All this abuse, assault, rape, discrimination and a hundred and one other micro- and not so micro-aggressions women must put up with daily, and all from men who claim to be sexually attracted to women. What gives?
Some experts have said that misogyny begins when, way back in the childhood of a boy, an important female figure, either a mother or sister or other, makes a mistake or does something wrong which wounds the psyche and plants a seed of doubt in his mind. As he gets older, this small sapling of hatred grows as various events transpire to confirm his doubts, which, when compounded with the patriarchal attitudes of other men suffering from the same problem at different stages of life and the unsafe environment that women find themselves in, which leads females to reject male advances perhaps more often than they would do if a safer environment was provided, result in a full-blown hatred developing by adulthood.
Hmmm! What to do about this? How can we heal this wound and return men to a love for women?
Now this is kind of personal for me because I have the exact opposite problem: although I am a feminist, I am unsure whether I am more of a feminist or a philogynist (somebody who loves women). Philogyny is the opposite of misogyny (not misandry, which is the hatred of men and, thus, misogyny’s counterpart).
At a very young age, two or three years old, I suffered physical, emotional, mental and verbal abuse from my father (though not sexual). When I started school, I then suffered further abuse from boys through teasing and bullying, leaving me as an adult with a distinct fear of violent reprisal from men and a distrust of them, caused by a cognitive bias that seemed to be corroborated by every subsequent letdown, both major and minor.
I am interested, then, in how the experience of many men results in misogyny and philandry (love of men), while my experience has resulted in philogyny and perhaps a little bit of misandry.
The fear is real. While, on a daily basis, not much usually happens, there is always that lingering terror that I might say something that would cause a man to fly off the handle and launch into a terrible physical attack upon my person, inflicting horrific, lifelong damage. That spider sense of fear and what I have just described is common and familiar to many women. An attempt to overcome it is a good thing to hope for but it would be a formidable and sometimes overwhelming challenge. What follows are two things that I hope will help. They are a partial solution, necessarily perhaps, but they are the best shot I can offer at my current level of understanding and experience.
The first solution is the Core Conditions of counselling theorist Carl Rogers, the founder of Client-Centred Therapy. He argued that every counselling relationship should feature EMPATHY, GENUINENESS and UNCONDITIONAL POSITIVE REGARD. These three, when all present at the same time, are necessary and sufficient to create positive change in the client. I believe men who suffer from misogyny should go to a Rogerian counsellor to experience Client-Centred Therapy. An exploration of their hatred for women and the experience of the Core Conditions can allow them to achieve release from the original pain caused by the initial female long ago and any subsequent major episodes.
Having achieved this, a further consideration could be CBT — Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, which rigorously questions pre-existing mental biases and subjects them to a comparison with objective reality, which then results in the creation of more accurate and positive mental models.
My second solution can perhaps follow on from that — exposure therapy, when the male is re-introduced to female society in a series of graded events that range from easy to difficult. “Easy” can be defined as any number of social occasions, from meeting women for a brief “hello” in the street to deep, meaningful conversations in quiet coffee shops on Sunday mornings.
However, one of the weaknesses of this approach is that it lacks any sexual or romantic content. Many rejections occurred during adolescence around sexual relations. I propose the idea of men learning how to offer women non-sexual physical pleasure in a consensual context, where he practises giving the Core Conditions to a woman while doing that.
For me, that physical element is, of course, massage therapy. There could be other forms but that is the one I have discovered in my life so far. What I have found is that the Core Conditions in the massage room create an environment of trust between therapist and client which, after a level of trust has been established and the woman has undergone perhaps five or more sessions of experiencing unconditional positive regard, she tends to start experimenting with pushing the boundaries — partly to test how unconditional the positive regard really is and partly to desire, often for the first time in her life, the possibility of acting out sexually in a non-exploitative context on her own terms, rather than the therapist’s.
This is often a huge revelation to men. Many men grow up with the idea that every time he wants a woman to do anything sex-related, it always means tricking, forcing, persuading or otherwise overcoming resistance to achieve it. The idea that a woman might volunteer to start doing this without any effort on his part, simply because he created a safe environment for her to do so, is a new experience and one that absolutely blows him away. He becomes enormously committed to creating this experience over and over, again and again. It revolutionizes his understanding of female sexuality and there can often be remorse at the methods he has used in the past to achieve what has now become so easy. He also develops a fear of messing up because, if he does, she won’t do it anymore. This, in turn, rewires his brain to associate sex and pleasure with safety, consent and female acceptance. I hope it can heal him of his misogyny.
Is this ethical? I think so. The woman is volunteering, it’s 100% consensual for both of them and a wonderfully positive and liberating experience. How far things go is up to the woman and the man is happy that anything is even happening at all.
This is a necessarily partial solution — I can detect holes in it where perhaps unforeseen things could happen that fall outside my zone of experience. There is also the question of how to roll this out globally to all men everywhere. However, I think it’s a good start and believe it will go a long way to solving the seemingly protracted problem of misogyny in this world.
Originally published on Medium.
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In my opinion, you’ve missed the main reasons for misogyny in Western society. It’s not caused so much by childhood experiences per sé, although I’d suppose it’s reinforced by experience. But like misogyny is rampant on a sociological level, I think the main causes are as well. And the reason it’s not so easily realized is that there’s too much presumption that “it’s a man’s world,” and only females are oppressed. Feminism, often equated with gender equality, has this general presumption. Which is why “misogyny” is such a high energy topic, while “misandry” is commonly scoffed at. I, like the… Read more »