Three Hundred Ways It Can Hurt to Be a Man — Category 6
CATEGORY 6: Ways in which men are held more accountable, granted less deniability, and given less access to victimhood, than women. [72 items]
[This post is part of a longer series; see the Index for an overview.]
CATEGORY 6: Ways in which men are held more accountable, granted less deniability, and given less access to victimhood, than women. [72 items]
When some software (e.g. Instagram, beauty blogs and vlogs, etc.) lowers girls’ self-esteem or quality of life, we view it as the responsibility of the companies behind said software to ensure this stops. When some software (e.g. porn, 4chan, dating apps, etc.) lowers boys’ self-esteem or quality of life, we view it as the responsibility of these boys to do better.
Growing up, it is the case that girls spend much more of their time socializing and talking with their friends, whereas boys spend much more of their time doing activities with their friends (or indeed without). It should not surprise us, then, when adult women are better at making friends, at knowing how to socially fit in with different kinds of people, at playing social games (both positive ones, like flirting, and negative ones, like emotional manipulation), and indeed at understanding relational problems, relational emotions, how one is perceived by others and how one may influence this, and so forth. The fact that women are better at these things is never viewed as a sign that they are sexist against men; it is obvious that their increased skill is at least in large part due to the vastly greater amount of time they spent practicing these things. But when boys grow up doing things and in the process learning better e.g. how computers work, how to think systematically, that they have worldly agency, and so forth, and thus become adult men who have an advantage in these things, modern culture firstly denies that they have any such advantage at all (indeed that there are any ways men could be better than women, even as it writes a hundred thinkpieces on things women do better than men), and secondly tells both men and women that any perceived advantage on men’s side is wholly the result of male sexism against women. It tells us that as long as a difference that benefits men may be perceived, we as a society should be giving women more chances, more encouragement, and more support, and should be telling men to inhibit themselves more and more, to make women feel extra welcome, to make more space for women, and so forth. Meanwhile, men are given no such support in the things women are better at (and, don’t get me wrong, women are absolutely better than men in a lot of ways). Instead men are told that insofar they are worse than women at these things, they must not have been paying as much attention to the world as women did, must not have listened to women enough to understand these things as well as they do, were only able to get by because they were privileged enough not to have organically been caused to ‘have to’ learn these things and that this is a sign we should take perceived privileges away from them, and so forth. This is a widespread, quite extreme, and deeply harmful double standard against boys and men.
On a societal level, women nowadays often have to worry less about hurting men than men have to worry about hurting women, both because men are viewed as less easily hurt and because men’s suffering is viewed as less bad than women’s suffering.
There are much more firm cultural norms in place around women not owing their sexual partners their own horniness and wetness, than there are around men not owing their sexual partners their own horniness and hardness. Women have more cultural leeway to say, “On second thought, not now.” Men, meanwhile, are told they always have to be hard during sex, and are given very little guidance, support, and understanding for when this sometimes doesn’t happen. Moreover, when between a man and a woman, the woman fails to get wet, this is often viewed as the man’s fault, whereas when the man fails to get hard, this is not viewed as the woman’s fault. (Of course, it is often the case that neither are anybody’s fault.)
To briefly adopt an adversarial, transactional, somewhat harmful model of sex: Even when the only thing a woman does in sex is to make herself available, there’s an implicit cultural norm that the man should give both her and himself an orgasm, even in cases where she’s doing very little work herself to get what she wants (or, for that matter, to give him what he wants).
There is in contemporary (feminine) culture a firmly-embedded notion that victims should be listened to, and that disagreement with victims constitutes a lack of understanding of, and empathy for, said victims. This coupling of who’s hurt with who’s right, means that a common strategy for people who disagree with others who have been hurt, is to deny that those people were hurt, or that their hurt was meaningful. Men’s suffering in particular is often denied in this way, viewed as unimportant or indeed nonexistent, or as merely a consequence of these men’s reading of the situation or their own attitudes towards life. This effect is stronger still in feminine cultures where men’s opinions are on average disagreed with more than women’s.
A similar framework, equally common in feminine cultures, holds that you may only cause harm to people when they deserve it; thus, if you need to cause harm to people, you better make sure you frame them as deserving of it. One example of this is the way many women (tragically!) believe they don’t get to set boundaries except in extreme cases, and thus, when they feel unsafe, start projecting all sorts of negative ideas, intentions, and stereotypes unto men, so as to feel comfortable enough with setting boundaries to set them. When people who are comfortable with doing harm, want to do harm, they just do harm; but when people who are uncomfortable with doing harm, want to do harm, they first reframe reality such that their target deserves it, and then cause harm. Given that men in general are more comfortable with doing harm than women are, it is women’s victims, who are in this manner dehumanized more, having their pain denied or being framed so as to deserve it.1
Let’s frame the masculine extreme of ontologies as “I am ultimately responsible for everything that happens to me” and the feminine extreme as “Ultimately I cannot choose what the world throws at me.” (Both are obviously wrong when taken in isolation.) Then the modern cultural framework where the focus is on one’s privileges within the world (read: the gifts one received from the world that one did not work for oneself) is a relatively ill-suited framework for more masculine people, who are asked to internalize a worldview inherently incompatible with (but in isolation no better than) theirs. Moreover, within the greater feminine ontology briefly defined here, the privilege framework is incomplete, since it focuses only on the good things one has gotten without earning them; the corresponding framework that focuses on the bad things one got without earning them, may be called ‘victimhood’. It’s very telling that the people onto whom the privilege framework is by far most often enforced, namely men, are also the people to whom the victimhood framework is granted by far least often. Only those parts of the greater framework that are to men’s disadvantage, are enforced upon them, whereas those that would help and support men, are kept away from them. (My framing here misses that a privilege framing can be a source for gratitude, and that the victimhood framing can cause people to remain stuck in their own suffering; but culture as a whole certainly views it as low-status to have privileges, and as high-status to be victimized; so let’s at least momentarily default to culture’s framing.)
When girls are scared of the world, modern culture tells them, “don’t worry; we will empower you; we will help you; we are here for you.” When boys are scared of the world, modern culture tells them to grow up, to man up, to stop being such pussies (when the speakers are more traditional) or cowards (when the speakers are more modern). Culture’s reaction to boys’ fear and weakness is to shame them, both for admitting to these feelings and for having them at all. This can create a strong internal punishing voice, especially at a young age, which it can be hard to break free from.
The cultural stories are that men fake love to get sexual pleasure, and women fake sexual pleasure to get love. Love and sexual pleasure are both deeply fundamental, human values; and though the hurt from a partner faking love is greater, the hurt from a partner faking sexual pleasure can be immense, too. Yet in both these types of cases, it is men who get blamed for not being virtuous enough. In the former case men are viewed as malicious, in the latter case men are mocked both for not being (sexually or psychologically) skilled enough to satisfy their partner and for not being secure enough to handle knowing they didn’t satisfy their partner. Meanwhile, women are viewed as the victim in both cases.
When a woman is incapable of understanding and following her gender role, it reflects badly on the gender roles, but when a man is incapable of understanding and following his gender role, it reflects badly on the man. For example, a woman who doesn’t know how to perform archetypically feminine behaviours like agreeableness, verbal and interpersonal subtlety, etc., or who doesn’t know how to gracefully and authentically wear feminine-coded clothing, will be given much affordance to say she’s rebelling against oppressive gender norms. Meanwhile, a man who doesn’t know how to perform physical or social confidence, who is interpersonally fragile, or who doesn’t know how to confidently and authentically wear masculine-coded clothing (instead defaulting to e.g. worn jeans and t-shirt), will be viewed simply as being less of a man, for being incapable of doing things more masculine men can do.
“Benevolent sexism” in favour of women is somehow still viewed as bad for women, even though by definition all other sexism is ‘benevolent sexism for men’ and this is never viewed as being bad for men. Women are presented as being the victim of all sexism, even when men are the ones actually suffering from it.
When a girl’s father hugely influences her view of men, the girl gets to blame her father for her own view of men well into adulthood; but when a boy’s mother hugely influences his view of women, the boy’s view of women is seen as his own responsibility at all times.
When men are the primary victims of a country’s justice system, or indeed of a country’s police, society as a whole does not care. It does not ask, “if men are more violent, why are they more violent? And once we understand what makes them more violent, could we help them, ensure they never land in a position where violence seems like their best or only option?” Society does not question if perhaps there is any kind of sexism or systemic injustice against men going on here. People will happily ask questions that remove minorities’ agency; but men, especially white men, are assumed to be the sole cause of their own outcomes in life. From this, much hurt is done unto men.
On a related note: women get lower sentences than men, for the same crimes. (This is, suspiciously, brought up much less often than the oft-mentioned mirror statistic that women are paid less than men for the same work, even though any extra prison time is much worse than a slightly lower salary is, and even though the people bringing up said statistic also tend to identify as the sorts of people who would fight, with a genuine and often laudable righteousness, for the most vulnerable and oppressed among us. And yet: there is no population as vulnerable and as oppressed as literal prisoners. Most members of this uniquely vulnerable and profoundly opppressed group are men, and even the few women among them will spend less time there than the men.)
There are many cultures where you will only ever hear the above brought up as proof not that the system is sexist against men, but that instead, since the system views men as having more agency and therefore being more responsible for their actions and punishing them more harshly, it directly means the system views women as having less agency, so in truth the system is sexist against women. These conclusions are drawn often and confidently, despite the fact that men are the justice system’s primary victims. Society happily asks questions when doing so might help women, but rarely when it might help men.
Even in modern progressive cultures, where it is extremely accepted that one may not judge any member of a minority group by the actions of said group’s other members, men are nevertheless widely expected to bear discrimination borne from other men’s actions. For instance, when bad men have shaped women’s expectations in some negative way, then society views it as the individual task of other men to work around these expectations and overcome them themselves; society does not ask women to simply have more positive expectations of men because their negative expectations of men are harming men. (A minor example of this would be the way men are asked not to walk behind women when it’s dark outside and there’s no one around. The vast majority of men simply wouldn’t harm a woman at all in this kind of scenario; yet because it does sometimes happen, all men are told to make it extra clear that they’re not going to do any hurt, regardless of whether anything in their personal history suggests that they would hurt a woman.) In this, men are treated far worse than any other group.
It’s extremely common for problems that hit both genders, but which primarily hit men, to nevertheless get reframed as women’s problems. Examples include: “college-educated women can’t find enough college-educated men to date, worsening their dating prospects” instead of “men are doing worse at college”; “women get hit on awkwardly” instead of “men aren’t taught how to flirt”; “women have to do emotional labour for men” instead of “men suffer from being bad at handling their own emotions”; and of course the now-infamous “1 in 4 homeless people are women.” Examples of this phenomenon could double the length of this list.
Culture sees that the people at the top are men, and concludes that ‘men are at the top,’ even calling society a ‘patriarchy’; in this it grossly erases the many many men who are in fact at the very bottom of society. Criminals, prisoners, addicts, people working physically taxing or dangerous jobs, etc. are all overwhelmingly male. Just because some men are at the top, does not mean that this does other men any good whatsoever; yet the deeply flawed narrative remains that because society is ruled by men, it is ruled by all men. Power differentials between individuals are erased in the eyes of the narrative; only the false conclusion that most men are more powerful than most women, remains.
“Women have it worse than men, so we should help women first” is a very common defense that people will give when asked why they obviously care about sexism but refuse to do things that help men. But it is primarily when it comes time to help men, that an argument like this one is given. At all other times, it is accepted that e.g. the greater importance of climate change relative to feminism, or the greater moral weight of animal suffering (which is frankly extreme, far worse than what humans as a species endure) relative to women’s suffering, simply do not discredit feminism, because in practice we all accept that we needn’t allocate our efforts based on the relative importance of different problems; and these same people will sooner fight for women’s right not to shave their armpit hair, than against any of the far greater social and systemic injustices that even they sometimes admit men face. All manner of arguments are ad-hoc considered valid when they defend against helping men, but as soon as the topic of helping men is dropped, the arguments themselves are dropped as well. It’s hard to conclude that it was ever the arguments’ validity itself, rather than simply an intrinsic aversion to helping and supporting men, that is mainly going on in these spaces.
There is a strong norm where for women it’s powerful and brave to complain, but for men it is weak to do so. Women gain status by complaining; men lose it.
This norm is much stronger still when one compares women complaining about and expressing anger towards men, with men complaining about and expressing anger towards women. The former is ‘speaking truth to power’; the latter is ‘hating women.’ As a result of this, many women get to share and bond over their suffering at men’s hands, whereas men who suffer at the hands of women get their words silenced, their lived experiences erased, their reputations destroyed, and their personhoods separated and isolated from others’. It can be incredibly important to people who have been hurt that they get to view this hurt as a thing that may exist, as something they may carry within them, without having to fear being thought of as lesser or as malicious for it. Female victims of men, may experience this healing validation easily; male victims of women may find this almost nowhere.
When women are hurt by men, even the most progressive people set aside their notion that women and men are equal and have equal agency and capabilities as a person, to instead sympathize with the women, because it’s very understandable that a woman could get hurt by men; but when men are hurt by women, even progressive, girl-power people scoff at these men, who are apparently so weak that they couldn’t even stop women from hurting them. These men are given no sympathy, and are instead mocked and perceived as too cowardly to wield some assumed kind of inherent male power or agency, against whichever women hurt them.
Women’s often immense social power and agency is often downplayed, even in very progressive cultures, thereby rendering women’s (female, but especially male) victims illegible as victims in the eyes of these cultures, often even in the eyes of these men themselves, who are only ever told that they are more powerful than women and thus could never be made to suffer by women, that surely the fault lies in themselves because they are the ones with power whereas women hold none. When it comes to female power, deniability is the name of the game; a defining feature of many progressive cultures is a kind of Schrödinger’s girl-power, where women are simultaneously believed to be capable of everything men can do and more, and to be so powerless relative to men that they could never be perpetrators of any harm against men. However this game gets played, men are the ones who lose.
One may frame a symmetry where the role that love plays for women, respect plays for men, and vice versa. From even contemporary society, women receive more love than men, and men receive more respect than women. It is culturally considered very acceptable for women to complain about not being given enough respect, and to demand more; but when men complain about not being given enough love, and demand more, suddenly they (but not women) are viewed as entitled, told that love isn’t something you can just deserve by existing, mocked for not wanting to work for it, doubted when they say they worked for it but still didn’t receive the love they feel they are due. Women are treated better in this.
In general, culturally, men are given very little affordance to get offended at things. When women are offended, the people around them are told not to offend women; when men are offended, they are sneerily told to be less fragile.
A lot of women are given much cultural affordance to be excessively (incl. inauthentically) agreeable to those around them, which sucks for men who aren’t used to this and who may get emotionally engaged, thinking some woman really likes them, only to be time and again hurt when it turns out said woman was just being agreeable. (This happens not just in a romantic context, but also in many regular friendly contexts.) When men take action based on this, such as trying to initiate a friendship or a date, they’re told off and sometimes even sneered at, told that they should have known that just because a woman acts nice to you doesn’t mean you get to assume she likes you. This is, first of all, confusing at first to many men, and second of all it is hurtful, because it leads men towards a worldview where they cannot feel likable or lovable even when women seem to like or love them.
In situations such as the one described above, men are often expected to understand and accept women’s actions, because there are good reasons for why women act this way. But oftentimes, even when men have good reasons for acting the way they do (and of course we do; of course our reasons are, on average, just as good as women’s), men are still asked to change the way they act. Ultimately women’s Schrödinger agency often allows them to externalize their own agency to e.g. their past, to cultural norms, to other people’s expectations, etc., whenever this benefits them (but of course to keep it internalized wherever this suits them). Men are far more often viewed as the ultimate cause of their own actions, and at all times must bear responsibility for what they do. In this, men face a harsher world.
Many companies, communities, movements, and ideologies, that are traditionally more composed of and/or aligned with men and/or men’s interests and/or masculine aesthetics, will more often be viewed in terms of their worst parts, getting their best achievements ignored. Meanwhile, many companies, communities, movements, and ideologies that are traditionally more composed of and/or aligned with women, women’s interests, or feminine aesthetics, will more often be viewed in terms of their positive ideals, with their practical weaknesses or mistakes being passed off as mere hiccups. (An example that reduces tremendous amounts of complexity but still, I think, holds marginal value: capitalism is highly individualistic, moreover with winners and losers baked into its design, and therefore is in some sense more associable with and more resonating with masculine culture; it is nowadays routinely attacked for the worst things it’s caused, with many of its incredible achievements for global health and prosperity going ignored. Meanwhile, communism, which as a highly communal, equality-driven, no-one-left-behind philosophy leans more feminine (and which in WEIRD contexts enjoys primarily female support), is a hip cool thing to fight for; in the public eye, the ideology itself may retain its luster, despite the fact that many implementations of it have historically been responsible for an extreme amount of deaths.)
Women tend to make their emotional state more dependent on the approval of those around them than men, so you have to bear more responsibility around a woman than you do around a man; this is doubly true when you’re a man, as then you’re expected to be able to hold that responsibility for them without being allowed to let people hold the same kind of responsibility for you.
Women are told they inherently deserve good things just by existing (read: as women). They are told they get to feel safe, they get to feel loved, they get to feel respected. When a woman can’t find good relationships, she’s told she deserves a good man. Men are told no such things. They’re told they have to work to make themselves feel safe, to work so that they may be loved for what they can offer those around us, to work so that they may earn people’s respect; and when they can’t find good relationships, they’re told they’ll simply have to work to become ‘better’ men and through this attract ‘better’ women. Men are not told that they inherently deserve good things; instead they’re told that fundamentally they aren’t worth people’s love until they’ve achieved whatever is needed to gain it.
Two common, gendered unhealthy ways in which men and women relate to each other romantically, are “I can fix him” for women, and “I can save her” for men. The latter rejects a woman’s agency; the former rejects a man’s actions. Being viewed as incapable of achieving what you want, is still better than being viewed as wanting the wrong things, or as using your capabilities in the wrong way. Here, too, when it comes to women, we fault the world (for oppressing them and making their lives difficult), but when it comes to men, we fault them.
In general, when there is some category of people that ‘choose’ to put themselves into situations where they are arguably exploited, they are viewed as victims of said exploitation: women choosing to stay with abusive men whom they could leave (which, do note, isn’t always an option); poor people choosing riskier lives of crime; girls choosing to log onto Instagram every day even when this gives them body image issues; and so forth. But when the exploiters are women and the exploited are consenting men, e.g. when women sell an ultimately meaningless veneer of emotional intimacy to men via OnlyFans, then these women are viewed as empowered, crafty, smart; and the men are viewed as perhaps dumb, or lacking self-control, but in no way as being exploited by these women.
As far as I’m aware (which admittedly may not be very far), ‘whataboutism’ only became generally known and viewed as a legitimate fallacy, after MeToo, during which many men would respond to women’s stories about male abuse by saying “not all men abuse women, though.” It’s telling that every other group gets to push back against any mass creation and strengthening of negative as well as directly (if to some extent justly) harmful stereotypes about them, but when men seek to defend themselves similarly, suddenly it’s an argumentative fallacy. Still now, men are the primary victims of calls that denounce whataboutism; in many other contexts, whataboutism isn’t even viewed as wrong.
If there’s one law in many modern progressive communities, it’s that you should never victim-blame… except of course when said victim is a male victim of cancel culture. These men get simultaneously told that cancel culture doesn’t exist (this denies and erases their lived experiences), and that, anyway, they surely deserved whatever they got (this is simply pitch-perfect victim-blaming).
It’s almost ubiquitous nowadays for male spaces to be modified so as to be made more welcoming for women, but you’ll never see women scramble to make a space more welcoming for men. Men are asked both to make their spaces more welcoming to women, and to make themselves feel more welcome in female spaces; women are often asked neither. Here, too, men are held responsible for their own feelings, whereas a woman’s larger context is held responsible for hers.2
There are consistent calls from many communities to change male cultures because ‘bad’ traits of male cultures are viewed as causing bad outcomes, while simultaneously these communities will often reject the notion that those outcomes of male culture that are good might be caused by notably ‘good’ traits of male culture which other cultures may not always share. In this way, male cultures are held responsible for their worse parts, but are given no recognition for their better parts.
On the topic of male problems being reframed as female problems: when men aren’t allowed to wear feminine clothing, this is often reframed as being caused by the fact that femininity is associated with all kinds of negative traits (e.g. ‘weakness’), which, aha, thus in truth points to a problem society has with femininity, and when society has problems with femininity, that means it has problems with women, so in the end women are the real victims here. This line of reasoning is tiresomely common; always it completely loses sight of the fact that in many such cases, men are literally the sole victim: women may wear masculine clothing, but men may not wear feminine clothing. That hurts men, and only men. (Well, and women who like to see men in women’s clothing.) It is extremely common for people to assume that when femininity is disparaged, that only women suffer from this, even though feminine men suffer right along with them, and often moreso, given how femininity in men is far more disparaged than femininity in women is. In many ways women, by virtue of being female, are to a great extent shielded from many of femininity’s negative associations, which hit feminine men far harder since men are expected (by both men and women) to be quote-unquote ‘better.’ (If my use of the word ‘better’ here prompted you to think about the way femininity is indeed often viewed negatively, and how bad that is for women, do not now forget that this is bad for feminine men too. In particular, in contexts where femininity is weak but women get to be weak and men don’t (which is certainly not all contexts, but which is certainly some), men are often the ones who suffer most from the cultural association of femininity with weakness.)
The reasoning I describe above is often also used to explain why the lack of acceptance for emotionality in men is ‘in truth’ sexism against women, since ‘emotions are viewed as feminine and thus as weak’. Do not be fooled: when men are not allowed to feeling and process and express their own emotions, it is men who are the primary victims of this; and when it is men, not women, who least get to be weak, it is men who are the primary victims of this.
When women tell men, “that’s not what I meant,” men are often expected to listen to them and adopt their frameworks and use of language; when men say “that’s not what I meant,” it’s often viewed as their responsibility to be more clear and not let themselves get misunderstood.
When women are bad at setting their own boundaries, society does not ask them to get better at this (though women who want to are sometimes encouraged in this), but instead tells men to hold women’s boundaries for them. When a man does something that a woman might not want, but the woman, for whatever reason, feels incapable of saying she doesn’t want it, then the man is expected to know that he might be crossing this woman’s boundaries, and to be very careful around this, ideally not to risk it at all. Men putting themselves into situations where they might unwittingly harm women, is viewed as being akin to drunk driving: you might not be in control, but you sure were in control of putting yourself in a situation where you’re not in control, so you’re still responsible for whatever bad things might happen. Women putting themselves into situations where they know they might let their own boundaries get crossed, meanwhile, bear no responsibility if anything happens to them that they don’t like. It’s the man’s fault if he makes out with a consenting but drunk woman, even when it was the woman who got herself drunk; it’s the man’s fault if he flirts too heavily with a woman he doesn’t know is too shy or insecure to reject him, even when it was the woman who put herself in a situation where she knew she might get flirted with without feeling confident enough to stop this; and so forth. At all times, women are assumed to have zero agency, for which men are made to bear the costs. In particular, when women are bad at setting and holding their own boundaries, society does not demand of them that they learn to do this; they’re simply given free reign to burden men with the task of safeguarding their boundaries.
When modern culture views asking women to set their own boundaries as ‘victim-blaming’, it is grossly ignoring the way male ‘perpetrators’ (not to be confused with ‘actual abusers’ (…whatever that means), whom it is generally good not to blame the victims of) in situations where women don’t set their own boundaries, are by these women made victims themselves, namely of having caused harm to these women. This can for many men be a very tough position to be in; it can be hard to come to terms with having caused harm to another person, and it is difficult, too, to navigate this position within one’s overall cultural context, particularly since many people will uncharitably interpret men when they have caused harm to women. Being incapable of setting one’s own boundaries is about as negligent as being insensitive to others’ boundaries when you take actions around people, but only one of these is incapabilities is viewed as blameworthy.
Modern culture is very loath to tell women to set their own boundaries better, instead preferring to tell men not to cross people’s boundaries. This latter approach is obviously not going to work anywhere near as well as the former, for many reasons. Firstly, the people that actually hear these sorts of statements will be women (who are not the direct audience of the latter message) and those men who, of all men, are already most eager to listen to women; the kinds of men who routinely cross women’s boundaries are, nearly by definition, much less likely to spend their time in spaces where they’d hear and listen to women’s societal requests of men. Secondly, many more women would benefit from setting their own boundaries better, than there are men who would do well to cross women’s boundaries less. Thirdly, even if you were to succeed in teaching the majority of men never to cross women’s boundaries, the remaining few men can still wreak havoc among many, many women, whereas if you were to succeed in teaching the majority of women never to let their boundaries get crossed, then you’ve succeeded in protecting the majority of women. Fourthly, men, being people, are likely to react negatively to, and be impacted negatively by, stories about things men do badly and should do better; meanwhile, it’s a far more positive message to support, encourage, and empower women to set their boundaries. This societal shift in approach, from advising women on how to set their own boundaries better to telling men not to cross women’s boundaries, is such a downgrade in effectiveness, and such an upgrade in the costs on men, that one can’t help but assume it was done because society finds even a small perceived direct cost on women to be unacceptable when it could instead bill men many times as much.
Flirting may (imperfectly and incompletely) be framed as a game where women’s role is to signal interest in deniable ways (which allows them to comfortably avoid having to commit to anything, avoid having to take responsibility for leading men on, avoid seeming slutty, retain control of people’s narratives about themselves, test the man on how he’ll act in contexts of imperfect information, get to feel extra desirable and indeed to test men’s sincerity by seeing men go further and take more risks just to have them, and so forth), and men’s role is to sift through this deniability to gain clarity (which allows them to take/get what they want, show off their personal qualities, get to feel extra powerful for having convinced the woman, and so forth). Then culture is increasingly giving women far greater freedom to act however they like, while simultaneously giving women far greater freedom to deny that their actions meant or implied anything. Men, meanwhile, are increasingly robbed of ways to probe women’s boundaries, to check where she’s really at, to interpret a ‘no’ as being temporary or played or strictly present for deniability purposes, and so forth. In this way, flirting is becoming much more difficult for men. (It is also in some ways becoming more difficult for women; I’ve heard women lament that they can no longer communicate that they’re up for getting flirted with by e.g. going out in revealing clothing. And lesbian flirting is infamously difficult, with hugs and kisses and even making out being fully deniable and therefore unreliable signals. But ultimately women always retain the option of giving up their own deniability and just being explicit about their intentions; men, meanwhile, are increasingly out of any options at all, and never had the option of simply telling a woman they’d like to fuck her, to begin with. And if that sounds like the kind of behaviour that’s intrinsically bad: I hear it works very well among gay men.)
In flirting, it’s become less acceptable for men to interpret certain signals from women as green lights. In society’s eyes, when a man tries to flirt with a woman in a way she doesn’t appreciate, it doesn’t matter how unlikely it was beforehand that she mightn’t appreciate it; the only thing that matters is how uncomfortable the woman felt. Men are only ever told to be more and more careful, told that they do not get to take risks, told that you don’t get to make moves on women when you know there’s a chance these moves might make women uncomfortable, and held fully responsible when indeed they do make women uncomfortable. Contemporary culture seems to have little understanding or empathy for the fact that men are always operating under uncertain, imperfect, incomplete, and highly filtered information here, and really have to be given some space to probe around and take risks even in these contexts. I’ve known many men, and indeed myself been one, who felt extremely constrained in expressing and pursuing their own sexuality, indeed constrained to the point of being given no space at all. For every possible move a man can make, whether that’s moving in close, casually touching, asking for a number, approaching, or even looking, progressive communities (and the aforementioned mass consolidation of men’s spaces into what amounts to women’s spaces) have been sure to spread dozens of stories to men of women being made uncomfortable by precisely these moves. Society is perfectly happy to give women arbitrarily much freedom (meaning: a greater decoupling between their actions and what men are allowed to assume those actions signify), with no regard at all as to what the costs of this freedom are for men.
It is considered men’s job to learn how to flirt in a way that doesn’t make women uncomfortable, but it is absolutely not considered women’s job to help men with this, to teach men how to do this, or even to serve as cracked eggs while men try to make this omelette. There’s no cultural understanding that flirting for men (much moreso than for women) is a skill, and that men much moreso than women have to learn this if they want any chance at meeting many of their fundamental human needs; no cultural understanding that like all skills, flirting takes time to learn, and indeed maybe some men only start learning later in life. But currently the responsibility for making flirting work out well, falls squarely on the shoulders of men. It is extremely disheartening to see just how little goodwill so many women hold towards men who are just awkwardly trying to poke around and explore this space, to learn this skill, in search of love and a space for expressing and sharing their own sexuality, and receiving someone else’s. If you want men to learn how to be attractive to you, you’re gonna have to let them fail, and you’re gonna have to let them make mistakes, and you’re gonna have to let them make you a little uncomfortable along the way. This isn’t a fight; it isn’t men’s interests against women’s here; because ultimately, a little freedom for men to make women uncomfortable will go a long way in giving women men who know how to flirt with them and how to love them, which is what so many women desperately want and are missing themselves, too. But this is not a view that modern society shares; as a man to risk making women feel uncomfortable, is often viewed as a capital sin, one that can easily, in unlucky circumstances, get men cancelled and leave them with no recourse at all.
Women get to simultaneously demand to be treated as though they are as powerful as men, and to be treated as though men are much more powerful and should therefore inhibit themselves in many ways so as not to harm women.
When many women are hurt by men, culture freely extrapolates this to “many men hurt women”, which is a completely different statement that is in no way implied by the original phenomenon. The whole thing gets framed as a problem with men, with male culture, that men are responsible for and which men have to solve. There is of course the notion that even men who don’t do anything bad, are still in a position to see it happen, and one might like to request them to change things; but women are in an even better position to see it happen, and it’s certainly not obvious that the average guy would have more power to support or stop men, than the average woman. When many women are hurt by some men, that’s a problem for many women and some men; it may be good for other men to be encouraged to offer help and support, but to demand it of them when they haven’t done anything wrong themselves, seems extreme and uncalled for. (Of course, ultimately all problems for women are problems for men and vice versa, because we’re all in this together; but culture never uses this framing to demand that women help men, so let’s not now use it to demand that men help women.)
Women are in general held less accountable for their own reactions to the world around them, than men are.
In particular, when there is some narrative that makes men disproportionately fearful (of some group; of the world; disproportionate, relative to how fearful the numbers imply one should be), men are oftentimes told to face the facts, whereas when there is some narrative that makes women disproportionately fearful, oftentimes society is told to change anyway so as to make women feel safe.
In times of war, men are viewed as more expendable and disposable than women; indeed, many countries still feature a solely-male draft.
Men suffer great social punishment if they try to escape being drafted in times of war, whereas women are encouraged to flee to safety, despite both male and female lives being, one should hope, wholly equal in value.
From many minority groups, especially women, “X makes us feel bad” is a sufficient reason to get to demand that others stop doing X. From men, “X makes us feel bad” is often simply viewed as irrelevant.
Some women will say they don’t like (and are even disadvantaged by) being given undeserved or unearned power, e.g. by being put on a pedestal, by being treated as more special or more correct just because they’re women, and so forth. When men are given unearned power by society (i.e. through many forms of anti-women sexism), however, many such women will still blame them for it, tell men to take responsibility for the power other people give them, tell men that they are privileged and solely advantaged by being given this power, and so forth.
More and more nowadays, women get to be arbitrarily desirable (e.g. makeup, dress up, show a lot of skin, post obviously hot selfies on social media, etc.) while simultaneously getting to demand that men don’t desire them: that men don’t express such desire, that men don’t act on it, indeed that they don’t even feel invited to do so, and so forth. There’s an increased cultural norm that women get to act however they like whereas men don’t even get to feel whatever that makes us feel, even when said feelings are so archetypical that it’s hard to imagine a man not experiencing them at all. To better intuit this, note how men are nowadays widely held responsible for the way their natural greater loudness and (over-)confidence often socially overpowers women, instead of these women being told not to feel overpowered or intimidated. Women’s reactions are viewed as constant, as the natural result of said women’s contexts; men’s reactions are viewed as being solely the responsibility of the men themselves.
Oftentimes women unwillingly do things for men, only to blame men for this, as though the women never had a choice. For example, performing emotional labour for men is often absolutely a choice, something women may simply refuse to do, yet when women do do this, they get to culturally blame men for ‘putting them in the position of having to do this.’ When women don’t set their boundaries to a man, they get to blame men for ‘not letting them set their boundaries’, even though they absolutely had the option of trying to set them. (Whether the man would have respected them is an altogether different matter.) Women are simply routinely given the option of denouncing their own agency and thus benefiting from not having to take responsibility for whatever happens afterwards. Men are often not given this option at all, and are often moreover given the task of bearing women’s agency in their stead.
There are many cultural movements (such as the fat acceptance movement, or various movements around bodies of women of color) to reframe women who used to be viewed in WEIRD cultures as unattractive, as being now attractive. Many of these movements have received moderately widespread support and even success. Meanwhile, any similar attempts at changing cultural norms around what is attractive in men, are (and would be) widely mocked and derided by women. Thus in many cases, when women are unattractive, we blame culture (that is to say: the men looking at them), whereas when men are unattractive, we blame the men themselves.
Similarly, in contexts where women as a group have lower self-confidence or self-esteem than men, this is often viewed as the fault of the cultures and environments around them, and said environments are demanded to change so as to better support women; but when men have either too little or too much confidence, they are themselves asked to change.
It’s often perfectly legal and overall moderately culturally accepted for a woman to carry a baby to term without the father’s consent and to subsequently render him legally responsible for part of the costs, but men have little legal or social freedom to either force a woman to get an abortion if the baby would be his, or to reject financial responsibilities for the baby. Here, too, women seek power when it benefits them, but are often loath to accept the responsibilities that come with it.
When men signal that they want something from women, women often view this as malicious behaviour, because many women experience being put in the position of potentially having to say no, as a burden, something they’d rather not receive; and since men are expected to know this, it’s seen as a bad sign when men do it anyway. This is one of many ways in which women who are bad at setting their own boundaries, externalize the problems that stem from this. Society, instead of telling women to learn how to say no, tells men to stop wanting things from women; a pretty unreasonable demand, all things considered.
When women lose attraction to their husbands, it is often not viewed as a problem for both of them to work on together, where not only the man is asked to find ways to become more attractive to his wife, but also the woman is asked to find ways to e.g. become more comfortable in her own sexuality, resolve her own sexual shame, internalize a sense of agency, safety, and freedom to set her own boundaries, and so forth. Instead, only the man is asked to change. Meanwhile, when men lose attraction to their wives, this is often viewed as an immoral action on his part.
There’s an overall sense that if a woman were to e.g. hit or cheat on a man, the first thought that comes up in people’s minds would be, “What did he do?” The implicit but default assumption is that male victims of female violence (whether physical, interpersonal, social, or psychological) must surely have deserved it in some way.
Much cultural oppression and sexism against women comes from other women; for instance, most slut-shaming is done by women; but female-on-female sexism often gets entirely erased in many conversations about anti-women sexism. This is another way in which culture is incapable of viewing women as perpetrators.
Modern culture’s increased zero-tolerance policy for victim-blaming, should benefit all victims, but in practice it benefits men far less than it benefits women, since men are much less likely to be recognized as victims. Moreover, in situations where both men and women both suffer (which is of course the majority of situations), women are often picked to fill the ‘victim’-role, after which men simply get shoved into the ‘perpetrator’-role. In these cases, culture’s increased inability to notice nuance and subtlety, and its insistence on instead reducing everything to a victim-perpetrator binary where the supposed victim may never be questioned or held even partially responsible, and where refusing to harshly judge and exclude supposed perpetrators is itself viewed as an act of hatred, have been deeply and unjustly harmful to many men.
The crucial component in much abuse is not physical but psychological. Within many relations between people, it may be either physical or psychological power which enables abuse to happen the first time, but it is often psychological power which enables either physical or psychological abuse to take place again and again. A primary component of much abuse is psychological: making the victim believe that the abuse is normal, that it is deserved, or indeed that the victim is themselves the abuser, and the abuser is the victim, now righteously claiming what is theirs to claim. (See also the DARVO-principle: Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender.) (As an example of this kind of psychological abuse where victim and offender are reversed: traditional cultures where norms against women physically presenting themselves in sexually desirable ways, are strong enough, will often claim that women who do e.g. wear revealing clothing in public, are intentionally arousing men’s sexualities, and are therefore wholly responsible when men act on this arousal.) It is culturally becoming an ever more common norm that men’s greater physical power over women should inherently make people wary of the fact that this puts women at a greater chance of being physically abused by men; meanwhile, there is no increasing cultural norm that women’s greater psychological power over men (especially when it comes to women’s greater social skills which allow them to control the narrative, as well as society’s much greater acceptance of women as victims than of men as such), should make us all wary of the fact that this puts men at a greater chance of being psychologically abused by women. In fact, much the opposite is happening culturally, with men-as-victims being an increasingly rare and derided narrative. (See also the way many men were, during MeToo, explicitly barred by women from sharing their own lived experiences of being the victims of sexual abuse. There are many women who seek to retain careful control over society’s narratives of victimhood, and prime among their tools is ensuring men do not get to play this part.)
Given that men are often the ones who, when dating someone, have to initiate new levels of intimacy, men also must (often actively) bear the responsibility of what implications these moves may have, which is much less the case for the receiving side. What if you want to kiss a girl but you don’t want to date her? It’s often seen as the man’s task to make this difference clear, because if they don’t, the woman may feel used and will get to blame the man for this. Meanwhile, oftentimes women aren’t asked to ensure that they correctly understand the man’s intentions or lack thereof before they actively decide to allow new levels of intimacy.
When women are made afraid by cultural stories of men abusing their archetypically masculine power (e.g. through rape), women’s fear is accepted, validated, and used as grounds to change the world. Meanwhile, when men are made afraid by cultural stories of women abusing their archetypically feminine power (e.g. through lying, excessive victimhood-claiming, gossip, cancelling, etc.), men’s fear is ridiculed and pointed to as a sign of weakness in these already fearful men. For example, men who are scared of female whisper networks will be told that if they’re so scared, maybe they should work on improving their relationships with women; this constitutes a quite inventive form of victim-blaming in which you blame and guilt someone who hasn’t even yet been victimized. Meanwhile, imagine telling women who are scared of groups of men using their social power against them, that if they’re so scared, they should maybe work on improving their relationships with men. This would be widely recognized as a gross form of victim-blaming; but it’s viewed as fair game when the victim is men.
The fact that society holds all men responsible for how women view us (i.e. it’s not women who are asked to view us more positively but men who are asked to act better), is doubly cruel given media’s mass negative narratives, and its near-total absence of positive narratives, about men as a group. With nearly 8 billion people in the world, you can write enough true negative stories about men, in any particular group or context, without the availability of such stories being at all correlated with how good men actually are. There is little stopping sufficiently motivated (or indeed simply sufficiently biased) news outlets and cultural communities to continue making women more and more afraid of and angry at men, and all the while the costs of this are overwhelmingly placed on men’s shoulders.3
Many traditional marriages take the form of “the man acts in the greater world; the woman supports him by taking care of him and their home space; the man can act outside only because the woman takes care of what’s inside.” This framing is often used to diminish men’s accomplishments (e.g. “this man could only achieve X because his wife was taking care of everything else”), and not always unfairly so; but it is never used to explain men’s failures (e.g. “the reason this man couldn’t achieve X is because his wife didn’t do a good enough job of supporting him”). In this, men are often granted only their failures, not their achievements.
Interpersonal experiences generally take two people, not one. When men make women uncomfortable in any way, these women are never asked to reflect on how, or indeed admit that, they themselves played a role, however minor, in interpreting the man’s behaviour in what may well have been an excessively fearful or otherwise adversarial way. They aren’t asked to keep in mind the innate humanity of the man in question, the way modern culture asks all of us to do with any other group; whatever women’s experience is, gets culturally accepted as fact, and it’s made men’s responsibility to change their behaviour. Men’s read of the situation in question is very often rendered irrelevant in culture’s eye if the woman’s perspective is different. In being allowed to write the cultural narratives of shared experiences, women are given quite extraordinary power, and given how ambiguous the vast majority of real-life situations are, it’s rare that women who perceive reality excessively adversarially (especially against men) are ever held accountable for this, since it’s exceedingly hard to pin down whether someone was being intentionally adversarial in interpreting one’s experience of reality, or whether that’s just an accurate description of how things happened. What makes this power dynamic between men and women even worse is that women often understand that supporting (rather than calling into question) one another in one’s interpretations of situations with men, gives women as a whole (including themselves) more power to decide the cultural narratives in their own favour, whereas men seem generally happier to throw other men under the bus.
There is more cultural understanding as well as acceptance when women behave badly or act out, that their bad behaviour comes from trauma or heartbreak (and as a consequence, that the right way to improve their behaviour is not to ask them to change, but to change the world so as to make it hurt women less); men’s bad behaviour gets little such empathy.
So many women are so intensely uncomfortable with bearing the burden of having harmed others, that a strong cultural message for men is to care less, to feel hurt less. In particular, culture doesn’t tell women to learn to reject men (in any context, not just romantically) even when it hurts us; it instead tell men to be hurt less by rejection. It tells men to want, less; to be less desperate; to care less; to need, less; all so that women will never have to deal with men’s genuinely intense natural emotionality. Greatly-felt and greatly-expressed emotions in men are increasingly becoming viewed as cringe, as ‘too much’, as too intense, as overwhelming. All in all, culture sends men a profoundly hard-hitting message, namely that women simply do not like to see their emotions, which is to say, our very nature, what lies at the core of our being. Men are asked to tone it down, even to shut it down, so as not to make women feel even momentarily uncomfortable.
For an excellent piece detailing the way hate is nowadays so unacceptable that haters feel forced to blame their victims for the hatred they feel, see Greer’s Hate is the New Sex.
There is one notable and somewhat unfortunate exception to this rule: cis women are often culturally powerless to defend their spaces against transwomen whom they perceive as disturbing these spaces. These are often difficult and nuanced situations; trans author Liminal Warmth eloquently writes about her own experiences related to this phenomenon here.
Scott Alexander has written a particularly great piece on the phenomenon of media being able to spread falsehoods solely through true stories, thanks to the world being simply so multifaceted that one can find hundreds of pieces of ‘evidence’ to support any narrative. (The irony of my saying this is not lost on me.)