Fellas, is it Gay to Hate Women?

why misogynists are so boy crazy (spoiler: it's not cuz they're gay)

I, like many others, have spent the last few weeks (months? Years? millennia?) being force fed videos of a certain bald Bugatti owner. He’s the kind of easy target people love to hate. His points are so easily disproven, his persona so ripe for mockery, his accent so very stupid that the jokes write themselves. People reference his rabid fanbase but I highly doubt that man would have gotten the reach he did if it weren’t for him being such an easy punchline for the terminally online liberal crowd. While I’m sure some people, particularly young boys, truly bought into his teachings in disturbing ways, I suspect a lot of the wave of support he saw was reactionary. Much like Trump, he’s so patently ridiculous as a person that you can only admire him if you see the other side as somehow even more outrageous. He’s not impressive outside of a purely materialistic fantasy. He has no personal morals or principles to speak of. I saw an early video of him bragging that he wouldn’t pay for a girl’s lunch, but when the time came he lacked the guts to simply refuse and hold his ground so he made up a half-baked story about leaving 50k in cash in his laundry. This is a guy bragging to the men watching about his alpha male behaviour who knows that real life women won’t actually be impressed by it. His posturing, his machismo, all this was for the men around him. Sure, some poor pick-mes got caught in the cross hairs and claimed to be into his alpha male schtick (probably hoping to catch a man with a Bugatti but without a podcast), but his act was never meant for them. So, how does a group of “progressives” looking for an easy target, an easy, punchy critique with no critical thinking required criticize the verbose woman-hating subject of a Romanian sex trafficking scandal? Easy! A solution so simple almost every 12 year old in 2008 thought of it already.

Call him gay!

Now, I’m going to break down this argument, which, while clearly a joke, I think is wrong on several levels— not even just morally speaking, but on a purely factual basis. Morally I also find it obviously reprehensible to a) blame misogyny on another marginalized group and b) use gay as an insult when Hilary Duff ended homophobia over a decade ago , but let’s be logical here, I know how you alpha males love it.

Premise 1: Gay men hate women.

While I will not deny that some gay men hate women, the same way many women hate women, it is simply not a requirement. This is not a case of cause and effect. You aren’t gay because you don’t love women, you’re gay because you like men. No amount of woman hating will compensate for not being into dudes. Andrew Tate is not getting onto any pride floats until he actually gets a boyfriend. Man up Andy.

Premise 2: Straight men love women.

The word love gets thrown out in all of these videos. But love isn’t the same as sexuality. No one ever says you can’t be a misogynist and be attracted to women—we’ve all been attracted to people we don’t love or even respect. That’s a biology issue, not a moral one. Bigots are attracted to people they hate all the time. Racists often fetishize the people they seek to marginalize. Lesbian was the most popular PornHub search term in 42 states in 2017, including every single southern state. Texas, Arkansas, Indiana and West Virginia, all red states who banned gay marriage until it was deemed unconstitutional, searched for lesbians more than any other states. The bible belt isn’t full of secret allies, let alone full of state’s worth of secret lesbians (although imagine how great life would be if they were). These men don’t want to love women. They want to sleep with them. They want to control them. They want to be admired by them. They want to be seen with them. They want to possess them. And they can do all that without loving them. When these guys say they need a trophy wife, it’s not because they need a wife. It’s because they need a trophy.

Premise 3: Gay guys are the ones doing this to us

Here’s where everyone is going to accuse me of being unable to take a joke, of taking things too seriously. To that I say: make better jokes. Get creative. I’ll laugh then. Promise.

Saying that men who hate women are gay implies that misogyny is gay people’s fault. I know, I know. That’s not what you meant! You have gay friends! You’re not using gay as an insult in a nasty, homophobic, 2008 way! You’re using it as a girlboss clapback in 2022! It’s not that deep! Or it IS that deep, too deep for me to understand, and your implication that misogyny is a response to internalized homophobia is actually very nuanced and progressive and compassionate, and I’m the problem for even assuming you meant it as an insult! I really don’t give a fuck. Tell yourself what you need to tell yourself. But saying that homophobes were secretly gay didn’t suddenly fling open the doors of their closets. It meant that a certain category of person could say that homophobia was the result of a personal issue, of someone not like you. It’s a problem for the gays to sort out amongst themselves. It’s an easy way of pushing a problem off to the side, of making it an issue of someone else’s dating pool. And yeah, there’s a reason so many people still believe that a disproportionate number child abusers or serial killers are secretly gay. It’s boring. I’m over it. At least Nancy Regan served her gay panic with a side of sloppy toppy. Make new jokes.

But once we unpack this particular insipid argument, we are left with a valid question buried underneath a quippy layer of t-shirt slogan irony:

If misogynists aren’t gay, why are they so obsessed with other men?

Well, I’m not a man, so I can’t say for sure. But I have a theory. And luckily, so do a lot of people smarter than me. Let’s lead with a quote that did absolute numbers on tumblr back in ye olde days:

“To say that straight men are heterosexual is only to say that they engage in sex (fucking exclusively with the other sex, i.e., women). All or almost all of that which pertains to love, most straight men reserve exclusively for other men. The people whom the admire, respect, adore, revere, honor, whom the imitate, idolize, and form profound attachments to, whom they are willing to teach and from whom they are willing to learn, and whose respect, admiration, recognition, honor, reverence and love they desire… those are, overwhelmingly, other men. In their relations with women, what passes for respect is kindness, generosity or paternalism; what passes for honor is removal to the pedestal. From women they want devotion, service and sex.”

-Marilyn Frye, The Politics of Reality, 1983

Men and women are raised in our society to see each other as completely separate cultures— cultures that interact, cultures that even depend on each other, but not cultures that ever truly understand each other. Men are from Mars, women are from Venus. Men are Britain, and women are Ireland—for generations one had complete control over the other, there were years of violence and turbulence, and now that we’ve reached a treaty, an uneasy alliance, one side believes that the playing field is level, feels that the other side did just as much damage and may even on some level think that things were better off the way they were before. The other side still feels a bitter resentment for the other after many lifetimes of unspeakable trauma, but at least now they can pay their own taxes and make jokes about their former oppressors. This metaphor got away from me a lot quicker than I expected it to. My apologies to the nation of Ireland.

We are taught to find solace and companionship within our respective cultures. Women seek sisterhood. We seek an opportunity to express our feelings without having to dilute or translate them, an understanding we assume no man will ever have. We say “boys will be boys!” (or more recently make tiktoks with Lana del Rey lyrics espousing the same sentiment) and absolve men of the responsibility of getting to truly know us, because at least the girls will always get it. We can always go home. We hope to find a partner from across the pond, but at the end of the day we know what’s safe, what’s comfortable. The most adventurous (and annoying) among us seek to move abroad— they only hang out with guys because it’s “less drama”. But when that blows up in their face they go home too. We are taught that the thing we are supposed to want most desperately is the thing most likely to kill us. We know where the danger is, and we know where home is, and we’ve been told we can rely on it for some small sense of safety.

Men have a similar solidarity, although it manifests very differently. Men are taught that women are conquests, trophies to be won. They’re mothers, sisters, daughters, and wives. Women as a group aren’t to be feared the same way, but they still aren’t to be trusted. They’re inscrutable, impossible to understand completely. They play mind games, they’re fickle. Alphas and incels tell young men that women are only looking for a wealthy, attractive partner to fund their lifestyle. They say that women will not hesitate to leave them the second their hairline recedes or their waistline expands, unless they bring something material to the table, and unlike women there is no sanctuary of sisterhood to return to if your partner, the one source of emotional support many men have, leaves. Is it any wonder that boys growing up being told that this is what they have to expect from women have no respect for them? That instead of seeking women out as companions, they seek them out as something to be won, something to prove that they provide something worth having?

Women fear men, because they have reason to. Countless statistics tell us to. Hell, by the time we hit 18 most of us have firsthand experiences backing those statistics. And it’s really fucking lonely. It’s hard going your whole life being told that the group of people that your soulmate, your life partner, your reason for living belongs to is the same group of people you need to protect yourself against. And being online hearing constant horror stories only makes it worse.

For young men, men who believe themselves to be good people, or at least not threatening ones, there’s still confusion. You’re told that the group of people you want and desire may not ever desire you back. They may even fear you, even if you’ve done nothing wrong. The best you can hope for is a symbiotic relationship, both of you using each other for whatever you’re worth. You’re told not to respect these people, that they’re never understand you, never be your intellectual equal. What a miserable prospect it must be to be 15 and told that you’ll one day either die alone or spend your whole life with someone you can’t respect.

Because men’s opinions are valued so highly, society tells all of us that our self worth will come from male approval. For women, we are only truly worthy, truly desirable if a man wants us. But this also applies to other men. Men are only truly worthy if they’ve made something of themselves that other men will admire, be jealous of. If you get a girlfriend, it has to be someone who impresses your friends, one other men want but cannot have. Andrew Tate talks about the women in his life like he talks about his stupid fucking Bugatti’s. You want them, and you don’t have them. He can get whatever he wants, and you can’t. It’s why he’s idolized by men—because he has what they know they’re supposed to want. He isn’t actually wanted by women. It’s not women on these podcasts talking about how desirable he is. He has no legion of groupies, no real female fanbase to speak of—in fact he’s part of several active investigations into sex trafficking, something that adds a new and horrifying dimension to everything he preaches. He doesn’t tell these guys how to get a woman they love, how to treat a woman well. He tells them how to get a girl who will impress the men in their lives. He tells them how to treat a woman while still being an “alpha”, still living up to the standards of those men. And he does it because he knows that vulnerable men entering a world of dating they have been set up to view as hostile and frightening are a devoted and profitable demographic. If you tell someone that all their worst fears are true, and then tell them how to overcome them, you not only gain a fan, you gain a disciple. Now, you’re a saviour. These young boys are growing up in a society that is very much segregated by gender, especially when you’re younger. If these boys heard what women really wanted, learned to respect them as equals and value their opinions, they might realize that the insecurities men like Andrew Tate profit off of aren’t as big a deal as they thought. They might find fulfilling relationships, learn to view themselves as individuals. They certainly wouldn’t listen to ex Big Brother contestants on the run from the law for advice. The further “alpha males” can drive these gender divides home, the stronger they can grip onto these boys. They want a monopoly. And that’s why they only care about men. Complexity, growth, these things don’t sell. Real community isn’t profitable, exclusivity is. They don’t care about women because it’s never been about women. They don’t love women, because they don’t need women.

They don’t love men, but they need them.