Jesse Powell writes:

I get the uneasy feeling that what started off as a story of a single mother who let her hostility towards men damage her son has turned to the subject of why women bash men in general and then finally degenerated into woman-bashing, men’s rights style. 

If I could make some generalized comments here, not so much specifically in regards to Andrew’s nephew, whose story is very troubling, but more generally on the subject of man-bashing. It is definitely true that man-bashing is a commonplace, that masculinity is treated as a disease, etc. The question is, why do women “dish it out” and why do men “take it” and even go along with it? 

I think there is a generalized assumption that men “are at fault” whatever the problem may be, whatever disturbance exists in society. Additionally, there is the widespread idea that women need to “step up” and “take charge” because men have messed things up, are good for nothing, are incompetent boobs. I believe the overall reason why men are the primary targets of this kind of angst and criticism is precisely because, in people’s guts, there is the assumption that men should be in charge and in control, that they are responsible for society’s functioning overall, and therefore are to blame when things go wrong. Men are always to blame because the leader is always to blame, the boss is responsible for the failure of his company, not the employees he hired and whom he tells what to do. What if the employees are not given direction by the boss because the boss is off playing golf, the company falls into disorganization, the employees are left to figure things out by themselves, and the company falls into losses, the employees pay is cut, some employees have to be laid off, etc.?  Who is to blame, whom is anger directed towards: the employees or the boss? 

In this analogy, men are the boss and women are the employees. The reason why men are to blame is because it is the man’s responsibility to make sure the family unit works right. When the family unit doesn’t work it is presumptively the man’s fault, because he is the boss. Now you might object, these women who bash men are in no way inclined to be submissive to men, to allow men to play their leadership role, as good bosses or managers. This is true, because the man has lost the trust of the woman due to his prior negligent behavior. Now to generalize the sins of particular men in the past to men in general, or to future developing men who are currently just boys, is obviously pathological and dysfunctional on the part of any woman, as well as unfair; and in the case of a mother in a position of authority against her own son, this is clearly abusive. 

I’m not trying to justify man-bashing here, just trying to explain it. As to why men go along with it, I think it is a feeble, timid, passive acceptance of their own guilt, a way to lazily get on women’s good side or avoid an argument, and a feeling on the man’s part that he is above such criticism, that such criticism doesn’t bother him, to let women do their bitching, it’s just what women do. Most importantly, men accept such broad brush man-bashing due to passivity, not wanting to get involved, not wanting to take responsibility. 

What men should do in response to man-bashing is assert their value, virtue, and purpose as men, assert the authority they need as men to do their jobs, and take on the responsibilities that are associated with the male role.  

As an aside, I reject the idea that the men’s movement is a reaction to man-bashing. Man-bashing is a legitimization or an excuse for the woman-bashing so prevalent in the men’s movement, but it is not the cause or the motivation of the woman-bashing. Man-bashing when done by women is a form of selfishness and narcissism. Woman-bashing when done by men is the same thing, selfishness and narcissism.

Laura writes:

Jesse writes: 

Now you might object, these women who bash men in no way are inclined to be submissive to men, to allow men to play their leadership role, as good bosses or managers. This is true, because the man has lost the trust of the woman due to his prior negligent behavior.

Women may also bitterly criticize men when they are doing everything right and when men are accepting their responsibilities. However, Jesse is right that society operates with a presumption of male responsibility that is attributable to the natural male role. Men are the first to blame even when they are not to blame. Jesse is also correct in his description of suicidal male passivity.

Jesse writes,

 What men should do in response to man-bashing is assert their value, virtue, and purpose as men, assert the authority they need as men to do their jobs, and take on the responsibilities that are associated with the male role. [emphasis added]

This is an excellent statement. Jesse is not saying that men should submissively accept insults. He is not saying men are always to blame for the insubordination, but that it grows worse when men do not assert themselves. This is no easy task in a world that demands men be hypersensitive. At the same time, as he acknowledged, women are to blame for their own selfishness and narcissism. Women are not children. They are morally accountable for the ingratitude and lack of respect they show for husbands, children and friends. Even assertive men cannot control a woman who is bent on destroying others.

                                                                                       — Comments —

David C. writes:

I would like to express my polite disagreement with Jesse. I don’t think he has proven that we blame men because we understand instinctively that authority belongs to them. I think we blame them because they do, in fact, occupy most positions of power in society, we’re unhappy with the things we see happening around us, and, like you said, Jesse, we tend to blame those who are in power. You and I agree that it makes sense to blame men but we hold this position for different reasons — you hold it because you say we all believe, instinctively, that men should have authority, and I hold it because I believe men already exercise that authority, at least at the highest levels of society. 

I think I can prove my point this way: Imagine that fifty years from now feminism has succeeded in radically inverting the historical order of authority. Now women hold virtually all the most important positions in society. They are the executives and politicans and clergy and so forth. However, much to our international surprise, large-scale mishaps still occur on occasion. Whom do you think the public would tend to blame? Women or men? I say it would be the women. It is very hard to blame anybody but the people who actually have the power.

Laura writes:

But we’ve primarily been talking about women criticizing men as husbands and fathers, not for their failures as executives or politicians. And women arguably hold the leadership position in the family today, especially given the tremendous increase in single mother households. So, if David is right, it would seem that men would be more openly bashing women instead of the other way around. Male authority in the family has been greatly diminished. Men do not “actually have the power.”\

David C. writes:

I see that women do often blame men for the failures of their families. Still, it seems to me this blaming is the result of the inability of such women to take responsibility for their own behavior rather than any instinctive understanding that men should wield authority.

Laura writes:

I think it is definitely a question of both. Women have this natural tendency to blame men that stems from relying on men, and they also resort to this habit even when they are themselves at fault. 

The analogy of employer and employee has serious limitations here because a husband-and-wife relationship is different and is based on mutual love. Still it works because the employee assumes the employer is in charge, as a wife often does with regard to a husband. Feminists wouldn’t admit this of course, but I believe this is one reason why anger at men only rises under feminism. Male authority is destroyed and yet women still presume it. The angry and embittered single mother is a perfect example of this. She has all the freedom from men she could possibly want and yet she is still enraged at them.

David Collard (not the same David C. as above) writes:

I have long felt the basic truth that women complain about men because subconsciously they expect men to be in charge. I have long noticed that somehow men are always to blame. And men accept this. It can be annoying or flattering, depending on a man’s mood. For example, I think men feel responsible for the entire family, including the behaviour of their wives. Whereas women, it seems to me, feel a special responsibility for their children’s behaviour. When my son misbehaves in public, my wife seems to feel more upset. I tend to take in my stride.

Male rights activists complain about “white knighting” in males, but so do feminists. A “white knight” – like any chivalrous man – is really taking responsibility for a woman and her well-being. The desire to protect a woman is very close to the desire to dominate her.

I was also thinking earlier, apropos of a remark at another blog, that if men and women are both obsessed with how women look, men and women are also both obsessed about what men think. Men’s considered ideas and thoughts seem to receive more weight than women’s. I think this is one reason why a woman can say dreadful things about men, and people just shrug it off, but men have to be so careful about what they say about women.

Laura writes:

Excellent. I especially like your point, The desire to protect a woman is very close to the desire to dominate her.

Similarly, a child may say, “I hate my mother,” but a mother cannot say, “I hate my child.”

Lisa writes:

Laura wrote, “Women may also bitterly criticize men when they are doing everything right and when men are accepting their responsibilities.”

See the kind and patient (and anything but effeminate) pioneer father, a real “Pa,” actually, played by a young Gregory Peck in the old movie The Yearling. He understands his wife, or at least knows how to handle her; is sympathetic to her heartbreaks and hardships and resulting bitterness, but never comes off as a doormat, and lays down the law sparingly, and only on behalf of someone else and not for his own needs or wants.

And Mark Jaws’ comment on the previous thread is so tenderly insightful: “Such emotional deserts [apathetic, uninvolved, or just unknowingly thoughtless fathers and husbands] do not cause flowers of love and appreciation towards men to bloom.”

Jesse writes:

When I was offering my explanation for the prevalence of male bashing, I was focused on the common petty insults directed at men in family or relationship situations. I think there is an instinctual or gut feeling that men are in charge, or should be in charge, and that this is reinforced by the power that men actually have, in the political and social realm and indeed in the family. I think women, in general, who aren’t with a man or who are with a weak unassertive man resent the man’s physical absence, when single, and resent the man’s authority absence, when with an unassertive man. In my experience, women with weak submissive men tend to actively resent the man’s passivity. It irritates them and seems to drive an ongoing hostility in them towards the man. This is true even with, or especially with, women who are bossy and domineering. Such women will aggressively hold onto their dominate position but at the same time resent the man’s weakness and passivity in giving in to them. 

I think if men in actuality are not in a position of power the man’s absence from his rightful authoritative role is resented, and there will be a tendency to blame the man for not asserting the position that according to the natural order of things he should hold. Men either actually hold the positions of power, in which case they are to blame for not making things work as they should, or women hold positions of power that men should be occupying, in which case they are to blame for allowing the woman to usurp their role, due to their passivity, negligence, and pandering. In the latter situation, the screw ups that women make, these are ultimately men’s fault because the women wouldn’t have been allowed to make those screw ups in the first place had men done their jobs and kept the reins of power in their hands. 

The moral of the story is, men, if you want to evade responsibility for what happens to society, you’re out of luck. Men are responsible either way, either directly or indirectly. People know this, sense this, feel this, leading to the dumping on men when things go wrong, as is so clearly happening in the world today. 

Man-bashing is often dysfunctional and gratuitous, but the way to respond to it is to assert your role as a man. This will not get rid of the insults, though it might lessen them after the initial outrage at the offense of male authority dies down, but at least it will make you as a man part of the solution instead of part of the problem. 

This extreme criticism is a side effect of the overall dysfunction of society. The only solution is a long-term one, the re-establishment of patriarchy oriented to the well-being of men, women and children.

Brendan writes:

I guess my own view on this is that many women get conflicted on this point because they are culturally taught that their relationships with men should be equalist, but then they find that this is not achievable in reality — in reality, either the wife or the husband has the balance of power in a relationship. I think it’s a bit of an oversimplification to state that women are all upset because men are abdicating leadership. There are quite a few women who are conversely upset because their husband has more “power” in the relationship, when they were culturally told it should be more equal. I think, in other words, that quite a few women are enraged because they are unable to achieve “full and total equality” in their relationships with men — either because she holds more power than he does (which both bores and angers her) or he holds more power than she does (which again angers and causes resentment in more than a few cases).

It’s tricky to assess the blame for this on the men who are marrying today, I think. The women they are marrying have been programmed to be equalists, as have the men. And the legal system is firmly on the side of the woman, really, in case there are any disputes. It’s true that these laws were passed by men, too — but those are different men from the men who are getting married today. Again, as I have said in the past, I don’t think it’s as simple as men “manning up” and women following along — there are not a few men who have tried this only to be unceremoniously thrashed by their now ex-wives by the family law system. Until both the equalist programming and the law itself are addressed, couples are still going to be struggling and muddling through their desire for an equalist relationship as compared with the reality of one or the other having most of the power.

Laura writes:

There are quite a few women who are conversely upset because their husband has more “power” in the relationship, when they were culturally told it should be more equal.

Even in a more functional society, and one less imbued with egalitarianism, some women will resent their own lack of independence and the power their husbands have over them. That will never change.

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