5 Ways Modern Men Are Trained to Hate Women

From Cracked.com courtesy of my facebook friend Jennifer D:

Now go to the front page of any mostly male discussion site like Reddit.com and see how many inches you can browse before finding several thousand men bemoaning how all women are gold-digging whores (7,500 upvotes) and how crazy and irrational women are (9,659 upvotes) and how horrible and gross and fat women are (4,000 upvotes). Or browse the "Men's Rights" section and see weird fantasies about alpha males defeating all the hot women who try to control them with their vaginas.

This current of white-hot rage has to come as a surprise to some of you, because we tend to think "sexism" is being dismissive toward women, or paying them lower salaries -- we don't think of it as frenzied "burn the witch!" hatred. Yet occasionally something like this Limbaugh thing will come along to prick that balloon, and out it pours. Like it's always waiting there, a millimeter below the surface.

More here.

While I don't agree one hundred percent with every assertion the above linked essay makes, I agree that every dynamic it mentions is definitely in play and affecting how American men think about women, in often unquestioned ways. Because that's the rub, "unquestioned." A complicated stew of social messages and custom, mass media, and sexual biology influences and guides the male decision making process when it comes to dealing with the opposite sex, and even those of us men who are relatively aware of all this are under its control to some extent whether we want to be or not. And, of course, that makes everything even more complicated: knowledge of social conditioning and biology, without the ability to really change personal behavior, make the notion of flipping some sort of intellectual switch turning us into nice guys severely problematic. That is, awareness of these problems is not enough to effectively change individual behavior, let alone instigate social change.

But, at least, awareness is a start.

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