From the courts of the Nitto ATP Finals in Turin, Italy, to the halls of the United States Congress, these have not been the best of times for men and anger management.
Much has been made of the recent Congressional pugnaciousness with the main card being Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Oklahoma) in shirtsleeves, challenging International Brotherhood of Teamsters President Sean O’Brien, head of a union that usually votes Democratic, after O’Brien wrote some tweets about Mullin. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont), chair of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, served as referee.
The undercard featured Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tennessee), one of eight Republicans who voted to oust Kevin McCartrhy (R-California) as speaker of the House of Representatives, and McCarthy, who allegedly elbowed him in the back in the kidneys. (I’m impressed that Burchett knows where the kidneys actually are in the body.)
Meanwhile, House Oversight and Accountability Chair James Comer (R-Kentucky), who’s been investigating the finances of President Joe Biden and his family, said committee member Jared Moscowitz (D-Florida) looked like a Smurf afte he accused Comer of being his brother’s financial keeper.
Over in Italy, things got a lot more physical as Novak Djokovic, who won the trophy for ending the year as the number one-ranked men’s player and will have been number one for 400 weeks as of Nov. 20, broke several rackets in the round-robin event, then looked at them over his shoulder and glared at the camera. In order of ascending violence, Andrey Rublev attacked his own knee after he lost to Carlos Alcaraz. And Alexander Zverev has been allowed by the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP), the men’s governing body, to continue playing, even though two women have accused him of domestic abuse.
All of which raises the continuing question: Are men angrier than women? Anecdotally, teachers will tell you that girls fight even more savagely than boys in the schoolyard, while studies show that anger is a human emotion across genders. But men and women are socialized to express their anger differently, with women — despite the catfights depicted on TV shows — more apt to express themselves verbally and men physically.
It may be that men have had more opportunity to express themselves violently, because they have had more power. They are the ones who traditionally have governed. They have been the ones with more to lose, including loss of face. They are the ones who have started and escalated wars. (It’s interesting that the first word in Homer’s “The Iliad,” perhaps the ultimate war story, is”rage.”)
Clearly, these men could use some anger management training. But my guess is that if tennis players faced real suspensions and the congressmen were primaried by women with real financial backing who linked the lack of decorum to the Trumpian digital age, we’d be seeing a lot more civility on the courts and in the committee rooms.