Don’t Blame Men for My Mistrust of Women

There’s a scene in the movie Revolutionary Road: Grand Central Station, 1955, morning. A wide staircase descending from the platforms is mostly empty—just a casual traveler or two taking time getting to the trains—until the cars-full herd of working commuters finally reaches the terminal. Their felt hats appear first at the top of the stairs, pinches and dents and subtle ribbon bands, brims tipped into the expressionless eyes of men with unsmiling, purpose-driven faces. We see their suit jackets next, then their slacks, as the wall of bodies grows, widening as it comes closer and building into a shoulder-to-shoulder mass of concentrated power and unstoppable virile energy flowing down the stairs.

Oh, to be standing at the bottom like a rock as they washed around me, a forest blend of aftershave in the air, suit sleeves grazing my arms…

I got goosebumps the first time I saw it.

I don’t know how others feel about the scene, but when I watched it again recently I imagined many women’s reactions in today’s climate would be negative. Too much testosterone-al energy. Too much masculinity. So much threat.

And this imagined response didn’t seem fair—to the men in the station, I mean; they were just going to work—until I remembered an experience I’d had a few days before in HomeGoods. While browsing an aisle, I squeezed by a woman to reach for a bookend I was sure I could put somewhere. In a different aisle, I looked over the shoulder of a woman who was scrutinizing something I also wanted to scrutinize. I passed another woman near the hanging rugs section. Another by the throw pillows. Another in the knickknack aisle…

There wasn’t a single man in the store. Not even as one of the women’s co-shoppers. Zero. I felt like I was in The Women—a movie in which males, their voices included, don’t appear in any of the scenes—and immediately headed for the exit, abandoning the bookend on a gardening shelf in my escape from all that estrogen for the safety of the parking lot and the isolation of my car.

So, I get it.

But saying I ran out of a store because there were too many women in it is simply not something a woman says. It’s highly unpopular to be a woman who would rather not be around, or be identified as just another one of, a lot of other women.

It’s the patriarchy, stupid!

The attacks on my type are whiplash-quick and seething. Women like me who don’t want to split off with the “girls” when sexes intermingle are referred to online (by other women) as pick-mes, traitors to our gender, and anti-feminist. Strangers with a passion for pop psychology diagnose our perspective as a symptom of internalized misogyny, and those identifying as some new version of feminist will say that a woman who’s mistrusting of women as a gender must, must, be influenced by the patriarchy. She must be seeking male approval. She must believe that whatever standards or preferences men have historically held are the standards and preferences to which she should conform.

As a feminist, I’m bothered by this.

First of all, a willful embrace of female victimhood and mental feebleness saturates that characterization of women-cautious women. It would be less annoying, and also less embarrassing, if it were one in a handful of theories, because an allowance for multiple explanations for why women might trepidatiously engage with other women would position the idea that men are controlling even our opinions of other women as just one possibility, and one that could arguably be true in specific cases while different explanations would be equally valid and true in others. Instead, the stance is simply, “If women don’t like women, it’s because they’ve been brainwashed by men.”

Forgetting the bigger problem of all this negative generalizing of various groups we’re engaging in so we get to fight fight fight without having to think for any seconds (Boomers! Gen X! Red Flag! Blue Flag! Rabbit season! Duck season!), implying that men are so intellectually superior to women, so unquestionably powerful, that they alone can shape our worldview and form our opinions of everything from what we wear to how we feel about other women sounds like a propaganda pamphlet distributed at a manosphere convention.

Granted, the negative and harmful aspects of the patriarchal influence on culture are inarguable. And certainly many women have had childhood experiences with men or patriarchy-subscribing families that have (mis)shaped the way they think about both men and women. But good god, as a gender we aren’t biologically susceptible to the (I guess?) master manipulation of the sub-group of men who have made clear that they only like women as mommies and fuckbots.

(Are we? Are you?)

Second, don’t men already receive enough recognition for things they didn’t earn?

Women will be the first to tell you that we’re capable of anything. But “anything” means anything. In my case, “anything” includes influencing a girl like me to grow up to be a woman who doesn’t hate, but is definitely not excited to group off with, other women.

It wasn’t them; it was us

I was two when my parents divorced and my dad took custody. One day not long afterward, my dad, my sister, and I were visiting my aunt on a day she also had some female friends over, and according to my aunt—who almost cried telling me this story a few years ago—I had gone from one of her friends to the next to ask each one, “Are you my mommy?”

Because the mother/child separation happened when I was young enough to apparently not remember what my own mother looked like, it’s more than possible that it planted a tiny little seed that would bloom into something like “abandonment issues” or even a vague sense that women might not be reliable.

But it takes more than one inciting incident to sully a demographic. It helped that when I was around nine years old the first woman I’d consciously grown attached to, one my dad had been seeing and who would come into my bedroom to talk like girls, didn’t say goodbye to me when she left after their breakup.

It also didn’t hurt that between the ages of eleven and seventeen I had a stepmother who, during some pretty critical molding years, was a model of emotional betrayal.

It’s thanks to those two later women and their traditional brand of perfume-and-bracelets femininity, not “the patriarchy,” that carrying a long-strapped or little-handled claspy purse is anathema to me, why I don’t wear a nail polish color, and why I dislike the sound of my own shoes, even if they’re Oxfords, clacking on the ground like a pair of high heels.

We’re not that innocent

While I’ve since matured enough to recognize it’s “not all women,” I’m still confused by the trending concept of the blameless woman. It can be found in the patronizing demand that we “believe women” instead of something more reasonable, like, “Don’t auto-dismiss women.” (Why would anyone believe someone just because she’s a woman? Has no one read To Kill a Mockingbird? Or the news?) It’s in the insistence that any drunk sex a female has must be rape (even if the guy is equally drunk) while thinking The Way We Were, in which Katie rapes Hubbell while he’s half-naked and passed out, is a groovy classic romance. It’s in the way women will scrape at the edges of their empathy to give compassion to, and possibly excuses for, the vilest of women while blanket-categorizing men as the devil.

A recent, and concrete, example of this: Elizabeth Smart, kidnapped at 14 by Brian David Mitchell and held captive for nine months by Mitchell and his wife, Wanda Ileen Barzee, was a guest on the podcast Armchair Expert. In the episode, Smart says that while she doesn’t want to say Wanda Barzee wasn’t “totally at fault” for Smart’s prolonged captivity, she also doesn’t think Barzee “knew what a healthy relationship was” and that she was probably “desperate for love,” and here was this man, her husband, saying, “You’re my queen.”

Monica Padman, co-host of the podcast, agrees with Smart that Barzee “must have really been so sick, so manipulated.”

Dax Shepard, the podcast’s creator and co-host, tries to offer the possibility that Barzee, the woman, was “equal monster” but seems aware that assigning 50/50 male/female responsibility for something as heinous as what Smart experienced would be dangerous for him, because he ends meekly with, “I don’t know, that’s what I’m kind of asking. Like, are you even able to evaluate that?”

Smart’s response says it all: “Sometimes I’m like, was she in such a bad place herself from her whole life’s past experiences that she just was so desperate for love […]?”

Smart and Padman made heroic efforts to grant sympathy to Smart’s female captor while casting the male as both the one-dimensional villain (no questionable history, no shitty parents, none of the mental health issues ubiquitously cited as reasons to give women grace) and as the all-powerful, evil whisper in a vulnerable female’s mind.

The poor woman couldn’t even get credit for her own crazy, yet the man was granted god-like powers.

I guess I’m a whore?

The Madonna-Whore Dichotomy feminists used to hate has been weirdly adopted as the new standard for women judging women. If we aren’t appropriately feminist according to today’s new feminism, we are apparently the men’s metaphorical whores. In all other cases, though, we’re unassailable—or at least deserving of forgiveness and understanding that shall not be granted to men.

(Another example: Northeastern University lecturer Margo Linadauer, director of Northeastern’s Domestic Violence Institute, half-excused the actions of Ghislaine Maxwell, who recruited and groomed girls to have sex with Jeffrey Epstein and multiple other inexplicably protected men, by saying she “was a victim of [Epstein’s] coercive control.”)

I wish I knew what has conditioned women to believe that women-in-general are somehow more susceptible than men to emotional or psychological manipulation. Or what’s given them such a low opinion of women, or possibly themselves, that they consider it an acceptable defense to insinuate that we’re incapable of having opinions or holding judgments—or even being downright terrible—without all responsibility being assigned to a man.

When our opinions or judgments don’t align with anti-male or anti-patriarchy (and “male” and “patriarchy” are too often conflated) views, how is it lifting and supporting women, how is it remotely respectful of women as a gender, to accuse them—us—of being men’s helpless, mindless, impressionable simps?

I do wish the women claiming to be standing up for women-in-general would rethink their purity/inferiority defense. It’s insulting.