#5. We Were Told That Society Owed Us a Hot Girl
From birth we’re taught that we’re owed a beautiful girl. We all think of ourselves as the hero of our own story, and we all (whether we admit it or not) think we’re heroes for just getting through our day. So it’s very frustrating, and I mean frustrating to the point of violence, when we don’t get what we’re owed. A contract has been broken. These women, by exercising their own choices, are denying it to us. It’s why every Nice Guy is shocked to find that buying gifts for a girl and doing her favors won’t win him sex. It’s why we go to “slut” and “whore” as our default insults — we’re not mad that women enjoy sex. We’re mad that women are distributing to other people the sex that they owed us.Yes, the women in these stories are being portrayed as wonderful and beautiful and perfect. But remember, there are two ways to dehumanize someone: by dismissing them, and by idolizing them.
#4. We’re Trained from Birth to See You as Decoration
With men, there are some scenarios where it stops mattering how he looks. With women, it always matters.
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Her role in society or level of accomplishment doesn’t matter. Even if she’s a damned candidate for the Supreme Court, the female always has a dual role: to function as a person, and to act as decor.
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She owes it to us to be pretty. That’s the social contract as we’ve understood it from the time we were toddlers.
And it’s a no-win situation. We hate you if you’re ugly; if you’re pretty, then …
#3. We Think You’re Conspiring With Our Boners to Ruin Us
Science doesn’t seem to totally understand why the “base urges” part of the brain reacts differently in men. Maybe it’s just a matter of having 10 times as much testosterone in their system, or maybe society has trained us to be like this, or maybe we’re all spoiled children. My theory is that evolution needs males who will stay horny even in times of crisis or distress, and thus cuts off the brain’s ability to tamp down those urges. Whatever — nailing down the cause isn’t the point. The point is that a man can be giving the eulogy at his own grandmother’s funeral, and if there is a girl in the front row showing cleavage, he will be imagining himself pressing those boobs in his face, with his own dead grandmother not five feet away.
When that happens, when we get that boner at the funeral, we get mad at the girl showing the cleavage. Because we, ourselves, our own rational personality that knows right from wrong and appropriate from inappropriate, knows this is a bad place to get a boner. So it comes off like cleavage girl is conspiring with our penis to screw us over.
Is that a crazy thing to think? Yep! That’s why it’s so frustrating, especially if you don’t have a whole lot of emotional maturity, and grew up with male role models who had even less.
No, this doesn’t excuse anything. Obviously, “She was asking for it!” is still a bullshit rape defense.
#2. We Feel Like Manhood Was Stolen from Us at Some Point
See, every single male can remember the first time, when he was 5 or 6 years old, he showed his penis to a stranger and everybody started freaking the hell out. He can remember the first time he got in trouble for hitting somebody, for peeing in public, for trying to jump off some high object or set something on fire. All of the core male urges, all the suggestions whispered to us by Darth Penis, all of it gets us in trouble.
And, when we get nostalgic for the past, we always dress it up in some ridiculous fantasy like 300, where everybody is shirtless and screaming and hacking things with swords. We are fed this idea that at one time, this is how the world was — all of these impulses that have been getting us grounded and sent to detention from kindergarten on used to be not only allowed, but celebrated.
And then at some point, women took it all away.
A once-great world of heroes and strength and warriors and cigars and crude jokes has been replaced by this world of grumpy female supervisors looming over our cubicle to hand us a memo about sending off-color jokes via email. Yes, that entire narrative is a grossly skewed and self-serving version of how society actually evolved. It doesn’t matter.
The result is a combination of frustration and humiliation and powerlessness that makes us want to get it back in the only way we know how: with petty, immature acts of meanness.
#1. We Feel Powerless
So where you see a world in which males dominate the boards of the Fortune 500, and own Congress, and sit at the head of all but a handful of the world’s nations, men see themselves as utterly helpless. Because all of those powerful people only became powerful because they heard that women like power.
This is really the heart of it, right here. This is why no amount of male domination will ever be enough, why no level of control or privilege or female submission will ever satisfy us. We can put you under a burqa, we can force you out of the workplace — it won’t matter. You’re still all we think about, and that gives you power over us. And we resent you for it.
All of the most bitter disputes work like this, by the way: Both sides think they’re the powerless party. It’s why tipping servers is such a bitter topic among some people — the server feels like the customer has all of the power (because their entire income comes from tips), and the customer feels like the server has all the power (because they can deny them food and drink and ruin their one night out). It’s why the richest people in the world can talk like they’re besieged victims, and mean it. It’s why the male leaders of the most powerful and richest church in the world can talk like they’re being made martyrs due to women asking for birth control. And mean it.
Quite a bit of this article is problematic, even some of the portions I have quoted, but much of the article really nails it. Read it in full
here
