The War of the Sexes

I offer one-hour video calls for coaching and consulting. Most people come to me for a talk about psychological abuse issues.

Lately, a noticeable number of straight men are booking time with me, a gay man, because they can't be honest with either women or their other male friends (including gay friends, who are often the most hostile). All of them are captured by feminism on steroids.

Some of the things they're telling me, paraphrased:

-I think I'm actually becoming a sexist. I don't want to talk to women anymore because they provoke and blame me for it.

-Whenever I object to [unfair/immature behavior] from a woman, I get a lecture about being a misogynist.

-The women I work with literally act like mean 14 year old girls.

-I won't be in an office alone with female colleagues anymore. I've seen the Title IX accusations they've leveled against other men who likely didn't do anything to them.

Many men are very angry with many women. I know that for many, the first thought is, "Oh, that Josh. He's an overly emotional misogynist."

It's not just me; you may have no idea how fed up men are getting.

And it’s not “just feminists” I’m talking about. It’s a lot of women who don’t consciously think of themselves as feminists, but who behave in the same way.

A comparison may help clarify this. For a long time, men got used to a world where they could slap their secretary’s ass, or make remarks about the pretty girl in the copy room so often she felt like every trip down the hallway was running a gauntlet of leering wolves.

That was a world in which piggish male behavior was so normalized that when a woman rightly objected to being treated that way, many men were genuinely flabbergasted to be told they were behaving badly.

As the fish is unaware of the water it breathes, these men were unaware of the atmosphere of piggishness they created and lived in. Some got genuinely angry at being called on the carpet, and genuinely felt they were being treated unfairly.

This is now the case in reverse with women. Not just feminists. Many women at large. Women have become used to a society (at least since the 1960s), where women can play the “sexism” card any old time. They have become used to being treated as “just as capable at every single thing in every single way as a man,” while at the same time being able to claim that they’re “mistreated” when they are held to the same standard of behavior and decorum and basic not-being-a-bitch behavior that men are held to.

It’s not that “women are awful.” They’re not. It’s not that “all women are overly emotional and manipulative.” They are not.

It is that modern women have been getting a very comfortable ride in many ways that they are not entitled to. Men have become terrified of simply saying, “no,” to women when they demand or push for something unreasonable.

And why shouldn’t we be? We’re told by women that we’re “abusive” when we won’t respond to manipulation. When we do put our foots in our mouths and say something we shouldn’t, we don’t get rapped on the knuckles for sexism anymore. Like the price of eggs, sexism has been inflated into “misogyny.”You didn’t hear “misogyny” constantly 15 years ago. You see the word every day today.

James Damore got fired from Google for making the most uncontroversial, factual observations about why sexed psychology affects workplace dynamics. The screaming harridans got their pound of flesh, and nearly everyone—women and men alike—crowed about it. It was disgusting.

We men are in a terrible bind. We are the more violent sex, and when we get out of control, we are a danger to women in a way that women can never be a danger to us.

Many women have cynically used this to create a stage atmosphere in which men being firm and even verbally aggressive about setting boundaries (frankly, telling whining nagging women to cut the crap) is seen by society as on a par with literal wife beating.

It’s manipulation and self-dealing. Men are humiliated daily in TV commercials, shows, public conversations. We’re either stupid, oafish, or in need of a mommy-wife to remind us how to turn on a washing machine (because we’re so fucking dumb), and no one bats an eye at any of this.

Just as chauvinistic handsy men got a free ride for too long. entitled women have gotten social princess treatment for too long.

We need balance again. And I’m afraid that the only way to achieve that is for men to draw the line and stop taking so much social abuse from women.

Initially, that often makes even sensible, sane, decent, kind women angry. Because of our current mores, they experience normal pushback as unfair and a kind of woman-hating brutality.

Women are just going to have to get used to it.

I’ve always been kind of a canary in the coal mine. A combination of impulsivity and having a big mouth means that I often say things that sound “extreme” to people years before my views become acceptable to say in public.

But they often do become acceptable. You’re going to hear more men talk like this.

Trans

There’s something else that needs to be dealt with: the genuine dangers to women and girls posed by trans. It is true that women and girls are in physical and psychological danger from so called “trans women.” It is true that they have lost the right to female only bathrooms, to female only locker rooms. Hell, we have actual men calling themselves women who are called women by the Olympics and allowed to beat women in the boxing ring.

It’s disgusting. It’s abusive. It’s sick.

But the feminists and women rightfully protesting this are, understandably, seeing through the equivalent of horse blinders. The view is narrow. So exercised are they about this—and they have every moral right to be—that they extrapolate from that and see all men as men as being their enemies.

They see the disadvantage they’re at with the trans issue, and then act as if they are similarly disadvantaged and abused at every level of society.

This is not true. More, it is women, not men, who have socially, legally, and culturally enforced “trans” on all of us. Without millions of teary-eyed “compassionate” women scolding the hell of out normal people and cuddling up to dangerous narcissistic men in dresses, this never would have gotten this far.

Yet, still, we men are told this is our fault. All men as a sex class.

And further, these same women who treat us like yesterday’s boiled shit then demand that we “step up and be a real man and help them.”

Is it any wonder, really, that the answer is sometimes, “piss off”?

For most of my life I had mostly female friends. I have had deep, rewarding relationships with women as a gay man. But looking back on many past friendships, I recognize that both me and my woman friend, without knowing that we were doing it, were using each other to get needs met in an unhealthy way. I tried everything I could to pull maternal love and sympathy from female friends, many of whom were glad to give it because it filled a need in them. But I asked for too much of the wrong things from people I should not have asked this from.

For their part, some of these female friends, again without knowing it, really only liked me because I was a nancy-boy who agreed with all of their feminist ideas. When I diverged from being a pocket-pansy I suddenly became, to them, “abusive,” and “just like any other man.”

We ended up hurting each other and walking away with anger, resentment, and mistrust.

As a young boy, I watched my stepfather beat my mother like a ragdoll (and me too). I stood in the living room at midnight in Fullerton, California, at 9 years old, and watched my stepfather strangle my mother pinned down on the couch. He tried to kill her while her children watched, and he almost succeeded.

My personal sympathy for women living in fear of men is real and learned from real life at the coal face. I’ve been raped; I can understand what it does to a person. It is not impossible for men and women to empathize with each other about very serious, disturbing things.

But now that I’m deeply in middle age, I’ve learned some things I did not understand when I was younger. Here is one. While there is no excuse and no absolution for the demonic behavior of my stepfather, the fact is that my mother, like many borderline personality women, gleefully provoked a lot of it.

She delighted in emasculating him, especially if her mother or his mother were present to see it. I can see the look on her face and hear the contemptuous sarcasm in her voice to this day.

Similarly, though less extremely, I notice a number of women actively delighting in provoking men unfairly, and then socially punishing them disproportionately when they react as anyone would.

I don’t like any of this. It’s disheartening that I feel compelled to write this, but I do, because it does need to be talked about.

What now?