Men aren't trash: a (former) feminist call to self-examination

The height of MeToo being in the rearview has not erased a reflexive need to blame men for individual problems which is psychologically harmful for everyone.

Mar 10, 2024

tl;dr Feminism encourages the cognitive distortion that others are responsible for our problems and feelings. This is an unhealthy frame for the world and should be questioned. Also, here are some tips for men to question it without sparking a fight.

i. Cognitive distortions in the cultural waters

Are we living in a political paradigm built on disempowering ideas? I was. Everything I write about here was something I carried around as Truth. From roughly thirteen to thirty, I was known as a woman who hated men.

I have been thinking a lot about how cognitive distortions shaped my behavior for over a decade. Now that they don’t, I see a culture that encourages using them as a framework to mediate and understand individual experiences of the world.1 My very first political identity was feminist, so perhaps that’s why the trends and behaviors I observe bother me more than the average person, so much so that I get catharsis from writing this.

There are compelling arguments out there about how these politically valenced distortions lead to an external locus of control, even though depression and anxiety are solved by developing an internal locus of control, i.e., you are in control of life’s outcomes.2 I had to break out of this mental frame and develop an identity as a disciplined person in control of my destiny. This is why I’m writing enough to have a Substack. There is no good life without discipline, and the political left doesn’t value it.3 I say this a lot, but it bears repeating in every post.

Jonathan Haidt and others also argued that more liberal girls and women are depressed or have a mental illness than conservative women. I surmise this is because political conservatism correlates with values coded as personally conservative: hard work, discipline, community, and family. These ‘conservative’ values are also crucial to living a good life4. But because the values themselves are politicized as patriarchal and oppressive, liberals abandoned them entirely as part of their moral frame. Ironically, liberal elites can only get to an elite rung of society through discipline, hard work, and delaying gratification, which denotes an internal locus of control. College-educated women are also far likelier than those without degrees to be married and raise children with their fathers despite valorizing single motherhood as a feminist choice.

I think third-wave feminism, out of which every other intersectional paradigm grew, encourages a set of cognitive distortions that ought to be questioned and debated loudly and often.5 Blaming problems on capitalism, sexism, racism, and even colonialism do you no favors and puts you off from taking a hard look at changes that are begging to be made inside you as an individual. These are the only ones under your control. That is how I beat the dark parts of my brain, telling me I was worthless - I heard everyone and myself saying so under the guise of empowerment. If I can blame these unfalsifiable concepts, my behavior toward others and emotional instability isn’t my responsibility. Too often, those dark parts led me to the causes of the Left internet, and the two phenomena fed off each other.

Mental illness and political obsession are a toxic mix that makes both mental health and politics worse. The distortions become the basis of action framed as political and collectivist but is, in fact, emotional and individualist. The great culture war is one tinged by mental illness, but this isn’t named because the advertising platforms have an interest in perpetuating it. If mental illness becomes an identity, the makers of the platforms have zero responsibility for its effects.

So, “men are trash” as a meme of the culture war is an expression of the following distortions that are endemic to internet culture among women (and so come out into real life). I used to believe everything listed here.

Others are responsible for my feelings - emotional reasoning and mind-reading.
I have no control over what happens to me - fortune telling, overgeneralization, mental filter.
Men/white people are behind x happening (to me) - all-or-nothing, fortune telling, magnification, emotional reasoning, the fallacy of fairness, and always being right.
Men/white people generally are untrustworthy - all-or-nothing, mental filter, disqualifying the positive, fortune telling, magnification, emotional reasoning, labeling, and personalization.

The hardest distortion here for me to beat was always being correct (I know, shocking). And I have noticed this one in too many women not to comment upon how harmful it is to relationships with everyone, regardless of gender. Emotional reasoning and always being right are the worst mix; they are all we see online. I, of course, recognize that plenty of men do this online, but women also do this in real life. I cannot remember a man I met who combined those two distortions to impose their will or win an argument.

I’m not the first to observe this, but I’ve heard it from enough male friends to think something isn’t right.6 And I suppose if you think men are inherently untrustworthy and won’t tell the truth about women, this is easily dismissed. But I will assume that if you’re reading this far down, you might have noticed something like this yourself - the weaponization of emotion, which I have seen only women do online and in real life against everyone, regardless of gender. This is a terrible way to live; I can’t sugarcoat it. I’ve gotten it from family, friends, colleagues, and everyone in between, but the one thing they have in common is their gender. I’ve also done it myself. I wish it were not so, but I’m writing to say things no one wants to discuss in real life.

ii. Blaming men blinds us to internal issues

Blaming men makes us blind to our own fallibility and socially destructive behavior. Many of us are raised in such a way that perfectionism is a leech on our psyches, so it would follow that in the quest to be perfect enough, it’s tempting to find a reason for your failure, something firmly outside your control. This becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, sapping away at your locus of control.

Women tend to have higher average levels than men of neuroticism, which often leads us to overthink.7 It also leads us to crave perfectionism; that desire isn’t just the result of socialization. Perhaps socialization encourages neuroticism, but these traits are seen in multiple cultures; it is reasonable to argue that because women’s rule-based reasoning is stronger than men's, we are likelier to be neurotic, which may correlate with or cause us to value perfection. We see this in how we function at work and in romance, always seeking the next potentially better possibility and overthinking interactions and negative situations. This also correlates with or causes many of us to show up on the therapy couch. We fail to live up to our neurotic expectations. I can confirm that I was once a slave to my unreasonable expectations of myself. It takes a long while to deprogram from it. It relates to the emotional insistence on equality and the obsession with injustice.

I lacked an internal locus of control, which is the source of resilience and perseverance, and any therapist worth their salt will try to encourage changing these disempowering beliefs. And yet, the culture among women consists of cognitive distortions that depressed people have, like I once did.

Professionally, this manifested as irrational hostility toward men I felt were holding me back in the workplace. It may have been correct, but my aggressive personality at the time could have been off-putting. In hindsight, after dealing with my addiction to anger, I’ve understood how I contributed to my problems in the first decade of my career. The problem here is false positives. Women have historically been punished for displaying the qualities that help men get ahead.

However, some of us do go too far in our aggression that would make anyone uncomfortable. Suppose people ever are uncomfortable telling you their opinions. In that case, it’s time to evaluate if you have an addiction to being angry at others for often small reasons, which you may then unleash on the internet.

People were walking on eggshells around me in all contexts. It was a regrettable way I treated people, as though they were responsible for my feelings. That’s a cognitive distortion that depressed people believe and should be worked on. I can’t fathom how I wasted so much mental energy on the world's unfairness, real or perceived. The problem is that I was always a contributor to these unfair situations. If I had kept my cool, I might have been more satisfied with less anxiety.

Both men and women have advanced my career. At the same time, the most vicious bullying I ever experienced in the workplace was perpetrated by the latter, so we don’t have some unique ability to be correct all the time in both our behavior toward and opinions of others or, really, anything at all. We are not implicitly more qualified than all the men we work with. Women have been held back professionally historically, but it is arrogant to assume that you’re always more competent than your male peers.

People are generally fallible and often incorrect in our assessments of anything and everything, and women are no exception. This should be understood implicitly if feminism is about being treated equally.

iii. Trash

The height of the meme was in 2017, but it persists in how we talk about men among ourselves and online. Let’s first define what it means to ‘be trashy.’ The implied premise is that men are trash because of their behavior toward and effects on women as a class and as individuals, in the sense that their behavior does not just affect the individual woman in context but the rest of the group in its cruelty. While we see male behavior affecting us as a class, we’re not willing to let men feel the same about our behavior affecting them as a group and as individuals. Of course, this is how we get incels; they’re the mirror image of feminist women blaming men as a class for our problems.

More importantly, I’ve also found that the same kinds of women who say men are trash also find ways to invalidate arguments about women’s anti-social behavior toward other women. It’s always easy to blame the patriarchy, a nebulous concept that no one can pinpoint very well in the most liberated society in history. I also have often heard the excuse that women bullying others were usually bullied themselves. This is said to be a kind of end to the conversation. Girls throughout school bullied me, and yet it never occurred to me to bully others.

Finally, suppose a woman prefers male company because they treat her better. In that case, this act of self-preservation from the social cruelty of women’s spaces is also framed as internalized misogyny that harms all women. So, protecting yourself from women hurts women - a fallacy if there ever was one. But feminist spaces don’t love logical arguments, and I’ve seen many a ‘logic bro’ be thus dismissed several times. Objectivity and logic, after all, are white supremacy culture.

Blaming nebulous forces for one’s bad behavior might be one definition of ‘trashy’; we should all stop doing it and take some responsibility for our minds and actions.

I wouldn’t expect anyone to handle an out-of-control me.

iv. The emotionally destructive tendencies of modern feminism

If feminism is about achieving equality in public and private life, we must contend with some destructive tendencies within the popular understanding of feminism. The tragedy perhaps stems from feminism’s mainstreaming on Tumblr, which bled into the rest of the internet to our collective detriment.

My life has been governed by the paradox of the feminist ethos itself being intertwined with my being since I had any consciousness of myself as a girl in an unfair world. I suppose I was destined to be militant about my desire for equality. However, popular feminism is a source of disempowerment for women in a time when we have the most power ever.

Much like people insist that race relations are worse than in the pre-civil rights era, women also insist upon fallacies like Americans being predisposed to hate women. Women are, of course, always ready to bully people they disagree with on social media and set about destroying people’s lives, famous or not, for expressing wrong thinking. Men pile on, but this behavior is fundamentally reputation destruction in which women are well-versed.

There’s also a tendency to use virtue signaling to acquire social clout, a verboten observation. Part of the reason progressive women struggle, perhaps, to admit when they’ve been bullies in the name of ideology is that we’ve come to think of ourselves as good people because of how we vote and the general guilt involved with being a white college-educated person.

An action that announces itself as virtuous is not so. It cannot be done for personal gain or to seek social approval.

Men, for all their fallibility, have become a collective prop for moral flogging when we all deserve it equally. Some people behave better toward others and are more in control of their behavior than others. We most likely have to work very hard at checking our baser instincts of anger and self-absorption because the ego, after all, is the most natural thing. We exhort others to keep it in check but often fail ourselves.

We have another destructive tendency to judge men by their worst behavior or tastes, especially in romantic contexts. We often delude ourselves that we’ve merely exercised our agency in our own equally harmful behavior. We have endless excuses for ourselves and no empathy for anyone else. This is what happens when the oppressed flip the power dynamic despite claiming to want equality; it has sunk many a revolution. And no relationship in which I hoarded the power ever went well; one even ended in divorce.

For example, if I had listened to female friends about my partner, I wouldn’t be the happiest I’ve ever been. He, like so many other men, struggled with social isolation and alcoholism (two of the leading causes of the drop in male life expectancy and high rates of suicide). If I had judged him by his alcoholism, I’d be judging him by his most challenging personal struggle, while he didn’t judge me for the emotional volatility brought by depression. I’m not saying that ongoing alcoholism should be tolerated, but perhaps we need to have a little more faith that people can change and allow room for them to try.

I’m unsure I understood the difference between material and legal equality demands and the preoccupation with social position. I think today's feminism is primarily the latter and has forgotten the imperative to pursue the former, which has colored the rest of social justice culture.

v. To Men

You can do something here. I’m speaking to those of you who don’t think women owe you something but who suffer under a domestic regime of emotional warfare. I say this because I used to enforce such a regime on my former partner, and it was a contributor to divorce. It wasn’t until I met a man who challenged my positions and, dare I say it, fought back when I was weaponizing emotion that I realized what I was doing. He never shamed me over it; call it self-realization. I wrote recently about how men are alarmed in specific ways when women cry, in that they feel like they need to do something about it. Another friend of mine refers to them as meltdowns, and this is an apt term because I indeed melted down before I got a grip on my emotional reactions.

The thing about meltdowns is that you can’t humor them. It is difficult, though possible, to explain patiently how x cannot be your fault, logically speaking, and that certain things you are held culpable for result from cognitive distortions. Above all, don’t treat your partners like children by acquiescing and accepting blame for things or shutting down. Not pushing back could be one of the contributors to intractable fights later on.

Trying to diffuse the situation with humor doesn't hurt if you haven’t done anything wrong. It’s practical, I hate to admit. I daresay some women might even prefer it if you fought back but may never say that out loud to you. Also, we don’t have any way to learn how to laugh at ourselves if we’re neurotic perfectionists, and if anyone can make it happen, it’s a romantic partner. I daresay that my partner's skills in this area keep the relationship strong and fights at a minimum. When I do something I previously got mad at him about, he mimics what I said then, and I realize I was being unreasonable.

Additional to the above is an appeal to shore up your confidence. I know it’s difficult for anyone, but it’s in the blood that women smell in the water, and it works against you in a relationship. Feminism has increased women’s confidence, which seems to have been accompanied by a decrease in men’s confidence (yeah, I know they still control the levers of power, but most men are struggling overall)—asserting yourself confidently means challenging illogical positions, and not backing down if you are called a logic bro or some similar ad hominem. I suspect the critical social justice ideology is so strong because men who disagree don’t often vocally challenge it because they understandably want to avoid a fight. But because you might avoid that fight, women don’t have to examine and defend their positions. My partner and I constantly debate, and he constructs a steel-man argument against my assertions. It increases my confidence in my argument and improves my debating skills.

vi. Afterword - Gender Trouble[s]

I have a confession. I’ve struggled with women all my life. I also found that when I was blaming (white) men for all my problems or even white people in general, I was miserable and let life happen to me, feeling like nothing I did to better it mattered. But I was wrong, and one’s actions and reactions to things outside of one’s control do matter and shape experiences and relationships. I’ve exhibited all the behaviors I critique above, which is why this subject is essential to me.

I am predisposed to being sympathetic to the plights of men because we can often bond quickly over intellectual interests and because no emotional or social status is jockeying involved between us. They also don’t bully me or ostracize me for wrongthink. I suspect that, ironically, the confidence many men carry around makes it possible for them to engage with me socially without feeling like they’re competing because it doesn’t even occur to them. Among women, I’m always on guard for saying or doing the wrong thing or being targeted for saying something too directly. I also cannot be myself; women have been angry at me for laughing too loudly and my boisterousness.

I carry many emotional scars from my relationships with women throughout my life in my family, among ‘friends,’ and at work. I won’t call it a trauma, but it’s cathartic to admit it out loud because it’s such a fraught subject. The list of harms is book-length, leading me to write this sort of thing in the first place. I’ve worked hard, however, to move past it and not be defined by these scars, which is a result of beating depression. I am probably obsessed with analyzing women’s behavior, modern feminism, and the collective consequences of individual behaviors. I’m conducting fieldwork to discern how humans behave in homo and hetero social groups and with each other individually.

Anthropologists rely on qualitative and quantitative data. Cultural anthropologists, specifically, conduct fieldwork (a banned word, apparently) and often try to understand a culture by living in it for a period and interviewing select members of the community under study (with insider-outsider positioning). Others are from the culture and study it (me, with an insider position). To that end, I have been speaking about these things with basically anyone, and there is a clear difference in sensibilities and conclusions.

Sure, men have been less victimized throughout history. Still, at a time in which women have the most cultural and economic power we’ve ever had, it’s insane to me that these disempowering and toxic beliefs are the default of college-educated women. It makes me feel infantilized, so I have to let the frustration out in writing.

The supposedly masculine part of me values logical reasoning as the mediating frame of my reality. I become emotional about illogical situations; I can’t explain this weird paradox. I enjoy discussing ideas and detest talking about work, other people, and whatever entertainment I’m consuming. I suppose I also express myself in a stereotypically masculine fashion. But I imagine because I don’t participate in the leftist gender paradigm in considering myself non-binary or otherwise queer, it’s easier to be annoyed at an outwardly feminine person who communicates like a man. I don’t think my tone is masculine, however. I cultivate the tone of the scholar I am at heart, necessarily with conviction and confidence.

I’ve drawn conclusions based on the average tendencies I’ve observed among groups based on qualitative pattern recognition. I recognize that many individuals don’t fit the description. Little of what I hypothesize can or has been studied quantitatively regarding gender relations, not only in part because these things are uncomfortable even to discuss. All I can offer you is almost four decades of experience living as a ‘masculine woman’ in a toxically feminine world.

My masculine inclinations have always been a factor in social strife between me and women. I didn’t want it to be this way, but one can understandably gravitate toward those who respect them. I have to watch everything I say in women's social groups, and there is always a queen bee and her lieutenants. That is always true in mixed-gender groups, too, but I’ve learned that male energy is necessary to dampen the worst anti-social tendencies I’ve seen in groups of women (gasp!).

Again, this is all anecdotal based on personal experience, but I am a millennial woman writing an essay. Talking about myself is perhaps one of the few ways to illustrate these things because it makes them more real. I say it because I assume at least one woman who comports herself similarly will see this and may feel validated, and at least one argument is diffused with humor the next time you have a domestic quarrel.

I write so I can hone my thinking. If I’ve gotten something wrong, I want to know. Healthy debate is how societies and individuals thrive. Thank you for reading.