When the women in your family go nuts

Obligatory “not all” caveats: In this piece I’m going to be talking about women specifically. Yes. I am saying that I think this problem is happening more with women than with men. Yes. I also recognize that this problem also happens in men. Yes. I know that you, personally, as a reader, may have this problem with your father. My writing this piece does not invalidate that.

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From friends, consulting/counseling clients, and from reading online, I’m hearing from a number of men whose female family members, mainly but not exclusively their mothers, have become impossible to bear.

Yes, it’s about woke/Trump/the election. Or about abortion, or LGBTQ, or about feeding “migrants,” or about any of the other bugbears that obsess today’s leftists.

These men I hear from, and whose stories I’ve read, are gay and straight. Young to middle-aged. Married and single. Generally they’re centrists to conservative, but some are more on the left.

The behavior they are reporting is not only rationally unhinged, but it is personally rude, provocative, and often outright galling. And the common denominator is a mother (or other female family member) exploding in rage, sarcasm, or manipulative tears toward men in their family who are not woke. Men who (often) voted for Trump. Or merely men who don’t hate Trump even if they did not vote for him.

An old colleague from my newspapering days decades ago who is now a middle-aged dad dropped this note to me this morning:

“You should start following Bluesky madness. My Mom has sequestered herself into that echo chamber madness and I am very concerned for what that is going to do to her 70 year old #resist mental health. She is online all the time in a way we were warned about our kids.

I am so proud my 14 yr old daughter has rejected that to just be on Pinterest and be in real life but I am really worried about my Mom. There is going to be an insane echo chamber there that is going to make the brain worms burrow deep. From a show perspective it will be both funny and horrifying and likely illustrative of your hypothesis around Cluster B.

I kind of want to know how nuts it is getting there but don't want to spend anytime there so you would be doing a public service to report on how nuts they are getting there. Just a thought from a random fan! Keep doing your thing brother.”

This note is typical of the kind of story I’m hearing.

Another friend has been telling me about how his elderly mother spends all day every day with CNN/MSNBC on the TV. She refuses to read or watch any other sources. Yes, I mean that she tells her son that she will not read or listen to any contradictory source he provides. Even when he tells her that what the TV is saying is factually untrue, that the TV is lying to her, that he’s not criticizing her but only trying to alert her that her TV friends are treating her badly, she will not listen.

She will start screaming, though. This is a woman in whose home I have stayed in the past. She’s the kind of mom everyone loves. Sweet and smart, unbelievably hospitable, and just the mom you want to have Sunday brunch with. I’ve never even heard her raise her voice.

But in the car the other day with her son during such an exchange as above, she started yelling “I don’t fucking care!” when my friend tried to point out that a media accusation against Trump was demonstrably false, and documented to be false. She then affirmed that she approved of harsh and unbalanced treatment/punishment of people on the political right, and that she would not want to see her side punished for the same behavior.

My friend wondered aloud for the first time if his mother actually has a Cluster B personality disorder. He has described her as becoming “absolutely unhinged.” That’s a word I’m hearing from many men about their mothers, sisters, and sometimes wives.

There is a sexed pattern of behavior I’ve noticed. These women get angrier at men than they ever get at women, even conservative women. They’re so furious that they say actually hateful things to their own sons or husbands, things that these men have never heard before. Some of the behaviors I’ve seen would, if it were my life, result in a rapid divorce or a no-contact withdrawal—it’s that bad.

My working hypothesis is that leftist/liberal women are, for the first time in decades, having to face disobedient men. Until the modern era of politics that has, whether we like it or not, pitted men and women against each other in this particularly sharp way, these women have floated along comfortably in their social position. They’ve gotten used to a world where “joking” denigration about the uselessness of men is seen as normal and certainly not sexist. They’ve gotten used to never being challenged on their political positions in any serious way by the men in their lives.

They’re used to a world that takes every female social complaint seriously on first glance, and rushes to assure the woman that the disagreeable man is a misogynist and definitely deserves to be outed as such.

We see this in female schoolteachers, too. A lot of it. We see allegedly adult professional women crying and moaning to their sob sisters in online forums, talking about how the minor male students in their charge are “oppressing them.” It is clear that these teachers hate boys. They hate them, fear them, and are furious with them when the boys refuse to be gelded.

Here is just one example. This is representative of countless other such posts not included here:

Boys have a boy sense of humor. Those jokes she’s complaining about above? That’s my sense of humor. Has been since I was about 10 or 11. That’s the sense of humor most boys and men have. Join me in the boys’ room for a series of jokes about how Helen Keller lost her virginity and what it sounded like.

This is never going to change. And it does not need to change. There is nothing wrong with this. Joking irreverently and darkly is what boys do. It is not young boys “oppressing” the grown-up women teaching them in class. It is not a rape threat. The boys are not “misogynists.” Good god almighty, I just had to actually write that.

(Additional necessary caveat: I already know there is classroom behavior that’s not acceptable. I am not endorsing boys being able to run roughshod over the classroom. I’m pointing out the deeper problem with the teachers blowing this into some personal emotional and political crisis.)

Readers and viewers of my show have heard me say before that men need to tell women “no” more. It has to become normal, once again like it used to be, for men to be able to say “no” to female excess. It has to be normal again to say “no” to female demands to conform to longhouse rules.

Women have given themselves the power to nag, dictate, demand, and shame men into their preferred behavior for a long time. They’re going to need to learn the concept “reciprocation.” They’re going to hear “no” more often, and it’s going to get louder and angrier until women start behaving fairly again.

This goes over poorly with some women. They are so used to female social deference, and so used to allowing infinite leeway to women with out of control emotions, that they hear the sentence, “men need to tell women no” as exactly the same as “men need to strip their women naked, put them in the kitchen, and rape them pregnant.”

This needs to stop; it’s hysterical.

Speaking with several middle-aged men with elderly mothers, another common theme has emerged. These men often say, “When my father was alive, my mother was different. Much more stable. He seemed to keep her biggest emotions in check. Since he died, my [leftist/liberal] mother has gotten increasingly unstable.”

I believe this. Men and women are complementary; their natural average psychological propensities serve to temper the other. Women in the home temper a man’s excesses, sexual/violent and otherwise. Mom is there to remind Dad that tough love is not the answer to every childhood problem, and that listening, empathizing, and sometimes cuddling, is a necessary part of the recipe. Home, both physical and psychological, matters.

Dad serves to temper mom’s emotional excess. He’s the one who sometimes needs to step in and remind her to leave Timmy alone and let him get over his skinned knee without excessive fuss. He’s a firewall that stops mom’s natural and normal maternal instincts from cossetting the children so tightly they never learn to walk two blocks in the city on their own.

We have been out of balance in the home, and in society, for a very long time. If we can fix this, it will take a very long time.

I think we must. Men, I’m asking you again to pluck up your courage (we’ve all gotten really wimpy) and start saying “no” to this kind of excess in your wives or girlfriends or family members. No, it won’t make you popular in the short term. Yes, it may mean in some cases that you have to withdraw from a relationship or put more distance there for a time. Nope, I can’t give you a formula to do this that will guarantee you a smooth ride and cooperation. That’s not how it works.

To the women who also see this problem, you’re very appreciated. Many of you are readers here. Thank you for acknowledging this problem out loud-it matters to men (at least it matters to me) to hear it from women, and to know that sensible women are willing to say it out loud where other women can hear it. I know it does not make you popular, either.

My request to you, reader: If you’re a man who has experienced this, please write a little about it in the comments. I will likely use some of those anecdotes on a future episode of Disaffected.