Men are the problem

Men are not so mad, bad or sad that they can’t make choices, and they are not so infantile or helpless that they can’t be answerable for those choices.

Image by Pexels from Pixabay

Rape. Murder. Sexual harassment. Image based abuse. Stalking. Coercive control. Child sexual abuse. Physical assault. Even animal cruelty. Crimes that destroy lives and futures and the one factor that binds them all together is that they are almost always committed by men, often against women and girls.

It’s not race, class, religion, sexuality, education, or childhood experiences that separate violence and non-violent people. It’s gender. Women (who are even more mad or sad than men) do not rape. Women (who are definitely more economically disenfranchised than men) do not kill the way men do. Women and girls, who are more likely to be traumatised in childhood, are far less likely than men to inflict trauma on others.

The conclusion is inescapable: men are the problem.

Violence is a choice and reasons are not excuses. Reasons might explain a choice, but they do not diminish accountability or responsibility for that choice. The poor little lost boys narrative doesn’t help boys and men but it does do significant harm to everyone else.

I read a lot of feminist writing and I am very aware of my obligations here. After making statements like this, I’m supposed to launch into a #NotAllMen qualifier to prove I am not a man-hating witch-crone ripped straight from fairy tales that document the bitter jealousy of unfuckable old women who fling curses at pure and beautiful young (white) women to destroy their chance of marrying a handsome prince.

Then I’m supposed to follow that up with a Good Woman proof-of-life paragraph about men and boys being sad and lonely and driven into poverty, which makes all their hatred and rage and violence entirely understandable. Poor little lads. *pat pat*

No. I’ve seen too many other feminists do this and I’ve done it myself too many times. Enough.

I’ve been spelunking through the manosphere since before the word was invented and I have NEVER seen a #notallwomen qualifier. Not once.

Imagine what #notallwomen might look like: Women are hurting boys and men, running their lives with their allegations of rape and abuse! Not all women though. I personally know lots of good women. My wife is a very good woman. She always helps out around the house, and she almost never complain about it. She even helps babysit the kids on weekends and she’s super aware of how difficult things are for men and boys. She would never dream of raping or abusing any man, so I know all too well that it’s not all women.

It just doesn’t happen. No woman-hating masculinity influencer has ever felt any pressure to modify or qualify his stance. It’s not just ok for angry men to hate women, it’s expected. Normalised. Accepted. Decried perhaps, but in the tolerantly sympathetic way a sports commentator might talk about an athlete who blew out his knee and can’t play ball anymore. It’s disappointing, it really is, but what can you do?

The “man-hater” label is supposed to discredit women who cite facts about male-dominated violence perpetration statistics or suggest that the wounds men inflict on women and girls are not trivial or irrelevant. Their data, research, facts, and voice are meant to be obliterated by the unproven allegation that they hate men (for no reason other than bitterness and their own unfuckability). As one calm, unemotional, logical man of the internet once said to me, “you’re only saying that because you’re a dirty slut who can’t get laid”.

Hatred is rarely about facts and truth, but I’ve not seen any men of the internet contemplate what might happen is if women actually did hate men. What if all that violence, objectification and contempt got so exhausting and damaging that women stopped trying to understand, cajole and persuade men, and just hated them instead? What if women were as socialized to rage and violence as men? Imagine the vengeance we would wreak, the collective liability we could carve out on men’s bodies, the pain we could inflict if we had contempt and hatred for men that led us to ignore, dismiss, erase and obliterate their lives and center ourselves in every story, every policy, every law, every decision and every sentence.

Would we find the tolerant sympathy that women-hating men expect in every corner of their world? Of course not, because men have always been emotional vortex of every story, where the bit players (women, girls, “unmanly” men, non-binary people) revolve around the hero’s every thought and feeling, reflecting adulation and submission or suffering just punishment for their refusal to do so.

Refusing to allow men to be so mad, bad or sad that they cannot recognise women and girls are real people is not hatred. As Will Stracke once told me, men know the way they treat women is wrong. They don’t need special classes to teach them about consent and respect because they do that with each other all the time. No one would suggest running special workshops to teach retail staff that stealing from the cash register is wrong. We just expect that knowledge as the basic minimum standard and there are immediate and unavoidable consequences for breaching that standard. Ignorance wouldn’t even be attempted as a defence: Oh, am I NOT supposed to filtch a tenner out of the register for lunch every day? Huh! I had no idea. How was I supposed to know? The money was just sitting there unprotected! My father used to nick money out of the till all the time and so did his father before him. It’s just what men do!

Men are not so ignorant, depressed, disenfranchised or lonely that they can’t understand sexually harassing and stalking women is not ok. They’re not lacking role models who can teach them that rape and abuse is wrong. They already know. But they do it anyway. As I wrote in the Rape Is A Theoretical Crime series here on Substack, they do it because they are entitled, opportunistic, raging, fearful, contemptuous or dismissive and they use those feelings as excuses for destruction, pouring them into what they perceive as an empty female vessel.

The bar for men is set so low it’s in the depths of hell and they still can’t reach it. Are you not drugging and raping your wife? Are you not watching videos of other men drugging and raping their wives? Are you not part of a predatory culture of organized rape and humiliation of teenage girls? Are you not talking over, ignoring and dismissing women you work with and live with? Are you not laughing along tolerantly as men joke about these things? Wow! What a Good Guy^TM.

Anyone who has ever been to a book launch, school event, conference or public discussion about the violence committed by men and boys will know that the overwhelming majority of people in the room are always women. The few men who do turn up are so often greeted with excessive applause that they will often get miffed at women who don’t shower them with uncritical praise. Men have more spare time than women but they’re far more likely to use it to play video games than to care for men and boys’ wellbeing. That’s women’s work.

Men are lauded for meeting the lowest possible standards while women are vilified for failing to do the impossible

I’m not advocating vengeance. Mostly because it rarely works and we are in desperate need of something that does work. But I do think we need to stop apologizing for our anger, qualifying our facts and endorsing men’s excuses for the violence they choose to commit. Men are the problem. They need to be accountable for the choices they make and the harm they do. Excusing, minimising and dismissing that harm is perpetuating it and men don’t need any more help to do that.

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AI declaration: I do not use AI in any of my work. Not for writing, structure or research. Mostly because the few times I tried it the results were so incomplete and unreliable that it ended up being faster and better to do it myself. I’m told AI has improved significantly since then, but I’ve chosen to not explore this because I don’t want to be tempted away from the complex imperfection of my own thoughts, voice and analysis.

I have sometimes used AI to create images, and they are all labelled as such. Graphs and data are all my own work from spreadsheets I create myself and data I download from reliable sources such as the ABS.