Why Can't Men Stop Fact-Checking Women's Fear?

A man reads a "men are scary" post and feels a jolt. He's a decent guy. The role of "threat" doesn't fit his experience, so he does what people do when they feel misunderstood: he contests it.

Here's what's strange about that jolt. Both people are right about something, and that's exactly why this conversation keeps breaking down.

When women say men are scary, they're reporting an experience built up over years of shared stories, close calls, and the fact that nearly half of all American women have experienced some form of sexual violence in their lifetime. It's not a claim about any specific man. It's a direct experience of a world that men don't inhabit.

Men, on the other hand, experience a world where the ambient threat level from other men is very low. They can walk down most streets at night without any threat of gender-based violence. When they do detect danger, they're looking at specific men, not all men.

These two histories produce different versions of reality, each one valid for the person experiencing it. Each can make the other's world feel incomprehensible, and their own feel like it needs defending.

This isn't a character flaw. Our brains didn't evolve to deliver objective truth. They evolved to keep us safe, and they do that by building a model of the world based on everything we've personally experienced.

Which is why argument doesn't work here. You can't fact-check someone out of their nervous system.

I had a session recently that showed what it looks like when someone stops contesting and tries to understand.

A wife was explaining to her husband why his compliments about her looks made her uncomfortable. They'd had a libido mismatch their whole marriage. No coercion, but years of ambient sexual pressure. So whenever he complimented her, it activated some unpleasant feelings: exposure, vigilance, a touch of dread.

It was an old script they both wanted to rewrite. But first, he needed to understand why her feelings made sense.

He loved her. He just couldn't locate himself in her story. So I told him something that had worked for me.

"This is genuinely hard for guys to understand," I said, "why a woman would feel that way around someone who loves her." His wife was nodding.

"For me, the easiest way in has been imagining what it would feel like to go to prison."

He was skeptical. "What, you mean like rape?"

"Sure. But not only that. The constant threat of violence and intimidation. Always having to be on your guard. Never feeling safe. Never able to fully relax when others are present."

His wife nodded and said, "Yeah. I see that." She turned to him. “Do you see that?”

He sat with it and you could see the wheels turning. The idea that a woman's experience among men could map onto a man's experience in prison—not identically, but categorically—was turning over in his mind.

"So you're not saying it's objectively the same. You're saying the categories of feeling are."

“Yes,” she said. “That’s most of it.”

He got part of the way there. She told him so.

The prison metaphor isn't a logical proof. It's a doorway of imagination. But to walk through it you have to believe there's something real on the other side. Something that doesn't fit your experience but is true nonetheless. That's the part that trips most of us up. Not imagining. The believing.