Men Who Hate Women
This was the original swedish (translated to english) title for the book Girl With The Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson. Without digging too deeply around, my first instinct is to believe the publisher didn't want to accidentally alienate a ton of readers with a title so biting. I suppose the swedes could handle it fine, but english speaking audiences weren't as trusted to not have kneejerk reactions.
That could just be my bias and coloured worldview, though.
I've been thinking more often about men hating women, about men who claim to love women, but who can't stand to actually listen to them, or to do anything other than objectify them. The more I think I can escape this sharp white noise of pervasive hate, the more I find it sneering around so many corners and gaps I never could have imagined.
Hate has as many variations as the rainbow has colours. I fully believe you can hate someone while claiming you love them. You know that saying about "No hate like Christian love." It's about your actions and the true meaning behind them. You can say you love someone, but your actions and your subtext betray your true intentions.
We have examples that Girl With A Dragon Tattoo blatantly lays out. Murder and rape. Being called a slut, a whore, a bitch. Manipulation and underestimation. The basic things you think of when you think of blatant misogyny. It's outright violence and hatred aimed towards one gender.
But some of the men who are supposed to be "good" also stand out to me. They don't believe women to be capable of doing harm. They don't see their potential or capacity to do... Anything? They lie blatantly or by omission as a poor attempt to "protect" people who happen to be women. It's this consistent theme that women are more fragile, powerless, ineffective...
These are all just shades of the same thing to me - the same hatred. Just repackaged and reskinned for each individual's personal pleasure.
I think about my coworker trying to excuse his racism directed towards India with a flimsy retort that they treat their women horribly... It was so absurd, I would've thought it was an awful joke if I wasn't better at understanding tone.
Not only does the US want to strip women of their reproductive rights - aggressively so - but this specific coworker can't even handle women as "competition" within the workplace. I recall vividly when he had told my friend who was a woman that she probably shouldn't even bother applying for the open lead position. And he just as quickly turned around to my other friend who was a man, and insisted that he should apply! I heard this two-faced coworker say that he believes "People who are softspoken shouldn't be in managerial roles. Who would listen to them?!" The quiet part of what he was saying was loud and clear to me. Many will take words like that at face value, and see absolutely nothing wrong with it, but I know the stereotypes, I know most people think of women as soft spoken, quiet - unbefitting for a role as leader.
I don't think many of these people with these prejudices stop to consider how our voices get turned down by a few notches. How did we decide our voices weren't worth hearing? What did we experience, time and again, to make us wrongly believe everyone else, about our own importance?
I think about the older men at my workplace, with all their "quirks". Men that tell you, "Smile, Hidden Dragon! Isn't it a nice day?!" These are the men who make comments about your weight that they'd never feel the need to point out with any colleague of the same gender. They don't notice or care when "Daniel" has lost or gained some weight, but when the water content of your body fluctuates, suddenly it seems appropriate to make verbal note of it.
There's the men who stare a bit too long. They stand a bit too close, and it makes you nervous. Nothing is necessarily happening, but you still don't like that someone is mere inches in front of you, staring intensely at you, demanding something from you. Perhaps some kind of preformance, or the expectation of exchanged words? Sometimes these are the same ones who also blatantly stare at your ass as soon as you turn around, and every other coworker tells you after the fact.
So now you avoid these people like the plague. You have to fake smile, wave gently across the room... But you refuse to speak with them if you can help it. What else can you exactly do? Complain? You already ""Complain"" so much. You've gotten a distinct impression that what little squeaking you already do is considered annoying. And we know management doesn't much like annoying girls, because you've heard the gossip when certain people aren't in the room.
So what else do you do? Smile and wave! It's a nice day!
CW: Stalking, Harrassment, Abandonment Murder, Shootings
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I think about the men who stalk us. Follow us too closely, all the way, all the way home. Casually tell us to our faces how they've been watching us for months now. They know where to find us and they've seen where we work. Either they think they're just being friendly, or they understand full well what exactly they're doing when they pull their car directly behind ours in the parking lot, trapping us from driving away. This is the uneasy feeling of being watched. The visceral fear of an unknown danger you can't control. Michael Myers eat your heart out.
I think about the men who take us to go hiking, and they don't tell us how prepared we really need to be, or they ignore all the signs of danger and ensure us it's going to be safe, it's going to be okay. They leave us stranded in the wilderness - alone - and it's now a matter of surviving by ourselves when we expected to have help. We die in the mountains. We die in the deserts. We start avoiding profiles where men list that they enjoy hiking and mountain climbing and we decline dates that involve "short treks" out into nature. The trust is gone.
I think about the men who get angry. They get so, so angry. They yell, they punch. Grab and kick. Slice and shoot. These men kill. It always escalates, there's nowhere to go but up-up-up. They shoot their ex girlfriend at her workplace. They shoot their wife who wants a divorce. They shoot the children too, because that's just some more terror to add to the list. Sometimes they shoot themselves. Sometimes they try egging on the police to do that part for them.
End of Triggering Content
And with this violence, a pearl of my own hatred sits deep and silent within me. Women who hate men. But does it come close? No... Mine is a seething, reactive hate. It can be calmed and subsided - hidden away deep inside of me when I actually trust someone. But it does exist.
Sometimes I feel awful that I hold my own hatred like this, but... Can any living thing be faulted for learning better? The patterns are jagged and go deep to the bone. Am I the one at fault for lashing out with visceral pain?
I think about all these loud and all these subtle ways that men don't really like women at all, and it feels like a rock sits in my throat, born from a boulder deep within my chest.
Maybe that's the hatred I hold. Or the sadness, or the pain. Layered together with a myriad of other hurtful experiences.
I think about that book title often.
Maybe, if I'm feeling generous, it was a choice by the publishers to gloss over these pains and hurts. "Let's not think about the systemic, societal hatred. Think about a cool ass girl instead. She has a sick ass tattoo!"
I guess I really would rather think about cool girls with cool tattoos...
What was that thing I said, about saying you love, but really hating...? Maybe if I'm lucky, saying I hate men doesn't really fully match up with my actions and subtext, it's just... Me saying that. I still try to maintain my benefits of the doubt for an entire gender. (obviously) Shit's just beyond rough out here sometimes...
Thoughts?
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