I once dated a woman I'll call Miriam. Three or four dates, if I recall. On the face of it the experience had little to recommend itself, except that this was when I started making intelligent decisions about relationships and, as I look back on it, where I first started learning about "projection."
In general, I have little patience for psychologists and psychiatrists. As individuals, I like them fine. I even saw one for a couple of years and it did me the world of good. However, as I said, in general I think that their theories and musings are no more informed than those of any person who has lived for a while. In a sense they're selling smoke. Once in a while, though, they come up with a new word that neatly expresses one of my experiences, and one of those words is "projection."
Miriam had a particularly sharp tongue. She spent a lot of time telling other people that their tastes and ideas were simply wrong. As an example, she once asked me what I thought of a film I had just seen. I told her that I liked it, but that I could see how other people might not. "That just shows how much you know about film," she snapped back. She had hated it, and anyone who didn't also hate it was obviously uninformed.
One of her favourite barbs was making reference to the "fragile male ego." Sometimes she would start to upbraid me about something and then stop herself. "I keep forgetting about the fragile male ego," she would sniff. At the time I wasn't sure what she was talking about. I was accustomed to abuse, and didn't mind it all that much. It's only lately that I have figured it out: she was projecting.
You see, it was she who had the fragile ego. She had to be best at everything. Her tastes and opinions had to be the most informed and the most correct. Nobody else could hold a contrary opinion or like different things unless they were uneducated or hopelessly stupid. When she saw other people appalled at her attitude, she looked inside her self to try to figure out why they would react that way and attributed it to the only comparable thing she could see in herself: her paper-thin ego.
Looking around at the claims of feminists, and even ordinary women, I see a lot of this sort of thing. Many of the bad qualities that feminists and women attribute to men are true of only a few men... but are true of many more women. The only difference in most cases is that these qualities either aren't acknowledged in women, or women simply haven't had the opportunity to exercise them so that they're noticed.
Take for example the now famous litany that men use what power they have (which feminists claim is considerable) mostly to their own benefit. If you take a clear-eyed look at history, at what men have done, you will see that the vast majority of what men has done has been for the betterment of all.
If you're accustomed to feminist thought, try this out for a mind-twister: men created almost every item of convenience, every medicine, and every political structure that exists today. This includes household appliances to make (traditional) women's work easier, drugs and procedures to make childbirth less painful and risky for women, and the political structures and processes that allowed feminism to exist and indeed flourish. Every law and government institution that benefits women was voted into existence by male legislators. Feminism has never been a great battle against an army of intransigent men. It has been a battle with the help of men, including the much-maligned "patriarchs."
Why, then, do feminists look back at history and paint men as brutish despots? They do it for the same reason that Miriam saw fragile egos everywhere. Feminists look inside themselves and ask, "What would I have done if I were in those men's positions?" and the only answer that comes back is "rule." It's not what the men were doing; the answer says more about the woman asking than the man she's asking about.
Indeed you can see this in practice rather easily. Where men assisted in drafting and passing laws mandating job equity, reducing the rights of accused rapists, etc., while modern feminists with any sort of power vigorously oppose measures that might give fathers more access to their children, or give equal treatment to battered men. Having gained power, feminists are terrified to lose it, and so they use it only for the benefit of other feminists. They then think to themselves, "This must be what it's like to be a man."
Even women who profess not to be feminists are busy projecting. I hear women everywhere—at work, on the bus, in the cafeteria—telling "stupid man" jokes, or discussing their husbands or lovers in extremely disparaging terms. Many women, it turns out, have very little respect for the men in their lives, even though they claim to "love" them. If you try to call them on their behaviour, however, they become coy and even slightly amused. After all, don't men do and say the same things about women? When I tell them that the only man I've heard talking that way about his wife in ten years is a friend of mine who just went though a nasty divorce, the ladies don't believe me. Again, they fill in the missing pieces in men's behaviour with their own disrespect, and end up with an image of a foul-mouthed lout. Projection.
In fact, if you look about at all of the objectionable, sometimes rotten things that feminism attributes to men, then look at the way today's women act, I think you'll find, as I have, that in almost all cases women's opinions are unfounded, unless they were talking about themselves. Men, upon closer inspection, aren't half as bad as women think they are. Women, upon closer inspection, are almost as bad as women think men are.
Oh, and as for Miriam, I would stay away from her if I were you. That was one of my intelligent decisions: I dumped her after the fourth date. After all, who wants to spend time with someone who can't face their own bad qualities, and instead attributes them all to you?
