Anti-Male Bias, and How Men Can Help Correct It

A side remark on Scott Adams' Rumble vlog was that marriage counselling could not have saved his first marriage because, he wailed, the therapist was, or therapists were, convinced that he was the enemy! And all his male buddies had felt this too! Women are perfect; always and only men are wrong! It's not faaair! And, since men used to be the ones paying for marriage counselling...it's destroying the family counselling industryyy!

Here's the part of his remarks that women can agree are objectively true: If marriage counselling is going to work, these days, it must challenge the fundamental sin of Adam in the Garden of Eden. The husband must not be allowed to blame the wife  Once the man is able to admit he's wrong, there's hope for the marriage. If the man wants to feel that he's right and blame the wife, the only question is whether she'll settle for the house, the children, and two-thirds of his income for child support. 

It's not that wives are faultless. It's that, in order to consider the question of what the wife might do better in the future, she has to know that it's safe for her to admit being wrong about something without the husband leaping in to blame her for everything.

Single women who have enough common sense to be worth  pursuing, ex-husbands will soon learn, have the same anti-male bias. We have compared a few stories. We know that when a woman says, "My first husband had major mental problems," chances are that he's lying around in a hospital somewhere; when a man says "My ex-girlfriend is crazy," chances are that she can spot the many self-serving errors of fact in his stories.

No, it's not fair that, if today's men say "My ex spent all my money on drugs, didn't feed the kids or even stay sober enough to have carried the baby out of the house in case of fire, and once showed her anger at me by trapping my dog in a vacant building and letting it starve to death while I was out looking for it every evening." 

If the facts are allowed to speak for themselves today's woman will believe that those things are true, but if she hears a man say the words she will automatically run them through a mental filter that says Men aaaalways try to blame other people." 

Applying that filter, we'd understand that man to say "I can't earn as much money as I want, so I resented sharing any with my ex. My ex probably has some sort of fatal wasting disease, and I didn't help her. I'm such a dead loss, I even made up a wild story when my own dog left me, which is obviously what any living thing in its right mind would have done."

Some women today still believe that a man can be a big asset in life. We probably have known a few who were--our fathers, brothers, maybe some other woman's husband--or their dear departed first husbands. Women learn to be cautious in singing the praises of living men but it may sound as if no widow's husband ever spilled a drink, slammed a door, or lost so much as a glove. Most of us have, however, learned from enough friends' and relatives' experience to know that most men are liabilities 

Men scramble frantically for evidence that women can be liabilities rooi, and although there is some truth in ths--somewhere in the United States, almost every year, a woman commits a violent crime--this attempt to make women look bad is not making men look good. We know Jack, and we know Jill, and although Jill might have been tiresome company at times we know very well which of those two would have done anything bad enough to justify a DIVORCE. We may enjoy fiction about a glamorous, rich, powerful, awful female who's left a long trail of men she killed because the first night with them wasn't good for her. That's a genre--Revenge Porn. Still, still know that in real life "wife" presupposes the half of a couple who doesn't cheat, made all of the good financial decisions, and does three-quarters of the child care and two-thirds of the domestic chores. 

Given the bias tat he is a liability who always tries to delude himself that things are someone else's fault, there is exactly one course of action for a man who wants to convince anyone that he's not as bad as the stereotype. And it's not the desperate efforts at ego defense expressed by things like "It was her bad idea," or "She's crazy," or "They're prejudiced against me." All those ego defenses do is make a man look worse. A man who whines "Reverse discrimination" is presumably a man who leaves puddles on the bathroom floor.

A man can show that he's different from the stereotype by demonstrating a very humble, teachable spirit. By consistently taking his share of the blame for what goes wrong. 

"It was my idea."

"If I'd locked the door, the thief might not have stolen my..." 

"I had unreasonable expectations about how the house should look, and about who should keep it looking that way. I've learned. If I have an opinion about the way the house looks I need to be careful about how I offer to do all the work myself."

"I was jealous. I shouldn't have been. I knew she was an extrovert when I married her. She had looks and money so I didn't ask about character. That was my mistake."

"She was one of those 'poised, polished' people who you know, if you think about it, have a lot of practice telling lies. Even so, I should have known something was wrong before she packed up and left." 

Men who learn to take responsibility for their own actions will find that they're no longer the enemy. It's that ego defense, the sin of Adam, that is their enemy...and everyone else's.