I've been thinking about how men and women relate and interact pretty much my entire adult life. It's a fascinating subject. Most of that time my thinking has been dominated by the feminist take on it but more recently I've had to recognise that there are two sides to the story. On a few occasions I've been scolded for daring to comment on a woman's post about men and accused of mansplaining when I try to explain the men's perspective. Surely mansplaining is when a man tells a woman about something she knows more about. This seems like the opposite. Some are suspicious of my need to comment on women's issues at all, but if the subject is how men and women interact, then I think I'm completely free to contribute. They could just ignore me, or block me. Instead we get into a lengthy exchange, and then they accuse me of hijacking the conversation. What has been universal is how vehemently feminists have resisted my attempts to look at the other side. In some cases they pretty much insist that there is no other side - men just have to shut up and listen, and do as they're told. Now obviously that's not going to happen - people just don't work that way - but especially when a lot of us know that what's being said about us simply isn't true - or isn't the whole story. But we're supposed to just keep quiet and accept it?
One thing I've been saying all along is not that men are
right/good and women are wrong/bad. It's often assumed by activists that if you
disagree with what they say, you must be saying the opposite (see for example
Andrew Tate and his misogynist ilk) but I'm saying something far more radical -
that men and women are not very different – that they’re about as bad/good as
each other - that we're all human - we're all messed up and there's good and
bad in all of us. This apparently is deeply offensive. They really need women
to be better than men. Certainly violence is usually something men do but women
are absolutely as capable of every other sort of abuse (emotional and
psychological) as men, and arguably more so - because they don't tend to fall
back on violence. Plus as I've said, the vast majority of men are not violent,
so it's a bit of a straw man. I know nobody who thinks violence is acceptable -
violent people need to be arrested, tried and put away - it's actually very
simple. It's the rest of it that's complicated.
To most people this idea that everybody's flawed and we
all do good and bad things, right and wrong things is obvious, but then if you
get into a debate about men and women something very strange happens. Suddenly
we're expected to put all the blame on men and simply take it that women don't
do anything wrong. I come across this all the time in conversations, and it
seems to be implicit in every conversation about women's rights. It’s as if, if
we admit that women do bad stuff, that the entire feminist edifice will
crumble. It will be the thin end of the wedge. This conceit that oppressed
people are eternally blameless infects practically every left/right debate I
see. I can see why campaigners want to maintain this image - it keeps the
message simple and easy to sloganize - but it's so obviously not true to the
other side that it makes a mockery of any attempt to negotiate. So we just end
up demonising each other.
Obvious though this is there is a subtle but powerful set
of traditional beliefs underlying the feminist message - so subtle it's almost
impossible to put into words. I know because it's deeply ingrained in me too.
Most of my life they’ve been my basic assumptions, and it has taken an awful
lot of soul-searching to see it clearly. I still feel like a bit of a fraud
when I articulate it in public.
The first thing is that men have all the power and women
have none. I still hear women say this despite all evidence to the contrary. In
any conflict between a woman and a man the assumption is that the man must be
at fault. It's practically hard-wired into us and has been all my life - way
before I knew about feminism. The women is always the innocent victim. If she
does something obviously bad (violence, infidelity) then the man must have
driven her to it.
Once you notice it you see it everywhere - when I told my
partner that a friend's ex had sold his record collection when they broke up
she said, "I wonder what he did to deserve that?" She's normally a
very fair-minded person who likes men but her automatic reaction was to assume
it was his fault.
I stopped watching Riot Girls because one of the
characters’ development depends on her writing songs about her shit boyfriend.
It never occurs to anyone to wonder what actually happened and if it really was
all his fault (if the subject gets tackled later in the series I apologise to
the writers).
A recent episode of Add To Play List on Radio 4
applauded Lily Allen for trashing David Harbour on her latest album -
assuming unquestioningly that obviously he deserved it.
Many groups on Facebook are infested with posts where
women slag off their exes - not just women's groups but fan groups, AI art
groups, neurodivergent groups, music groups. In every instance the comments are
supportive of the women and do not doubt that the man was at fault. I often
comment "I need to hear the other side of this" just to remind people
that another side exists. Apparently though this is deeply offensive - there is
no other side. The woman is entirely blameless. In one case - on a
neurodivergent group - a woman was complaining that her male partner got very
upset about loud noises and wanted silence, and of course everybody came out on
her side - accusing him of being controlling and abusive, but I wonder how it
would have gone if it was the woman who needed silence and the man who wanted
noise? My guess is they would have supported the woman's need for peace and
quiet and denounced the man's selfishness.
In contrast it's remarkable how rarely I see posts of men complaining about the women in their lives. There'd be plenty no doubt if I went into the manosphere, but I don't see those complaints in mainstream groups on other subjects - it's just not done. In real life - in the past, I've almost never heard men putting their female partners down. I heard it more when I was a kid but even then not often. Some women seem to believe that the men's world if full of misogynists denigrating the women they know to their mates and abusing them when they get home, but that's simply never been my experience, and unlike women, I know what men say when women aren't around. I'm not saying it never happens but I've never heard a man say that women are inferior of evil. Many men believe women are better than men. These days, if your partner is upsetting you, you keep it to yourself. In some circles I know, any criticism of a woman is likely to get you labelled a sexist or misogynist, and behind that there's still a lot of chivalry. I know feminists find this laughable but the need to protect women is deep in masculine conditioning. Well before feminism went public in the 60s, being mean to the woman in your life was deeply unacceptable. Of course it happened, and back then the police did not get involved. I had one relative who was known to have hit his wife and his daughter, and he was held in contempt by everyone. I was brought up with the very clear instruction not to hurt girls (not that I would have hurt anyone) but hurting boys was ok. Men only talk about their relationship problems one to one down the pub with a close friend, and then apologetically, because they feel deep down that it's all their own fault somehow.
It took me a very long time to stop taking all the blame
when my first marriage fell apart. I felt so guilty that I simply left her the house
we jointly owned rather than claim my share. It was much later that it really sank in how badly she'd
behaved. I certainly didn't behave impeccably but essentially I was a naive
schmuck who got dragged into an impossible situation.
Even now, knowing this, I know people will read this and
be going "Yeah right - what did you really do?" because
somehow it has to be my fault. I've considered describing the whole sorry tale
here to show what I mean, but I know that if people really want to blame me it
won't matter what I say - they'll say, "yes but you could have done
better". The urge to make the woman the innocent victim - no matter how
badly she behaved - is incredibly strong - even in me. Still - what I'm saying
is that we both handled things badly - for all sorts of reasons, and really,
like all such stories, the moral is that we shouldn't have been together. No
doubt she could have been very happy with someone else (and I hope she is) and
I've certainly had very much better relationships since. (The idea that the
shit people do in one relationship tells you all you need to know about how
they’ll be in all relationships is idiotic. None of us gets things right the
first time and we can all learn from experience.)
I think what's happening now is that a lot of men know
deep down that they're not to blame for everything - that women behave badly
too - and feminists really don't like that. Like all political activists they
need to maintain the moral high-ground in every possible way at all times.
There can be no chink in the armour. I've come across a lot of women - friends
and girlfriends - good people in every other way - who simply can't bring
themselves to admit that they messed up in a relationship. It simply has to be
somehow the man's fault. They may be compassionate about what his problem is (insecurity, anxiety, autism, depression etc) but it still has
to be his problem and she did nothing wrong.
This is the bedrock. He has all the power - therefore he
is responsible for anything that goes wrong. She is the innocent victim -
therefore she is not. She has all these obstacles ranged against her - he doesn't. The idea that anything really goes wrong for men is
laughable - it's simply not an admissible argument. If men do have any problems
it has to be their own stupid fault - because they could make things better if
they really wanted to - they just choose not to. At the same time men are kind of stupid - they don't
really know what's going on. If there's any dispute between men and women then
the men should simply shut up and listen. "Believe women" is the
campaign slogan - unquestioningly accept their side of the story, because after
all, there isn't another side to the story. For the record - I don't
unquestioningly accept what anyone says - man or woman.
It took me quite a long time to take seriously the idea
that men have real problems. I suspected it was so because my life has been such a struggle, but it felt like whining -
because we shouldn't complain - we should man up and deal with it. I'd been
conditioned so thoroughly to believe that women are good and men are bad, I
couldn't even take my own issues seriously. A common response to this is that I'm saying that women oppress men (on the assumption that, since I am
critiquing feminism, I must be saying the total opposite of what feminists say)
but I'm not saying that. I'm saying that we're all oppressed by the way society
is set up - which gives us all these ridiculous crippling gender roles. My epiphany came
when I read that men are far more likely to die young than women by every means
except child-birth, and twice as likely to be murdered. These are solid
statistics - not 'lived experience' anecdotal evidence bullshit, and they tell
us not just that there is this huge horror at the centre of men's lives but
also that it somehow doesn't matter very much to most people. It’s just the way
it is. Violence against women and girls is the big campaign. The men somehow
deserve to die - or it's their own stupid fault - because aren't we all so
powerful? No - we're not. This realisation connected me with my working-class
roots and the nature of the pay gap, which is not at all what it seems, and that told me, as I keep saying, that hardly anyone has any power or wealth to speak
of. As usual my argument is not the mirror image of the feminist argument (that
men are especially hard-done-by) but that we're all oppressed by that tiny
minority of old white men at the top, and all these culture wars are just a
distraction from our real battle, which is bringing them down.
Can we not all agree on that?
