Why do men express such hatred of women?
Psychoanalysts suggest that men’s gender identity is very fragile because, within typical child-rearing practices, girls can identify with their primary care-taker while boys have to separate themselves from their mother in order to achieve and assert their masculinity.
‘The whole process of becoming masculine is at risk in the little boy from the date of his birth on; his still-to-be-created masculinity is endangered by the primary, profound, primeval oneness with the mother.‘
It is only by setting woman apart as Other, by resisting intimacy with her, by treating her with contempt and aggression, that men assert their own independent and fragile masculinity.
And because men have distanced themselves from ‘the weaker sex’ over the ages, setting themselves up as superior, it must be unbearably humiliating to need and desire women so much.
Sex with women can re-evoke in men ‘the unqualified, boundless, helpless passion of infancy. If he lets her, she can shatter his adult sense of power and control; she can bring out the soft, wild, naked baby in him’.
In heterosexual intercourse men risk discovering in women an unsettling power which contradicts and undermines their own more obvious social, political and physical power.
No wonder male sexual desire is so desperately tormented and full of conflict.
Because women know men to be vulnerable and fragile, they are often tempted to excuse them as 'just little boys’ who need to over-compensate for their sense of inadequacy or 'womb-envy’ with acts of spiteful misogyny.
Female nurturing is presented as the solution to male violence - as though women haven’t been doing that for centuries.
Germaine Greer once commented that 'women have very little idea of how much men hate them’.
For it is painful to confront the extent of men’s hatred. But only when both men and women acknowledge its existence, its extent and its pervasiveness, can we act to end it. .
