Women Are Not a Mystery. You’re Just Not Listening.

Gender essentialism has convinced men that understanding women is impossible, while women are still expected to understand, anticipate, soothe, and explain men.

Recently, I published an article about the long history of women having the audacity to exist publicly without first obtaining male approval. Naturally, a man appeared in the comments to explain women to me.

Women Keep Having the Audacity to Choose

More specifically, he dropped a link to his own essay titled Women: A Grand Mystery, a piece so spectacularly aligned with the point I had just made that I initially had to ask whether it was satire.

It was not.

Women - A Grand Mystery

The article begins by warning readers, “especially women,” that they may become emotionally distressed by what follows because women are supposedly “prone to become quite sensitive and unpredictable after reading essays about their gender, especially when written by men.”

The trap is obvious from the opening paragraph. Before a woman has even responded, her response has already been classified as irrational. If she dislikes what he writes, that does not mean the writing was insulting. It means she is sensitive. If she objects to being stereotyped, she proves the stereotype. If she becomes angry after being called unpredictable, hormonally governed, intellectually mysterious, and in need of male restraint, then clearly the author has correctly identified a problem with women.

It is the rhetorical equivalent of poking someone repeatedly and then announcing, with great satisfaction, that they appear irritable.

From there, the essay moves through a familiar parade of clichés. Women are unknowable, emotional, temporarily irrational during menstruation, prone to poor planning, strangely powerful over men, and in need of male restraint when their emotions threaten to overwhelm them. Men, by contrast, are apparently less likely to “lose their head” when the family is threatened, which is an interesting claim to make after several thousand years of men responding to wounded pride by duelling, invading neighbouring territories, starting wars, smashing furniture, and punching holes in drywall.

We see here the mark of the rational male.

The menstruation material is especially revealing because it treats women’s anger during PMS as evidence that their emotions are fundamentally unserious. My personal theory is that the things that enrage women when they are PMSing are usually the same things that irritate them the rest of the month.¹ The difference is not that hormones have invented a new grievance out of thin air. It is that the threshold for tolerating bullshit has dropped.

Perhaps she is not suddenly irrational. Perhaps she is simply less willing to absorb the same dismissiveness, mess, condescension, incompetence, or casual cruelty she usually works harder to smooth over.

The standard male response to this has often been avoidance: stay out of the way, say as little as possible, wait for the weather system to pass. But that assumes the problem is her reaction rather than the behaviour provoking it. A better solution might be to notice what keeps coming up and change it. If the same grievance appears every month, perhaps the useful question is not, “How do I survive her period?” but, “Why am I giving her the same reason to be angry over and over again, and is this perhaps something that annoys her the rest of the month too?”

That would require treating women’s anger as information rather than hormonal noise that disrupts your good time. It would also require men to do something much more difficult than hiding in another room: take responsibility for improving their behavior in a relationship.

The author repeatedly insists that he is being affectionate, but he is not. Calling your sisters “creatures,” describing their menstrual cycles as recurring periods of insanity, and suggesting that you and your father needed to calculate when it was “emotionally safe” to emerge from your rooms is not fond teasing. It is contempt wearing a sitcom joke as cover.

He describes women as blessings, angels, divine inventions, and delightful mysteries, but he also describes them as irrational, badly prepared, unstable, dangerous, naturally subordinate, and perhaps incapable of understanding even themselves. This is a familiar form of sexism because it does not always arrive snarling. Sometimes it arrives smiling broadly while explaining that women are magical, inscrutable beings whose peculiarities men must patiently endure.

The compliment and the insult are not opposites. They are dance partners.

Women are not a species

At one point, the author explains that his mother was different from his four sisters and that his sisters were different from one another. Each woman he encountered was an individual with her own personality, moods, needs, and habits.

A reasonable person might conclude from this that women are individual human beings. Instead, he concludes that women are a “mysterious species.”

This is gender essentialism at work. Gender essentialism takes patterns associated with men and women and treats them as deep, fixed, natural truths. It does not merely suggest that people may be shaped by sex, gender, socialisation, culture, or experience. It turns categories into destinies, with men becoming one kind of creature and women another.

The author’s favourite guide to this arrangement is John Gray’s Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, which he believes should be assigned to schoolchildren before Shakespeare. Personally, I think children have suffered enough.

There are some books that are best used as fire starters…

The recommendation is revealing because Gray’s book does not merely suggest that partners sometimes communicate differently. Its entire framework rests on the idea that men and women are effectively members of separate civilisations, complete with distinct languages, instincts, values, emotional needs, and methods of thought.

Gray writes:

“Men mistakenly expect women to think, communicate, and react the way men do; women mistakenly expect men to feel, communicate, and respond the way women do.”

He then makes the premise even clearer:

“Without the awareness that we are supposed to be different, men and women are at odds with each other.”

Not may be different. Not are often socialised differently. Not sometimes develop different communication habits. We are “supposed to be different.” The distinction has already been transformed from observation into destiny.

The genius of Mars and Venus

The genius of the Mars-and-Venus framework is not that it helps people communicate. It is that it makes failed communication feel inevitable.

If your wife says she feels unheard, perhaps she is simply speaking Venusian. If your husband withdraws instead of talking, perhaps he has returned to his Martian cave. If a woman explains what she needs and the man ignores her, perhaps the translation was simply too difficult.

Once men and women are treated as visitors from different planets, misunderstanding stops being a failure of curiosity, attention, or care. It becomes the natural consequence of interplanetary diplomacy, which is an extraordinarily useful arrangement for anyone who does not want to do the work.

Gray tells us:

“When you remember that men are from Mars and women are from Venus, everything can be explained.”

Everything.

That is an ominously efficient theory. A framework capable of explaining everything usually has another useful quality: it can rarely be disproved. Any behaviour can be folded back into the system. A man who behaves “femininely” has suppressed his masculine traits. A woman who identifies with Mars has more testosterone. A person who does not recognise themselves in the descriptions can simply “look deeper.”

The categories always survive. The person must be incorrectly interpreting themselves.

Separate planets, separate purposes

The book’s most revealing passages are not really about communication. They are about what men and women are supposedly for.

Gray writes:

“A man’s sense of self is defined through his ability to achieve results.”

A woman, meanwhile, receives a different emotional assignment:

“A woman’s sense of self is defined through her feelings and the quality of her relationships.”

Elsewhere, he offers an even cleaner division:

“Men are motivated and empowered when they feel needed. Women are motivated and empowered when they feel cherished.”

Men achieve, while women relate. Men act, while women feel. Men need purpose, while women need affection.

Gray presents this as a discovery about timeless male and female nature. A historian sees something much more familiar: separate-spheres ideology with a space programme.

For centuries, patriarchal cultures have claimed that men belong to the world of achievement, production, authority, rationality, and public action, while women belong to the world of emotion, intimacy, nurture, beauty, and relationships. Gray simply rebuilds that arrangement on two planets.

Mars has highways, tall buildings, uniforms, technology, and accomplishment. Venus has harmony, feelings, clothing, shopping centres, gardens, and counselling. Apparently the universe itself contains a gendered division of labour.

The metaphor makes an old hierarchy feel whimsical. It adds telescopes and removes the politics.

The world’s most convenient mystery

The cultural insistence that women are unknowable gives men a remarkably effective escape hatch. A man can fail to listen to women for decades and conclude, not that he has failed to listen, but that women cannot be understood.

He can misinterpret a partner, overlook her unhappiness, dismiss her anger, ignore her stated needs, and then shrug: “You know women.” Or “Women are complicated.” Or “Women say one thing and mean another.” Or “It must be that time of the month.”

The explanation transforms his lack of curiosity into a universal law.

What is striking in Women: A Grand Mystery is that the author never seems especially interested in what the women around him thought. His sisters appear primarily as hormonal weather systems. His mother is an ideal of maternal love. His former partners become a “mixed bag of joy and grief.” The woman currently closest to him is an “angel from God.”

Women appear as categories in relation to him: mother, sister, girlfriend, wife, teacher, temptation, mystery, help meet. They are rarely permitted the ordinary dignity of being people whose behaviour might have reasons unrelated to their function in a man’s life.²

He repeatedly tells us he has known many women, but proximity is not the same as attention. Living near women does not automatically produce knowledge of them, particularly when every piece of evidence is fed into a theory that women are irrational by nature.

You can spend a lifetime looking at something without ever learning to see it. Once you have already decided that women speak another language, why bother asking what your sister meant? She was never speaking your language anyway.

Meanwhile, women are expected to understand men

The burden of incomprehension is not distributed equally. Women are told that men are simple, but they are still expected to study them constantly.

Women are expected to know when a man is upset even when he says he is fine. They must distinguish anger from fear, silence from sadness, withdrawal from exhaustion, and irritability from shame. They are expected to know when to encourage him, when to leave him alone, when to soften criticism, when to offer praise, when to protect his pride, and when to translate his emotional state into words he has never learned to use.

Gray’s book makes this asymmetry unusually visible.

He tells men to listen more, which is reasonable enough. But he devotes enormous energy to teaching women how to manage the conditions under which a man might successfully perform that listening. Women must not criticise too directly, offer unsolicited advice, follow a man into his “cave,” demand intimacy at the wrong moment, sound accusatory, imply blame, or make him feel inadequate. They must reassure men that their unhappiness is not necessarily his fault and show appreciation for his listening so that he understands listening has value.

They must ask in precisely the right way.

In one especially revealing passage, Gray writes:

“Women have a lot to learn about men before their relationships can be really fulfilling.”

He then explains that women must learn not to interrupt men’s withdrawal, not to panic, not to demand intimacy, not to offer help, and not to interpret silence as neglect.

The man retreats, while the woman studies the retreat. The man goes silent, while the woman learns how not to disturb the silence. The man struggles to listen, while the woman learns how to make listening feel safe, rewarding, and nonthreatening.

Mars receives an operating manual. Venus is assigned technical support.

Emotional labour with a planetary theme

This is the unequal economy of understanding.

Girls are taught early to notice other people’s feelings. Women are expected to remember birthdays, anticipate needs, choose gifts, maintain family relationships, organise social lives, recognise tensions, prevent conflict, and make gatherings emotionally pleasant.

This is not because women emerge from the womb clutching a colour-coded family calendar and asking everyone how that made them feel. It is learned labour.

Someone remembers that your mother is still angry about Christmas. Someone notices that the teenager has gone quiet. Someone realises your friend felt excluded. Someone phrases the complaint carefully because otherwise he will become defensive and the discussion will shift from what he did to how bad he now feels about being told.

Someone keeps the emotional machinery humming. Usually, we call her overreactive right up until she stops doing it.

Gray inadvertently describes this imbalance repeatedly. Women, he tells us, are naturally intuitive because they have spent centuries anticipating the needs of others. They are relationship-oriented. They care, nurture, communicate, and improve.

But rather than asking why women have spent centuries anticipating everyone else’s needs, he treats the resulting skill as evidence of female nature. The labour disappears into biology.

Women become good at emotional interpretation because they practise it. Men become bad at it because they are excused from practising. Then we call the outcome natural.

The cave has excellent labour protections

Gray’s cave metaphor is probably the clearest example of how essentialism turns a behaviour into an exemption.

According to Gray, stressed men withdraw, become quiet, lose awareness of others, and focus on their own problems. At times, he writes, a man may have only “5 percent of his mind” available for his relationship. He can become “distant, forgetful, unresponsive, and preoccupied.”

The woman’s task is to understand.

She must not follow him, pressure him, or interpret his behaviour personally. She should find other people to meet her emotional needs, go shopping, take a bath, call a friend, see a therapist, or occupy herself until he returns.

The cave is treated as male nature. Her reaction to being ignored is treated as a communication problem she must learn to manage.

He withdraws because that is what men do. She feels neglected because she does not yet understand men correctly. The result is an apparently neutral theory in which one person’s emotional absence becomes a natural cycle and the other person’s pain becomes a misunderstanding.

This does not mean nobody ever needs solitude. Of course people need time alone. The problem is the transformation of one historically gendered pattern into a universal biological law, followed by a set of instructions teaching women how to accommodate it.

The cave comes with excellent labour protections.

Women must speak fluent Martian

Gray also insists that men and women use the same words with different meanings. Women, he says, use “poetic licence,” superlatives, metaphors, and generalisations to express emotion. Men take their words literally because men use language to convey facts and information.

This produces an entire “phrase dictionary” translating women’s speech into something men can understand.

When a woman says, “We never go out,” Gray explains that she does not really mean that. She means she wants intimacy, reassurance, romance, appreciation, and perhaps dinner. When she says, “No one listens to me,” she is supposedly making a complex emotional request hidden beneath dramatic language.

The man is advised not to take her words literally.³ The woman, meanwhile, must learn to formulate her needs in ways that do not threaten his competence, trigger his defensiveness, suggest criticism, imply blame, or make him feel inadequate.

She must understand what he means when he says nothing. He must learn what she means when she says something.

Again, the work is not evenly distributed. The man’s silence is meaningful and deserves respect. The woman’s speech requires translation and correction.

One is an instinct. The other is a dialect problem.

Pop culture’s lovable idiot

Popular culture has spent decades turning male incompetence into an endearing personality trait.

The sitcom husband forgets the anniversary, buys the wrong gift, cannot tell that his wife is angry, does not know where anything in his own house is kept, and remains baffled by his daughter. He makes a catastrophic parenting decision because his wife left him alone with the children for four hours.

The studio audience laughs because he is not cruel. He is just a man.

His wife rolls her eyes, repairs the damage, explains the children to him, reminds him of the appointment, and performs the final scene in which everyone learns that he meant well. The joke depends on her competence. Without the wife quietly understanding everyone, the lovable idiot would simply be an exhausting adult leaving a crater in the living room.

Romantic comedies often perform a similar trick. The man does not need to understand women generally. He merely needs one grand revelation near the end, usually followed by a public declaration, a sprint through an airport, or the interruption of an event other people worked very hard to organise.

The woman, meanwhile, has spent the entire story analysing his emotional unavailability, interpreting his behaviour, recognising his hidden goodness, and waiting for him to achieve the basic insight that she is a person.⁴

This imbalance is packaged as romance.

Even seemingly harmless phrases reveal the arrangement. “Happy wife, happy life” often does not suggest that a husband should care about his wife’s happiness as an equal partner. It means that the mysterious female creature must be pacified so the man may enjoy peace.

“Women are complicated” means their dissatisfaction need not be taken at face value. “Men are simple” means their behaviour should be accommodated rather than examined. “Boys will be boys” means women and girls will handle the consequences.

These sayings do not describe men and women. They assign labour and excuse failure.

The flattering cage

Essentialist arguments often survive because they include compliments.

Women are more intuitive, nurturing, spiritual, morally superior, precious, and naturally suited to becoming the heart of the home. They are angels.

The author of Women: A Grand Mystery claims God has always honoured women. He points to Jesus speaking with women and entrusting them with important messages. Then he explains that men must nevertheless remain heads of households because someone needs final authority and because husbands are supposedly better equipped to stop wives from going feral on the neighbours.

This is not honour. It is paternalism.

Benevolent sexism idealises women in ways that justify limiting them. Women are placed on a pedestal, where they can be admired, protected, spoken for, and prevented from wandering dangerously near power.

Hostile sexism punishes women who reject the arrangement, and the two work together. The “good” woman is loving, soothing, forgiving, maternal, emotionally available, and grateful for male leadership. The difficult woman is angry, political, sexually autonomous, demanding, ungrateful, or unwilling to provide free counselling to the men around her.

One is an angel. The other is crazy. Neither is simply human.

Gray’s version is more secular and therapeutic, but the structure remains familiar. Men are competent, autonomous, achievement-oriented providers, while women are intuitive, relational, nurturing receivers. Each sex is supposedly honoured in its own sphere.

The old hierarchy has traded the pulpit for the relationship seminar.

At a certain point, an explanation becomes an alibi

Gender essentialism is not flattering to men either. The belief that men cannot understand women assumes men are incapable of empathy, intellectual curiosity, emotional growth, or sustained attention to another person.

It sets the bar for male relationships somewhere beneath the basement.

He forgot. He did not notice. He cannot express himself. He does not know how to comfort people. He does not understand why she is upset. He was never taught.

At a certain point, an explanation becomes an alibi.

Men are not born unable to listen. They are not biologically incapable of remembering birthdays, recognising distress, reading books by women, learning about menstruation, or asking a follow-up question.

Treating these skills as naturally feminine lets men avoid developing them, then presents the resulting incompetence as proof that the stereotype was true.

One of the strangest moments in Gray’s book comes in its opening story. His wife has recently given birth. She has been physically injured during labour, can barely walk, has run out of pain medication, and has spent the day caring for a newborn without adequate help.

When Gray returns home and finds her distressed, he becomes defensive and prepares to leave. She has to stop him and explain, very clearly, that she is in pain and needs him to hold her.

Gray interprets his failure to recognise this as evidence that men and women are different:

“Another woman would have instinctively known what Bonnie needed. But as a man, I didn’t know that touching, holding, and listening were so important to her.”

Perhaps another woman would have understood because women are trained to notice pain, anticipate care needs, and remain attentive to people recovering from childbirth.

Perhaps the issue was not that he was from Mars.

Perhaps the issue was that his wife had to explain why abandoning her while she was injured, exhausted, and caring for his newborn child would be unkind.

The planetary metaphor does not make that interpretation kinder. It makes accountability disappear into orbit.

She probably told you

The most revealing thing about “women are mysterious” is how often it is said after women have explained themselves repeatedly.

The author ends his essay with this line:

“A woman’s mind is a mystery, maybe even to them.”

That is not just glib. It is deeply dismissive.

First, men are excused from understanding women because women are supposedly too strange, contradictory, hormonal, and alien to be understood in the first place. Then, when women do explain themselves, men are given a second escape hatch: perhaps she does not really know what she thinks either.

It is a perfect little system. A man does not have to listen because women are mysterious, and a woman’s own account of her feelings can be discounted because she is apparently mysterious even to herself.

That means there is no answer she can give that must be taken seriously. If she is calm, perhaps she is hiding what she really feels. If she is angry, perhaps she is hormonal. If she changes her mind, she proves women are inconsistent. If she holds her position, she is unreasonable. If she says exactly what she wants, perhaps she does not truly understand her own mind.

The mystery is doing political work. It strips women of authority over their own experiences.

Women say they are tired. They say the division of labour is unfair. They say a joke is demeaning. They say they do not like being spoken to that way. They say they need help, that they are unhappy, that they are afraid, that they do not want sex, that they do not want children, that they want careers, that they want independence, and that they are angry because something unjust has happened.

Then someone rubs his chin thoughtfully and announces that women are impossible to understand. Or worse, that perhaps women do not even understand themselves.

This is how female testimony gets dissolved into nothingness. Her words become evidence of a mood rather than information about her life. Her anger becomes hormones. Her refusal becomes confusion. Her dissatisfaction becomes instability. Her stated desire becomes something a man feels entitled to reinterpret for her.

Perhaps she was not speaking in riddles. Perhaps she was not speaking Venusian. Perhaps she understood her own mind perfectly well.

Perhaps you simply preferred the version in which she did not.

Because if women really are another species, another planet, another unknowable civilisation, then you never have to confront the possibility that she explained herself clearly and you chose not to believe her.

Mystery asks nothing of you. Understanding requires curiosity, humility, memory, and the willingness to accept that a woman may be the leading authority on what she thinks.

That is much harder than blaming Venus.

Women are not escape rooms

I do not think women are uniquely mysterious. I think human beings are complicated, inconsistent, historically situated, emotionally layered creatures who cannot be reduced to a few rules in a relationship manual.

Men are not simple, women are not incomprehensible, and neither group possesses a single shared mind.

What gender essentialism does is take the ordinary difficulty of understanding another human being and distribute responsibility for overcoming it unequally. Women are expected to learn, while men are permitted to shrug.⁵ Women are expected to soothe, while men are permitted to withdraw. Women are expected to explain men to themselves, while men are permitted to classify women as irrational when the explanation becomes inconvenient.

The greatest trick of “women are a mystery” is that it sounds like admiration while functioning as an excuse.

It allows a man to insist that he loves women without taking their thoughts seriously. It allows him to describe them as angels while mocking their bodies, dismissing their emotions, and endorsing their subordination. It allows him to transform contempt into affectionate humour and then blame women for lacking grace when they fail to laugh.

Women are not mysterious because men and women belong to separate species. Women appear mysterious to men who have been taught that observing women is the same thing as listening to them.

It is not.

Perhaps the real mystery is why so many men would rather build a bridge across the Atlantic, consult an interplanetary phrase book, and invent an entire Venusian civilisation than ask a woman what she thinks and believe her answer.

1. Source: the fact that I had a male roommate for five years and we got along great when I wasn’t PMSing and I didn’t magically turn into an insane rage monster towards him when I was. I wasn’t subliminating rage toward him when I wasn’t PMSing, which meant that I didn’t have the urge to throttle him over anything when I WAS.

2. God forbid women have interiority.

3. From a woman to any man reading this, when we say something we mean it.

4. I don’t think I’ve ever watched a romcom that made me think “yes, that man understands women as complex human beings with their own thoughts” by the end of it.

5. Or in the case of Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, be given specific instructions to “hug your wife four times a day” or “give her twenty minutes of attention” as if she’s a pet that needs enrichment and play time. No, really, he breaks it down in a checklist of 101 things you can do to “score points” with women. Most of which are just basic adulting that anyone should be doing.