Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them: When Love Hurts and You Don't Know Why: When Loving Hurts And You Don't Know Why

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If I were to go in search of this dark matter, that thing inside men that makes them treat women as two-dimensional characters in their three-dimensional narratives, I would have to look deep into the hidey-hole of the unconscious mind. There is a reason that the phrase “Tell me about your mother” is shorthand for the sprawling landscape of psychoanalysis. Adam Jukes is a writer and therapist of more than 40 years who, for half of that time, specialised in treating men who abused women. The author of Why Men Hate Women and What You've Got Is What You Want Even If It Hurts shares a common belief that it is the trauma of childhood and, most crucially, the relationship between a boy and his mother-figure that steers the course of male psychology. For cost savings, you can change your plan at any time online in the “Settings & Account” section. If you’d like to retain your premium access and save 20%, you can opt to pay annually at the end of the trial. verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ Bates agrees that the phrase is problematic, but, as she wryly asks towards the end of her book, why should she and her sisters have to do all the work of detoxifying language, and men themselves? Perhaps we men who don’t hate women can make a small start by replacing talk of “toxic masculinity” with something more appropriate to Johnson, Trump, and their acolytes – perhaps, say, “pathetic man-babyism”?

Men have a very weird set of messages hurled at them from the day they are born, especially when it comes to women. These messages come from parents, friends, online dating gurus, romantic comedies, porn, and more. You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. Compare Standard and Premium Digital here.

Signs of misogyny

He is extremely competitive, especially with women. If a woman does better than him socially or professionally, he feels terrible. If a man does better, he may have mixed feelings about it but he is able to look at the situation objectively. He will unknowingly treat women differently from men in workplace and social settings, allowing men various liberties for which he will criticize female colleagues or friends. The band’s defenders will often point to the bawdy humour in their songs. The big-breasted, thunder-thighed women and hopelessly horny boys that inhabit them bring to mind saucy seaside postcards and Carry On films. In 2004, in an interview with Sylvie Simmons for Mojo magazine, guitarist and band founder Angus Young remarked, “We’re pranksters more than anything else,” while his brother Malcolm noted: “We’re not like some macho band. We take the music far more seriously than we take the lyrics, which are just throwaway lines.” But if the band members are merely pranksters, then women are their punchlines.

The pitiful irony here, as Bates shows, is that “men’s rights” groups splintered from the original, pro-feminist “men’s liberation” movement, which sought to free men themselves from harmful social expectations of masculinity. As one activist put it: “Our enemy isn’t women – it’s the role we are forced to play.” Nearly 50 years later, this still sounds like it might be worth a try, especially in a modern culture formed around such ossified, regressive stereotypes that it can seem society has become much more sexist even since the 1990s.And this stuff filters upwards through friendly media and middlemen such as far-right commentator Milo Yiannopoulos, so that men at the top can speak in code to their supporters. When Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed for the Supreme Court despite allegations of sexual assault, Donald Trump said he supported “men and justice”, a clear dogwhistle to the misogynist demographic that believe they are victims of a vast feminist conspiracy. Boris Johnson, meanwhile, called David Cameron a “girly swot”, implying that women are to be despised for learning, and wrote of the “hot totty” at a Labour party conference. As Bates shows, moreover, sexism and anti-immigrant rhetoric often go hand in hand, via the conspiracy theory that foreigners challenge the rightful supremacy of the white male.

Plenty, but not all. There’s an unpleasant sneering quality to Bon Scott’s assertion on Carry Me Home: “You ain’t no lady but you sure got taste in men/That head of yours has got you by time and time again.” In Let Me Put My Love Into You, Johnson sings: “Don’t you struggle, don’t you fight/Don’t worry cause it’s your turn tonight”, a grim rape fantasy with the payoff: “Let me cut your cake with my knife.” Sexually, he likes to control women and gives little or no attention to their sexual pleasure. Foreplay, if it occurs at all, is only a necessary means to an end. He likes oral sex but only as a recipient. His favorite positions enable him to avoid looking the woman in her eyes. A few years ago, while my daughter was playing with a group of girls at a friend’s house, I overheard one of them prancing around in front of a mirror and wondering out loud if she looked fat. It was just role-play, an imitation of something seen on television or perhaps said by a parent, but it was chilling to hear; an unsettling fantasy of future anxiety. But more male involvement in a child’s development is not a simple panacea. “It doesn’t mean we won’t have fury and dependency,” says Orbach. “But they would be ameliorated and it wouldn’t be expressed in terms of girls feeling shit about themselves because they’ve got their own internalised misogyny and boys being so damn frightened that they’ve got to control women.” At the moment the political will to make these changes does not exist. In this superb self-help guide, Dr. Susan Forward draws on case histories and the voices of men and women trapped in these negative relationships to help you understand your man’s destructive pattern and the part you play in it.

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The cultish nature of incels is not an aberration but an extension of male psychological development He will make promises to women and often fail to keep them. With men, on the other hand, he will almost always keep his word. Even in a nurturing family, a child will grow up with chauvinism,” says Jukes. “Culture and society are the seedbed where the child’s misogyny takes root. The construction of the woman as the carer is all around us, and that is part of what informs men’s rage with women. In my millennial patients I don’t see any difference to patients I was seeing decades ago.” Men are not victims and incels represent the worst in men: how they refuse to accept their own responsibilities and their reluctance to know themselves or admit what lives in their unconscious. The root of this is shame and frustration, which analysts believe comes from a childhood spent feeling impotent in the shadow of the father (castration anxiety) and separated from the mother. Masculinity, therefore, is a defence mechanism. Two books about hate and gender have been published in recent weeks; one is pretty much irrelevant, but has been propelled into the global spotlight thanks to an overly zealous French official and a tiny but astute publisher. The other is a profoundly important piece of work that is unlikely to get the universal attention it deserves. These topsy-turvy reactions reveal much about skewed societal reactions to feminism.