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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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. 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.

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. 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. I am a proud feminist, and a sizeable proportion of my work as a journalist is about combating sexism. I try, where possible, to encourage my daughter to think about how women are represented in art, music, film and everyday life. Together we have looked quizzically at the acres of pink in children’s clothes shops and at the miniature cookers and plastic cupcakes aimed at little girls in Toys R Us. We have talked about why so many of the female characters in classic kids’ books are dismissed as bossy, or cry a lot, or play second fiddle to the boys. We have had tentative conversations about sex, physical autonomy and body image. I try to be frank with her at all times, but even I’m not quite ready to give her a full breakdown of the body shaming, objectification and dehumanising of women in the AC/DC oeuvre.Interesting read, but some of the ideas and opinions expressed are outdated at best and potentially dangerous at worst. He will zero in on a woman and choose her as his target. Her natural defenses may be down because he’s flirtatious, exciting, fun, and charismatic at first. 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. 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.

AC/DC are the worst. This much I know. They are preposterously smutty, hopelessly unsophisticated, and pretty much every one of their songs sounds the same. As well as big riffs, they are defined by casual sexism and oafish double entendres. When not extolling the delights of fighting, gambling, drinking and fast cars, their songs are about getting laid or hoping to get laid. Their songs are populated by strippers, prostitutes and young men with apparently unvanquishable erections. They really are appalling. Man, I love AC/DC. 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. 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. It’s this context that, in the case of AC/DC, renders their lyrics daft as opposed to damaging. In seeing the band for what they really are – a bunch of archly sex-obsessed idiots with sharp tunes and some seriously killer riffs – she might just grow up to love them critically, but love them all the same. 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.

The overall effect is relentlessly chilling; it is impossible to imagine what it must be like, to be the actual focus of this violent fantasy. Yet it wasn’t Bates’s personal experience of far-right misogyny that spurred her research. Rather, she reveals, in the sober, precise but accessible terms that recall her pre-Everyday Sexism career as a researcher (straight out of university, she worked for the sex and relationships expert Susan Quilliam, who was updating The Joy of Sex): “The reason I suddenly decided I had to write about it was because of this bizarre experience I was having in schools.” Only once, in the whole world, have terrorist charges been brought in relation to an incel killing It’s because of moments such as this that I’ve made a point of offering my child an alternative narrative – one in which women can be proud of their bodies, exist apart from the male gaze and not just reject but hoot with laughter at the moronic archetypes presented in advertising, the media, film, TV and music. It’s worth noting that none of this – at least so far – has come at the expense of her enjoyment. She will roll her eyes at the teeny-weeny waists and bulging eyes of Disney heroines, but will still happily watch the movies.

verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ She shows how to break the pattern, heal the hurt, regain your self-respect, and either rebuild your relationship or find the courage to love a truly loving man. If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month. 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. Damaging male behaviour has for a while been called “toxic masculinity”, but the problem with accusing people like Johnson of toxic masculinity is that what they will choose to hear is a) that they are very masculine (jolly good!), and b) that masculinity itself is fundamentally poisonous (which proves that the speaker must be a crazed man-hater).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.” He will cheat on women he is dating or in a relationship with. Monogamy is the last thing he feels he owes a woman. 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”? Incels – the online subculture of self-loathing “involuntary celibates” who define themselves through their inability to find love or a sexual partner – fit this misogynistic pattern very neatly. Paradoxically, these self-proclaimed losers also exhibit a kind of hyper-masculinity. The cultish nature of incels is not an aberration but an extension of male psychological development: a need to control mixed with a sense of humiliation. It’s always someone else’s fault – in the case of incels, it begins with a belief that genetics has dealt them a bad hand. Damn you, Mother Nature.