Rage Rooms

Published in Dublin’s The Martello Journal in June 2025

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Paying to smash up crockery is a new trend. It’s spread from the stressed-out worker bees in Japan to the hen-do parties, to teenage girls and grandmas in small places like Norwich. Not only is it a fun group activity for a Saturday out in town, but it is therapeutic. It helps people process their breakups, their grief, and all that pent-up anger. Most of the punters, ready to swing a sledgehammer and let out a scream, are women. 

There is little evidence of a biological difference in men's and women’s capacity for anger. If I hear someone grunt ‘testosterone’ to try and win at this point rather than listen to what else I have to say here, I’ll kick them in the nuts. 

Here’s another biology lesson. There are secret chambers within women. Some of them are due to the fact that science hasn’t been interested in setting sail into the female anatomy and ‘discovering’ our parts. Instead of a money-fueled mission to Venus, they poke around with a penis in a cave with the lights turned off, while fantasising about Mars. 

When we, women, go within ourselves, there are a lot of echoey sounds, as loneliness passes through the corridor of bolted shut chambers like a cold draft. The clitoris chamber is where we catch the loneliness in an embrace and lie down with it. To touch it, and transform. Curl into a foetal position, hold ourselves, and feel warm. That’s the nice end of things. There’s a darker, danker part of the corridor, however, where the loneliness is scared to tread because of the rumours of the bad things that happen to it there. The bolted door full of cracks and a gap at the bottom sucks it in with a whirling force – not sugar and light spun into pink candy floss, not a vacuum cleaner working nights. No! Loneliness gets whipped up into a hurricane of rage, just like in men. 

A lot of this loneliness-fuelled rage comes from frustrations with having so many of these chambers locked by men. Fear to walk freely through the streets, to travel wherever we want alone, to wear what we want. To be me, free of how you see me. Not the cockblock, nor the wife material. Not the one who is naturally better at cleaning your piss from the toilet seat. Naturally better at cooking for your ungrateful parents who don’t know any better, who expect nothing less from me, and nothing more from you. When I’m operating in this role, outside forces move my arms to smooth down my skirt, stiff like a plastic doll. I feel so lonely. In your world, you keep pruning me and pruning me. Cut back to a twig, who knows what vitality is still stuck underground, and so I am lonely, because I miss myself.

Listen to the rest of the essay on my Substack.