You, a cis man, stopped significantly being bitter at women. How?

July 10, 2024 9:08 AM

I am looking not for best theoretical approaches, but what has personally worked for *you/* to become less bitter at women, how long it took, and what the progress looked like. Sock puppets welcome.

Obviously, I’m asking because I’m struggling with this in my own life: figuring out how to deprogram a number of men with genuinely negative experiences with women, or who grew up with stereotypes of women, who have universalized them into negative views of women. You could say it’s not my job, and it’s not, but I have to live with them and so does the world until the deprogramming happens. I want to approach this with compassion and empathy. Help me! Tell me how you got there!

Mostly this appears as:
- the belief that women do not care about men except for money and power
- the belief that women lie to men to trick them into relationships and will reveal their “true selves” once they have them “hooked”.
- the belief that women just want to “control” men
- the belief that women will lie about men in order to take “vengeance” against them and so they cannot be believed.

I know the answer may be “therapy”, but I’m looking more deep; like if the answer is “therapy”, what within your therapy helped you make the realization?

posted by corb to Human Relations (15 answers total)

I have a close loved one who had really negative views of women many years ago, as part of a broader package of bad sterotyped views of anyone who wasn't just like him. It was programmed-in-from-his-childhood-and-family-of-origin stuff and from his telling, the deprogramming was basically mostly just a matter of "spending time with all different kinds of people and realizing through lived experience that most of what he thought he knew about them was wrong."

In his case I suspect it "helped" a lot (though was immensely painful and destabilizing for him) that he underwent a severe crisis around a loss of religious faith, which meant that he was more broadly realizing that a lot of what he thought he knew about *everything* was wrong or at least partial and inadequate. So it wasn't a huge step from there to "oh, maybe this other thing about women being Like This and gay people being Like That and whatever" was also worth revisiting.

Obviously you can't and shouldn't replicate "total rocking of fundamental worldview and total loss of faith in prior sources of truth" as a way to get through to people, but I pass it along in case there's a kernel of anything there that may be helpful.
posted by Stacey at 9:59 AM on July 10 [1 favorite]

I’ve spent a lot of time working through this stuff after getting divorced in 2016. Most of the progress has been re-working internal dialogues and I haven’t had talk much talk therapy, it’s honestly just never worked for me despite many many attempts. A few notes:
- Recognizing that social media is about farming engagement and nothing else, if you engage with propaganda you will be further propagandized.
- Reducing porn watching and staying mindful that it is, at best, a performance and does not represent what anyone should consider a healthy sex life
- Spending more time around LGBTQ people that struggle with all the same issues about intimacy and sex that transcend gender stereotypes
- Spending more time feeling real empathy and kinship toward women as human beings rather than potential lovers
- Recognizing that I’m doing real harm by carrying these attitudes even if I don’t express them openly
- Given all of the above and more, feeling some positive reinforcement that the changes I make to my attitude are deepening and expanding my ability to relate to all people and how nice that feels

Things I am glossing over:
- Treating depression
- Addressing issues with booze and weed
- Getting my finances in order so I stop constantly panicking about resources

Bonus:
- Post-pandemic I refreshed my wardrobe and getting compliments from strangers helped so so much. This one really took me by surprise.

Finally: I was a real shit about this for years and I feel awful about it.
posted by misterdaniel at 10:01 AM on July 10 [53 favorites]

I think the first step is to not try to present anything to them that runs counter to things they know from experience are true. Every one of those things that you listed is something that has happened to me personally so if someone told me "that doesn’t happen" I would have dismissed them as either willfully misinformed or trying to trick me, but I had the advantage of also having a large circle of friends that provided me with ample counterexamples. It should not be hard to point them in the direction of someone they know who runs counter to their messed up narrative and ask some questions about why that might be.

"Eric has been broke for as long as we’ve known him and he always has a girlfriend, so can we admit that there are some women who don’t aren’t after a man’s money and power?"

I have been the broke-ass scrub that people have used as the example in this situation; it works.

"Lisa said she was attacked by her ex-boyfriend. You’ve been her friend for a long time and we all saw how badly he treated her when they were together, so you don’t think she’s lying, do you?"

Every group of friends knows at minimum one woman who everyone openly acknowledges was treated abominably by a man; it can be useful to point out that if in some rare instances there are women who lie about things men have done for them the reason the lie is so readily believed is because everyone has witnessed many more examples of times where the mistreatment was undeniably happening.

My nephew’s father is both a bigot and a deeply mentally unwell person and he tells my nephew some buck wild things. My sister in law has done a lot of amazing work gently guiding my nephew away from those beliefs by pointing out counterexamples and asking questions ("Your friend Tyler’s dads are gay; do they seem demonic to you?") and letting him reach his own decisions. It may seem condescending to approach your adult friends the same way one would a six year old, but honestly guys who think this way aren’t significantly more advanced in their reasoning.

I’m sorry that you are having to deal with this but I appreciate you taking up this burden in the hopes of making the world a better place.
posted by Parasite Unseen at 10:04 AM on July 10 [12 favorites]

There is a long curve that starts with vague unease and ends with incels.

Boys and young men get it hammered into them that men have all the power, while at the same time they’ve been raised primarily by women and have their daily lives run by an educational system that is 77% female. They’re not at an age where they can see the bigger picture and the cognitive dissonance is often where things start to go wrong. Women appear to be running their lives, and women appear to be lying about it.

Another thing that gets hammered into both genders is that males and females are fundamentally different creatures. As per your examples, this often plays out in relationships (or lack thereof). If you believe that women have misled you for the bulk of your life so far, it’s easy to glom onto the idea that relationship issues are due to women’s innate deceptive nature.

Probably the most powerful realization available is that same-sex relationships suffer from the exact same crap as heterosexual ones. Homosexual relationships have the extra burden of dealing with societal rejection, but when it comes down to using and abusing other people there is no fundamental difference. Both gay and straight people can use the same marriage counselors.

Obviously, just saying that directly will be seen as combative, but I think if you approach it obliquely (casually mentioning that your gay friends are having the same problems) I think you can encourage them to rethink their attitude about how relationships work, specifically to realize that relationships are the problem, not gender.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 10:17 AM on July 10 [10 favorites]

I'm working on this right now with a longtime friend that has slipped into some casual to not-so-casual misogyny after being blindsided by a terrible divorce.

One thing that seems to be helping, or at least problematizing these narratives helpfully, is just spending time socially in groups with women that don't line up with the stereotypes. A lot of it seems to be "X person did this to me and there's a whole media ecosystem out there designed to pander to and then weaponize my pain, humiliation, frustration", etc. It seems pretty dependent on women being mostly an abstract concept that that stuff can be projected on, vs. actual flesh and blood people that are complicated, contradictory, etc.

I'm not going to lie, though - right now especially it feels like a heavy lift.
posted by ryanshepard at 10:45 AM on July 10 [7 favorites]

i'm going to join the chorus of people who are mostly answering the question in terms of helping other people get out of vile worldviews rather than talking about themselves, which is not great but, well. i hope someone who can answer the question well while mostly talking about themselves can chime in. but in the meantime this is what i've got:

men with this sickness most often live in exclusively male spaces, or at best in spaces that are almost exclusively male and also entirely male-oriented. i'm thinking about the tech industry here, and all the tech industry barbie-boardrooms full of men in positions of power who don't realize they're in positions of power, and who absolutely cannot carry on conversations with actual human women. i'm thinking about high school chess tournaments with so few non-male participants that on the rare occasions wherein people on my team played against anyone who used anything but he/him they would in post-game analyses totally avoid using the pronouns of their opponent, or else pause awkwardly and then talk really quietly whenever saying "she" or "her", or even use he/him regardless of their opponent's gender. and, like, when someone's only in exclusively-male spaces like that the vacuum left behind by lack of interactions with women can get filled up with, for lack of a better term, super weird shit.

therefore: get them to go to knitting classes. this particularly applies to the ones who think of themselves as being chess-ey super-rational algorithmic thinking stem-oriented uber-haxx0rs, because knitting is pure algorithmic thinking and it'll blow their minds when they realize that 1) that's the required skill and 2) there's all these women out there who are way better at it than they are. they'll all be terrified, at first, to even consider going to a knitting class, and they'll all take a ton of cajoling, and many of them will act like it'll make their dicks fall off, and the worst of them will say that taking knitting classes is gay and therefore bad. some of them will be too far gone to trust in a majority-non-male room, either because they'll be overt raging assholes or covert missing stairs, and so this advice can't apply to them. but if they're capable of behaving like a human in public then it's time for 'em to get knitting.

"knitting class" here is of course used as a stand-in for "convince them to spend a lot of time in spaces where the majority of the people there are female/afab and where women tend to lead" rather than as a prescription for knitting specifically. but also knitting classes really are good for this. fwiw my knitting class equivalent — the thing that got me to stop thinking of women as abstract entities rather than people — wasn't learning to knit, but was being in a ton of university classes that were 75% or more afab people while working on a degree in literature. but learning to knit is significantly cheaper than getting a degree in literature.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 10:57 AM on July 10 [17 favorites]

I have worked through some of this myself and talked about it with male friends who were further down the path towards being really bitter. One thing that helps a lot is to experience situations where those statements are definitely not true. There are clearly some women (and men) who only think about using relationships for money and power, but that is fairly rare. The human brain really likes to take specific situations and turn them into general rules, and once those rules are established you can't really convince someone they are fully "false" because the brain will come up with examples to defend the beliefs. Trying to argue that something is "wrong to believe" can change how people act, but they may just be hiding their beliefs until they get into a relationship.

The way to actually change beliefs is to live through situations where those beliefs are specifically false. For toxic beliefs about women, one great way to fight that is to build explicitly non-romantic and
equitable relationships with women. A lot of men grow up believing that all relationships are about finding potential mates or ways to advance their career, and that really distorts things. But, if men build natural and caring friendships with women that are based around shared interests, men will start to think of all women as unique people with their own important desires and needs. Another way to help with that is to be very clear about when it makes sense to objectify women. For example, there is a big difference between the on screen representation of a porn actress (which is clearly presented as a sexual object) and the actual person portraying that role. Telling a horny straight male to "never objectify attractive women" is never going to work, but they can learn to think about women as always being real people who are worthy of respect and only being sexual objects in very specific situations.
posted by JZig at 11:42 AM on July 10 [3 favorites]

All four of the negative beliefs on your list are predicated on understanding women only in a sexual/romantic context. Honestly, when women generalize about men in that context, things turn pretty justifiably negative, too. Maybe sex these days is just so consumerist and exploitative that nobody's at their best. If you're mostly judging another human as a means to satisfy your own biological or social desires, that's not a recipe for a lot of nuance and human connection.

I second bombastic lowercase pronouncements's suggestion of just spending time in non-sexual activities where there's a critical mass of women present, including in highly skilled and leadership roles. Ideally not competitive activities but collaborative ones with an authentic shared goal (community theatre? Habitat for Humanity?), so they can experience valuing women as co-contributors rather than simple objects of desire. If that's even possible, I guess, which depending on age/ interests it may not be. Even a knitting circle isn't going to open somebody's mind if they're mostly approaching it like "that one chick over there is a 7, gotta pick just the right project to impress her."
posted by Bardolph at 11:52 AM on July 10 [8 favorites]

Just chiming back in to add that (assuming you're very, very, very sure these guys are safe around kids) then having contact with little girls can be another way to drill in the idea of women as full human beings outside their role as objects of sexual desire.
posted by Bardolph at 12:24 PM on July 10 [1 favorite]

As a young man I had completely ordinary-for-the-time views about girls and women, which, since it was Australia in the 1990s, were the kinds of attitudes I am not now proud to have had.

What changed my way of thinking---way of being myself---was joining a political party in a faction which had a significant female membership, female leadership, in some of its bodies and committees a female majority, and an expressed feminist set of goals. It was being exposed to women who had goals of their own, that they wanted to achieve, and realising that I shared and would benefit by them.

So here's another vote for 'join any kind of organisation with women in it with collective goals'.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 6:05 PM on July 10 [5 favorites]

Many of the answers here revolve around getting men to change their lives in order to achieve your (laudable) goals, which I think is at the outside edge of reasonable. "Get them to stop hanging out with their football buddies and take up knitting"--ok, sure, but... that good luck with that. I respectfully suggest that MetaFilter self-selects in such a way that the ways that MeFites who were bitter about women became less bitter about women is often not relevant to the majority of non-MeFites, unless you are talking about an unusually liberal group of women-hating men.

Strategies that I have seen work, some of which are not popular on MetaFilter, include:

* Asking "what if it was your sister/mother/aunt/daughter"-type comments and questions, when the sexist guy expresses these thoughts. Very unpopular for "we should inherently respect women" reasons, and yet it works sometimes.

* Time. I've seen men angry/unhappy after divorces, etc. go through a phase of intense feelings along the lines of what you describe, subsequently easing up, often after 6-12 months of negativity.

* Parasite Unseen's point about asking questions and letting people come to their own conclusions has sometimes worked for me. The answer may not immediately be what you want, but I have asked questions like that, and sometimes seen related change weeks or months later.

* I have found the phrases "not all women are like that" or "you know most women aren't actually like that, right?" sometimes productive in these conversations. It's confrontational and has not always worked, but sometimes it has.

Good luck. This is a heavy burden to bear.
posted by cupcakeninja at 6:25 AM on July 11 [2 favorites]

* I have found the phrases "not all women are like that" or "you know most women aren't actually like that, right?" sometimes productive in these conversations. It's confrontational and has not always worked, but sometimes it has.

IMO, this is the main problem. It's not all women, it's the tiny subset of women male misogynists are interesting in 'dating', whereas I actually mean fantasizing about dating. They are mostly like that. And ironically acting like a stereotypical misogynist man is not going to get you dates with those women, because they aren't interested in watching Mr Misogyny play video games or smoke with your bros. They rate social capital highly, which generally requires money and privilege.

Also society should dial back the lie that to get a date, you just have to 'be yourself', unless you are super special. You have to be the 'better social version' of yourself, especially if 'being yourself' involves mostly solitary and often gendered activities or sitting at home, like the misogynist men we are talking about. Fine if you are like that, but it isn't going to get you dates.

So generally it's not wrong that people (both men and women) 'lie' to get dates, and when they get 'comfortable', they show their 'more true' self. And that creates conflict, and leads to broken hearts. That's just facts.

So IMO, the fix is to tell them how they are, and they need to temper their expectations to someone interested in the same things they are, not that 1% of misogynist women they fantasize about. They will actually be happier with a normal woman too. Win-win.

Or if they really think they want to date those women, tell 'em to get off their butts and work harder, because they have a lot of competition.
posted by The_Vegetables at 9:09 AM on July 11 [1 favorite]

Just one last note, after reflecting on The_Vegetables' response above: big existential beliefs like these are often as much about personal narrative and emotional self-management as they are about objective fact. When men start talking like this, do you ever practice attending on a pure feeling level to why it feels gratifying to them to bring it up in that moment?

In particular, if these are man with high sexual expectations and limited relationship success, then I'd think it would be immensely comforting to reflect on female perfidy and the injustices men suffer at women's hands. After all, if all women are selfish, manipulative gold-diggers, this implies, pleasantly, that (a) it matters less if I'm not dating one, (b) any current loneliness is because they're unreasonable, not because I'munworthy, and (c) most importantly, if only the right people could see the injustice of it all, then the world might reform and I would automatically get everything I want without having to lift a finger.

By contrast, viewing women with nuance and compassion might open up some scary possibilities-- like that my relationship difficulties are at least partly my own fault. Or that I could get some of what I want, but then I'd have to change-- to conquer an addiction, cut back on my favorite vices, do emotional labor, pay attention to others, compromise and accept imperfection, exercise and eat healthy, whatever. Who wants beliefs like that? To riff on the famous saying, it's hard to make a man know a thing when his self-esteem depends on his not knowing it.

If there's a chance this dynamic is in play, then I'd think the best approach would be just to redirect to happier and healthier topics, like hobbies, family, skills, getting outside. Or else to ask simply, "What would change your mind about that?" and really listen to the answer.
posted by Bardolph at 9:38 PM on July 11 [2 favorites]

What's your relationship with these men? Are they interested in changing their views, or are you trying to change their views without them figuring out that's what you're doing? Would they read a book if you asked them to? Or join an activity if you asked them to?
posted by decathecting at 12:12 PM on July 12

I (not cis or a man but something adjacent) became less bitter and angry towards women by being around other people who weren't, and who I liked and respected, and who made fun of me for my stupidity.

They didn't shame me but they laughed at me when I said stupid shit. It didn't negatively effect our relationships and they didn't treat it like a big thing that effected their opinion of me, they were just like "what a dumb thing to say, you're an idiot". It's pretty normal for guys to jokingly but also seriously call each other stupid. It was casual and got me thinking.
posted by Summers at 5:52 AM on July 13 [1 favorite]