First of all, if you have already decided that the reason men get defensive when you point out the harmful things that some men do – like sexual assault and domestic violence – is because they’re weak, stupid, pathetic, self-centred, immature, or secretly bad themselves, and you’re not openly curious about the possibility of a different answer, then stop reading.

I don’t write for close-minded people.

Next, let me acknowledge the truth of this problem.

Whenever someone posts online about men being the primary cause of harm to women, often the comments section does indeed get flooded with defensive reactions from men. Most of which essentially say the same thing: “not all men”, i.e. the claims you’re making are unfair because only a small percentage of men do these things and I’m not one of them etc.

It’s a fair challenge: why do you get defensive if this isn’t about you? Why is defending mena and yourself your first reaction to hearing about harmful things happening to women?

And of course, if men were to say that all women were something harmful, women too would get defensive, even if the harm being caused to men was real, e.g. gold-diggers.

I’ll point out something obvious first: some of these men are simply sexist. They hate women, think women are inferior to them, and will attack any woman who “gets out of line”. But if you’re open to it, I’d suggest this is not even a majority of the guys reacting. It’s oversimplifying the problem to see it this way.

If you want to understand, either as a man who gets defensive, or as someone who watches men get defensive, I’ll share some ideas that might help you increase your understanding of human psychology. If we want to solve this problem, we have to first understand it.

I was one of these guys.

Not to an extreme level – I would rarely actually write a comment. But I could feel a kind of eye-rolling tension whenever I saw a post where a woman complained about how men are always such creeps, rapists, violent, stupid, bad in relationships, lazy fathers etc. Despite knowing that I’m not who they’re talking about, and that who they’re talking does indeed exist, I would still be bothered by the posts.

When challenged about my reaction, I started exploring myself, trying to understand why these posts got to me.

I’m not some Red Pill manosphere type guy. I hate Andrew Tate and others like him. I adore women – my two favourite people on this earth are my wife and daughter. I believe women are more emotionally intelligent than me, and they treat me better than men generally do.

And I worked in the Department of Corrections. I know for certain that the biggest physical threat to women is men. Men beat, rape and kill women on a regular basis throughout the world. If I was a woman, I too would consider a strange man to be a threat until proven otherwise, and statistically speaking this would be a smart strategy. It’s one I will teach to my daughter to keep her safe.

So why do I feel resistant to people pointing out this problem? Why do I feel the urge to “correct” them if what they’re saying is essentially true?

Turns out, there’s a few reasons, and each post I see may trigger off all or some of them.

The most rational reason that comes up is an aversion to untruthfulness.

This one is triggered off when a creator – usually the militant feminist type – blatantly misrepresents data to make men look much worse than they are. From outright lying to fudging the results of a study, there are plenty of posts that make men look terrible based on straight up misinformation. When a creator says something like one in three men will sexually assault a woman, it’s just absurdly incorrect.

I get this type of resistance to any post that does this about any topic – conspiracy theories, shit-talking people behind their back, politically divisive rage-bating, AI-videos pretending to be true etc. So this resistance is the most reasonable one: I hate liars.

But I’ll admit this isn’t the only reason I get defensive.

We men must admit to ourselves that it’s not just about some kind of devotion to accuracy. There’s a reason that posting against men gets more attention and attacks from us than others that could be inaccurate too.

The more uncomfortable reason is because the beast inside us is being called out.

This is one of the main reasons anyone gets upset about horrible crimes. Sure, we are compassionate to the victims and outraged at the way they’re treated. But humans aren’t that compassionate. We get upset more because we know that possibility lies within us as well.

Within every man – indeed, every human – is the possibility of violence, cruelty and horror. Humans dominate the planet not because we’re the smartest or strongest, but because we’re the most ruthless. We destroy to a degree that no other animal could ever compete with. We’re the only animal capable of sadism – committing harm solely for our own pleasure.

It’s incredibly uncomfortable to be reminded of this; to have our egotistic identity of being “a good man” challenged by the hard fact that this identity is a paper-thin veil covering horrors we don’t want to acknowledge. Only a small percentage of men rape or kill – probably less that 3% globally – but 100% of men have the potential to. And deep down, we know it.

Yet, this brings up another reason the posts upset us: the arrogance of the creators of these videos.

There’s something about their “I’m superior to you” attitude in the videos that feels hypocritical to us. Humans really struggle to accept hypocrisy; especially being talked down to by someone we know isn’t better than us. The instinctive distaste for arrogance is shared by both genders.

Some of these video creators have an air of “I’m a woman/feminist man, so I’m better than all men”. They don’t usually say this directly, but it’s heavily implied through the way they talk.

We don’t get as defensive when someone just academically presents the facts from a neutral place. But when someone is basically saying, “Some men are rapists therefore I am superior to all men” we get tense. Because deep down we know you’re not better. No one is. Every human has the capacity for great harm; they need only be placed in the right situation.

When these creators attack men, they show this capacity directly. They are clearly enjoying the pain they cause men. They bathe in the defensive reactions they trigger. We can feel it when someone’s primary purpose is to hurt men’s feelings. That’s sadism! 

There’s a hypocrisy in pretending to fight for women’s rights when what you’re really doing is using women’s suffering as a platform to attack men for your own gratification. You know you’re being harmful, and that’s your primary motivation. That means you’re not better than anyone. For many of us watching, you’re actually worse. We don’t respond well to being talked down to by someone more harmful than we are.

Many of the more radical feminist types openly admit this. They enjoy bathing in the tears of men. Which means they’re not really feminists – because they don’t primarily care about other women. They care about hurting men for their own personal pleasure. They would happily hurt another woman if it helped them gratify themselves. And they often do. They’re the first to shit on traditional women.

You’ll notice we are reactive to some of the male feminist “allies” who shit on other men too, indicating it’s not necessarily sexism driving us. We’ll hate an arrogant man just as easily, especially when we know the guy is just trying score points with women – probably hoping to get laid – and for some us, like myself, who know that a guy like this is actually at high risk of being a rapist himself.

There’s also a weariness in men who are just tired of being blamed for everything all the time.

For men in my generation especially, we have heard nothing but negativity about men since we were little boys. Despite treating others well and doing our best, we only hear negative feedback. And we’re sick of it, so we start reacting emotionally to any and all criticism, even then it’s fair. It’s strange to us that women don’t have more sympathy for this experience… isn’t that what happened to you, too? Aren’t we going through similar things?

We’ve grown up and witnessed something that bothers us: a lot of the harm we’ve seen done to women was done by other women!

In high school, it was girls bullying the other girls more than boys were. Boys weren’t calling girls fat and ugly and slutty – the mean girls were. When we got older and started working, we saw that the worst gossip, backstabbing, and career sabotage was committed by jealous women to other women. Yet we were told that men hold women back. ALL men. It’s hard for us to hear that women don’t have a fair deal in their careers when we’re doing nothing to stop you succeeding and we see you clawing each other back like crabs in a bucket.

This is not to say that our views are accurate, or even based on facts.

Often, like all humans – including all women – our beliefs are based on a few highly emotional personal experiences more than hard statistics. And we know this, deep down, so we can also assume these posts are coming from the same place.

We can tell when a woman is coming from a place of scorn; where her lack of success in love and life is being blamed on men because she refuses to take responsibility for her own decisions.

When a woman does a post shaming her current husband for being lazy, we all watch it thinking, “This is your best solution? Embarassing him online instead of confronting him, or getting therapy, or leaving him? How are you superior to him when this is how you respond to a relationship issue?” We immediately side with him because we suspect you’re the real villain in the relationship.

We know this must be the case because when a responsible woman talks about society’s issues she doesn’t do it in this hateful blaming way. She’s more fair and reasonable.

You don’t need to agree with our resistance. You can think we’re being irrational and illogical and so on. Some of us have indeed fallen prey to the manosphere algorithms and other false influences.

But if you refuse to have any empathy for the way we arrived at our position, then you stand no chance of converting us into allies. You only provoke resistance, and discourage us from listening to you more closely.

So if your goal is to make men more compassionate to the plight of women, why would you behave in a way that actively sabotages that goal? We can only assume it’s because your true goal is just to provoke negative reactions for your own validation.

And that’s something we simply cannot respect or listen to.

If you want someone to be your ally, you need to meet them where they are, and build from there. If you refuse to humble yourself into doing this, then that’s fine: keep your pride instead of achieving your goals.