Light on the Shore is a regular reader here, and she shares her thoughts on why women tend to treat men badly and why men who don’t happen to like women generally have sound reasons for disliking them.
Women in general do not think about men at all unless they want something from them. I’m not even sure that many women see men as real people with feelings - the only real people being those women and children in their own. In-group. Women’s social circles, though dependent on the husbands’ status and ability to provide resources when viewed objectively, operate without the men having direct involvement at all. Which is why some men seem to think they don’t exist
Women are constantly forming and reforming social relationships to solipsistically (but not narcissistically) provide first survival, then comfort, and then ability to thrive resources to the children, other women, and the children of the other women in their in-group. These are distribution networks. And I don’t actually think they are as unstable as they seem to men, but haven’t fleshed that thought out fully yet. The maneuverings are what women think about and talk about all day long, when they aren’t badgering their husband to make more money, or if he can’t or won’t, do more at home.
Men are only relevant to the social circles/distribution network to the extent that they provide a valuable input - status, money, energy, time, skills - that can be converted into a distributable asset for the woman.
To put it as callously as possible, the female-death match is an on-going fight to enslave and maintain ownership of (at least) one man to harness his resources into providing for you, your children, and the other women/children you distribute your time/energy/money/things to for the duration of his life. To the extent that you can enslave a high status male, you are all securing access to some of the time and energy of the men whom he leads as well...
Men cannot trust anything a woman says at the dialectical level, because what she says is not for the purpose of conveying information to him, but is rhetoric to ensure compliance - to cause pity in him to keep him providing for her, scare him into think he’ll lose access to sex to keep him providing for her, etc. And men cannot read the rhetoric well. They think the woman is emotionally incontinent or childish when she actually being manipulative.
You think women are untrustworthy because you are looking for factual information in the speech, but really she’s untrustworthy because she is manipulatively conveying emotional information for personal gain. My opinion is that it is much more conscious than men want to believe. Or if it is subconscious, it is only just so. It’s also fair play because to woman’s minds because (a) men are bigger so woman cannot obtain what they want via violence, and (b) the mating game is higher stakes for women because their bodies and lives are at risk so they get to make and use whatever cheat codes they can.
We certainly hear this all the time. Women frequently make it very clear to all and sundry, usually in the form of public announcements, that she isn’t dressing up, having her hair done, or getting her body surgically modified for the man in her life. She’s doing it for herself, and if he happens to like it, that’s all right, but it’s beside the point.
Men tend to think that this is just posturing, and that she’s really doing it to make him happy, but apparently that’s not the case. And, of course, most married men know that the most definite way to ensure that a woman never wears a particular dress or styles her hair a certain way is to tell her how much he likes it. The logic suggests that she can’t do it anymore, because if she did, then she would be doing it for him and not for herself.
Whereas a man will religiously wear a shirt, or a cologne, for the next thirty years simply because one female acquaintance complimented him in passing once.
This is why a man should never be too complimentary about anything his wife does that he really likes. To the contrary, he is well-advised to go overboard on the compliments when she wears something that doesn’t suit her, or does something that irritates him.
In a second comment, Light on the Shore answers my questions about how men are supposed to respect a woman’s opinion when that opinion can be reliably expected to repeatedly change over time? Which of those various opinions are we supposed to respect? Are we supposed to respect all of them, or do we reject the previous opinions when the new opinion appears?
Short answer: All of them. But also “boys are dumb” because they can’t see why the opinions aren’t actually in conflict.
In other words, female expressions are best regarded as intrinsically rhetorical in nature, not dialectical, and there is no direct informational substance to them. Glean what you can of them from these attempts to manipulate you, but never take the statements too seriously or at face value. It is always the observable actions, not the explanatory words, that matter.
A good friend of mine - Bravo - once explained that he was still with an attractive, intelligent, but highly disagreeable woman because she had told him that she loved him. This was a very big and meaningful deal to him. It wasn’t until I pointed out that she had also told him a number of unprintable and very unflattering things about himself, things that were mostly untrue, and that her observable behavior was considerably more in line with the latter than the former that he was willing to even start considering the possibility that perhaps marrying her would be a ghastly idea.
As a general rule, men have no idea how naive they are, or how ruthlessly women are able to make use of that naivete.
Brilluant
Likely the VERY BEST ‘SMACK DOWN’ I have ever READ.
Period.
JOG…with profound Thanks.