"We are not feminists because we hate men; we are
feminists because we respect and love men and we don't understand why they do
not always return that respect."
Germaine Greer, author of the “The Female Eunuch”
Many women have been puzzled by this lack of love and
respect. After all, logic suggests that
if you love someone, they would naturally love you in return. Yet many women in relationships with men
don’t find this and often experience the complete opposite.
To be fair, there are some men who can fully appreciate a
woman’s love for them but it isn't true of all of them. The mystery for too many women is that when
they try to love men, they only receive contempt, abuse and even violence in
return. As a result, large numbers of
women all over the world are beaten up, raped and murdered by men. The most common way women become murder
victims is to be killed by their male partner.
Not only this, many women today have access to pornographic
videos on the internet and are shocked by how badly women are treated in these
films. The same is true of video games
made for young men, which are full of extreme violence, some with female
characters on the receiving end of it.
It suggests that many men are sadists, because they become sexually
excited by seeing women being mistreated.
The question women ask is, “why are men like this?”
One of the barriers to understanding this is feminism
itself. The feminist dogma, which claims
that men and women are the same, is not helpful, because it is clear that they
are not. Yes, it's true you can find
feminine men who will act like women, or masculine women who behave like men,
but people like this are in the minority.
The way the majority of women and men think, feel and behave are radically
different from each other.
The biggest difference between men and women is that women
give birth to children and men don’t.
The very fact of childbirth and childcare makes women unlike men in so many
ways. The maternal instinct makes women
far more caring people than men.
Feminists don’t want to be reminded of this. It would be too easy for
chauvinistic men to use this fact to claim that women should stay at home and
look after the children while men go to work.
Unfortunately, when following the feminist dream, women find
themselves trying to hold down a job as well as look after their home and
children, with limited support from men.
This is because, on the whole, men do not have the same commitment to
care for children as women do. They love them, maybe, but not in the way a
woman does. As a result, too many men are left free to pursue their careers and
hobbies and mostly leave childcare to the woman.
If we look at the animal world, we can get a clearer
understanding of why this is so. In most
species of mammals, (which is what humans are), males fight each other for
dominance and access to females. We see
this clearly in animals like stags, rams and bulls who bash their heads
together every year. So we find that
males instinctively associate competition, aggression, violence, dominance and
submission with sexual desire.
Male birds have been observed helping to care for the young
and in some species do as much, or even more, than the mother. This is not true with mammals, where most
males do little to help and support the mothers with young. In some species like bears, tigers and lions,
the males will even kill and eat the young of their own species.
Female animals rarely fight each other, as their instincts
are largely concerned with giving birth and looking after their young. The masculine drive concerns competition,
aggression and violence, while the feminine one is maternal and is all about
love, caring and nurturing. They couldn't be more different.
This is why many men who are loved by women do not always
give love in return. A man instinctively competes against everyone, including
the woman he is having a relationship with. She shows love for the man, but he
is fighting her for dominance. It's not going to be a successful outcome for
the woman.
When male animals battle each other there is no sense of
fairness or equality. The winner has
greater access to females and food, while the loser is pushed away. We see a similar situation in human
males. When men compete against each
other for money or power, the rules of the game are, “the winner takes it
all”. We can see the result of this in
the big gap between rich and poor in all patriarchal societies. The poor are
the losers in the endless fight for dominance between men.
If a man exhibits the same attitude in his relationship with
women, he may compete against the female by verbally abusing her or beating
her. What he wants is her submission to him. When he thinks he has won this
game, because he has made the woman frightened of him, he then assumes he has
the right to dominate and mistreat her.
Many men, who are losers in games they play with other men, feel that
this is the one game they can easily win, because they are bigger, stronger and
more aggressive than women.
The crazy truth behind all this is that many men want loving
women, who will care for and support
them, but instead of being grateful, they return this love with abuse. What
these men don’t realise is that women are not playing male competitive games.
They don’t know they are supposed to be fighting for power with their male
partners; all they know is that for some strange reason, their partner is being
horrible to them. It's a mystery.
Women then try to tame men by being even more loving or
trying to reason with them. Sometimes this can work, as occasional men come to
realize that their relationship with women is not a fight for dominance. Some men can even appreciate this, relax and
enjoy the fact they are with someone they are not in competition with.
Although some men can wake up to the fact they are acting
like jerks and become ashamed of their behaviour towards women, what often gets
in the way is the pull of popular culture, which tells men they need to be
tough and macho. It encourages men to be
even more aggressive than they normally are.
They believe that women love men who are assertive, dominant and even
violent. Many women fall for it too and come to think they should love macho
men.
Too many men can get away with their selfish behaviour
because women tend to treat them like children.
Women love their children deeply, but on the whole, children show very
little appreciation for the things their mothers do for them. As some mothers have complained, “no one
knows what I do, until I don’t do it.”
Women caring for children become used to giving and nurturing without
reward or thanks. This means that for
many women, an unappreciative man is just another selfish child.
Men also use a double standard about women who freely have
sex with lots of men. This is exactly
what men want- women who will give them sex with no strings attached. But instead of being grateful, they call
women like this whores, sluts and tarts and treat them with contempt. Paradoxically, men seem to respect women who
will say “no” to them and play, “hard to get” games, because they are behaving
like men.
They have similar attitudes towards prostitutes who, again,
are giving men what they want- sex with no emotional attachment. They show no
respect for these women. Many sex
workers are frequently attacked physically as well as verbally and even
murdered by men, unless they have some form of protection, usually a pimp, who
may also beat them to show who's boss.
So we have the strange situation that if women give men what
they want, they show no gratitude. However, if a high-class prostitute demands
large sums of money for her services or treats the man cruelly, then she is
given far more respect. This suggests
masochistic behaviour in men. They only admire cruel and demanding women,
because it reminds them of themselves. It's what they would do.
The possible masochism of men is another barrier to
understanding what is going on between men and women. This word comes from the works of a 19th
century author called Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, who wrote a famous novel
called, “Venus In Furs”. In this story
he describes a relationship in which a man is completely dominated and
mistreated by a woman. (It seems this
story was partly autobiographical.) From
this book came the word masochism – the desire to be badly treated.
The irony is that von Sacher-Masoch was a man, but the word
'masochist' is generally used to describe females. In the early 20th century it was commonly
believed among psychologists that all women were essentially masochistic. They
really want to be hurt and mistreated.
This belief has since been challenged by feminists but it still remains
strong in popular culture.
The problem for men trying to understand women is that the
behaviour of women who give unconditional love without complaint and those who
are masochistic are very similar. The
difference is that a person who gives unconditional love is acclaimed as a
saintly person, while the masochist is thought of as being mentally ill, with
self-esteem issues.
As a result, women with abusive male partners are hit with a
double whammy. Not only are they being abused, but it's claimed they secretly
like it, because they have a mental illness.
Men who mistreat women want to believe this, because it justifies their
behaviour. As many men who abuse or rape women like to claim, “she was asking
for it.” It's a rationalisation. If they
conceded that they were gratuitously hurting kind and caring people, their
behaviour would be seen as abhorrent, even to them.
Fortunately, not all men want to treat women badly, but even
when this is true, women often have further problems. Some men want to go from
one extreme to the other. Instead of
being men who mistreat women, they want to be men abused by women. This was
clearly true in the case of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch.
So if men who hurt women are a mystery to women, what are
they to think of men who want women to be cruel to them? In the Femdom scene
men ask, plead and even pay for women to dominate and humiliate them. Again we can make sense of this if we go back
to men’s competitive instincts.
There are men who still instinctually desire to compete
against women for dominance, but because they recognize that women are caring
and loving people, they don't want to hurt them. It's the first step on the
road to loving women. As far as they are concerned, there is only one other
option - it means that women have to
abuse them. In men’s competitive games
there has to be a winner and a loser. It's very black and white thinking. If a man cannot be a winner because he is not
ruthless enough to compete with and dominate a woman, then the price he has to
pay is to be a loser. He is not macho
enough to be a winner. Given the choice,
such men would prefer to be in a relationship where women mistreat them, than
the other way around.
For most women this makes no sense at all. They see no
problem with simply being equals in a relationship. They are used to
co-operating instead of competing. But the competitive instinct is too strong
in men, even when they are aware of it. It's what is normal for them. Just as caring and supporting people is
normal for women. In most situations men naturally compete to get their own way
or to impose their views, even if it makes their partner or children miserable.
It's a very powerful instinct and difficult to ignore.
In the wild, male animals can only co-exist by establishing
a hierarchy of some kind. When two males
meet each other, they growl, threaten and even fight each other, until one male
backs down. This then makes him
subordinate to the other male, and a pecking order is established. Most male animals end up playing the
subordinate role because there can only be one male leader in any group of
animals and he will demand constant submission.
Men are not much different.
The whole of patriarchal society has been created by men as a hierarchal
system, though the pecking order in human society is mostly established by who
has the most money. Men have to do this,
because it's the only way they can co-operate without constant conflict. As
with other animals, most men end up playing a subordinate role, because in all
patriarchal societies there are far fewer Chiefs than Indians.
Men want the same system in their relationships with
women. They want one of them to be
established as the boss for the relationship to work. If this doesn’t happen, then the man becomes
unhappy until the pecking order is sorted out. He needs to know whether he's in
charge or not.
This constant jockeying for position can be a problem even
in the Femdom scene. Women complain that Femdom men try to “top from the
bottom”. They instruct women how they want to be dominated or abused, so they
hang on to control that way. They still want to be in charge even though what
they are ordering is that women whip them and abuse them. As a result, if a woman doesn't keep making
it clear that she is the boss, she can find herself simply acting out their
fantasies, just like any other woman.
This might be just another habit. Men who pay a dominatrix
become used to telling her their fantasies and having them acted out. Truly dominant women have to put them right
about this and change the relationship from fantasy to reality. This is why in femdom relationships, men have
to frequently go through rituals like kissing the woman’s feet, to remind them
of their subservient role. Femdom men
call this 'going into sub-space', which is the feeling they have when
submitting to female authority.
A relationship where the woman is the boss solves most
problems for women. She can make her male partner take his fair share of
looking after the house and children.
She can decide to continue working and make her male partner leave his
job to become a househusband. This
allows a woman to have both a career and children at the same time, if that's
what she wants.
A truly dominant woman doesn’t have to involve herself in
the femdom game of abusing her male partner.
We cannot assume that a woman is cruel and vicious just because she is
dominant. It’s perfectly possible for a
bossy woman to be a compassionate and caring person. Just because dominant men tend to be brutal
and selfish, it doesn’t mean dominant women have to be the same. It is women’s strong maternal instinct that
makes it possible for women to be caring and loving leaders, who do not abuse
their position.
For women, love is instinctive and natural, so much so, that
it has been suggested women 'love too much'.
For this reason, women who try to participate in the competitive games
men play in sport, business, politics or even war, are encouraged to suppress
their loving feeling towards others and try and be as ruthless as men are. Some women are able to do this, but not the
majority. Because of their maternal instincts, female leaders feel they want to
be a good mother to the people they rule, not a cruel tyrant.
Men are also capable of love, but their competitive instinct
gets in the way. It's not easy to love
someone you are competing against, but it happens. Take boxing for example.
Before a fight, the two boxers will insult each other to try to “psych each
other out”. Then they will fight and try
to inflict as much damage as they can on each other. Afterwards, they will embrace
and even show genuine love for each other.
The same is true in all competitive sports, where sportsmen
demonstrate a degree of both love and hate for each other. It is also true of businessmen or
politicians. They use all sorts of dirty tricks to try to outsmart their
business or political opponents, but are still able to socialise with each
other. It is even true of soldiers in
war, who are trying to kill each other but then can show genuine love for their
enemy when the fighting stops.
Unfortunately, it can also happen when men have relationships with
women, much to the confusion of the woman. Women do not understand why men can
be both loving and cruel in their relationship with others.
Men complain women are very mysterious and complicated. What is ironic and not so well-known, is that
women say the same thing about men, as we see with the Germaine Greer quote at
the beginning of this article. The big
problem for women is that they are largely unaware that competitive men tend to
love and worship winners and despise losers.
If a woman presents herself to a competitive male as a loser, not able
to beat him, then the man will feel contempt for her. When women try to appease an abusive man, all
that happens is that they receive even more abuse.
There is a saying that, “people can only love us to the
degree we love ourselves”. This is the
lesson women have to learn in their relationships with men. A woman who doesn’t love herself is a sitting
duck in any relationship with a man. She
is far more likely to accept either verbal or physical mistreatment from
men. By doing this, she unwittingly
encourages them to do it even more. This
is also true for mothers caring for children.
A mother who is too self-sacrificial can be taken for granted and even
treated badly by her own children.
A woman with an abusive male partner can find herself in a
vicious cycle. She accepts selfish and cruel behaviour, which undermines her
self-confidence and causes her to hate herself.
The man picks up on her self-hate, thinks she is a loser or a masochist
and assumes, “she is asking for it”. The abuse becomes even worse.
It seems that men can love and worship women who love
themselves, but find it much harder with women who are less self-confident. One
way out of this dilemma is for the man to train or encourage woman to love
themselves, as sometimes happens in the Femdom world. Even though women will find it a very crude
way to do this.
In relationships between men and women, women can teach men
how to love others, but only if they are able to love themselves and take the
leadership role. Likewise, a man can
teach a woman to love herself, if he is able to love and respect women
himself. What seems to get in the way of
this is popular culture.
Many women read romantic stories, in which the heroine is
swept off her feet by an alpha male type.
This might be fine in fiction, but when acted out in real life it means
the woman can find herself the victim of abuse.
We can see this clearly in romantic novels like, “Wuthering Heights
Men are exposed to similar ideas in books and films, where
the action/adventure heroes are mostly violent men. These heroes become role models for many boys
and men and the underlying message is reinforced - that all problems can be
solved with force, violence and aggression. It becomes a disaster when men
apply the same solutions to problems in their relationships with women or even
their own children.
What is clear from all this, is that men need to learn how
to love others, so they will not hurt and mistreat them. Women need to learn
how to love themselves and reject ill-treatment from sadistic men. This can only happen in a relationship where
the woman becomes the dominant partner. Equality is something most men cannot
deal with, because of their competitive instincts. So the best way a woman can protect herself
from abuse and violence in a relationship with a man and get him to love her,
is to take on the leadership role. She needs to demonstrate that she is, at all
times and all circumstances, a winner and the person in charge. That way the
whole family will benefit, as the head of the family will be a loving and
caring person.