Women Keep Having the Audacity to Choose

Male Grievance, Historical Illiteracy, and Why Some Men Think Feminism Is the Problem

I had a whole response written to Jared’s “women don’t actually like nice guys” rant, but he blocked me before I could post it.

Which is tragic, really. Not for me. I’m fine. I have snacks and a historian’s tolerance for nonsense. But it is unfortunate because Jared accidentally became the perfect case study for the exact thing I wanted to talk about: the way male grievance turns feminism into a catch-all explanation for women making choices men dislike.

Jared is not interesting because he is unique. Jared is interesting because he is immensely ordinary. He is one more specimen in a very crowded jar labeled Men Discover Women Have Interior Lives; Public Reaction Mixed. We are not here because Jared invented anything. We are here because Jared keeps saying the quiet part out loud with the confidence of a man who believes introspection is something that happens to other people.

The larger pattern is simple. A woman makes a choice. A man dislikes the choice. Instead of asking whether she had reasons, whether he misunderstood, whether the relationship failed for ordinary human reasons, whether he might have contributed to the outcome, or whether women are simply allowed to make choices he finds baffling, the conclusion becomes: feminism did this.

That is not political analysis. That is grievance wearing a clip-on tie.

Exhibit One: Feminism as the Universal Villain

Jared first wandered into my mentions by responding to my article about patriarchy training people. My point was not that men are inherently terrible, women are inherently perfect, or every individual man is personally responsible for every injustice on earth. My point was that patriarchy is a social system, and social systems train the people living inside them.

Jared replied:

The thing is, you don’t have to say this. This is a basic premise of popular feminism (not necessarily academic feminism). It’s called the “women are wonderful” paradigm.

Feminism trains people just as much as the alleged patriarchy is supposed to. It trains women to be distrustful of good men. It trains women to hate masculinity. It trains men to hate themselves and women to hate their natural bodies.

This is a useful starting point because he immediately does the thing the article described. He takes a systemic critique and translates it into a personal grievance. “Patriarchy trains people” becomes “feminism teaches women to hate men.” The argument only works if you assume that criticism of patriarchy must secretly be hatred of men, which tells us rather a lot about how he understands masculinity.

It also quietly concedes the premise. He says feminism trains people “just as much as the alleged patriarchy is supposed to.” Great. Wonderful. We agree that social systems, cultural narratives, and institutions shape how people think and behave. He simply wants feminism to be the sinister puppet master and patriarchy to be imaginary, which is convenient if your politics require centuries of gendered law, labor, religion, medicine, education, and social power to be treated as a collective hallucination.

The funniest part is the claim that feminism “trains women to be distrustful of good men.” Women are not distrustful of good men because a feminist pamphlet bit us in childhood. Women are cautious because women have experience. We know that “good man” is not a title a man awards himself for showing up with clean fingernails and an opinion about consent. It is demonstrated over time. Trust is earned, not granted automatically because someone insists they are one of the nice ones.

Exhibit Two: The Nice Guy Who Thinks Feminism Took His Prize

After that, Jared decided I needed to understand why men dislike feminism. He wrote:

And if you do actually care to understand why guys don’t like feminism, and why we think it’s been destructive, read this. Colin is not a unique case. Nearly every guy either knows somebody who’s been through this or has been through it himself:

The article he linked argued that women claim to want “nice guys” but actually reject them, pathologize them, or choose more toxic men instead. This is a familiar grievance. It is also a very revealing one because it treats romantic disappointment as a political indictment.

Here is the problem. “Women don’t like nice guys” and “women distrust performative niceness” are not the same claim.

Women generally like kindness just fine. What many women distrust is a very specific performance of niceness: the man who announces himself as safe, feminist, emotionally intelligent, or unusually decent before anyone has asked; the man who treats basic respect as an investment portfolio; the man who is patient and generous right up until he realizes sex, romance, forgiveness, or devotion are not being dispensed from the machine.

Women did not invent the “nice guy” problem because we hate kindness. We named it because many of us have met men who use kindness as camouflage.

We know love-bombing when we see it. We know when someone is performing emotional intelligence rather than practicing it. We know when a man seems more invested in being recognized as good than in actually being good. And yes, sometimes women are overcautious, defensive, suspicious, or unfair because experience has taught them that danger often arrives wearing a helpful smile and carrying a vocabulary it learned in therapy.¹

We are so very sorry that women’s accumulated experience occasionally makes it harder for men to get laid.

But that is not feminism ruining men’s lives. That is women learning pattern recognition. We’ve always had pattern recognition, we’re just allowed to say no to the men who trigger our fight or flight mechanism now.

Exhibit Three: “I Know Her Better Than She Does”

Then came the divorce post, which is perhaps the crown jewel of the exhibit. Jared wrote:

Having been through the marriage and divorce cycle, I still don’t think marriage itself is the issue. The problem is the modern women who were broken by feminist lies. Even though my ex would tell you she is decidedly not a feminist, make no mistake, she is one. I know her better than she does.²

It’s not enough to merely find a woman who would not call herself a feminist. If she is not firmly anti-feminist, it probably is not going to work out.

There it is. There is the whole worldview, sitting in the open like an Australian possum in a bakery.

The possum is, however, much cuter than Jared.

His ex-wife says she is not a feminist. Jared informs us that she is. She describes her own beliefs. He corrects her. She offers an account of herself. He replaces it with his interpretation. Then he presents himself as someone who understands what feminism has done to women.

This is the part where a historian quietly puts down her coffee and stares into the middle distance.

Because the issue here is not whether his ex-wife is or is not a feminist. I do not know this woman. For all I know, she spends her evenings reading Phyllis Schlafly by candlelight. The issue is that Jared’s instinct is to treat his interpretation of a woman’s beliefs as more authoritative than her own.

A woman says, “This is who I am.”

A man says, “No, I know better.”

And somehow feminism is the problem.

This is also where the “divorce came out of nowhere” genre begins to hum ominously in the background. I do not know what happened in his marriage, and I am not pretending to know. But if a man publicly announces that his ex-wife does not understand her own beliefs and that he knows her better than she knows herself, I am not overwhelmed with shock that the relationship encountered turbulence.

The historical pattern here matters. Anti-feminism has long depended on the idea that women are unreliable narrators of their own lives. Women do not know what they want. Women have been misled. Women think they want freedom, but they really want protection. Women think they want education, but they really want marriage. Women think they want careers, but they really want babies. Women think they are not feminists, but Jared is here with a flashlight and a divorce decree to explain the truth.

At some point, concern for women starts looking suspiciously like a refusal to believe them.

Exhibit Four: Respect, Obedience, and the Language of “Owing”

Jared also appears in a discussion about what wives owe husbands. First, in response to another man’s comment about respect, he writes:

The belittling in private thing is huge. So often I see the advice given to women that they should not belittle their husbands in public. Nothing is said of belittling him behind closed doors. That is more destructive, in my experience.

On its own, this is not especially outrageous. Belittling a partner in private is destructive. Belittling a partner in public is destructive. Contempt corrodes relationships. Marriage counselors did not need Jared to descend from the mountain with this tablet.

But placed beside his other comments, the emphasis becomes part of a larger pattern: the recurring belief that women are not sufficiently attentive to men’s emotional injuries, while men’s authority to diagnose women’s failures remains largely unquestioned.

That becomes much clearer in the next screenshot, where Jared writes:

I wrote an article kind of related to this topic near the end of last year, while my marriage was in its death throes. Part of it came out of my consideration of what my marriage should have looked like, and part came from thinking through the duties men have to their wives and what reciprocations would make the most logical sense. It might help move the conversation forward for you. I think what you’re really looking for is to understand what you owe your husband because society can easily enumerate all the things he owes you, but if you ask people what you owe him, all they will tell you is either “nothing,” or they will list superficial and performative things like the examples you gave (eg always let him sit at the head of the table). If we begin by understanding the duties and privileges of husbands and wives as reciprocal, that pushes the conversation forward, and we can start to consider what women owe their husbands universally and look for ways to apply that practically in our own lives.

There is a lot to unpack in “what women owe their husbands universally,” and very little of it smells fresh.

The word “owe” is doing a great deal of work. It transforms marriage from a relationship between two people into a ledger of obligations. More importantly, it frames the cultural problem as an insufficient accounting of what women owe men. Not what partners owe each other in a specific relationship. Not how two people negotiate care, respect, labor, intimacy, repair, and trust. What women owe husbands universally.

That is the kind of language that makes my historian brain start dragging nineteenth-century conduct manuals down from the shelf.

Because “what women owe men” has never been a small question. It has been embedded in law, religion, custom, advice literature, marriage manuals, property regimes, sexual expectations, and domestic labor for centuries. Women have been told they owe men obedience, sex, heirs, emotional management, household labor, moral refinement, forgiveness, admiration, silence, patience, and a properly warm dinner.

The idea that society has been shy about telling wives what they owe husbands is historically hilarious.

The issue is not that relationships require nothing from women. Of course they do. Relationships require something from everyone involved. The issue is that anti-feminist discourse often treats women’s obligations as natural, universal, and morally urgent, while women’s autonomy is treated as selfish, suspicious, or socially destructive.

Exhibit Five: Girls Mature Faster, Therefore Feminists Are Trashing Men

In another thread, Jared responded to a post about the phrase “girls mature faster.” He wrote:

This is interesting because growing up I only ever heard this said by adults who wanted me to think that the girls were intrinsically better than me.

Later in the same thread, he added:

Absolutely. I just get tired of seeing this stuff online. Feminists trashing men, manosphere guys trashing women. Men and women are supposed to love one another!

This is a revealing misreading of the phrase “girls mature faster,” because that phrase is not usually deployed to grant girls power, authority, freedom, or respect. It is much more often used to make girls responsible.

Girls are told they mature faster so they can be expected to sit still sooner, behave better sooner, understand social nuance sooner, manage other people’s emotions sooner, and absorb blame sooner. It is not generally a compliment. It is a burden dressed up as praise, the little satin bow on a box full of unpaid emotional labor.

This is the phrase adults use when girls are expected to tolerate boys harassing them because “he probably just likes you.” It is the phrase hovering in the background when girls are dress-coded because boys might be distracted. It is the assumption behind expecting girls to be kinder, quieter, more forgiving, more careful, more emotionally fluent, and more responsible for the atmosphere of every room they enter.

“Girls mature faster” is not the opposite of “boys will be boys.”

It is the other half of it.

“Boys will be boys” excuses boys from responsibility by treating their behavior as natural, inevitable, and developmentally adorable, even when it is harmful. “Girls mature faster” assigns girls responsibility by treating their self-control as natural, inevitable, and morally required, even when they are children. Together, the two phrases create a tidy little system: boys act, girls absorb; boys disrupt, girls regulate; boys are impulses in sneakers, girls are unpaid assistant managers of everyone’s emotional and physical safety.

That is not feminism trashing men.

That is patriarchy training children.

Jared heard the phrase as an insult to boys, and I am not saying it never felt that way to him. Gendered expectations harm boys too. Being told, explicitly or implicitly, that boys are less emotionally capable, less responsible, or naturally more chaotic can do real damage. But the phrase was not created by feminism to crown girls as superior beings and throw boys into the developmental basement. It belongs to a larger gendered script that harms girls by making them responsible too early and harms boys by denying them accountability.

The problem is that Jared interprets this as evidence that feminists are “trashing men,” because in his framework criticism of gendered expectations keeps becoming criticism of men themselves. He recognizes that something felt unfair, but he aims his frustration at feminism rather than at the social system that taught adults to excuse boys and overburden girls in the first place.

Once again, he is describing something patriarchy produces and blaming feminism for noticing it.

Exhibit Seven: The Good Spouse and the Mask

In another marriage discussion, Jared responded to someone saying many people simply lack the skills to create good marriages. He wrote:

Unfortunately the same behaviors, skills, and attitudes that indicate you would be a good spouse also attract people who would seek to take advantage of you, and if you pair up with a good actor or actress, well, you’re screwed when the mask comes off.

There is a recognizable pain here. Plenty of people have had the experience of believing they were loved by someone who later seemed to become a stranger. Plenty of people have found themselves wondering whether the person changed, whether they missed warning signs, or whether they were deceived.

But again, the interpretive pattern matters.

In Jared’s world, being a good spouse appears to make a person vulnerable to exploitation by someone else’s deception. That can happen. It does happen. Yet when this idea is placed beside his other claims, it becomes part of a larger refusal to examine relational failure as mutual, complex, or ordinary. The danger is always the other person’s mask. The woman who misled. The woman who failed to appreciate. The woman broken by lies. The woman who did not know herself.

There is very little room here for the possibility that relationships fail not because one person was a saint and the other was a villain, but because two people brought incompatible wounds, expectations, habits, and failures into the same house and called it marriage.

But that explanation is less satisfying than grievance. Grievance gives you a villain. Self-analysis gives you homework.

Exhibit Eight: “The Women Who Don’t Want a Nice Guy”

Returning to the “nice guy” theme, Jared wrote:

It took a long time, but I realized that the women who don’t want a nice guy (a genuine nice guy, not the kind who flip a switch when they get rejected) are just not worth the heartache. I’d rather be alone for the rest of my life than stuck with a drama queen.

If she doesn’t appreciate all you do for her, move on. She’s not worth it. You shouldn’t even need her to leave. You should learn to recognize when she doesn’t appreciate it and respect yourself enough to end things.

This is where the nice guy discourse folds neatly into male grievance.

On the surface, there is reasonable advice buried in here. If someone does not appreciate you, leave. If a relationship is draining you, leave. If you are being mistreated, leave. Perfectly fine.

But the surrounding framework matters. Jared is not simply saying people should leave bad relationships. He is saying women who do not want a nice guy are not worth the heartache. He is imagining a category of women who reject genuine goodness and therefore deserve dismissal.

That still avoids the central issue: women are allowed to reject nice men.

A man can be genuinely kind and still not be the right partner. A man can be decent and still not be desired. A man can be stable, thoughtful, respectful, and emotionally available, and a woman can still say no. That is not proof that she is broken, shallow, damaged, feminist-poisoned, or secretly craving toxicity.³ It is proof that attraction and compatibility are not moral vending machines.

This is one of the places where anti-feminist grievance becomes most revealing. The issue is not that women reject good men. Everyone gets rejected. The issue is the belief that women’s rejection of a good man requires an ideological explanation.

Sometimes the explanation is much simpler.

She did not want him.

That is allowed.

Exhibit Nine: Abortion, Child Support, and the Fantasy of Male Opt-Out

In a discussion about child support, Jared wrote:

I thought the point of bringing this up was to point out the hypocrisy of pro-abortion policies. Women can opt out of motherhood (by killing their child, a heinous and disgusting act), but men may not opt out of fatherhood (by doing the much less heinous act of simply not paying money).

Also, sometimes child support is objectively unfair. I have a friend whose ex is now married to a woman (she left him for that woman and married her as soon as it was legal for her to do so). When it comes to expenses “for the kids,” the court requires them to split costs 50/50. So for instance when there are fees for his son to participate in boy scouts, both parents pay 50/50 on that. They also split custody time 50/50. But, he also has to send money to her personally every month for child support. Why does he have to pay her anything at all?

This is a different issue, but it belongs to the same ecosystem.

Reproductive autonomy is reframed as women getting away with something. Child support is reframed as men being denied an equivalent opt-out. The child becomes almost incidental, which is remarkable in a paragraph that begins by calling abortion “killing their child.”

The broader grievance is familiar: women have too much power, men are trapped, and systems unfairly privilege female choice. This ignores the rather important biological, legal, and material reality that pregnancy happens inside someone’s body, while child support exists after a child exists and is meant to support the child, not reward the mother for being annoying.

The comparison only works if you flatten pregnancy into a financial inconvenience and child support into a punishment men suffer for women’s choices.

Again, the issue is autonomy. Women’s reproductive autonomy is treated as an unfair advantage because it allows women to make a decision men cannot control. The resentment is then translated into the language of equality: if women can opt out, why can’t men?

But bodily autonomy and financial responsibility for an existing child are not the same category. The argument depends on pretending they are.

Exhibit Ten: Wives, Warmth, and the Revolutionary Discovery That Men Like Being Loved

In another post, Jared responded to a quote about a woman improving her marriage by dropping “constant mental criticism” and showing “warmth, appreciation and respect.” He wrote:

I love it when women post how they realized all they had to do in order to be happy in marriage was love their husband instead of hating him. It’s the most obvious thing in the world, yet most women out here act like it’s some grand revelation.

This is the sort of sentence that sounds like common sense until you sit with it for more than three seconds.

Of course affection matters in marriage. Of course warmth matters. Of course contempt is corrosive. Nobody serious is arguing that spouses should spend their evenings hissing at each other across the casserole dish.

The problem is the little phrase “all they had to do.”

Because “all they had to do” quietly removes every other possible factor from the marriage. It erases unequal labor, emotional neglect, sexual entitlement, financial stress, childcare, resentment, weaponized incompetence, loneliness, exhaustion, and the thousand small ways a relationship can become unlivable while still looking perfectly normal from the outside.

In Jared’s framing, the wife’s unhappiness is not a signal that something in the marriage might need examination. It is a failure of attitude. She was mentally critical when she should have been warm. She was insufficiently appreciative. She failed to perform love correctly. Once she stopped “hating” her husband and started loving him, happiness apparently arrived like a casserole from the Lord.

How convenient.

Because what this really suggests is not mutual transformation, but lowered expectations. The wife becomes happy when she stops criticizing, stops expecting, stops noticing, stops asking whether her husband is actually meeting her needs, and simply redirects her energy toward warmth, appreciation, and respect. The husband does not appear in this sentence as someone who changed. He is not asked to become more attentive, more equitable, more emotionally available, more responsible, or more loving. The lesson is for her.

This is where anti-feminist marriage discourse often reveals itself. It presents itself as pro-love, pro-family, and pro-marriage, but what it frequently means is that women should lower their standards until whatever their husbands are already offering becomes enough. If she is unhappy, she should become more grateful. If she is resentful, she should become more respectful. If she is exhausted, she should become more loving. If she is lonely, she should stop mentally criticizing the man sitting beside her and consider whether the real problem was her attitude all along.

That is not a recipe for a healthy marriage. That is emotional austerity with throw pillows.

A genuinely mutual argument would ask what both partners owe each other. It would ask whether warmth and appreciation flow in both directions. It would ask whether the wife’s criticism appeared out of nowhere or whether it grew in the soil of being ignored, dismissed, overburdened, patronized, or treated like the household’s emotional infrastructure. It would ask whether “love your husband” is being used as an invitation to intimacy or as a demand that women stop noticing disappointment.

But Jared’s framework does not require that curiosity. It has already found the culprit.

Women just need to love their husbands instead of hating them.

How marvelously simple. How historically familiar.

Exhibit Eleven: Feminist Men Are Against Family Life

Finally, in a discussion about fathers and domestic labor, Jared wrote:

That’s simply false. Feminism sold you the myth of the do-nothing dad, but it’s just fake propaganda. Men throughout history have been involved in family life. Society would not have functioned if they were not.

Feminist men are against family life.

This is a perfect example of male grievance as historical illiteracy.

Yes, men throughout history have been involved in family life. Of course they have. No historian worth the ink in her footnotes would argue that men were absent from families until feminism invented diaper-changing in 1971. Men have been fathers, providers, teachers, tradesmen, farmers, disciplinarians, protectors, companions, and members of households across time.

But that is not the same as saying men have historically shared domestic labor equally, changed diapers as a normative expectation, cooked routine meals, managed household logistics, or shouldered the daily repetitive care work assigned to women in most patriarchal family structures.

“Men were involved in family life” is not a rebuttal to “domestic labor has been gendered.”

It is a dodge.

The final line, though, is the real treasure:

“Feminist men are against family life.”

This is one of those claims that only works if “family life” means “a family structure where women know their place.” Feminist men are not against family life. Feminist men are against using “family life” as a velvet curtain over unequal labor, male entitlement, reproductive coercion, economic dependence, and the expectation that women exist to absorb everyone else’s needs.

If your definition of family life collapses the moment men are expected to cook dinner, change diapers, respect women’s autonomy, and treat marriage as a partnership rather than a throne room with laundry, the problem is not feminism.

It is your definition of family.

What Jared Shows Us

Jared’s posts are useful because they gather so many forms of male grievance in one place: historical illiteracy, statistical illiteracy, self-analysis refusal, and the persistent treatment of female autonomy as social danger.

His personal experiences may be painful. I do not doubt that. Men can be hurt. Men can be mistreated. Men can be trapped in awful relationships. Men can be manipulated, belittled, betrayed, and broken. Feminism does not require pretending otherwise.

But pain does not automatically produce insight.

Sometimes pain produces politics.

And when personal pain becomes a universal theory about women, marriage, feminism, child support, abortion, dating, and what wives owe husbands, we are no longer simply hearing one man process grief. We are watching grievance harden into ideology.

The central feature of that ideology is not love for men. It is suspicion of women.

Women choose wrong. Women think wrong. Women leave wrong. Women desire wrong. Women define themselves wrong. Women fail to appreciate. Women fail to respect. Women fail to love. Women fail to understand what they owe.

And feminism, conveniently, explains it all.

That is why the issue was never really whether women like nice guys. The issue is whether women are allowed to choose men, reject men, leave men, disappoint men, disagree with men, or define themselves without those choices being treated as evidence of corruption.

Feminism did not make women human beings.

It simply insisted that society stop pretending they were not.

Some men have never recovered.

1. Notably this is why so many men want to date much younger women. Because 18 year olds haven’t always developed their pattern recognition enough to know a pile of bullshit when they see it.

2. Dear reader if you are already sitting there thinking: “Buddy, I may have identified one reason for the divorce.” You are not alone.

3. That said, women can be attracted to men who harm them. It’s unavoidable that both men and women will sometimes have terrible taste in partners, because of youthful inexperience, trauma, or because they are craving more of an adrenaline rush than a lasting relationship. I once dated a smoking hot narcissist for six months because I was 21 and dumb. That wasn’t feminism failing me. It was a frontal lobe that wasn’t fully developed.