Why Can't a Man Be More Like a Woman?

Back in the day, when women were entering the psycho professions in ever larger numbers, female therapists claimed that they, by virtue of their anatomy, had a far better understanding of what it meant to be a woman. They could feel female pain because they had felt female pain. It was difficult to dispute the point.

Effectively, it was a successful marketing ploy. Perhaps too successful. By now the psycho profession is becoming a woman’s profession. The vast majority of college psychology majors are female. In the future, psychology will more closely resemble nursing than doctoring.

And yet, this must also mean that female therapists have no real understanding of what it is like being a man. So they want men to be more like women. They believe that therapy must teach men to express their feelings, they are fostering character traits that will cause a man to be disrespected by other men. Today’s therapy, conducted most often by women, but also by many men, attempts to girlify or womanize men. Not surprisingly, men who are perceived to be weak will try to overcome the profession by becoming more aggressive and violent. Be careful what you wish for....

Of course, the alternative is to medicate men. Because if you cannot treat them with psychology, there are always pills.

It’s not just about the male/female binary. It’s about the fact that what passes for research in the psycho fields today has been hopelessly contaminated by ideology. In particular, by feminist ideology. This ideology defames and demeans boys, considers them to be toxic and criminal, and sees manliness as something to be healed.

We would be remiss if we did not point out, yet again, that the American president who excelled at empathy, who felt your pain, was also the American president who sexually assaulted and abused and harassed women. The dimwits of the American Psychological Association will never make the connection, but they are promoting a type of male behavior that is decidedly abusive toward women. The word “machismo” does not come from an Anglo-Saxon culture. It has nothing to do with the codes of gentlemanly behavior. In truth, psycho professionals today seem not to have heard of or to understand such codes. They want men to get in touch with their feelings, the better to become mini Bill Clintons.

Now that the psycho profession has been taken over by women, or better, by feminists, it shows a distinct and marked hostility toward men. It is less blatant than the feminists who shriek their outrage at all men, but surely, it is more obviously promoting antagonism between the sexes than comity.

The psycho profession belongs to the Great American Cultural Revolution. It has set out to change human nature, the better to make it fit into the ideological straitjacket produced by radical feminism. It cares less about treating mental illness or emotional distress than in transforming society. Note the following report from the American Psychological Association. I emphasize, this report was not produced by a bunch of radical feminists. It was produced by the nation’s leading organization of professional psychologists. Hopefully, you will never again be tempted to imagine that this has anything to do with science.

It addresses questions about manliness and masculinity, but it really cares about the fact that its ideological blinders have caused it to alienate half of the population. And to lose a considerable amount of business. If you imagine that a middle aged man who has emotional issues is going to consult with a young woman who wants him to feeling his feelings… you are living in never-never land.

So, we read an opening gambit, one that suggests that the cultural revolution has not been as successful as psycho professionals would like. Strictly speaking, this has nothing to do with mental health:

And men still dominate professionally and politically: As of 2018, 95.2 percent of chief operating officers at Fortune 500 companies were men. According to a 2017 analysis by Fortune, in 16 of the top companies, 80 percent of all high-ranking executives were male. Meanwhile, the 115th Congress, which began in 2017, was 81 percent male.

The important point is that therapy did not just arrive on the scene yesterday. The therapeutic culture, as Philip Rieff dubbed it, has been around for five decades now. If men and women are at daggers drawn, then perhaps the psycho world should begin by taking some responsibility for its appalling stupidity… especially in treating men.

Anyway, the APA is happy to assert that men are a criminal class. We note, as a curiosity, that beyond failing to take any responsibility for this situation, the APA, a pseudo-scientific outfit, makes no mention of hormones like testosterone:

But something is amiss for men as well. Men commit 90 percent of homicides in the United States and represent 77 percent of homicide victims. They’re the demographic group most at risk of being victimized by violent crime. They are 3.5 times more likely than women to die by suicide, and their life expectancy is 4.9 years shorter than women’s. Boys are far more likely to be diagnosed with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder than girls, and they face harsher punishments in school—especially boys of color.

Nor does the APA mention  that the culture and especially the school system now functions like a matriarchy. It is decidedly hostile toward boys and tends to beat them down in favor of girls. That this should have led boys to be more hostile toward girls should be the least surprising outcome.

For the record, the APA concludes by blaming it on the patriarchy:

Thirteen years in the making, they [the new APA guidelines] draw on more than 40 years of research showing that traditional masculinity is psychologically harmful and that socializing boys to suppress their emotions causes damage that echoes both inwardly and outwardly.

It’s been decades since anyone has dared defend traditional masculinity, so we again see an instance where ideology trumps reality. Another one is contained in the following piece of nonsense:

Prior to the second-wave feminist movement in the 1960s, all psychology was the psychology of men. Most major studies were done only on white men and boys, who stood in as proxies for humans as a whole. Researchers assumed that masculinity and femininity were opposite ends of a spectrum, and “healthy” psychology entailed identifying strongly with the gender roles conferred by a person’s biological sex.

How ignorant is this? Consider the facts. The work of psychotherapy began over a century ago when Sigmund Freud set out to cure hysteria. All of the hysterics were female. He traveled to Paris where Jean-Martin Charcot had a ward filled with hysterical females. In truth, the European wave of hysteria provoked serious and considerable interest in female psychology, by psychologists and especially neurologists. To say that second-wave feminism provoked an interest in treating women is beyond ignorant. It is ideologically driven ignorance.

Then, the psychologists bring forth the real problem. Whatever the psycho profession is selling, men are not buying it. They are not good patients. They are not lining up to be told that they should be more vulnerable. They are not seeking mental health services. Considering that the psycho profession holds them in contempt, why is anyone surprised. They made their bed. Now they should lie in it.

The APA explains:

This masculine reluctance toward self-care extends to psychological help. Research led by Omar Yousaf, PhD, found that men who bought into traditional notions of masculinity were more negative about seeking mental health services than those with more flexible gender attitudes (Psychology of Men & Masculinity, Vol. 16, No. 2, 2015).

And also:

… men are often reluctant to admit vulnerability, 

Just what a man needs, if he navigates the world of men… an enhanced sense of his own vulnerability. Better yet, therapy prescribes more openness about feelings… as was evidenced by Bill Clinton:

Because of the way many men have been brought up—to be self-sufficient and able to take care of themselves—any sense that things aren’t OK needs to be kept secret,” Rabinowitz says. “Part of what happens is men who keep things to themselves look outward and see that no one else is sharing any of the conflicts that they feel inside. That makes them feel isolated. They think they’re alone. They think they’re weak. They think they’re not OK. They don’t realize that other men are also harboring private thoughts and private emotions and private conflicts.”

Make men weak and vulnerable. The psycho world does not understand that this systematic derogation of manly behavior is likely to provoke a counter reaction. Most men do not just take it lying down. They fight back.

The therapists do understand that some of these traditional masculine traits are not so bad, but they care more about defeat than about victory, about suffering pain and about self-sacrifice:

It’s also important to encourage pro-social aspects of masculinity, says McDermott. In certain circumstances, traits like stoicism and self-sacrifice can be absolutely crucial, he says. But the same tough demeanor that might save a soldier’s life in a war zone can destroy it at home with a romantic partner or child.

Therapists do not undestand traditional masculinity, so they caricature it. They reduce it to violence and sexism. Again, ideology drives the conversation. 

Now, however, psycho professionals are working on positive masculinity… because it should be used to accompany the weakness and vulnerability that has become the professions stock-in-trade:

The clinician’s role, McDermott says, can be to encourage men to discard the harmful ideologies of traditional masculinity (violence, sexism) and find flexibility in the potentially positive aspects (courage, leadership). He and his team are working on a positive-masculinities scale to capture peoples’ adherence to the pro-social traits expected from men, something that has yet to be measured systematically.

So, they want to overcome norms and do not understand that the culture has been degrading masculine norms for decades now. And they do not understand that the wave of bad male behavior, documented by the #MeToo movement is the direct consequence of this absurd effort to reject norms of courtship, dating and gestures of respect for women.

The goal is not to help men. The goal, as the study makes clear, is to transform the culture and to change the world. Tell me why insurance companies are paying for this indoctrination and brainwashing:

Getting that message out to men—that they’re adaptable, emotional and capable of engaging fully outside of rigid norms—is what the new guidelines are designed to do. And if psychologists can focus on supporting men in breaking free of masculinity rules that don’t help them, the effects could spread beyond just mental health for men, McDermott says. “If we can change men,” he says, “we can change the world.”