On Men Who Don't Like Women

This isn't about sex, the activity. It's about sex, the biological designation.

This guy could be innocently working hard late into the night or setting his fantasy football roster for the weekend. On the other hand, he may be writing a bunch of violent, misogynistic stuff on some online manosphere forum. I suppose the scary part is that there’s no way to know. (Image/Getty)

A lot of men don’t like women.

I don’t know if it’s most men. Probably not. But many.

These men don’t enjoy the same activities or content that many women enjoy. They don’t generally believe—down deep in their guts where all of life’s uncomfortable truths reside—that women are as smart, as strong, as capable, as cool, as funny, as talented, as [insert your status metric of choice here] as men are.

These men tend to listen to other men, and consciously or not, ignore the voices of women. They seek out male podcasters, musicians, authors, politicians, friends, coworkers, and all of the other things I’m not thinking about or am blind to because I’m a dude and probably do this a little bit myself.

Many men, points out

Celeste Davis

in her fantastic and thought-provoking article The men who like women and the men who don’t. Yes we can tell., LOVE several women in their lives—their wives, daughters, mothers, grandmothers, sisters, etc.

But they don’t LIKE women. There’s a difference between liking people and loving them, Davis notes.

Davis’ article was inspired by an Anne Helen Petersen article a few weeks earlier, in which

Anne Helen Petersen

measures the charm and likability of actor Glen Powell, (Twisters, Top Gun: Maverick, Hit Man) a dude whose meteoric rise to stardom in such a short time, is rivaled only by Chris Pratt’s a decade ago when he went on his body-transformation Guardians of the Galaxy and Jurassic World ride following his years as the lovably oafish Andy Dwyer on NBC’s Parks and Recreation.

Petersen observed that what makes Powell so appealing is what she perceives as his rare quality of actually LIKING women.

“It’s different than knowing you can get women, or wanting to control women, or even loving women,” Peterson wrote. “He likes them. He appreciates them. He enjoys their company.”

Davis read that article, and then started thinking about the men in her own life through this lens—the men who like women relative to the ones who do not.

“I was shocked how easily I could differentiate between who likes women and who doesn’t,” Davis wrote.

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I started thinking about my own life and the thousands of men I’ve known throughout my years. And perhaps it’s a byproduct of geography and circumstance (I had a stereotypical small-town, conservative upbringing in Ohio), but yeah, I see this too.

Even among many guys you can trust to be decent humans, and to love their wives and daughters, there’s still an element of preferring the company of men.

I know several guys whose annual trip to Vegas or a golf resort or a hunting getaway away from their wives and children is the thing they look forward to most all year.

A lot of men reading this aren’t going to like it, but I hope they’ll sit with, and think about what long-time educator and philosopher Marilyn Frye wrote about straight men, and how it might inform how we show up in our relationships with our opposite-sex partners. (Shout out to commenter

Elisa

, owner of a brand-new Substack named Information Hemorrhage for sharing this.)

“To say that straight men are heterosexual is only to say that they engage in sex (f*cking) exclusively with the other sex, i.e., women. All or almost all of that which pertains to love, most straight men reserve exclusively for other men. The people whom they admire, respect, adore, revere, honor, whom they imitate, idolize, and form profound attachments to, whom they are willing to teach and from whom they are willing to learn, and whose respect, admiration, recognition, honor, reverence and love they desire… those are, overwhelmingly, other men. In their relations with women, what passes for respect is kindness, generosity or paternalism; what passes for honor is removal to the pedestal. From women they want devotion, service and sex. Heterosexual male culture is homoerotic; it is man-loving.”

This insidious quality in most of us men—the quiet part most men don’t say out loud because they often don’t realize they do and think these things on account of the unpleasant implications—is at the center of many relationship breakdowns.

I don’t mean to imply that enjoying the bonds and brotherhood of male friendships should be demonized. Having a tribe is much more positive than negative. People often feel a need for tribe—a sense of belonging—if they don’t have one. But there’s a danger in the ease in which many people coexist with people of the same sex, and then punish their opposite-sex relationship partners because the experiences with them, for lack of a better term, “feel worse” than the experience of being around friends.

Anger and resentment ensues when the people you sacrifice most for are consistently giving you feedback which signals that being you isn’t good enough anymore.

Kind of feels like a chicken-or-egg thing. Are men not liking women because of this emotional experience? Feeling like their spouses/partners turned their backs on them? Some sort of bait and switch?

Or. Do many men not like women, speak and act in ways women experience as disrespectful or abusive or neglectful because of that, and then their relationships get shitty?

On Being Afraid for Your Safety Depending on Election Results

It would make sense to me if women were supporting Kamala Harris for President of the United States simply because she’s a woman who could break that historical glass ceiling. (For those of you not in the U.S. who might not pay attention to our politics, we’ve never had a woman elected president in our nearly 250-year history.)

But to my surprise, I’ve encountered at least two women so far who voiced fearful concern over the possibility of Harris being elected, not because they’re fans of Donald Trump, but because they fear a widespread societal backlash toward women if Harris is elected.

That had never occurred to me. Imagine experiencing fear on account of being male, having another man be elected president, and then fearing for your wellbeing and those like you simply because the president is a man, and now you wonder whether you might be a target.

I didn’t have to magically transform into someone who liked women. My personality is such that I’ve pretty much always liked everyone. But I did have to transform into someone who could NOTICE and SEEK TO UNDERSTAND and EMPATHIZE with other people whose life experiences might differ dramatically from my own, which always makes agreement and finding common ground more difficult.

This happens ALL. OF. THE. TIME. in human relationships, and especially in marriage.

I’m often asked: “Hey Matt! How did you arrive at the place you are now in terms of your thoughts and feelings about marriage and relationships?”

This is almost always asked by a wife feeling sad and frustrated and increasingly more hopeless about the idea of her marriage or partnership ever becoming the healthy and sustainable union she longs for. She legitimately wants to know what I did on my personal-growth journey because she’s hoping her husband or relationship partner might be willing and able to do the same.

I think the most basic starting-point idea I can boil it down to is empathy. My ex-wife was a completely different person than me with completely different experiences. While I don’t love gender stereotypes, it’s undeniable that several of those differences were rooted in me being a man and her being a woman, and me not fully respecting those differences, regardless of whether biological sex had anything to do with them.

This is the real work of relating to other people, and it’s so necessary for relationship partners to do this for one another, but I think even more to the point here, that men work hard to do this for the women in their lives.

Everyone who isn’t us can have drastically different experiences from our own. And I believe there’s a real blindness to and thoughtlessness around this idea. People, in general, display a common lack of awareness or outright indifference to other people’s wants and needs.

And I’m not here to preach niceness or politeness. People are not obligated to adhere to my arbitrary standards of what it means to be well-mannered or a “good” person.

I’m here to preach that when we don’t proactively, intentionally, mindfully remain conscious and vigilant about the very different way someone else might think or feel in everyday situations relative to how we think and feel, there’s probably going to be a lot of frustration and conflict in your relationship with those people.

So, if you’re someone who values sustainable marriage or long-term romantic partnership, or even just having good friendships, we have to do the mental and emotional work of considering these differences that we’re often not actively thinking about.

Men commonly demonstrate a lack of awareness and appropriate thoughtfulness around the very different ways women might experience various situations.

• I’ve never felt afraid of being assaulted while walking through a dimly lit parking lot at night. It’s really common for women to clutch pepper spray or something sharp like their car keys when doing this.

• I’ve never said something or shared an idea, felt ignored, and then witnessed everyone take it seriously after a man said the same thing at home or at work.

• I’ve never heard it implied that doing things the way I do them is weak or bad. (… “plays like a girl”)

There are nearly endless examples of how my human experience has been easier or more comfortable than many of the women I’ve known (or anyone who belongs to a different demographic) on account of being born male.

I’m not asking you to agree with any of this or feel the same way as anyone else.

I’m asking you to do the work of understanding why—if your relationship partner (or anyone you care about) is a woman—someone else might arrive at these conclusions and learn how to honor these experiences that might be completely different from yours.

This isn’t about being nice, although it is a better way of being. You don’t get to have healthy relationships if you don’t do this work.

How did I get from whoever I was in my previous life to whoever I am today?

I learned how to articulate my ex-wife’s story and experiences in our marriage. All of those moments when we argued about something, and I thought she was treating me unfairly, or thinking unclearly, or overreacting to some event.

Regardless of how differently I might have thought or felt about the situation, our marriage would have been strong had she been able to trust me to respect her diverse perspective as much as I was fighting for my own.

It’s not about agreement. It’s often not even about who’s right or wrong. Trust and connectivity thrive when both partners can trust one another to treat each other (and what’s important to them) with the same level of importance as they treat themselves.

You’re not obligated to do this. Just please understand the inevitable outcome when you don’t.

The truth is, I really did like my wife during our marriage. She’s a pretty fun and likable person.

But she didn’t feel as if I did. My intentions and her experiences were not at all aligned or in sync.

Whenever she tried to talk to me about it, I probably just told her how crazy and unreasonable she was being.

Looking back, I probably just needed a man to say the very things she was trying to get me to hear.

“Don’t be silly, babe. I LOVE you,” I probably said.

If you don’t already know, this is how your marriage ends.

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Matthew Fray is the author of “This is How Your Marriage Ends: A Hopeful Approach to Saving Relationships”, a relationship coach, and formerly the blogger at Must Be This Tall To Ride.

P.S. - I know these things can present really small to some of you in your busy lives and marriages/partnerships. But that’s exactly why developing mindfulness and communication habits around these domestic scenarios is so critical to maintaining peaceful, loving relationships. If you have trust erosion, and/or pain points and frustrations around things like this at home, consider working with me as your relationship coach to develop these skills and habits. This stuff matters. Book your next appointment here. - MF