There are many men who are proud simply because they are men. That pride is not strength. That pride is not wisdom. That pride is fed to them by society, and the more it is fed, the more insecure it becomes.
What is this pride anyway? Does it mean you are better than others? Or does it just mean you feel a sense of worth? Because when you feel worthy only because of your gender, you immediately begin to believe the other gender is less worthy.
There should be a name for this phenomenon. Humans are weird like that. We make a little story about ourselves, call it identity, and then act shocked when the story turns into hierarchy. We think we are unique in our feelings, which makes us feel proud and lonely at the same time. It is mostly seen in teenagers, that feeling of “no one understands us,” “no one has felt this before,” “we are different.” Some people never outgrow it.
Are insecure men just teenagers who never grew up? Possible.
What I noticed, growing up was this: everyone praised boys for simply being boys. Their existence was celebrated because of their gender. They were deserving of more love, more resources, more freedom, more room. Girls were expected to shrink, adjust, serve, and disappear. I saw women in kitchens, in silence, in sacrifice, withering away and putting themselves last. Trust me, I saw the insides of many households. Curse and gift of being a curious child. And the boys? Many of them did not even notice. They enjoyed the privilege.
Ofcourse, they would grow up entitled.
Of course they would grow up thinking men are above women in the hierarchy.
I understand they were conditioned as children. That much is true. But once you grow up and start defending the conditioning instead of changing it, just to keep your false sense of superiority intact, then you are no longer innocent. Then you are choosing comfort over justice. Then you are participating in the harm.
And yes, misogyny is harmful both ways. It harms women by making them unsafe, unheard, and overburdened. It harms boys too, by making them emotionally closed off, arrogant, and terrified of softness. A boy taught to dominate does not learn how to feel. A man taught to suppress tenderness does not learn how to be human. That damage is real.
Why is a sense of superiority harmful? Do I really need to explain that? Okay, I will.
Every sense of superiority is false. Be it based on class, color, gender, or religion. It fuels the hierarchy. It keeps people inside boxes that were built by privileged humans pretending their boxes are truth. Read I Am a Lover But I Have Not Learned How to Stop Hating.
At the basic level, we are all humans.
We all bleed the same.
We all love the same.
We all deserve freedom.
Everything else is superficial. All the rules, the conditions, the system - all of it is made to divide and rule.
Let me come to the main point before I get lost into another spiral.
Sense of superiority in male ego is one of the core reasons of misogny.
What is misogyny?
It is hatred, contempt, or ingrained prejudice against women. And let us be clear: misogyny is not only in men. Women can carry it too, because they are also its victims. That is how deep the disease runs. It gets inside the house. It gets inside the mind. It gets inside the language.
Assholes like have made it a flex to be a misogynist. But it is far from a flex. It is trash dressed up as confidence.
Misogyny is a disease. A social disease. If you were ignoring it because you yourself are not openly misogynistic, that’s a problem too. A deadly symptom has already shown up, and we are all being asked to answer for it.
Sit with that for a moment. What would that do to women, all over the world. The safety? You are not even safe in your own house with the man you married. Terrifying.
A society that teaches boys that women are lesser plants the seeds of violence early. If girls are treated as less, if boys are told girls exist to serve them, if women are reduced to bodies, duties, and obedience, then the final logic becomes terrifyingly simple: her pain does not matter, her consent does not matter, her humanity does not matter. This is how inequality becomes cruelty. This is how cruelty becomes rape culture.
And the scale is not small. Misogyny does not stay in one bad man’s head. It spreads through families, institutions, politics, and online spaces, and research has linked sexism to broader social harms for everyone, including poorer health and more violence. If a society normalizes male entitlement, then violence stops feeling like an exception and starts feeling like atmosphere. That is the danger.
Now you might say, “I am a man and I do not do that.” Good. But the conditioning is still there, somewhere in the water we all drink. It can live in your jokes, your silence, your assumptions, your impatience, your instinct to center men’s feelings before women’s safety. I know this because I have had to look at some misogynistic parts of myself too. To accept is the first step. Denial just protects the disease.
And that is why we do not want pity performances or empty apologies. We do not want empty “I support women” statements with no behavior behind them. We want change. We want accountability. We want people to look at the conditioning and stop calling it nature. We want boys to be taught that tenderness is not weakness, that equality is not an insult, that women are not born to be repaired by men, served by men, ruled by men, or used by men.
Do not judge people who are brainwashed by misogynistic propaganda and stop there. Educate them. Empower them. Interrupt the pattern. Call it what it is. A disease cannot be healed by pretending it is only a bad mood.
We are not going to get out of this by being polite to the lie.
We get out by naming it. By unlearning it. By refusing superiority in all its forms. By choosing to see women as fully human, not as helpers, not as targets, not as extensions of male ego, but as people.
Human. Human. Human.
That is the whole point.
by
Arsh Kaur
arsheverest.com
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