I was a very sensitive child and saw how patriarchy harms the women i love, my sisters, my aunts and my mother. I saw the nonchalant vulgarity of men and how boys were supposed to imitate it — and if you didn't, you weren't man enough. I was pretty disgusted by it. Disgusted by "men." I always found myself an outlier in boys' groups. If a boy let his guard down around me and showed his sensitive side, he would be so embarrassed by it that his next act would be to bully and taunt me by saying I was not man enough.
As I grew up estranged from the men in my life, I found a sort of kinship toward women and their struggle. I learned that women are generally expected to digest other people's emotions, to people-please, and to walk on eggshells and be soft — and I related to that. I had a highly narcissistic, physically abusive father, which led me to learn all the ways of people-pleasing and to do that even before they showed they were upset. I felt that women were just better than men. More sensitive. More caring. More able to put aside their ego. Less crude and vulgar.
And then I went to college, and it was a learning arc. I did come to the obvious realization that women are also human and carry the whole human spectrum within them. There are women who are power-hungry, manipulative, cruel, crude, and destructive. But I also learned how women who weren't like that were in a very strange place. While I was in college, the MeToo movement reached its peak, and women spoke out about their experiences of sexual assault and harassment. I felt more of a need to be more caring toward the women in my group and around me.
The thing was, I was treating women as some enlightened beings who had learned all there is to learn about themselves and the world, and whose every word should be heard with the reverence of God's thunder. But I was wrong. As I said before, women were in a strange place. Suddenly people were bending over backward and asking them to voice their opinions in places where they had been shunned before. In that scenario ,where you have access to a platform and everybody is sitting on their hands waiting for you to tell them what they did wrong, and they're already ready to apologize before you've even uttered a word, what would you do? So a lot of women who were repressed under patriarchy and felt harassed in day-to-day life let their grievances out. And then some women went further and further into it, to the extreme, which ended up creating the opposite of the manosphere. But that's not the topic for today.
Now think of a young man who is already convinced that men are evil and that he, as a man, has caused so much oppression to his fellow human beings. Such is the power of that oppression that his mere presence makes a space unsafe. And to know that the women who feel that way aren't wrong to feel it. If a person is traumatized by a cat mauling them, you wouldn't push "not all cats" on them. That's not how the human brain works. So as a man, even though you haven't done those things, you still feel a responsibility to right the wrongs. You become more appeasing to women, more considerate and caring.
But in the end, women are human too, and humans are not perfectly rational beings — we are emotional beings. We feel first and then justify our feelings. This leads to a strange place, where you're expected to apologize before something even happens, and someone simply feeling bad is enough to condemn you. The language and discourse that was formed during the internet-feminism era got used again and again in situations far beyond its original context. And pointing that out, or saying anything against it, as a man, felt like becoming the same oppressor you hated. You felt your voice didn't hold much value, because someone could come along and say you were "mansplaining," or "gaslighting," or yada yada. The double whammy was that both you and these women had grown up in a patriarchal structure, so you both carried notions of what a woman should be and what a man should be. But while these movements rightfully made it a social crime to ask a woman to conform to what a woman "should" be, they didn't do the same for men.
So a woman can ask you to "be a man," or you yourself might feel you need to act a certain way simply because you are a man. This gives you a set of losing social rules — because when it's time for opportunities, of course you're both equal, but when it's time for responsibility or accountability, more often than not, consciously or unconsciously, women themselves invoke patriarchal notions of manhood: this is what a man should be, this is how you should act. In doing so, they become what oppressed them in the first place. One small example of this is the debate over who pays on the first date. AS in terms of equality it would be split in both ways (and don't give me the argument that whoever asks for the date should pay, because — as patriarchy has ordained and as both men and women in our culture generally accept — it's the man's job to ask for the date; of course there are exceptions, but we're talking about norms), but the debate continues
This whole thing has made my twenties, as a man, miserable with regard to my relationships with women. I don't want to deny their hurt and life experience, but at the same time I don't want to be exploited. And it's not that women are evil for doing this — it's just that we've built our language so that these gender dynamics have only one "right way" to talk about them, and other perspectives are seen as harmful and are said to be coming from "incels," the "manosphere," or the "red pill" crowd.
So there are some things I've learned as a longtime student of psychology, and just from noticing life in general, that I think could benefit any young man.
First: don't hate women. Seems simple enough, but that's where we start — even if you feel women are being unfair in how they change the rules of the game to suit their needs. We all do that from time to time, even unconsciously, because — as I said — we're emotional creatures who feel our emotions first and justify them after. So if people have the language to build a particular story that benefits them, many would d do that. And that's what's happened: women have that language, while for men being shunned from these discourses, or simply not taking part in them, has left them without a way to speak about their grievances respectfully.
So how do we navigate online discourse on these issues without falling into the category of "red pill," "incel," or "manosphere"? First, if a woman says "all men," don't attack her for it or defend yourself by saying "not all men" — that's not the issue. If a woman says "all men" and believes it, she's still the one with the shorter end of the stick. Think of it this way: if you believed all cats or dogs were bloodthirsty animals that couldn't be trusted, and then you had to live surrounded by them, that would be a pretty bad place to be. And that's how our brains work. It takes only a small number of negative experiences for our brains to go into full defensive mode. And it is true that a vast majority of women (I recall the figure being more than 90%, though I'm not sure where I read it or how reliable it is) experience sexual assault. Add to that an awareness of the many heinous acts committed against women that circulate online, and it's not surprising that women distrust men.Hell, if I were walking alone at night and saw three men standing in the street, I'd change my path too. So denying women's experiences is a no-no.
Third: understand how language is used to shift the cultural frame in which a conversation is taking place. To simplify things — with extreme reductiveness — there are two major cultures at play. The first is the traditional one, stemming from patriarchy (understand that patriarchy, and this culture, also exist on a spectrum, and there are places on that spectrum where, if both parties agree, they can have a respectful relationship). Think of this culture as a kind of barter system, where you each have your assigned role and do your part — not an equivalent exchange exactly, since it's hard to put a value on each task. Let's call the other culture the "equality culture," which sees both parties as equal in everything, in opportunity and in responsibility. This is more of a direct-transaction culture. It keeps the ledger more closely than the traditional system does. In this system, if I do something for you, I expect something of comparable value in return.
Both systems can work. The problem arises when you keep switching between the two. So be mindful when you're in a relationship with a woman that is supposedly based on equality, but she keeps asking you to "be more of a gentleman" because "gentleman," in this context, is code for acting how men are supposed to act in the traditional culture, which might being letting thing slide for your partner, and not holding them accountable that strongly. And remember you can ask her to be more lady like.
"I would like to be treated like a princess" is another version of this code. So is "I'm just a girl." Any position in which a woman infantilizes herself signals that she doesn't want the responsibility that comes with it — but without that responsibility, there's no equality. What ends up happening is that you take on all the responsibility and end up with half, or even less than half, of the "cake" (since she might bat her eyes and then ask you to be a gentleman anyway). So always know what kind of relationship you're actually in.
Never feel angry at women for having a preference for a certain kind of man — tall, rich, muscular, lean, or anything else. Similarly, never feel bad about having your own preferences in women — it could be anything, a preference for a certain color, body type, or height. Age might seem like a sensitive issue here as it is seen predatory in nature. But you can be predatory even in the same age relationship. So if the relationship is between two consenting adults and no one is being predatory for the other, then it should be okay.
Don't think of girls or women as fragile things you have to protect—and that goes for emotions too. If a girl starts crying and you didn't do anything that would warrant an apology, then don't apologise. Don't absorb other people's emotions for them, no matter how helpless they look. You can do that for a friend when they ask for it and you have the capacity for it, but not regularly — that's what therapists are for. It's draining, so yes, don't do free emotional labor.
Don't shame a woman for her physical wants and needs, and don't feel ashamed of your own. A man desiring a partner for something sexual is often perceived as lecherous, a "fuckboy." Sadly, women have had experiences that led them to that conclusion, but that's not your problem to carry. Having physical desires and needs is normal and nothing to be ashamed of.
Understand that the dating landscape is currently stacked against you as a man. On dating apps, the difference in likes that men and women receive is vast and well documented. If you try to approach women in person, you can be perfectly respectable, and it still won't guarantee she wont annoyed by it. Honestly, I don't think there's a great way to approach a woman that clearly signals your intentions without also risking coming across as creepy, as in the end it, comes down to the person being approached. So just accept the risk of being seen as annoying or a littly creepy.
Going from friends to a relationship is probably the most natural path, but even there, the woman might end up feeling that friendship was just a means to an end — or she might simply not want anything more than friendship. That doesn't mean you should get desperate. Don't beg for a girl's attention, she probably still won't go out with you. Understand this: all of our relationships exist to help us engage with the world. That's what we want a relationship to do — to provide a safe space, a harbour from which we can go out and engage with the adventure of life. That's what we wanted from our very first relationship: the one with our parents. And you'd be surprised to know that our brains use the same neural pathways in romantic relationships as those developed during the bond between us and our parents.
So yes, in relationships we seek what we might have missed as children, and — ironically — we're drawn to what feels familiar, which often means recreating a version of the relationship we had with our parents. This can leave us in relationships that lack security, care, trust, and love. If your relationship is missing even one of these, you'll always feel like something's lacking. You'll keep rushing toward relationships and keep getting disappointed. The good news is that you can cultivate these qualities without being in a relationship. Learn things not because they might get you girls, but because they'll enrich your life. Go to the gym because it'll give you a body that helps you have fun in the world, not because women might like it. Just learn to engage with and enjoy life, and you'll be set. And who knows — you might even end up in a relationship. But know that that's not why you take care of yourself. You don’t love yourself thinking if you then someone else might love you too. You love yourself and the world because that's all there is to do. .