Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them: When Love Hurts and You Don't Know Why: When Loving Hurts And You Don't Know Why

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In Men Who Hate Women: From Incels to Pickup Artists: The Truth about Extreme Misogyny and How It Affects Us All, journalist Laura Bates investigates the online communities whose ideology centers around having power and control over women, how these affect society, and what can be done to change it moving forward. Men themselves were the real victims, they’d tell me, in a society in which political correctness has gone mad, white men are persecuted, and so many women lie about rape. I do find it hard to know where the misogyny ends and the narcissism begins in my history of abusive relationships, or whether abuse is abuse and the person doing the abuse can be many things at once?

That is what makes it so easy to focus on women’s dress, behaviour and choices when we consider sexual violence. Its symptoms are aggressive – mental and physical abuse characterised by shouting, screaming, extreme jealousy and possessiveness, and insistence on financial and organisational authority.As Bates shows, moreover, sexism and anti-immigrant rhetoric often go hand in hand, via the conspiracy theory that foreigners challenge the rightful supremacy of the white male. Most violence against women (in the US and UK – Bates who is British doesn't often mention non-Western women so let's safely assume we're talking US and UK) is domestic and is therefore carried out by someone they know. When his basic needs for support and protection are not met, he carries that pain and emptiness into adulthood. Yet we’d rather stay ignorant of this misogynistic hate movement, actively grooming and radicalising our boys, than be forced to confront it.

In her psychoanalytic interpretation, Forward says that “the drive to repeat the familiar combined with the equally powerful drive to make it come out better creates a trap into which many women fall”. Men Going Their Own Way like to hang out with other men going the same way on forums or YouTube, where they happily converse for hours and pages about exactly the thing they are supposedly pledged to avoid. It's a great book, but is very firm on the idea that it is looking at misogynists, not narcissists, however I find there is an awful lot of crossover. Borrowed from cult film The Matrix, this refers to the scene in which the protagonist, Neo, is offered a choice between taking a blue pill, which will enable him to continue seeing the world around him the way he always has, or a red pill, which will suddenly shift his perspective, enabling him to see the ‘Matrix’ and, in so doing, realise that nothing in his world is as he had thought.

First, that violence towards women is caused by misogyny and is therefore idealistic as it is an effect of thought, and second that violence towards women should be understood as sui generis - unique in its own characteristics - and unrelated to the causes of other social violence. It feels wonderful and flattering, but it also blinds a woman to the fact that she's doomed to fail. A thought experiment might be instructive - imagine a society where misogynistic ideas had been totally eliminated.

By using the Web site, you confirm that you have read, understood, and agreed to be bound by the Terms and Conditions.Use paradoxical therapy: imagine you telling your partner that they are right to abuse you, because you are worthless, go on your knees, thank them for all they do to you. And this stuff filters upwards through friendly media and middlemen such as far-right commentator Milo Yiannopoulos, so that men at the top can speak in code to their supporters. What you hear about them sounds so strange, so extreme, so hard to believe, so laughable even, that it is easy to shrug off.