The wounds in the war of the sexes

men get hurt too

What I’m about to write reflects a lot of my personal thoughts and emotional reactions, but those are shared by a number of men who don’t say them out loud. Often, they’ve never said them to anyone because they’re rightly afraid of being rejected by friends, male and female, and rejected by society (can’t get hired, gets reputation for being a “toxic man”).

How do I know this? Because they tell me in private messages. In emails. In consulting sessions with me.

Yesterday I released an audio episode of Disaffected that featured a conversation with psychiatrist Dr. Mark McDonald. We talk mainly about the rise in borderline personality abusive behavior in women in society. Yes, we do say that women’s behavior has become abusive and extreme in many ways that are socially praised and called good self-actualization.

Mark is a practicing family psychiatrist who has seen thousands of patients and their families. He’s well familiar with human psychological frailty.

I am a man who was raised by a disturbed and abusive mother with borderline and narcissistic personality disorders. In my adult life, I recreated this relationship often by my choice of friends and social circle. I’m also a former “male feminist,” leftist, Democrat, “ally to women.”

Agree with us or not, we aren’t ignorant men with limited experience who act in the world based on some innate misogyny.

While these have been a minority, the negative responses the episode got from some women-including a truly nasty email to me including the usual implication that I have a personality disorder—is representative of bad female behavior that has become socially acceptable.

There is an astonishing asymmetry between how women and men, respectively, are allowed to express displeasure with the other sex. Women in the West, for decades, have been allowed to call all men pigs and rapists who are born innately violent. They’ve been allowed to blame every setback in their jobs, their marriages, their income, their self-esteem, on men. Men as a sex class.

It’s been decades since a father character on a sitcom was allowed to be anything more dignified than a bumbling fool, an adult toddler who’d burn the house down if it weren’t for his long-suffering wife. “Happy wife, happy life” is considered a “cute” and heartwarming saying, not the whistling-past-the-graveyard sideways acknowledgement of a tempest waiting to boil over that it truly is. Men say this with a rictus grin, not a genuine smile.

Now, in order to pre-defend myself, I have to do the following acknowledgements. But they won’t work:

-Yes, men are the more physically violent sex
-Yes, men are nearly all the rapists
-Yes, men can hurt or kill women much more easily than in the reverse

This is all true, but it’s been turned into this:

“Therefore, women cannot be criticized for anything. Women are allowed to use their sex’s weapon-manipulation, shame, moral punishment, expulsion from groups or society, reputation destruction-to any degree they want and it will never be as bad. In fact, it’s not bad at all. And if you say it’s bad, that means you’re a MISOGYNIST.”

There’s no reciprocity. Women are not held to account as full adults in our society the way men are. It’s the goddamned truth. And men like me are sick to death of it. Correctly and proportionately.

Women’s physically weaker nature has been socially laundered into a get out of jail free card for female-style abuse that’s off the charts.

I remember when I first understood clearly and completely this double standard. About six years ago, as my mind was changing about politics and culture, the first Great Sorting and Expulsion in my friendship circle began. In those days, nearly all my friends were women, as had been the case all my life. Compare to today, when I have one true female friend I trust, and all the rest of my friends are men. There’s a reason for that.

A woman I considered a close friend delivered to me a “concerned” discourse on my budding misogyny. The phrase that sticks in my mind: “I’m really concerned about your anger at women.” It stopped me cold. “Anger at women” is coded as a desperate emergency. It means the man is about to go rape and murder a woman or seriously abuse her.

I folded. I groveled, I said I was a bad boy, I was sorry for scaring her, I’d go inside myself to examine my toxicity. That is, I did a “fawning” response just the way I’d done with my abusive mother.

As you see, this is a sharp memory for me that sticks. I see it now for what it really is:

No matter how justified a man’s anger at a woman, or at women’s behavior in general, no matter how badly he’s been hurt by a woman, merely saying “ouch” is itself an act of abuse against women.

Is that exaggerated? In some cases, yes. But in others, no. It’s closer to the truth than it is to hyperbole. And if you find it hyperbolic, try to see it as a necessary reductio ad absurdum that delineates a real dynamic even if you think it’s over-dramatized.

The typical response from resentful/feminist-inclined women to the kind of critique featured on my recent episode goes like this. These are paraphrases to illustrate general points, but they are accurate paraphrases:

-”Being that angry at women isn’t really a good look. Are you sure you’re not worried what people will think?”

-”Men are the violent sex responsible for wars and murders. Maybe you should look at that before criticizing women.”

-”Maybe it’s that men as a sex class are all Cluster B.”

-”Are you sure it’s not you who has a personality disorder?”

-”I’ve listened to every one of your shows and have agreed with so much of what you say. But this was shocking misogyny and now I see you’ve really been a misogynist all along.”

These are all indirect, manipulative forms of “shut up, male abuser.” They’re very effective. They shut a lot of men right up. They’re effective because society backs the woman making these accusations.

And here’s the red meat for those waiting for a hook to dismiss my point and call it all a personal psychological problem (see how generous I am?): Yes, these are all the kinds of things my abusive mother said and did to me. That’s why I notice them in broader society. Yes, I know. Feminist women see that as proof that “I hate my mother and project that onto all women.” Notice how, unlike when women cite abuse from a father, the fact that a mother abused a boy isn’t even acknowledged. He has no reason to hate her. He just does because he’s a man. A girl though? Well of course she hates her abusive father. (Note-I don’t even hate my mother anymore. I did for a time, but hate burns out. It’s closer to indifference and low-key sadness today).

What they won’t concede is that I have correctly identified female-typical abusive behavior by seeing it at home and correctly and accurately noticing that it has become socially acceptable for women generally.

This dynamic, the way we talk about this, is a tragedy. It demoralizes people; it certainly demoralizes me. It wasn’t always this way, and it doesn’t have to be this way today. But I’m afraid that it’s going to be messy, and shouty, and ugly for a while before we achieve balance again.

Men are going to be angry with women and there’s nothing you can do to stop it. The more you try to stop legitimate anger, the angrier we’re going to get.

I know that most of the women who react this way (and to be fair, they’re not a majority of women, but they’re not “just one percent you can brush off”) were hurt. They have reasons to feel this way. Some of them are valid. Others have been deliberately twisted by social predators into something unreasonable.

But honestly? It chafes to acknowledge that, because these women won’t return the acknowledgment. They won’t accept that boys and men are capable of being deeply wounded by women. It strikes men like me as utterly selfish and callous, and it makes us angry. It makes us want to say, “Ok, then fuck you, and fuck your hurt.”

For men like me, much of the wound starts with the fact that we love women. Gay or straight, romantic or platonic, most men want to love women. We also want to be loved by them. We want to please them. When we discover that the women we want to love and please cannot accept it, and throw it back at us as more proof of what rotten toxic men we are—what can one expect? Yeah, we might begin to get angry. We might even hate.

I don’t know how society is going to solve this. I wish I did. But I do know that at least one person is going to take this essay and hold it up as an example of how men like me are just making it worse. That’s what I meant above: we can’t even say ouch when a woman steps on a metaphorical toe without being told that our expression of pain is another act of misogynistic abuse.

If we put a group of people in a trap, they’re going to fight their way out. When they emerge, they’re going to be very angry indeed.