Men hating women: A look into the psychology of misogyny

“All men hate women,” said Claudine. This was not a statement I could just let go. I mean, I am a man, by most agreed definitions, and as far as I know I don’t hate my wife. She had returned home in disgust after an act of road rage left her frazzled, another incident of condescension and aggression at the hands of a young male driver. “He wouldn’t dare talk to a man that way,” she explained.

“All men?” I said, double-checking.

“Yes.”

If she were right, it would explain a lot. Do all men, even the most earnestly considerate and progressive, harbour misogyny in the darkest recesses of their beings? And if that’s true, what can be done about it?

The idea that masculinity is now toxic suggests we’ve only just noticed. For millennia, rigidity and repetition has been ingrained into male and female identities, but behind these social structures may be something more primal. An unholy stew of psychology and the culture that springs from it has made men what they are. Toxic masculinity is a tautology.

In July, the Misogyny Hate Crime Evaluation Report, a project of two Nottingham universities with the co-operation of the police, recommended that incidents of misogyny be recorded as hate crimes under the law and, as importantly, in the public awareness. After two years of research, it found that over half the women who contributed had experienced threatening behaviour, almost half had been groped, a quarter had been followed home and a quarter had been sexually assaulted.

     ‘Masculinity is not in a state of crisis. Masculinity is a crisis’

Dr Loretta Trickett of Nottingham Trent University tells me, “This has consequences for girls and young women. I don’t think the boys who do it realise the impact of what they do. Sexualised street harassment often involves older men targeting much younger girls.”

If I were to go in search of this dark matter, that thing inside men that makes them treat women as two-dimensional characters in their three-dimensional narratives, I would have to look deep into the hidey-hole of the unconscious mind. There is a reason that the phrase “Tell me about your mother” is shorthand for the sprawling landscape of psychoanalysis. Adam Jukes is a writer and therapist of more than 40 years who, for half of that time, specialised in treating men who abused women. The author of Why Men Hate Women and What You’ve Got Is What You Want Even If It Hurts shares a common belief that it is the trauma of childhood and, most crucially, the relationship between a boy and his mother-figure that steers the course of male psychology.

“For the vast majority of people all over the world, the mother is a primary carer,” Jukes explains. “There’s an asymmetry in the development of boys and girls. Infant boys have to learn how to be masculine. Girls don’t. Masculinity is not in a state of crisis. Masculinity is a crisis. I don’t believe misogyny is innate, but I believe it’s inescapable because of the development of masculinity.”

In its basic form the theory is that as boys “individuate” and develop a sense of self, they have to separate from their mothers when they realise that they are not like them and they cannot – in Freudian terms – possess them. This repression marks the end of the Oedipus complex. In their anxiety the boys then identify with the father and it’s here that they learn about what it means to be masculine. The clichés of masculinity: being strong, fearless and competitive – above all, not being like the mother – permeate boys’ lives. At this point, “A part of the male ego is identified with a penis,” says Jukes, “and the whole body can be identified with a penis and that’s when you get masculinity.” If true, it will lend a certain piquancy the next time you hear a woman tell a man to stop being a massive dick.

Analysis is a broad church, full of schism and nonconformism, and Freud’s feminist critics have picked apart his theories, not least his ambivalence to, or disregard for, the female condition. However, 100 years later, even his detractors concede the role of the unconscious and the problematic nature of boys’ relationships with their mothers.

“The internalisation of misogyny is not restricted to boys – it comes out of being raised by mothers,” celebrated author and psychoanalyst Susie Orbach tells me. “Because the mother is the person we are most dependent on, the rage and fear at being cut off from her or the terror of mother’s disapproval leads us to repress it. Girls grow up to be mums, so they internalise misogyny. But boys don’t grow up to be mums, so they feel thwarted and their power comes from feeling they can thwart back. For a boy it’s so confusing.”

The male child feels that to be dependent on a woman is dangerous and this makes him feel vulnerable, which, without wishing to sound like Yoda, leads to fear, which leads to sadism. That anxiety is repressed and is expressed via the unconscious as misogyny.

Worse still, Orbach and Jukes agree that the more disruptive and traumatic childhood is, the more likely it is that future behaviour will become extreme. “If you are brought up in a household that’s very fractious, then what you’ll seek in a future relationship is one where people are in a rage all the time because that’s what ‘love’ means to you,” says Orbach. “Your internal experience of an intimate relationship is one that evokes your first, your primary, love relationship, which is the one with your mother.”

“In early childhood we lay down our default settings,” says Jukes. “We are programmed to remember pain. That’s why the species survives. We have a need to return to the default settings because that is where we feel secure – in our stress and pain. We think we want something different, but what we do is set up dramas that ensure we end up back at the default.” That’s not to say educated and privileged men are less likely to be misogynists. This is classless, international and transhistorical.

“Even in a nurturing family, a child will grow up with chauvinism,” says Jukes. “Culture and society are the seedbed where the child’s misogyny takes root. The construction of the woman as the carer is all around us, and that is part of what informs men’s rage with women. In my millennial patients I don’t see any difference to patients I was seeing decades ago.”

Masculinity, then, appears on a sliding scale, usually depending on a boy’s childhood environment and trauma. All children experience negativity, with indifference or neglect at one end and physical or sexual abuse at the other, and the more painful childhood is, the more likely a boy is to emerge as “hyper-masculine”. Meanwhile, the more masculine a boy is, the more he represses his feelings about women, so the more misogynistic and abusive he is likely to be. This also works in reverse, with hyper-masculine men also more likely to be emotionally vulnerable, even helpless.

“I can’t tell you the number of men I’ve worked with who have been violent or nasty who end up crying, begging for forgiveness,” says Jukes. “This is terribly complex, turning the perpetrator into the victim – but that dependency is at the root of masculinity and, of course, dependency cuts into the heart of masculinity. It subverts it.”

Incels – the online subculture of self-loathing “involuntary celibates” who define themselves through their inability to find love or a sexual partner – fit this misogynistic pattern very neatly. Paradoxically, these self-proclaimed losers also exhibit a kind of hyper-masculinity. The cultish nature of incels is not an aberration but an extension of male psychological development: a need to control mixed with a sense of humiliation. It’s always someone else’s fault – in the case of incels, it begins with a belief that genetics has dealt them a bad hand. Damn you, Mother Nature.

“The rage and righteousness against women represent one felt injustice after another,” says Jukes. “Incels’ basic premise of ‘She won’t let me fuck her’ is about as straightforward an Oedipal statement as you can make.”

Men are not victims and incels represent the worst in men: how they refuse to accept their own responsibilities and their reluctance to know themselves or admit what lives in their unconscious. The root of this is shame and frustration, which analysts believe comes from a childhood spent feeling impotent in the shadow of the father (castration anxiety) and separated from the mother. Masculinity, therefore, is a defence mechanism.

In the Star Trek episode “The Enemy Within” (bear with me), Captain Kirk is split into two. One version is hyper-masculine – childish, violent, vain and sexually aggressive – while the other becomes indecisive, weak and caring but feckless. The story ends with the idea that the nice Kirk needs the nasty Kirk to command the ship, so they find a way of splicing them back together again. Astounding as William Shatner’s acting is, the premise is false because the breakdown of traditional masculinity doesn’t mean the end of strength or authority or decision-making. Neither does the end of masculinity mean the end of desire or sex (of any variety). No man is binary in this way. The tenets of traditional masculinity – to dominate, to be tough and to see women as an “other” and mistreat them accordingly – are not necessary to be a man.

But how can we break down masculinity and the misogyny that comes with it? I found unanimity among the experts that I spoke to. If the problem starts with childhood, so does the solution. Breaking the dependence on the mother as “primary carer” is the first step. For this to happen, we need to reconsider the value of social engineering. “The solution for me isn’t to blame mothers at all, it’s to engage fathers in child-rearing so that the fury and disappointment and authority is not vested only in the person of the mother but shared between two parents,” says Orbach.

With the noble exception of the Scandinavian nations, paternity leave provision in most countries around the world is pathetic. Only by relieving the burden of the mother (and the general economic reliance of women on men) can these stocks be unlocked. “Primary school education is really female-dominated and I think that’s a problem,” says Trickett. “We need male role models from a very early age. We need to make a balance between being a caring male and the notion of being ‘acceptably male’.” The available figures tell us male teachers make up only 15 per cent of staff in British primary schools. Male nursery staff are virtually nonexistent.

But more male involvement in a child’s development is not a simple panacea. “It doesn’t mean we won’t have fury and dependency,” says Orbach. “But they would be ameliorated and it wouldn’t be expressed in terms of girls feeling shit about themselves because they’ve got their own internalised misogyny and boys being so damn frightened that they’ve got to control women.” At the moment the political will to make these changes does not exist.

New ways of addressing child development could mitigate against the effects of the traumas that boys and girls inevitably face. “Clinically, the end point is to stop splitting [seeing objects as all good or all bad],” says Jukes. “If you can stop this you will be mentally healthy.” That is easier to achieve if you are raised in a loving and masculinity averse family. “That doesn’t mean you won’t feel distress – shit happens,” he continues. “But it means you will be able to deal with the shit well.”

Masculinity and the misogyny it allows is so embedded men rarely recognise it. It affects our physical and mental health, and it builds walls few of us even acknowledge, let alone attempt to peer beyond. “The LGBTQ movement is having the argument for all of us,” says Jukes. “In essence, they are fighting this battle for everyone, gnawing away at the edges of these definitions of femininity and masculinity and we will all be liberated by their success.”

You can be a man without being masculine, but reaching that happy place will take generations. So sometimes it’s helpful to ask some difficult questions: “Where do these feelings come from?” and “Do I treat women differently to men?” But perhaps not, “Is my wife just a bad driver?” Deconstructing masculinity is tough to begin and it’s even harder to complete. We can’t make it a perfect world, but we could make it a significantly better one.

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From November 2018, see a month’s worth of content on what it means to be a man, on GQ.co.uk, written by a variety of columnists each day.