Three Hundred Ways It Can Hurt to Be a Man — Category 7.2
CATEGORY 7.2: Ways in which men’s ways of doing and relating to social interaction, friendship, and other social areas of life, can be hurtful. [15 items]
[This post is part of a longer series; see the Index for an overview.]
CATEGORY 7.2: Ways in which men’s ways of doing and relating to social interaction, friendship, and other social areas of life, can be hurtful. [15 items]
Women almost never need to fear coming across as creepy; it is almost solely men who forcibly repress themselves in many ways (socially, physically, sexually, etc.) so as not to have their actions unpredictably (and indeed often for reasons that to many men seem inscrutable) viewed in this way. Simultaneously, there is little that most men can do to never get read as creepy, given how different women have different sociocultural sensibilities which cannot all be simultaneously accounted for.
Socially, especially in flirting but also in many regular social contexts, a social dynamic of “men entertain; women are entertained” seems a cultural default. See e.g. the way it’s often men who joke and women who laugh at jokes, or the way it’s often the case (for better or worse) that men lead conversations and women follow (similar to how in partner dance there are often ‘lead’ and ‘follow’ roles). Leading has many benefits; but following is the easier role. Moreover, the follower often has the freedom to lead, whereas the lead often does not have the freedom to follow.
Men are not allowed to complain about innocuous female behaviours they feel impact them (e.g. when women don’t smile at the workplace), whereas women are very much allowed to complain about innocuous male behaviours they feel impact them (e.g. when men use wink-emoji’s in the workplace).
Male social maladaptivity (e.g. not knowing how to flirt, how to joke, how to emote, and so forth), even when wholly bereft of any malicious intentions, is commonly viewed as a threat to women, and one that they get to feel unsafe around and demand for it to be limited so as to not need to feel uncomfortable. Female social malaptivity, on the other hand, is not at all viewed as a threat to men, and men are given much less cultural affordance to complain or feel uncomfortable around it.
Men ghosting women, a behaviour that women do en masse to men, which is literally ‘not doing anything’, has recently been identified as the latest form of misogyny that men direct at women and which men deserve to get publicly named, shamed, and cancelled for, all in the name of women’s empowerment. Meanwhile, when women ghost men, this is viewed as empowering, as women trusting themselves and setting healthy boundaries, and so forth. In this, men face a hurtful double standard.
In many progressive communities, men, out of all groups, are assumed to be least worth listening to when it comes to gender; men who have thought a lot (or who have thought unusually intelligently) about gender, have a much harder time being listened to than even women who haven’t spent nearly as much time and effort thinking about it. Despite the fact that both femaleness and maleness are crucial components of gender, men’s perspectives are often shut down and silenced, solely on the basis of said men being men. This, too, is an example of men being made to suffer for negative stereotypes set by other men; other groups in these cultures are asked to bear this sort of negative discriminative treatment dramatically less frequently.
Whether romantically or merely socially, women are in social contexts approached more often than men are, whereas many men who want to connect with people will have to learn how to approach people.
Women are allowed to be weirder than men, because weird behaviour in women is just viewed as weird (particularly by men), but weird behaviour in men is viewed as dangerous (particularly by women), as something relatively unknown that might well be harmful. If you look at e.g. female celebrities, they’re often allowed to do far weirder things than male celebrities; but even in regular people, weirdness in men is often much more likely to get them viewed as a threat to others.
In dating, men are told they must, and are expected to, make the first move (i.e. approaching a woman), which, being the first move, must necessarily happen before they know anything about the woman in question beyond her looks, body language, etc.; but they are simultaneously told that it’s disrespectful to women to want to talk to them solely on the basis of her physical traits. Many women adversarially interpret this behaviour from men as them being there to fuck them entirely because they like these women’s looks, as opposed to the far more realistic scenario that men are there to find women to talk to so they may see if they’d like to be more intimate with them, and in a situation where they only have a woman’s looks to go on, will naturally choose a woman they like the looks of. Over and over, men’s motives are projected upon very negatively.
Insofar men are less taught how to skillfully socialize with and befriend others, society’s increased atomization disproportionately hurts men, who now often find it much harder still to make friends. Loneliness is overwhelmingly a men’s problem.
Straight men suffer much more from (internalized) homophobia within male cultures, which disables incredible amounts of non-sexual intra-male intimacy and vulnerability, than straight women suffer from homophobia within female cultures.
When men insult or get angry at women, women have a wide range of accepted social tools to defend themselves, but when women insult or get angry at men, men have next to no accepted tools, social or otherwise, to defend themselves. Asking other people to support them is viewed as worthy of ridicule; walking away is viewed as heartless; bursting out in tears oneself is viewed as weak and unmanly; screaming back would be so intimidating so as to nearly parse as violence in the eyes of everyone else; and of course, the common and oft-useful male-on-male conflict tool of actual physical (but measured) violence, like shoving the other person, is extremely not done when a man does this to a woman. So given that men have extremely few socially accepted tools to defend themselves against angry women, it’s extra cruel that, with the proliferation of social media publicizing people’s thoughts and cultures that encourage women to publicly express their own anger, men now have to deal with this kind of unfair situation increasingly often.
Women are given much more freedom when they get triggered by male anger at women (and to thus request that the man controls his own anger, or that she be given more space, if this is an interpersonal context; or to demand that the man’s viewpoints be silenced, if the context is e.g. in media), than men are given when they get triggered by female anger at men. Indeed, female anger at men is nowadays simply a rote and everyday part of the modern (online) man’s experience; there exist many, many men who get genuinely triggered by this stuff, but who, when they ask for this signal to be a little less loud, are told solely that since it is men who (in these cases) made women suffer, it is only right that men now suffer women’s anger about it (even when the men in question are likely to be altogether different and indeed different types of men than those that caused the overwhelming part of the suffering in question to begin with).
It is much less accepted for men to act dominant towards women than it is for women to act submissive towards men, whether in popular media or within the regular social interactions of everyday life.
When women want to increase their confidence before going out, or just want to feel extra attractive, they can put on makeup. Men have no such options, neither for quickly increasing their looks, nor for increasing their confidence (the male equivalent of what good looks give women).