Link: https://thefoldpress.substack.com/p/why-does-it-feel-like-men-expect

I find comment sections to be one of our greatest accidental sociological experiments. Give thousands of people anonymity, a celebrity scandal and absolutely no invitation to participate, and suddenly everyone is defending a dissertation.

The women were largely doing what women tend to do in moments like these: empathizing, sharing their own experiences, reminding each other not to ignore patterns. One comment in particular read, “You let a man slide once and suddenly he starts ice skating.”

Thousands of likes. Because periodt.

And then I got to the men… What fascinated me wasn’t simply that some defended Joey. That was honestly to be expected. What interested me most was what they chose to scrutinize: her reaction.

Hundreds of comments from men saying essentially the same thing: Why did she make it public? Why embarrass the father of her child? Why put their business online? Why couldn’t she handle this privately? Why did she have to say all of that?

Mind you, this is an incredible amount of scrutiny for someone they would readily describe as a “good woman.” Successful, beautiful, classy, lowkey. She checked every box… until now. And somewhere between my rising blood pressure and their increasingly revealing projections, a question dawned on me:

How much further along would men be as a collective if they policed one another’s character as enthusiastically as they police women’s reactions to being mistreated?

We hear endlessly about women needing to choose better. But who exactly is responsible for being better?

Society's perception of women has always been skewed. I took a psychology class that, when going over the fundamentals in the early days, some of the first studies were done on the emotional regulation of women compared to men. These studies have been done over and over again, always showing the same thing: That women are no more emotional than men, and no less effective at regulating emotions.

Over a hundred years later and we still have to keep proving it. If the truth that we are just as rational and intellegent as men were to be widely accepted, it would become a lot harder to blame us for our apparent lack of stoicism and grace.

Unfortunately this imbalance is so ingrained in people's perceptions of women that even cold, hard facts haven't changed their minds.

Comments sections are the cesspool of social intercourse. But they are really revealing. Back when that huge earthquake struck Sichuan province killing 80,000, back when the CBC was still stupid enough to have comments on news stories, I sat in shock and horror as my fellow Canadians, people who have this self-image of being polite, tolerant human beings, positively CROWED at the deaths of 80,000 mostly peasants because they didn't like the government in a city that was as far away from them as Ottawa was from, say, Edmonton.

I mean I already knew that the "tolerant, kind, polite" Canadian thing was horseshit, but I had no idea what the depths of their depravity were until I read literally thousands of such opinions.

It doesn't surprise me in the slightest that when men think they're anonymous and talking about women that they slide into that kind of thinking as well.

Somehow, we believe as a society that women are emotionally unstable and hormonally unpredictable, but girls are much more mature than boys at every stage of school. When women cry, they’re blackmailing the men around them and can’t control their emotions, but when men punch a wall or flip a table, they’re getting their anger out safely.

I’m not actually confused about why, just exhausted.