can do this by looking at the single most important thing men do with their aggression in our society.
“All men have nightmares.”
I heard a fellow psychiatrist say those words during an impromptu discussion of male psychology recently, and the phrase struck me as dramatically true. For the majority of men, when they come of age and marry, take on an enormous burden which they may not lay down with any conscience this side of the grave. Quietly and without histrionics they put aside, in the name of love, most of their vaunted freedom and contract to take upon their shoulders full social and economic responsibility for their wives and children.
As a woman, consider for a moment how you would feel if your child should be deprived of the good things of life: proper housing, clothing, education. Consider how you would feel if he should go hungry. Perhaps such ideas have occurred to you and have given you a bad turn momentarily. But they are passing thoughts; a woman does not give them much credence; they are not her direct responsibility; certainly she does not worry about them for long.
But such thoughts, conscious or unconscious, are her husband’s daily fare. He knows, and he takes the carking thought to work with him each morning (and every morning) and to bed with him at night, that upon the success or failure of his efforts rest the happiness, health, indeed the very lives of his wife and children. In the ultimate sense he alone must take the full responsibility for them.
I do not think it is possible to exaggerate how seriously men take this responsibility; how much they worry about it. Women, unless they are very close to their men, rarely know how heavily the burden weighs sometimes, for men talk about it but little. They do not want their loved ones to worry.
Men have been shouldering the entire responsibility for their family group since earliest times. I often think, however, when I see the stresses and strains of today’s market place, that civilized man has much harder going, psychologically speaking, than his primitive forefathers.
In the first place, the competition creates a terrible strain on the individual male. This competition is not only for preferment and advancement. It is often for his very job itself. Every man knows that if he falters, lets up his ceaseless drive, he can and will be easily replaced.