When I came home tonight after attending a dinner party where all the guests seemed normal, I started thinking about that phrase from the play "The Mourning Bride" by William Congreve, an English author of the early eighteenth century. You know the one: "Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned, nor hell a fury like a woman scorned." When you think of these few words, you automatically think of a woman who has been jilted by the one she loves and wants to viciously strike back. However, have you ever wondered how a bully responds, if he is the one who is jilted?
This thinking/wondering came about as a result of the cyber bully who trolls my blog and leaves disparaging, rude, libelous, abusive, and threatening comments. Sometimes this type of behavior accelerates into death threats, as it did with me. Most cyber bullies - 90% - are men. So, I started wondering just why do some men hate women to the extent that they'd do this.
I started doing some Googling and discovered, not to my surprise, that there's a lot out there on this topic. Some write about this phenomenon being the result of original sin when Eve took and ate the forbidden fruit and then blamed it on Adam. That fruit, by the way, was a symbol of knowledge, something that Adam couldn't supply. Some actually believe that this story is central to the oppression of women worldwide.
Did you know that the English language has 220 words (almost all derogatory) for a female and only 20 for a male (almost all complimentary). Consider the following: A 'master' exercises authority, whereas a 'mistress' is a so-called kept woman. The term 'sir' retains respect, while 'madam' refers to someone who keeps a brothel. A 'lord of all he surveys' is quite different from a 'lady of the streets', and the meaning of 'he's a professional' is generally understood differently from 'she's a professional'.
Susan Forward, PhD, a leading psychotherapist states: "Once we begin to examine the forces that drive the woman hater, we find that much of his abusive behavior is a cover-up for his anxiety about women. This man needs, as we all do, to feel safe. As adults most men fulfill these yearnings through physical intimacy, emotional sharing and parenting. But the woman hater finds these yearnings terribly frightening. He harbors a hidden belief that if he cares for a woman, she will then have the power to hurt him, to engulf him and to abandon him. Once he has invested her with these awesome and mythical powers, she becomes a fearful figure for him."
She goes on to explain that the woman hater's conflicting emotions of yearning and fear result in behaviors of hostility, aggression, contempt and cruelty. "Early childhood plays a role in contributing to this misogynistic behavior. In an ideal situation, a mother nurtures and is a boy’s primary source of comfort, while fathers help pull the boy away from mother so that he does not become overly dependent on her. If you look closely at the childhood of a woman hater, the father was probably either too passive to pull the boy from the mother, or he was a bully himself, and consequently, the boy had no option but to make his mother the center of his universe."
"Without realizing it, in adult life he transfers this dependency, as well as conflicts and fears that go with it, onto the woman in his life. The woman hater saw his mother as having the power to frustrate him, to withhold love from him, to smother him, to make him feel weak, or to make insatiable demands on him"—and as an adult he views women as having these same powers."
This partly explains why the cyber bully Thomas Churchwell hates women bloggers. The irony is that if he bumped into me on a street, and saw that I am not any of the things he writes about me, but that I am a nice, ordinary girl, he would run away shame-faced. Maybe. Of course, then he wouldn't mind meeting a new online target to assuage his childhood traumas.
I used to feel some sympathy towards this type of man because, no matter what, something terrible happened to him early that skewed his image of women. But now I believe that he doesn't deserve any sympathy except from his psychiatrist.
4 comments:
I have made the mistake of forgiving the hate-filled cyber blogger because in my liberal mind, I believed he was a victim of his childhood abuse and deserved some understanding. Wrong. This male cyber bully is a failed person, never achieving anything in life. Therefore, he kicks the most readily available "victim", in his eyes. Women. Like the john who can only perform with hookers, this cyber bully can only rise to the occasion by bashing women. He deserves in a place Dante's Inferno, surrounded by women who ignore and debase him. This cyber bully cannot tolerate the truth and when the written word doesn't conform with his view of the world, he attacks the poster with spam and egregious non-meritorious complaints. This person does not deserve any sympathy, only antipathy.
Great post Scarlett...and very thought provoking. Mothers are generally nurturing but it is Father's who generally give a child his/her sense of self-worth and confidence. This combination is becoming rare, so the claim that mothers are emasculating their sons nowadays may be due to the breakdown of that combination. By the way, I think a connection to original sin is a lot of c**p but then I did not read what you did. Although Eve was tempted by the serpent to eat, Adam also ate the forbidden fruit.
Thank you, each of you, for your very valuable input.
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