Why Men Don't Like Women

It's not exactly a mystery

A lot of women are surprised and disheartened to discover that men don’t like women very much, which is yet another indication of female solipsism and lack of empathy. They’re just noticing this now? If it takes you literal decades to notice that half the population is less than entirely enthusiastic about you, you very clearly are not paying any attention whatsoever to them or their feelings.

A few weeks ago Anne Helen Petersen wrote about what makes actor Glenn Powell so appealing and I have not been able to stop thinking about something she said.

What makes him so appealing? Obviously he’s no eye sore, but Peterson points out that it’s far more than that. She says the main thing that sets Glenn Powell apart from other actors is that he likes women.

But isn’t that pretty basic? Don’t most men like women?

You would think so wouldn’t you, but actually no.

The first thing to point out is that most actors do not have a normal sexual orientation. Glenn Powell might actually be straight, which is not at all the case for most Hollywood heartthrobs ever since the first talkies were introduced. The producer’s casting couch is as much a requirement for actors as it is for actresses, so it’s not really a profession that serves as a reasonable metric for the average man.

But that doesn’t mean the observation is incorrect. The explanation, however, is entirely false:

How is it that so few men like women?

It’s certainly disheartening how rare this quality is in men, but something I read recently in Liz Plank’s book For the Love of Men helps explain why it is that so few men like women.

Through hundreds of interviews she shows how men are penalized for not performing masculinity so early, so often and so intensely that to safely navigate the world, their unconscious north star becomes stuck on “be masculine.”

Kindergarten boys get made fun of at school for liking girly shows like My Little Pony, parents don’t allow their boys to leave the house in girly clothes, teenage boys are ridiculed for having a girly voice.

From the time boys are preschoolers on up through adulthood- the worst thing to be is like a girl. The worst way to run is like a girl, the worst music is girly music, the worst things to care about are the things girls care about, the worst way to act is like a girl.

You’d think that the obvious thing for the woman to do would be to simply ask a number of men why they don’t like women, but of course, even such an obvious solution is completely beyond the capacity of a solipsistic woman. Better for her to engage in an appeal to her own imagination; obviously that’s a much more reliable method of obtaining relevant information. And it’s really inexcusable, as even a modicum of empathy combined with observation would have provided her with the answer.

The reason so few men like women is because women treat most men very badly.

Now, I’m not one of those men; high-status men tend to like women because women behave very differently around us. And I’m not saying women are necessarily unjustified in doing so, I’m simply pointing out the observable reality.(1) For example, I can count on one hand the number of boys who treated me as badly as the average girl did until I turned 16. The first person who ever punched me in the face was a girl: Jodi Phythian clocked me one in first grade for no reason that I can recall. And while women almost uniformly treat me in a deferential manner now, to an extent that I consider almost embarrassingly servile(2), I’m not blind to the way they treat most of the other men around them. And it’s not as if I’ve forgotten the experiences of my formative years.

Women customarily treat the vast majority of the men they encounter with disrespect, disdain, and contempt. Even when they truly love a man, they will say terrible things to him from time to time that would end the relationship in an instant if he were to say them to her. They genuinely think men don’t notice all their passive-aggressive little digs, their little tee-hee-hee, I’m only joking insults, because men so seldom respond to that sort of thing in kind, or even at all. What I find amusing, being one of the very few men who genuinely doesn’t care what women think about him or anything else, is the way they invariably respond with wide-eyed shock when a man simply responds in a direct manner to their little verbal sallies.

When I was a teenager going through my Duran Duran phase, a middle-aged friend of my mother’s made one of those little comments about my two-toned hairstyle, ostensibly to me, but more for the benefit of the other women there. You should have seen her face when I looked at her, smiled, and said: “I’m hardly the only one in this room with dyed hair.”

Born to be an 80’s bad guy.

This, by the way, is one of the reasons men don’t respect most women. It is because they don’t respect anyone, male or female, who will dish it out, but can’t take it in return. If you want the respect of men, then you have to earn it by their rules.

The ironic thing is that I do genuinely like and appreciate women. The essential trivialities of their small talk are different, but are no worse on average than that of the men. (3) I don’t care what they think, of course, but I don’t care what men think either, because I view the average individual of either sex as a literal retard. Even by the writer’s own standard, I pass her test with flying colors; I am far better read in female authors such as Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters, Tanith Lee, Susan Cooper, Lois McMaster Bujold, Banana Yoshimoto, Barbara Tuchmann, Hiromi Kawakami, and Donna Leone than the average woman is in male authors.

But here’s the thing. I know that none of that will avail me anything at all in the author’s eyes, because nothing that a woman says can ever be safely taken at face value.(4) She will abandon her self-proclaimed standard in a moment, and feel entirely justified in doing so, because she is a woman. Which is why she is not only wrong about why men don’t like women, but why no man can reasonably respect her.

Here is a question for women. How are men supposed to respect your opinion when your 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? I’m genuinely curious to what the prospective answers might be.

I’m not saying that women should necessarily behave any differently. There are more important things than being considered likeable by men. Women have very good and sound reasons for keeping men firmly at arms-length until they are able to determine that a man is not a Gamma creep, a potential stalker, or worse. But actions always have consequences, and as a general rule, men do not like anyone, male or female, who does not habitually behave in a friendly and respectful manner toward them.

It will probably strike most women as counterintuitive, but the observable reality is that the less seriously a man tends to take women, the higher the probability that he genuinely likes them.

And in any event, as should be obvious to any adult, if a group of people doesn’t like you, then the problem almost certainly lies with you. We are not born with a Creator-ordained right to be liked; even the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights doesn’t go that far, at least not yet.

I wish Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt and Mark Wahlberg were awash with shame to be seen as not liking women. I wish it was terribly embarrassing for any man to not respect women.

I wish women would hold themselves to the same standards they seek to hold men. And I wish women would think before they speak and refrain from saying awful and reprehensibly stupid things that they will conveniently forget they said just five minutes later.

But the world is what it is, not what we wish it to be.

UPDATE: Perhaps the funniest part of the article is the positive presentation of the suggested metric “has female friends”. Speaking as a man who has always not only had female friends, but beautiful female friends - professional cheerleaders, swimsuit models, etc - this is really not the sort of thing that the average woman is going to appreciate or be able to handle. To a certain extent, what the woman has done here is write an unconventional ode to Alpha Males.

(1) There is a perfectly rational case for a woman presenting every man she encounters with a resting bitch face and a harsh word. This is one way a woman avoids being harassed or victimized. But this perfectly rational and justifiable behavior comes at a cost; for every creep and predator she successfully deters, she convinces 100 men that she is an unlikeable bitch.

(2) I’m referring here to my personal life, not my online experience. As an author, and more importantly, an elite publisher in a European country, my social status is rather elevated even if what passes for my fame is more notoriety than celebrity. And women just despise those bad boys, right?

(3) I will admit that I find it easier to engage in a male conversation about sports than I do in a female conversation about people I don’t know. But a female conversation about fashion, celebrities, or pop culture is fine. They tend to be less annoying than men pontificating in ignorance about politics or the economy.

(4) This is actually a very good thing. If men were to make a habit of taking women at their word, no couple would stay married more than five years. If you’re a woman and the concept upsets you, just contemplate some of the things you have told the various men in your life over the years.