I need one thing from a partner that few men have: sustained participation in an activity that helps with emotional balance. Therapy would do it, meditation would do it. Church could do it (depending on the Church), yoga could do it they were really into it. But most of these activities are dominated by women.

Men, on the other hand, tend to indulge in more overt expressions anger. This seems vaguely self evident, but you know, for numbers: in the US, men accounted for 73% of people arrested and over 80% of those arrested for violent crime. Over 90% of people convicted of homicide are male, and 98% of mass shootings are carried out by men (but not all — there have been some female mass shooters.) On a lower level, men are more likely to get into car accidents than women (with 4 out of 5 fatal accidents being caused by male drivers).

OMG — testosterone! Off with their nuts — amirite?

I am not right.

There are some other phenomena at play. For instance, while men in any social class tend to be more violent than their female counterparts, women in lower socioeconomic classes will often commit more crimes than men in higher socioeconomic classes (read here — great book, btw.) Additionally, while historically men have caused — like — all the violence, they have also had, like, all the power. It’s a studied thing that having more power leads to having less empathy for other people. It’s possible that many of the supposedly innate differences between the sexes have stemmed from a power differential. The amount of crime committed by young women has been on the rise since the 80s (aka, after the second wave feminism of the 70s.) There are many factors that could account for that, so I don’t want to imply a causal relationship there, but… something to think about.

However, it is possible men are just wired to be more violent than women. I’m willing to entertain that.

But if that’s true, they should be extra double going to yoga classes. Why is the less violent gender the one learning all the emotional self regulation?

Because women are expected to regulate the emotions of men as well as themselves. They have to sharpen their emotional regulation skillz because they’ll be regulating for two even when they’re not pregnant. This has been a thing that’s starting to get noticed in feminist circles; the concept of unpaid emotional labor that women are expected to supply. This takes many forms (and I’ve written about this before) and at its most benign looks like listening, support and empathy. However, as it becomes more noxious, women are expected to read the emotions men and proactively protect them from their own negative emotions.

In my personal life, I remember a man telling me that women should reject men’s sexual advances in a way that won’t hurt the man’s feelings. And, that sounds reasonable on first glance. However, unfortunately, honest communication of the feelings “I am not sexually attracted to you” is considered hurtful to most men. So, women are forced to not communicate their honest feelings in order to protect the man from feeling anything bad.

For me, this need to protect men from the truth of my reality if it will hurt them has extended so deeply that I have laughed off sexual assault so that I would not hurt the feelings of the man who assaulted me. At great personal cost, I should add. A few years after that, I asked someone out, and was rejected by them and that experience split me wide open. Yes, being rejected was painful, but it was nothing — nothing — compared to the pain I absorbed trying to save men from the pain of rejection. Being rejected by someone I had a crush on led to my being sad for a few months. My absorbing sexual harassment from men so they wouldn’t have to face rejection led to years of flashbacks, depression, and an inability to work in my chosen profession.

To deal with all my pain, I went to therapy. And yoga, and meditation class. I have done so much personal work, devoted years of my professional life, and thousands of dollars to — functionally — protect men from the shattering reality that I was not sexually attracted to them. But it was the truth; I wasn’t. And these men, when faced with the pain of my rejection could also learned how to handle difficult emotions but generally they choose not to.

Instead of learning how to take a rejection gracefully, men will claim women should “let them down easy.” It comes right down to that Margaret Atwood quote “Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.” Men are so terrified of being laughed at, rejected or absorbing indignity in any way that they demand women risk physical violence so they don’t have to face the pain of rejection.

This is an unfair trade, and one that women only make because historically men have had power over us. If you need to rely on a male income for your livelihood, you have to make sure your presence improves the lived experience of your husband. Otherwise, he might kick you to the curb and you’d be fucked. Even now, with a continued disparity in earning potential, women will often manage male emotions so that a woman can be assured of material support by providing emotional value to her partner. Often, this goes beyond the conscious recognition of the men who receive it.

I remember one of my male friends was a complete wreck during his divorce. He relied on me so much emotionally after he lost the support of his wife (wanting to talk with me, wanting to cuddle with me, etc.) that I completely started to break down. I had to set some hard limits (like, not seeing him for a week) that didn’t go over very well. Our friendship was severely strained until he started seeing a dominatrix whose demands included health conscious things like getting him to quit smoking and going gluten free. What I see now, in retrospect, is that this dominatrix did a bunch of the emotional management he had received from his wife, and that I was not willing to provide. Ultimately, my friend got a new girlfriend (who he’s now married to) and stopped seeing his dom.

Yet, to this day, I’m not sure he fully understands how reliant he is on the emotional management of the women in his life even though he was completely non functional without it. I see this crop up again and again in my male friends; I see men who are only able to quit their substance problems when they get a girlfriend, or men who drift into workaholism every time they are single. So many men I know are unable to live a happy life when they don’t have a woman who stops them from feeling the negative feelings that accompany their poor life decisions. It’s notable that they often do not stop making these poor life decisions.

How do women prevent men from facing the repercussions of their decisions?

It reminds me of this Savage Love letter, by a woman thinking of divorcing her husband (spurred on by election related stuff):

The longer we go without sex, the more he drinks, and the meaner he gets about it and literally tries to force himself on me. I feel so fucking violated. … I find him absolutely repulsive when he’s drunk, like not at all connected. Oh, and he also insists on having a giant Duck Dynasty beard which I also regard as a serious turn off and we haven’t kissed in the eight years that that monster has been on his face.What do I do? Someone needs to fuck this man so that he’s nice to be around. It used to be that I would recognize that problem, and get swirly enough to do something about it. But I just hate the way men like Trump have treated me throughout my whole life so much, that I just want to tell them all to go fuck themselves.

I think the line “Someone needs to fuck this man so he’s nice to be around,” kind of says it all. Someone who is abusive should learn the lesson no one wants to be around you when you’re like that. But, men don’t have to learn that lesson. You know who fucks me when I’m an abusive asshole?

No one.