note: mods recently told me to post this again after it was shot down

if you're male, we generally feel a compulsive need to imagine that women are victims, women need our rescuing, women are more caring and that this makes women wonderful. because we generally want to be "the good guy" or the noble knight who rescues her and gets a kiss at the end of the day and gets called a gentleman. if we don't have agency in the story, if we grant her agency, then we fear that we stop being relevant at all, we fear that we disappear and go extinct if we become background characters because most of us know what it's like to be invisible to women. to be laughed at is to become irrelevant. to become irrelevant is to be left on the sidelines and die out. the man's estimation of the woman's agency and competence doesn't have to be accurate, it's done this way to meet a psychological need.

when you hear about a woman leaving her marriage (and scoring a jackpot in divorce court), you need to imagine that her rationalization about her not being "happy" or "fulfilled" in it must have been something entirely justified in your eyes so you tell yourself that her husband must have been a misogynistic abusive douchebag to create a story where he deserved it. when that girl you've been orbiting breaks up with her boyfriend who looks more sexually dimorphic than you, you need to imagine that he was a "jerk" and a "douchebag" and you're such a wonderful guy that you could replace him. it may be true, but you were motivated to come to that conclusion whether or not it was accurate. (and if she isn't attracted to you, no, you can't replace the ex. and if she gets married to another dude, i got news for him: he's going to age while he competes with the ghost of her ex's dick that won't ever get old. titanic, anybody?)

why? because you need to maintain this image of women as wonderful, so if something bad happens to them or they do something you don't approve of, you need to come up with every reason you can to discount it even if it means caricaturing them into drooling lemmings who are always victimized in your mind and more easily brainwashed than a 4 year old. why are some women in sex work? brainwashed! why are some women feminists? brainwashed by le evil billionaires! why are some women NOT feminists? brainwashed by the patriarchy! and notice how we're never willing to stop and just say "because they chose to do something i disagree with, as adults who are wholly responsible for their behaviors".

and on the female side: as an older thread pointed out, let's say you're pro-choice. you want to criticize pro-lifers. so what do you do: do you look at the demographics of pro lifers, and find that a large number of them are women of all sorts of religious and political affiliations? no, you have to blame it on "incels" and evil conservative men who want to "literally enslave" you. why? because you need to uphold the feeling that women are wonderful, and if anybody says something that contradicts it, it would make you extremely uncomfortable, it would violate your idea of the natural order of things, and you transfer this sort of cognitive dissonance and this unease into rage directed at whoever brought it up. you start to silence them as hate groups, you start to mock them using their sexuality, you start to picket for getting them fired from their jobs.

so the next question is: why is it this way?

because men are the ones bashing each other's heads in and competing for women. this seems pretty obvious but if you doubt it: there's a reason why no woman ever said to her followers online "you gotta go to the gym and improve yourself or you'll stay a femcel loser!!". this seems self evident for me but some are motivated to ignore this fact and will bring up edge cases or outliers.

and due to this competition aspect, we men understand at least subconsciously that blaming a woman, attacking her socially is verboten because she's way out of your league and other guys who see you as a competitor will use this opportunity to make her out as a victim of your hatred so that they can earn her approval and get her in bed. the second-order effects of this can't be understated: even if you personally don't want to compete for this woman you're socially attacking or that you're ascribing negative traits to, the fact that other men want to earn her approval by beating you up/lowering your social status with accusations and pandering to her makes it advantageous for you to fall in line! it's easier then to scapegoat other men, other male targets who are lower hanging fruit and attribute antisocial behavior to them or ascribe negative traits to them than to a woman!

and if you're female: you also find this arrangement convenient, because women's strategy as a group is generally to disregard upholding moral standards for individuals in favor of demanding the most concessions you can get as a group! pro lifers and pro choicers both team up to blame men for disagreeing with their respective stances, right wing and left wing women both come together to claim victimhood at the hands of men like it's a trophy, and even when you expect them to disagree, they're all suddenly on team woman and they'll all defend the best and the worst among them alike as if they're possessed by a hivemind. it's why we have millions of male feminists and very few female MRAs. when there's a man in the room, women of all stripes are suddenly a chorus, even if the chorus is in disharmony and have the collective rhythm of broken glass and screaming cats.

men don't do this: men are willing to throw punches at their own gender. why? it's not because men are a morally upstanding bunch. it's because as i said, the women are wonderful effect is due to a subconscious need to imagine that women are this way and that all bad behavior can be blamed on some easily-scapegoated men. this is not a necessarily conscious thought process, however.