Forgive me if the flair is wrong; I didn't really know exactly how to label this post. Basically, I've been seeing this therapist for a year now, and changing therapists is not an option I have at the moment, so please don't tell me to do that. She is usually fairly helpful, but something about her really irks me--if I discuss an abusive relationship I have and point out patterns of male narcissistic behavior (i.e. hurt you, then tell you you're insane for being upset about it), she goes straight to "not all men." I asked her which men she grew up with. She said the men she knows at work aren't like that. She has never been married and doesn't have a boyfriend, so these men she supposedly knows are only known from a professional standpoint.

I was like, yeah the abusive men I know don't act like that at work either. They'd never get anywhere in their careers if they did. The thing about men is that their abusive behavior tends to come up exclusively in relationships because relationships with women breed entitlement--they think they own you, so they treat you as such. They would never treat their coworkers or colleagues the same way. Lundy Bancroft discusses this extensively.

So this therapist is determined to convince me that the majority of men are nice. I do understand why women and liberal feminists in particular like to believe this, because it makes your life a lot easier to believe it. It's less sad. It makes the world seem happier. I've met a few sheltered women who are absolutely determined to believe this and I don't fault them for it, unless they use this belief to interfere with my life or misguidedly "comfort" me like this therapist did.

The unfortunate thing is that she is wrong--even in western countries, which are supposedly liberal and equal, the vast majority of men watch porn; a lot of studies confirm this. ~88% of porn contains some form of physical violence, so the majority of men watch violence against women and see no moral issues with it. With my generation, bdsm is wholly normalized, to the extent that all of my friends' boyfriends choke them. And the west is supposed to be better than the rest of the world--if you look at India, for example, you'd be exceptionally lucky to encounter a man who doesn't explicitly think women are his property. So, from an objective standpoint, the majority of men absolutely are narcissistic and dangerous. There is no way around this in the western world unless you want to argue that "porn isn't inherently bad" or "bdsm isn't inherently bad." If you accept that these things are institutionalized violence against women, then it becomes readily apparent that the majority of men approve of and consume said violence. So yes, the majority of men are bad. But some women don't want to accept this, even most, because it's hard, so they deny it and say "but my male colleagues are nice." Okay, Karen.

This is problematic in therapy. It amounts to denial of lived reality at times, and it's very silly. It's not comforting to hear blatantly false "but men are nice trust me" logic; it's frustrating and absurd, and undermines attempts to protect yourself. You can't protect yourself right after leaving a fairly abusive relationship if everyone around you thinks the solution is to convince you that men are actually nice. This is incredibly counterproductive to women's safety. I'm only 18 and going to therapy on my parents' dime, so I can't switch therapists, but I want to know how to approach this. Libfem-leaning therapists tend to take fear of men as hysteria rather than the reasonable and self-protective response that it is, and it's incredibly frustrating.