I made a mistake I couldn’t initially admit during a conversation with a friend about women. As a part of trying to express my newfound sexuality, I was excitedly telling them about how I “enjoyed spending money on beautiful women.” To me, buying women gifts, supporting their businesses, or just paying for dinner, is how I enjoy showing love. All women are beautiful to me, so I was taken aback by my friend saying I was coming across as misogynistic.
At first, I was puzzled. Contextually speaking, being a female-bodied person, it made me feel powerful to be able to choose how my money was spent and I was excited to feel I could give back and support women, especially to those who need it. As we discussed further, she began asking me if I was okay with women paying for themselves or buying me something. I responded with, of course, and was frustrated that wasn’t assumed. I went home puzzled and eager to seek answers as to why my friend would react that way.
The misogynistic context of the phrase “spending money on women” is related to men objectifying women for their own pleasure and using money as collateral to excuse their poor behavior. That much I understood. As one side of me argued, though, I said it with literal intentions. Shouldn’t she have understood I wasn’t objectifying women and was intending to be generous? I felt the context of our situation would make my words change meaning. After all, I’m not a 50 year old man talking about strippers. It led to an internal disagreement as one side of me agreed with her view and another side of me felt unseen.
It reopened a rejection wound I’ve had with women for most of my life. The cycle would look like this: I say something that upsets someone -> I try to explain what I meant and try to understand what I did wrong -> the explanation I receive doesn’t translate to me well due to an unspoken implication -> I seek further clarification -> the other party shuts down -> I feel rejected and give up asking. Now I was literally experiencing the same cycle within myself as my masculine leaning side withdrew in defeat while my more feminine side felt abandoned for the obliviousness of his questioning.
I reassured my masculine side that it’s okay that he was frustrated. He then let out an outburst: “Why is it that when I say things literally, she always takes it out of context? She knows I’m not trying to objectify women. Why should I need to change when she can’t even explain to me what I’m doing wrong? All I was doing was trying to show how much I care and now I’m the bad guy. Why should I even bother?”
After the emotions were released, my feminine side re-emerged to point out, “The issue isn’t about you caring. It’s about how you say it. When you use that phrase, how am I supposed to know you’re any different from all of the men out there who treat me like an object? Men who respect me don’t use that phrase. You can show me you care by saying you want to support women financially. It’s saying the same thing, but doesn’t remind me of the men who have hurt me and my friends in the past.”
My masculine let out a frustrated sigh, but felt relieved he could understand better and have an action he could take to resolve the conflict. Both versions of me were frustrated and wanted to be seen and heard, but neither one was speaking to the other about what was really important to them: having their pain acknowledged and accepted. The feminine version of me needed to know my masculine side came from a place of caring and was willing to listen while my masculine side needed to know what he could do to change and that he wasn’t being rejected for who he was.
Does this dynamic sound familiar?
I decided to throw the scenario past ChatGPT to gain more clarity and context on how I could have approached the situation better. As it spit out alternative phrases I could have used, something caught my eye in its explaination on how I could communicate more effectively. It used the phrase “language of control” to describe words and phrases that often have implied meanings intended to control others. Suddenly awareness struck me like lightening as to why I had so many seemingly random conflicts with others in the past.
When people perceive you as powerful, regardless of how you view yourself, your words will always carry a different implied meaning. As someone who has been in various roles of authority, the language that I’ve used throughout my life didn’t phase me as something to be taken as intending harm. After all, if my peers were doing it, I naturally was going to mirror them. It would help me take charge of situations, especially being a smaller person (I weigh barely 100 lbs). How I speak often came from a place, albiet subconsciously, with an undertone of control and fear that frankly, I never even knew existed.
Since I had always felt othered as part of my queerness, autism, and my traumatic upbringing, to have another person highlight a subtle power dynamic blew my mind. Me? Have implied power and social status? As someone who frequently tried to run away from those very things, I couldn’t imagine myself being placed in the same category as those whom I was attempting to protect myself from. And yet, I was a reminded of a distinct memory of myself in middle school.
I knew from a young age that women were looked down upon, not taken seriously, and expected to conform. I knew I was different and wasn’t going to allow the systems around me to make me a “victim”. So I observed behaviors I saw powerful men did. They sat a certain way, spoke a certain way, and looked you in the eye during a conflict. I adjusted my voice to be lower and avoided feminine things like the plague. I even tried to learn about battle field strategies. But nothing I did ever removed the terror I felt in my chest that no matter how hard I worked, I was always going to be weaker than the men around me and I would never truly be safe.
That fear had guided me for years. It had led my decisions and inhibited me from self-expression, joy, and my own personal power. After developing PTSD, the wound became worse. Suddenly, the words I’d used had become harsher to keep others away. It took less energy not to filter myself and care about how I came across. I was a tiny human. How could I intimidate people who actually fit into this world? The reality was, pain blinded me from both sides of my own truth: the pain of being the victim time and again and the power that comes from not being able to accept it. It all came down to one thing: trying to reclaim control when it felt like I had none.
When we ignore our true power, it becomes much easier to never see our impact on others. While we often think of this in terms of inspiring or helping others, the unfortunate part is that there is a darker implication to not accepting our strength. When we perceive ourselves as weaker than we actually are, we allow behaviors and situations that, in reality, we can control. We also can separate ourselves from the pain of realizing we are included in the problem. Healing only comes from recognizing we’re part of the solution and that how we view ourselves doesn’t mean the world feels the same. This is why our words matter.
I clung to misogyny because of fear: it’s what men used to protect themselves from other men and from the women they so desperately wanted to connect with but could not understand. It was what I had used to differentiate myself so I could survive in work environments where I would have been otherwise dismissed and ignored. And without the pushback I deserved, I continued to move through life with the hopelessness that I would never truly understand why I couldn’t just be accepted despite trying to be the protector and helper. What I had been missing the whole time was understanding how power looked versus what power felt like.
As society struggles with the rise of incel culture, the “male loneliness epidemic”, and other regressive developments, I think my transformation from cynic to healer points to a new opportunity for discussions around how we address gender in our relationships and how our communication style holds more weight than we give it. If we can start holding space for historical context and cultural expectations from a common place of caring, we might just start making better progress in our connections.
So if you’re a person like me, who has good intentions but doesn’t always get the words right, let’s learn together and keep talking. It’s important that we keep doing so for ourselves and the people we care about most.
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