The Masculine Mystique
youtube.com/watch?v=ZLA0MCH3oTE
It’s ironic that men say that women don’t know what they want while at the same time being totally clueless about what they want themselves with women.
“But I love my wife”, says the cheating husband. What kind of self-deprecating woman would settle for that kind of love? And for centuries, even millennia, wives were settling for their own sloppy tenths, consoling themselves with being “a good wife and a mother” while their husbands were free to fuck around and try to figure out what the hell they wanted. And the society at large turned a blind eye to it. Men have needs and a “good wife” should be more understanding of it, it said. I say, screw Freud and Jung, and whatever justifications they came up with to explain the complexity of the needs of the delicate masculine psyches, these cheating men should be hunted down and castrated (for the sake of the family). Why should the women have to bear the brunt of it? Like women don’t deserve to have their own wants and needs.
And so what happened? The men glorified and martyrized of the “good wife” role, in which the more humiliation and suffering she accepts, the more saintly and desirable she becomes. The virtuous, patient, and forgiving wife. An ideal woman. A true saint. Like a selfless “mother” and a personal slave who makes “her man” her whole existence. What more could a man ask for? It must have been some kind of cruel joke, to take a selfless, hollowed-out shell of a woman and turn it into a “virtue” to be admired and imitated. Woman as a thing, as a decoration. And it was those instances in which the woman tried to reassert her own individuality that made the man the most uncomfortable, as if suddenly hearing a plastic doll speak up on her own. It disrupts the idyllic world that man has created for himself, and it startles him. How does he shut her up, and make her behave again, he thinks to himself, so he could go back to how things were before, quiet and peaceful, where he had everything under his control, was listened to and taken care of.