I'm well aware that the women I get into 'debates' with on social media might not be representative of women in general. I've known plenty of women in real life who do not share some of their more extreme views, and many of them seem to even quite like men. Strange but true.
There are though some basic assumptions that almost all women seem to share - the most pervasive being that we men are all powerful, confident, strong, and generally at ease in what they see as a 'man's world'. Bad things do not really happen to men - or if they do, it's their own silly fault. If something goes wrong in a relationship it's generally assumed to be the man's fault. If the woman does something obviously wrong (violence or infidelity) then the man must have driven her to it. In contrast, women are ever the powerless, blameless victims. This means that, in disagreements between men and women, the men's point of view is worse than worthless - it's an impertinence. A man explaining his perspective on the subject is simply 'mansplaining'. Only the woman's perspective is valid.
The usual explanation for this is that we've heard enough of men telling us what's what and it’s time to listen to the women for a change. The problem with that is that although men wrote all those big books, they're very rarely about ordinary men's every-day lives - what your ordinary man in the street feels, thinks or wants. They're writers, academics, priests and politicians pontificating on the world at large, generally avoiding the subject of what men actually feel on a day-to-day basis. This is the opposite of 'women's literature' which has covered every possible aspect of women's lives - work, relationships, parenting, sex and just generally coping with life. I used to read quite a lot of fiction but tended to avoid men's writing because I just couldn't relate to it. I preferred women's writing because it tackled the ordinary everyday events and feelings they have to deal with. I confess I still don't really know enough about how men think or feel, because they just won't talk about it - even in literature - unless they're some kind of criminal or outsider. An editor told me that novels simply shouldn't be about the kind of experiences I wrote about - insecurities and anxieties and failures and embarrassments. The facade must be maintained - even if we injure ourselves and others maintaining it.
Many women seem to think the same thing - they believe in the man as powerful, confident, strong, and generally at ease in the world, and see men who show their feelings as needy, creepy or weak. It's odd to me that modern feminism seems to have swallowed traditional gender roles so uncritically. There was a time, back in the 80s, when sensitive, feminine men were considered cool, we were all 'new men', ‘in touch with our feminine side’. In the 90s we were 'metrosexual'. Now young men who are not traditionally masculine must identify as gay, queer or trans in order to be acceptable at all. Other (cishet) men, not surprisingly, have to go to the other extreme. There is no in-between anymore. I've never been very masculine myself, but I've never been much interested in how I look, or wanted to have sex with men, so frankly, if I were young now, I don't know where I'd fit in.
The problem here is that women think they do know what it's like to be a man - better than men do in many cases. I've been accused of mansplaining when I'm talking about how the man feels in an interaction between a man and a woman. Apparently only the woman's opinion is relevant. Despite the fact that there are two people involved, only one of them gets a voice. The woman explains how the woman feels and also, how the man feels. When I've disagreed with the woman's assertions about what a man thinks, feels or wants, I've been dismissed - because what would I know? I'm just a man and women know better. I've recounted occasions when my intentions were misunderstood, ignored and derided because they didn't fit in with what women assume men are like and been told that the woman was right and I was wrong. When I've pushed my point of view, women have posted laugh emojis - because obviously I don't really know what's going on inside my own head. That or I'm lying. This is actually a pre-feminist view of men and women - I remember it well as a child - men not understanding what's really going on, being naive and childish and simple-minded, and we don't help ourselves.
Traditional masculinity forbids introspection ('navel-gazing'), showing or talking about our feelings, or going for help, so it's a fact that many men genuinely don't know what they really feel - they just won't go there, but I know for a fact that any man who is not scared to look at his own mind is as capable of understanding what's really going on as anyone. I'm one of those people and can honestly report that woman have very often misinterpreted what I think or feel, though they insist they haven't. They are absolutely sure they know what's going on in my head better than I do. It's very discouraging.
The basis for a lot of their assumptions about men is in that simple characterisation I started with - that men are powerful, confident, strong, and generally at ease in a man's world. In many ways it's the underlying bedrock of feminism, and yet it's just so obviously wrong. Modern progressive politics is riddled, and I would say, corrupted, by the embarrassingly simplistic belief that you can tell who has the power in a relationship simply by knowing their sex. It's a weird sort of biological determinism. Men are powerful and to blame for everything that goes wrong in the world. Women are powerless and innocent. I have come across this idiotic belief even among otherwise intelligent, educated, compassionate people. It's ok as an average - men are on average better off and have more power than women, but as I've explained many times here, that's because the average is skewed by a small minority of very wealthy powerful men at the top. It simply doesn't apply to the vast majority of men, who have about the same amount of wealth or power as women. There is, as I've said many times before, also a minority of men who get what they want by violence, and that gives them a kind of power too, but the vast majority of men are not among them. Most of us view violent men with fear and contempt. Some women have claimed that all men somehow benefit from the fact that most people at the top are also men, but I've seen no evidence for this - there is no patriarchal trickle-down effect that I can detect (though there is an old boy network but the men at the top view the rest of us with suspicion and contempt.) I've also heard it said that "All men benefit from rape" but I can't see how I benefit in any way from half the population not trusting me. How does that help me? I have no idea.
Still this presumption persists. Arguably, the whole feminist edifice stands on the idea that everything men do is about dominating women, and can be interpreted in that light. The fact that I know, as a man, that that is simply not true holds less than no weight. Apparently I'm deluding myself. It is very strange to have other people tell me that my mind does not work the way I know it does - hence the title of this essay.
An obvious example is 'mansplaining'. This assumes that if a man is telling a woman something she already knows or hasn't asked to be told, that he is doing it to dominate her. My own experience is that most 'mansplaining' stems from a genuine wish to be helpful, or someone whittering on about his pet subject. In what sad world are either of those bad things? It might be annoying or boring, but it is not domineering, and of course, women do them too. Of course, sometimes it is genuinely belittling, but I've seen women do this at least as much as men - often as a response to their perception that they are being talked down to.
I also heard a woman complain that a man at work was putting her down by asking her questions about her taste in music, maybe as a sort of test, but what she didn't seem to realise was that men do this sort of thing to each other all the time, and he was treating her as an equal. Certainly this sort of one-upmanship can be tedious - I don't really like it - but the idea that men only do it to woman in order to put them down is ludicrous. Some women tend to assume that men don't respect women as much as men, and cite all sorts of minor transgressions, but never check to see if men do the same to other men or not (or indeed whther women do it to each other - I have it on good authority that they do). All-male and especially working-class environments can be tough, noisy, competitive, and down-right rude, but a woman in that situation can't be complaining of sexism if she's being treated as one of the lads. If she wants to be treated differently she's perpetuating the traditional gender roles that tell us that women are the weaker sex and need to be treated with kid-gloves. Surely that's not what feminism is about? In any case it's certainly not been my experience of women.
'Objectification' is another one - the idea that men typically view women as nothing more than objects to do sex to. I'm not saying that no men are like this, but I've rarely met them. It's certainly true that many men get a lot of pleasure from looking at women - I mean we really do - whether it's in real life - in the street or at a party, or in a picture or video - we absolutely love looking at women. I don't know if there is a female equivalent - women's attraction to men is often taken to be deeper and more meaningful somehow, but again this probably rests on the idea that men's attraction to women is not deep or meaningful - that it's just sex. Once again of course, most men are rubbish at talking about their finer feelings, but that doesn't mean they don't have them. The problem with the theory of objectification is that it asserts that men only look at women in a sexual way, or that if they look at a woman sexually, they can't appreciate anything else about her. Both these things are wrong. Me being sexually attracted to a woman does not prevent me appreciating other things about her at all - often the opposite. There used to be a myth that sexy women are dim, but I don't know anyone who thinks that anymore. This is also where feminism gets tied up with prudishness – the idea that men having sexual thoughts about a woman is somehow intrinsically wrong. The bottom line is that men have all sorts of complicated feelings about women - just as women do about men, but in my experience, domination isn't high among them.
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