Late last year I reconnected with a friend from high school that I hadn't spoken to in about 10 years. After talking and playing MTG together for a while, he would start ranting to me about his wife. Nearly all if it was stuff he made up in his head, about her being crazy because she's a woman, about her being a prude, about her being stupid because she's a woman. It started small, just a comment here or there. I pushed back whenever I felt like I had the context to do so, or whenever it was blatantly bigoted. At one point he tried to gaslight me thinking it would work because he gaslit her until she stopped pushing the issue.
I only went over there to hangout two more times after that, and he started talking about the content he consumes, mostly police dashcam/bodycam footage being commentated over. He made exactly the kind of comments you're imagining he did, depending on the profile of the person in the videos. Totally odd behavior, I told him on more than one occasion that he sounded racist, and homophobic, and sexist.
One time I was there, he was in the shower and his wife sat to eat lunch and find something to watch. She chose a video by a gay plant YouTuber I can't remember the name of, with a big ass cat. Anyway, the whole time she kept apologizing to me for how gay this must be and how she can really turn it off and watch something else. I felt bad for her, and I hope she can find a way out, because she deserves better.
I cut him out of my life entirely again. The renewed friendship probably only lasted 6 months.
I hope the wife of your former friend will wake up to the fact that her husband is a POS and leave. She doesn’t deserve to be ground down and apologetic for liking what she likes or being who she is.
She makes considerably more money than him, and their house is also solely in her name. I hope she finds it in herself to get up and go(or get up and kick him out), because she would genuinely be so much better off without him. They've been together since we were teenagers, so she didn't have much dating experience before him. I don't know how awake she is to it.
At least she goes on trips with friends to national parks and stuff, without him.
> I cut him out of my life entirely again. The renewed friendship probably only lasted 6 months.
This is the part of the cycle that no one really talks about because we're the types of guys who, if our friends exhibit this behavior and don't change after we've called it out then we just don't associate with them any longer. Then they just find the right people who will validate their cruelty or ignore it.
You know what though, give yourselves credit on this type of behavior. Your behavior is the part you can control. That’s where you can either do your best to stop, or add to the bigger problem.
You can’t control them finding a friend group that condones it. And I’ve never personally heard women gripe about the ones that try the way you guys are trying. There’s no expectation that it 100% solves the problem. There will always be violent creeps. The best we can aim for is the parts we can control.
You two are the things we hope for; men that are willing to do whatever is in their power, in that moment, to put an end to the stuff that contributes to the problem.
You win, you didn’t lose. There’s a bunch of small wins like that, and each one counts as a drop. It takes trillions of droplets to create a tsunami. If more men do what you two do, then soon there will be very few groups of men for guys insisting to stay like that to hang around. They’ll isolate themselves and eventually die off. Then the remaining women, girls, boys and men will be able to live a more peaceful, safe existence.
The most illuminating takeaway here is that the misogynist has a wife who makes more than him, owns the house, and puts up with his misogyny. The "good guy" is third wheeling (and active on Reddit).
There's a study that shows that male "extreme misogynists" have higher female sexual partners, with the least "extreme misogynists" at 0 sexual partners.
Also, while male sexual activity has declined to a minority. Female sexual activity has remained constant. This means that women are picking the same men.
When women talk about the men they see, they describe women-haters and abusers of all sorts. Unless they're currently with a long-term, who they'll describe in a positive light.
Something is not adding up here.
More and more, it is looking like women ignore good men. And only hyper fixate and choose bad men until they give up.
Truly. She works long days as an OR nurse while he works a customer support job from home, spent over a decade having to take care of him when he was a raging alcoholic(before he stopped drinking in favor of other drugs), and he still has the audacity to rant about how she's so lucky that she doesn't have to work 5 days a week compared to him. Somehow waking up at 4:30 every day, and driving to work, and working for 10-12 hours in that kind of environment, is less exhausting than sitting at your kitchen island smoking weed and responding to a few emails a day.
If I were to come across this randomly on here a year ago, I would have been suspicious that it was a made up story, because it hits so many different notes. But it's real unfortunately. I've got more examples of how he spoke to and about his wife, but it doesn't even need to be said. It's all the same thing repackaged.
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u/Putrid-Block1431 3d ago
Late last year I reconnected with a friend from high school that I hadn't spoken to in about 10 years. After talking and playing MTG together for a while, he would start ranting to me about his wife. Nearly all if it was stuff he made up in his head, about her being crazy because she's a woman, about her being a prude, about her being stupid because she's a woman. It started small, just a comment here or there. I pushed back whenever I felt like I had the context to do so, or whenever it was blatantly bigoted. At one point he tried to gaslight me thinking it would work because he gaslit her until she stopped pushing the issue.
I only went over there to hangout two more times after that, and he started talking about the content he consumes, mostly police dashcam/bodycam footage being commentated over. He made exactly the kind of comments you're imagining he did, depending on the profile of the person in the videos. Totally odd behavior, I told him on more than one occasion that he sounded racist, and homophobic, and sexist.
One time I was there, he was in the shower and his wife sat to eat lunch and find something to watch. She chose a video by a gay plant YouTuber I can't remember the name of, with a big ass cat. Anyway, the whole time she kept apologizing to me for how gay this must be and how she can really turn it off and watch something else. I felt bad for her, and I hope she can find a way out, because she deserves better.
I cut him out of my life entirely again. The renewed friendship probably only lasted 6 months.