"The American ax fetish is everywhere — in designer ax brands, the rise of ax-throwing bars and the internet’s first ax emoji..."

"If you just want to hold one, try a social club like the one in Brooklyn that hosts urban wood-chopping workshops for 'desk job warriors' who crave timber skills and connection to the outdoors.... Axes have even begun to crop up as baby shower gifts, which explains the ax-themed birth announcements and baby milestone posts on Instagram (hatchet for scale).... 'I think owning an ax gives some of these people the idea, at least, that they’re connecting to their heritage, and to places outside of where they feel they may be trapped,' [said Craig Roost, of Council Tool Co.]... 'We call it ax therapy,' [said Michael Applegate, an axe thrower]. 'Get away from the 9-to-5, hit the pause button, throw some steel into some wood and feel a little bit better.' Some participate because it makes them feel powerful, confident, joyful. Others because it brings them calm. (Recent ax throwing literature ties the sport to female rage; see also, lumbersexuality.)"

From "Our Lives in the Time of Extremely Fancy Axes/What does the artisanal ax craze say about what we’re chopping?" (NYT).

There's a link on "female rage," and it goes to: "An Axe for the Frozen Sea/Learning to Throw Axes in 2018" by Megan Stielstra is (from September 2018 in the Believer Logger). Excerpt:

Rage is nothing new. But the policies and rhetoric of our current administration have kicked it screaming into the center of things. There are moments from this time that I will never un-see: children in cages under foil blankets.... A child-sized bulletproof backpack in polka dot pink, sold for a hundred and fourteen dollars on Amazon..... A photo of Merrick Garland.... Christine Blasey Ford saying that she remembers the stairwell, the bedroom, and “the uproarious laughter.”...

If anger is the siren, rage is the tornado.... Ferocious. Destructive. Medieval Latin rabia, from Latin rabies or “anger-fury,” akin to Sanskrit rabhas or “violence.”...

I’m pulling out clumps of my own hair. I’m gnawing the insides of my cheeks.... Lately I’ve noticed that my butt hurts; a physician-friend explained that we hold tension in our pelvic muscles and everybody’s walking around with their asses clenched. I’m always hot, my internal thermostat cranked....

I want to split open, my guts on the table. I want to see this rage.... I have recently started therapy.... And axe-throwing.

There's a link on "lumbersexuality," and it goes to: "Lumbersexuality, a Sport and a Pastime/Why do people — mostly men — want to throw axes and dress like lumberjacks?" by Jonny Diamond (from last June in Longreads). Excerpt:

Beards and bears and woodsy scruff have now fully entered the mainstream as the contemporary lumbersexual reappropriates the same tropes of classic American masculinity so long adopted and amplified in LGBTQ spaces. But even the original tropes themselves — of paternal strength and rugged stoicism — are products of male fragility....

So let the axe be many things — tool, work of art, diversion — but let it also be a way back into the forest. Let this very old machine remind us of our limits and show us not what is ours to use, but ours to preserve.