If men only knew women in this position…𝗦𝗲𝗲 𝗺𝗼𝗿𝗲

 

As a man, I get what women mean when they say that many men don’t see women as “fully human”

I am going to try explaining this phenomenon from a first-person vantage point as a guy. Please know this is not universal and is especially less relevant to men who have grown up with sisters/positive male role models in everyday life.

From youth us males are plied with media that frames women as prizes to be won whose attractiveness and chastity are an extension of our personal worth, be this in music videos or narrative stories. We are also rarely given stories told from the vantage point of women that we’d willingly consume, and therefore aren’t encouraged identify with women as having agency and unique viewpoints. Of course we can point to women getting unrealistic expectations themselves through princess stories, etc., but 1) A lot of those spotlight the romantic interest’s great character as part of the prize in addition to wealth, handsomeness and so on 2) Most media is still greenlit by men and at scale the male perspective is more absorbed by women than vice versa.

As we get older other males not only rank our social status within the social group based on whom we attract, but also how callous or objectifying we can be–the more objectifying we sound, the more we indirectly telegraph that we personally have no trouble romantically. Men are literally given positive social reinforcement for dehumanizing women from youth. Widely available pornography for males who rarely engage with females in real life has likely made the viewpoint of women as “consumables” worse.

On top of that, any expression of hurt over a woman being mean to us, and any expression of identification with a woman’s first person perspective (even something like talking up a woman’s accomplishment or passing on a woman’s salient opinion in conversation) risks us being labeled as weak/corny/gay and socially ostracized. That pressure is so totalizing that we even shudder at the possibility we are subtracting from our own masculinity while thinking alone to ourselves about attraction or life struggles from a female vantage point. When we see a woman who’s put together and pretty, we view her as a package to acquire, not someone who herself consciously made fashion and demeanor choices to navigate society and its pressures alongside us.

In living years of performing misogyny to other men to masquerade how little we actually understand women, while shuddering at even a hint of trying to empathize with a woman’s first-person lived experience , we develop a default masking persona we wear to engage with most women we encounter, which actually makes our interactions with them stilted and forced (the way a sheltered white person might interact with a Black person speaking in heavy AAVE).

This type of clenched interaction is not fun, it’s suffocating and it also usually plays as insultingly infantalizing or condescending to the women as well. Yet at the same time, we tell ourselves this is what we are “supposed to” be talking to women like due to a confluence of social pressure, personal insecurity, and being too weak to stand on business as our true selves in the public eye. It is a mentally-taxing way to behave and each successive time we do this masking we are further removed from activating our mirror neurons and being genuine and present while engaging with women.

So some men don’t even bother interacting with women they aren’t attracted to, because the interactions from our boxed-in woman-facing persona isn’t enjoyable to put on to begin with and some men will only find it worth it to put it on when trying to curry favor with women they think would make for a good “prize”–someone whose being around will elevate their own social worth, or someone whom they can bang in secret. But where women get it wrong is in claiming men only see the women they are attracted to as full humans, just because they are fawningly nice to said women. In actuality for a lot of men, the niceness is just another form of dehumanizing the attractive woman, a performance wherein we’re still not evaluating the attractive woman as a fully three dimensional individual.

This is what guys are doing when they complain they aren’t getting female interest as “nice guys,” btw. They have formed a completely fake self, driven by not seeing women as full humans since youth, and they have been molding that fake self only according to things they have ambiently heard from women about what they are “supposed to” say, never having developed theory of mind of women, and never fathoming the interior processes inspiring what women express. A lot of us also have deep shame of our own sexual desire and have never built the mental fortitude to parse when it is coloring our thoughts, so we aren’t shelving/compartmentalizing our lustful feelings but instead imbuing their charge into conscious interactions with polite company–another phenomenon that causes women’s individual persons to be flattened by men into one of the interchangeable means for their self-esteem elevation and sexual release.

Ironically, it’s this homosocial, homophobic, dehumanizing vantage point I am describing that causes most men’s dating and social problems, but a lot of men are too deep into this mindset to even be aware, and they are too habituated and directionless to attempt taking on a healthier mindset. Men who bear this view of women I’ve described are also oftentimes socially inept among other men too; men who lament being lonely and friendless, but have likely written off tons of potential friends and enjoyable interactions based on snapshot judgments of how such people could not elevate our social status.