Why misogynists are hapless victims, and why there is nothing to be done about it

I think that many misogynists take themselves far too lightly. They must have grown up in a cultural milieu where contempt for women was accepted pretty much as common sense. This unexamined attitude has always prevented them from getting too close to actual women, but it remains an unexamined attitude. Anything that individual women might have to say about it merely confirms the already internalised prejudices: namely, "Women are mean. They say things just to make me feel uncomfortable."

The mistake that leads the misogynist into most trouble with women is a very human one. He really doesn't understand that he has crossed a line by expressing his contempt for women. Perhaps he supposes that he is merely expressing his freedom of speech.

A misogynist, to my mind, is a cultural dupe, a victim of right-wing talk radio. He has internalised particular values that will get him into trouble, but he knows not where they came from. Certainly, he did not come up with these ideas about gender by himself. He considers them to be "common sense".

Because he really is a babe in the woods concerning his own values and motivations, one can become friends with a misogynist. Only, his apparent capacity for friendship with a woman is likely to be misleading -- that is to say, merely apparent. The misogynist sees to this, and here is how he does so.

So long as life remains simple and there are no bumps along its road, the misogynist attempts to get along on the basis of canned meaning (fantasy and ideology). That is, he sees the relationship he has as necessarily unfolding according to a very particular script -- one that he likely takes as "universal" (for he doesn't bother communicating its content to anybody.) It's only when life is unpredictable, when unscripted events occur (as they do), that canned meaning no longer seems to be useful anymore. As a consequence of being at a loss about how to make sense of unpredicted and contingent reality, the misogynist starts to cast aspersions around. That is when he alights -- as if by "common sense" -- on the view that he had internalised a long time ago. "It is all the fault of a woman/women that nothing makes sense to me anymore. My applecart has been upset by female emotionality."

Thus a woman who had unwittingly befriended by a misogynist finds herself blamed not only for the varying contingencies of life, but also for the fact that the misogynist has not been able to understand them. In the middle of a crisis, she also has to deal with the misogynist gesticulating and waving about how she actually produced the uncomfortable situation through her putative female states -- the nebulous powers of her "emotionality".

It is true that a woman has to have unusual levels of tolerance to allow the relationship to have proceeded to this point. More than likely, the misogynist has already engaged in offensive boundary crossing a number of times. For instance, he has typically taken what were intended to be ironic statements on her part, or even just general comments about engaging in an aspect of life, as if these were "confessions" on her part.

"Confessions concerning what?"

Why, confessions concerning "typical" feminine weakness -- of course!