Repost

The fogging of feminist critiques by patriarchy is all too common, not least because it is taught by patriarchal systems that "women" per se are only able to communicate about personal issues not real ones. So, what we are encountering here is, in a very material sense, patriarchy's immune defence against a hostile critique.  Feminism is not a hostile critique of men, but of a system that keeps men and women at each other's throats.

The fearful and/or angry reaction has its roots in feelings, spouting forth in many men, that in and of themselves they are not attractive to women.

Men often underestimate their capacity to be appealing, just for being men, that is for their intrinsic qualities like personality and intelligence and so on. Patriarchy is therefore a compensatory system for this (often delusional) sense of something lacking in the nature of one's unfurnished being . The emotional certainty that many men express is the ideological certainty that no woman would like them as they are, in their truly spiritually/psychological naked state. Without puffing themselves up with titles or money or pretending to be more intelligent than they are, they assume women would reject them.

Feminism represents a challenge to men to simply be who they are, on an equal level with women, without trying to be something else -- above all, without trying to be something more than women are capable of being (appealing, perhaps to factors biological) to shackle women into a relationship based on power.

The feminist challenge to be what they actually are frightens many men because they don't think it is based on reality.

Many males feel certain that women do not actually want anything as straight-forward as feminists imply, but that women are expecting more than that. Such men's fear that men cannot live up to women's expectations becomes translated as "women are fickle". Many men may also suffer from fear that they would be abandoned by their women, unless there is something compulsive at work like the ideology of patriarchy which preaches female inferiority and therefore keeps women partly shattered, or some act of law that will prevent women from leaving men.

It's not the case that men recoil from women acting outside of their traditional roles. It's more that many men,but not all, cannot imagine maintaining a relationship that isn't based on force.