Men’s Fears of Women in Intimate Relationships

Segregation scars the soul of the perpetrator as well as the perpetrated— Dr. Martin Luther King

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It is controversial, some would say offensive or even dangerous, to suggest that those in privileged positions are also harmed by the systems they create to oppress others. There is a longstanding controversy within feminism about the importance versus the dangers of talking about the ways in which men are also impacted by patriarchy (Weiss, 2018). I have been approached, rather forcefully at times, and with a lot of emotion, by dear and trusted friends and colleagues that my writings will be used to justify bad behavior by men. This is a legitimate concern. It is treacherous to write about the ways in which an abusive system also impacts perpetrators—in this case, the ways in which men are also harmed by the patriarchy—without sounding like you are crying “white tears,” a colloquial term meant to poke fun at white people who feel guilty or defensive when confronted with their privilege.

For example, white people complain about being discriminated against by affirmative action or declare that “all lives matter,” or Christians in the United States complain about being the victims of religious persecution. The fear my friends and colleagues have expressed is that understanding will lead to forgiveness, that painting men’s bad behavior in a sympathetic light will be taken for condoning the behavior, for shedding “white tears.”

It is also true, historically, that when men have entered the conversation to talk about their experiences, they quickly become the center of that conversation, and the voices of women are often lost. The Supreme Court confirmation hearings of Brett Kavanaugh are an excellent example. As long as Dr. Ford was alone in talking about her experience, most of those listening—including the President and a majority of Republican senators—said they found her testimony credible. However, as soon as Justice Kavanaugh and Senator Lindsay Graham made the strategic decision to go on the offensive and put their own experience front and center in an angry and entitled way, they appropriated the role of sympathetic victim, and Ford’s voice was quickly lost.

There are also those who take men’s legitimate fears of women and conflate them into an understanding of the world in which women have all the power and men are disadvantaged and persecuted (Cohen, 2015). There is no reasonable understanding of the world that rationally supports that conclusion. Men are afraid that women will laugh at them, but women are afraid that men will kill them. Men still retain the majority of power in the world and in almost any heterosexual relationship. It is the birthright that both men and women inherit, willingly or unwillingly, from their families and the patriarchal culture they grew up in, Straight couples have to work unceasingly to stem the patriarchal tide that resides deeply within both of them to find any hope of a mutual partnership.

It is confusing when people in privileged positions talk about being afraid. We think of fear as something that only people in disadvantaged positions experience and imagine that the advantages of privilege inoculate against fear. It is all too easy to think about privilege in a relationship in two-dimensional terms, reducing the complexity of the relational patterns to two roles, a victim and a perpetrator. It is challenging to validate the emotional experience of those in the privileged position without appearing to condone the controlling behaviors that often mask their fears. When someone talks about being afraid, we instinctively think there must be someone to blame, someone who is responsible for frightening them. The challenge is to talk about men’s fears of women without blaming women. Men are afraid of women not because of something that women have done to them but because of the patriarchy in which both men and women live.

The feminist principle of mutuality states that a relationship can only be growth-enhancing for one person if it is growth-enhancing for both, and by extension, that a relationship is detrimental to both parties if it is detrimental or limiting to either one (Jordan, et al., 1991). While men clearly are the primary beneficiaries of the patriarchy, they are also harmed by the same system that harms women, harmed by the limitations the patriarchy imposes on men’s capacity to lead fully emotional lives and participate in mutual relationships. The American Psychological Association’s “Guidelines for Psychological Practice with Boys and Men” (APA, 2019) acknowledges the privilege given to men and boys and their greater degree of social and economic power while also saying that men are confined and restricted in their capacity to function adaptively by the same system-level policies that bestow that power. Men’s “lives are a strange combination of power and pain, privilege and isolation. The way we define our power, the way we have set up a world of men’s power, the way we assert that power—these are the sources of our pain; this is men’s contradictory experience of power” (Kaufman, 1994).

When we stereotypically reduce our understanding of men in intimate relationships as commitment-phobic, emotionally withholding, or shut down, we do a disservice to men and profoundly misunderstand what is happening in the couple. When we understand the fears that lie beneath these defensive postures in men, then everything changes. The only way out of this mess is to work together. We are going to have to include an interest in the internal lives of men if we—women and men together—are ever to work our way out of the grip of the patriarchy.