Snapped.

A brief note about control.

I was probably five years old playing outside at recess. I wanted to play for as long as possible before leaving to go to the bathroom, aware that I did have to go but it wasn’t that bad yet. Little did I know at the time that the doors to get back into this particular section of the school were quite heavy. I hadn’t realized that I’d never been in a position to open them by myself before. I pulled and pulled at the outer doors and got in after much struggle, but couldn’t manage the same thing with the inner doors. I couldn’t hold it. I’d run out of time. I couldn’t control it a second longer, and that’s definitely the most embarrassing scenario in which I needed to change into the spare set of clothes each student had in their cubbies once a teacher spotted me in tears, sound muted behind the thick glass panes.

When is the last time you lost control?

If you asked me, I’d likely point to that particular day as a five year old. Not being in control is a very unpleasant feeling. I should clarify that it is unique from making a bad choice or working with limited options that likewise back you into a corner. In those scenarios, some of which can be genuinely terrifying in their own right, your hands are still at least on the wheel of your own life even if the road beneath you is falling apart. I associate lack of control, generally, with childhood when you still don’t quite know how things work. In adulthood, I’d probably associate lack of control with madness if not physical illness. With that in mind, it’s curious that lack of control consistently comes up when I am interfacing with adult males.

When was the last time you lost control? I quickly came to suspect, if not explicitly told that in adulthood, men in particular find themselves losing control quite a bit. Not in the sense of wetting themselves, no. The men around me seemed perfectly content pissing wherever they pleased. Men losing control seems to always come up in two primary contexts: violence and sex (which I consider to be a prominent subcategory of violence within the male mind). It is this understanding that seems to play a big part in how human civilization functions. Ask me, though. Ask me what I think about that.

I think it’s bullshit.

Maybe, I thought distantly, maybe he has a problem. Maybe he needs help. What an odd thing to think of a man stalking toward you with a folding chair gripped in his hand before he hurls it at you, continuing to scream about how stupid and useless you are. I am relieved to say this was not a domestic incident. No, it was just me at my internship with my boss, whose ire was frequently directed at any number of his underlings. In his own words, he would “snap,” supposedly, but he meant no offense. Most said he had an anger management problem, but was still a good guy. I just thought about how he seemingly had no problem managing his anger around his boss or his friends or the high-profile teams of artists we’d work with each day at this particular music festival. No, it was just me and the other interns and the production assistant who he’d treat this way.

Having a female body seems to go hand in hand with temptation. What is a man to do if he simply cannot control himself? Maybe, I thought distantly, maybe he doesn’t know what he’s doing. What an odd thing to think of a man with his hands on you, your tears having as much of an effect on him as it would a pair of heavy glass doors that won’t budge. I deploy language indicating lack of consent. But this was not new information. We’d spoken about similar experiences playing soccer in high school for a few minutes, at which point he asked for my number and I refused. Such an affront, apparently, put him firmly in the realm of no longer being in control. He said as much. But he was in control. He did know what he was doing. He just didn’t care. And he did stop when witnesses intervened.

I can recall a few times where I was gripped with the most blood-boiling anger. But even at those times, I still felt like myself. How could I not when the cause of such anger was my character questioned, my morals trampled, my loved ones demeaned, my capabilities dismissed? And I would bite back with exactly what was true in my heart. I was every bit in control of my words even if sometimes - embarrassingly - I was not in control of my tears. But even that could be trained out of me. Perhaps what was trained out of me instead was an inclination to scream and throw things and destroy. For a child, that is a tantrum. For an adult, at worst, it is an act of war.

“I suppose we can chalk this up to him having a bad day,” my current boss in his forties says of my coworker who is in his fifties creating a spectacle at six in the morning publicly berating at the top of his lungs another crew member in front of a crowd for something extraordinarily trivial. “Even I snap sometimes.”

“I can’t control it,” another fellow roadie says to me after similarly screaming in someone’s face not for the first time, face red and veins popping. He’s currently in tears about it saying something about how he’s working on himself.

“If you were being held at gunpoint, could you control it?” I asked, finding myself in a unique position to be readily able to question a man about this. He frowns but, to my surprise, he thinks.

“Yes,” he admits.

“So you are in control,” I say, “you’re just choosing, on some level, for this to all bubble over. Frequently. Creating a spectacle of yourself and enemies of everyone else on this crew. If I came into this conversation screaming in your face, what would you think of me? Not anything positive, I’d imagine.” He frowns but nods in agreement, tears beginning to fall in earnest. I get annoyed by the shred of sympathy I feel for him. With what he’s been dishing out, he should be able to take something as light as this.

Am I airing out my theory on the wrong man?

Do I care?

Evidently.

I dismiss him from my office.

As of this moment a few weeks later, what used to be a daily problem seems to have suddenly cleared itself up. Maybe my time and attention was worth it after all.

I have been told about this thing called testosterone, how it can do a number on you. How women who inject themselves with it can be more prone to various violent tendencies. But my thought is that if these men who have served as obstacles in my path had been afraid of me, it wouldn’t have happened. If they knew I could hurt them, it wouldn’t have happened. Imagine going your entire life knowing that if you throw a tantrum or lash out or rape or maim or kill, nothing will happen to you. You might be convinced, then, that you lack control. That someone not bending to your will inspires uncontrollable violence. That these things just happen when you “snap.” When what you really lack is not control at all. It’s a sense of consequence. The same one I learned when I was five and decided, just a few more minutes on the swingset, then I’ll go.

Then I look at myself and what people say about me. How I’m so calm in the chaos, how I never raise my voice, how I stop and think and consider before I speak, and how I talk down violent men with grace, diffusing countless situations. These are good traits to have, I am told. But when surrounded by men who snap like clockwork, conveniently only in situations when they wield the power, I am wondering how much of that madness was trained out of me on purpose because I was born female. I think, far from the first time, about violence. How it’s not the answer, men say. But also how much I wish I even had the ability to hurt them like they hurt me. I’d say I dare you to open your mouth. I dare you to lay a finger on me.

So that’s my pet peeve, I suppose.

Don’t tell me you lost control unless you really mean it. Odds are we’ll all be able to tell.