40
DiscussionWhat did men teach you about men that you wish you didn't know?
I mean, I guess I'm glad I know all these things, but the education was so harmful, so discouraging, so scary. I was making a list today, and these are the things men who were in my life taught me about men that I wish I didn't know, or rather, that I wish were not true. Add you own in the comments!
I learned that love and sex have almost no connection for men. For many men, "I love you" merely means "I want to have sex with your body." And then most men experience a cognitive affective shift after sex that means they are less interested in you after they've marked you by having sex with your body.
I learned that men are capable of forcing you into sex. Men are also capable of using violence against you. And they can do these things while claiming to "love" you. In fact, the violence of dominance sexually arouses them.
I learned that men's minds and hearts are always laser-focused on other men. Status among male peers is what men crave most of all. To gain that status (or not to lose what status they have), men are fully prepared to throw women under the bus, even women they "love."
I learned that you will always be a woman to a man, and you can never be a friend or an equal. I learned they will pay far less attention to what you say than what any man--literally some bum off the street--says.
I learned that if you try to emulate men or stand up for men, that does not bring you men's respect. Handmaidens are always just that, a member of the servant class.
I learned that expecting reciprocity from a man is like expecting blood from a turnip. Reciprocity is reserved for other men.
I learned that men are fully invested in the double standard, and believe the legal system exists to provide impunity for any crimes men commit against women.
The connection is not to a specific woman or person but to "woman" or "people." The warmth comes from their internal sense of continuity from woman to woman or social experience to social experience. It's like a pool they dip into and dip back out of again. The continuity is in themselves only, though they do not feel it that way.
As a young woman, I was often puzzled by the tendency of men I hooked up with to think they knew things about me and to sort of script a personality for me (frequently wrong), and I think this is at the bottom of it. They have an idea of "woman" and they plug all the women they engage with into that idea, like they were casting a role or dressing a doll. Then, even though you are a completely different woman than the one they engaged with last time, they approach you with the same sense of warmth and familiarity.
Gay men do this too. And granted, most of the gay men I know are of a certain generation, but I used to marvel at the immediate yet impersonal intimacy of the gay dance club experience. The point was to go lose yourself in "man/men." Individual men you interacted with in this scene were just a part of "man/men." There was this huge, throbbing (forgive the adjectives) sense of connection and enmeshment that could be wholly impersonal but felt very personal in the moment.
I spent a lot of time studying men, charming ones in particular, because I wanted a character in a book I was writing to be as realistic as possible. If I had been born a man, I think this is the particular evil I could have fallen into--a love for "anima"--the idea that woman is a welcoming pool you can always dip into and enjoy, whether or not you've bothered to build and maintain relationships with specific women. This also explains men's shock when they age and young women become less willing to fill this role.
Wow, that's an amazing insight . . .