The Woman Is Keeping Me Down

When a young man is frightened of approaching an attractive young woman, he is not usually afraid of her, he is afraid of Her - of the judgment of imagined “women.” Men now spend significant time attending to norms around sexual propriety and social harmony, in almost all spheres of life, in a way that is generally awkward for us and that we wouldn’t otherwise. Even powerful men, who may have dominating relationships with the individual women in their lives, are subject to a fantasy of women’s judgment. The Woman is present even when women are not.

After many years of studying and writing about gender, I think the best way to understand the sexes in 2026 is through the works of Jacques Lacan, the midcentury French psychoanalyst. This is, simply, because the contemporary ontology of gender is feminist, and the ontology of feminism is fundamentally Lacanian. I don’t generally like Lacan; I find him opaque and tedious. But his work, especially on the superego (the “inner critic,”), seems to best illuminate the psychic battlefield on which the war of the sexes plays out.

Lacan famously said “Woman does not exist”, meaning there is no psychic symbol that can stand in for all women, the way that “Man” can stand in for all men. But social changes in this century have elevated the maternal and feminine in our superego. The symbol of “Women” has begun to play a role in our cultural and political abstractions that’s equivalent to the one that “Men” has played for many years: (eg “the Man is keeping me down”, “fuck the Man,” more recently as “patriarchy” in feminist discourse, etc.)

Men now experience significant internal judgment from feminine symbols: “The feminized culture,” “the Longhouse”, “HR,” etc. These are another way of saying “the Woman is keeping me down.” With respect to Lacan, “Woman” still doesn’t truly exist! But many men suffer as if She does, because they have enthroned a symbolic woman in their own minds as a punitive idol. Like the feminists, they have outsourced their worth as human beings to a superegoic Nemesis they name the Opposite Sex.

NB: the word “superego” just means “over me” or “above me.” This was Freud’s word for the symbols in our minds that we imagine to be larger or more powerful than us: they can include God, Nature, the law, “the System,” etc. Freud discovered that you can find the meaning of these symbols to any given person in the dynamics of their relationships with their parents. This is what gives them their powerful emotional charge.

Superegoic constructs usually have some truth to them - we are all subject to the law, and to nature, and to weather. But we tend to greatly exaggerate these symbols’ potency in our lives. Most of us, for instance, have used the rain as an excuse to cancel plans instead of investing in an umbrella, or a good jacket and boots. If we have made a habit of this, it’s not a stretch to see that the rain is not the real obstacle, even though we have no control over it. The fact that we blame it, rather than putting in a small effort to overcome it, is itself the sign that we actually prefer to stay home.

In feminism, the superegoic construct in the imagination is “the patriarchy” among elite women, but more commonly, it is just “men.” “I hate men,” “men are trash,” etc. When actual human men object to this phrasing, women immediately reveal the game: “Oh, I don’t mean you, honey.” They’re not talking about the real men in their lives, they’re talking about a symbol of superior, privileged men they have constructed in their minds, and then elevated as the punitive judge of their identity, their womanhood, their entire way of being.

In most American social spheres of politics, you can find a corresponding flavor of this in the local conspiracy theory: “White supremacy,” “colonialism,” “the Jews,” “the Deep State,” etc. All superegoic constructs come with significant paranoia, because in the act of elevating them, we give them panopticon access to everything in conscious thought: they can see (and judge) everything we think, speak and enact.

(There is great wisdom in reserving this position in the mind for an all-loving, all-forgiving divinity, but I won’t take that digression today.)

For men, the superegoic fantasy of a judgmental Nemesis/Woman constantly sizing them up is not experienced as animal terror, but more as a haunting by abstraction. It is the equivalent, again, of the feminist “male gaze” - the sense of every act being perceived in the third person by a judgmental panopticon. This fantasy has embodied concreteness - it is felt to be real, as a kind of global constriction of energy - even when the mind recognizes it is otherwise insubstantial. Men *feel* the Woman’s presence (as paranoids can feel the System, as feminists can feel the Patriarchy) with an intensity that is directly correlated to how much responsibility they offload to the construct. Which is to say, we perceive the superego to be real in our bodies to the extent that we blame it for our faults and troubles, and rely on the anxiety and shame it produces to motivate our behavior.

The contemporary therapeutic approach to superego pathology is to expose it as a fantasy that relieves pressure on the ego, and then to de-aggregate the construct: to pull it apart and understand it as a bundle of small, mundane fears, projections and challenges within individual relationships. (By the way, ladies, if your therapist has not helped you do this with “the patriarchy” or your relationship to “men,” you are throwing your money away.)

Lacan might say something like: You stop fighting the Woman when you recognize that She is a fantasy-organization of the world. You secretly want women to be frightening, evil, capricious, unknowable - because you want to blame them for the ways you feel ashamed of yourself. You want them to be beyond reason and power so that you can be constricted and constrained by them. The alternative is too terrible to conceive: that *you* are in fact responsible for how you live, what you want, who you are becoming. The Woman, like all superegoic constructs, is a screen on which you project the fear of your own desire. Because to desire is to risk shame, and shame is the thing you fear most of all.

In plainer language: To stop blaming shadowy forces beyond your control for all of your problems, you start by mapping the tangles and problems that you currently believe are thrust upon you by the world. Then you look closely at them. Where is the actual line of control? What is actually within your power to change, and what is actually beyond you? How might that line change if you were to acquire allies, equipment, training or a new mindset? You line up your challenges, and then, one by one, you face them, bringing everything you’ve got, leaving nothing. You will win some, thereby improving your life, and you will lose some, which you will find rarely changes things for the worse. After enough challenges, you will find you have a realistic view of the *actual* rules that constrain your life, rather than the imagined set that previously kept you hopeless. When you can see your actual levels of ability within your actual constraints, you can effectively change. By taking up the pen and authoring your own life, you learn the ability to transform yourself as needed.

As I said in the beginning, culture and society have genuinely, radically changed in this century. The sexes and their relations have equalized enough that the construct of the Woman now possesses just enough plausibility that men can believe it, elevate it, suffer from it. (Indeed, many women have believed in the Woman for much longer than men, and that is just as potent a vector for the fantasy’s introduction into the American character. But that’s another essay.)

Freedom from the superego means seeing through the illusion of plausibility and taking the maximum amount of responsibility for your life that you can bear. You stop blaming the devil below or above you for things that are actually in your control. You start owning what is actual, what is real, what is at hand in your conscious experience. First you get stable, then you clean up your act, and then you finally have the room for desire. You start admitting to yourself that you want the silly, benighted, limited human things that you actually want. And you start going after them.

Before long, you learn that you can’t do this without opening yourself to judgment - your own and that of others. You can’t want without exposing yourself to the possibility that you may not be good enough to attain your heart’s desire. You can’t want without risking the discovery that you are truly, genuinely unworthy of what you want - not in the eyes of other people, but by the harsh rubrics of the Real. You may want too much. You may have to grieve that something you have long dreamed of has always been out of your league. To want genuinely is to risk true ego death.

But what those who still chain themselves to their diseased superegos can not experience is that courage emits such a light in one’s life that it completely washes out the actual consequences of adventure. Victory and defeat are revealed as the caprices of fortune; will, courage and faith are the true province of the human being. Desiring freely melts resentment and frustration, and fills you with an almost lurid self-possession. Contrary to the mockery and scorn you once imagined, you find that others admire you for having the balls/ovaries to actually try for something. Simply by allowing yourself to pursue your desires, you learn to stand before yourself without shame.

The only problem, of course, is that once you have started standing up to the superego, and stopped relying on its rows and rows of teeth to keep you from wanting anything dangerous, it becomes impossible to settle for someone who hasn’t. You watch others hallucinate vast invisible forces everywhere, finding excuse after pathetic excuse to avoid simply admitting what they want and asking the world for it. It’s a little funny and a little sad. Most of all, it’s lonely. It puts you in a rare group of people who don’t need to elevate others in order to punish themselves into compliance. Soon, it becomes intolerable to be elevated by others in such a manner.

But there is a consolation: unlike your previous deluded, self-imposed loneliness, you will have come by your new loneliness honestly. You will have swapped “extraordinary suffering for ordinary unhappiness,” and a resentful foreclosure on intimacy for a genuine shot at love.

It doesn’t matter whether or not you find it. You begin to heal. And soon, the world around you starts to heal. Individuals stop appearing as avatars of abstract systems and forces - their sex, their race, their class, their position in the hierarchy - and start appearing as they really are: fallible, limited, lovable, fragile human beings. The abstract systems themselves recede from your conscious view; you accept them as a slightly disappointing background hum rather than an army arrayed against you, with all the terror and grandiosity that once conferred on your self-narrative. One day, you find that this same mortifying, humanizing, strangely ennobling process has happened to the person in the mirror.

And that turns out to be precisely what you were looking for all along.