, 15 min read
My Subconscious Fear/Distrust of Men || From a Psychological Standpoint
Our human brain is so dumb! We assume that because these five guys were bad, it means four billion men are bad. No brain! Let’s not form an entire opinion on four billion people based on our childhood experience.
Male audience and hatress for men
Considering that my audience is oftentimes 90% male, and my subscriber base is about like 75% men (last time I checked), I must have a really damn good reason to record this. Because otherwise, what a risk am I taking? How stupid am I to be recording something that seems to be against the exact people who are supporting me? And the reason that I’m here right now is because these thoughts, to me, are pretty mind-blowing.
I’m 23 years old, as some of you guys know, and I only recently—very recently, maybe two weeks ago—discovered and realized that I have a subconscious hatred of men. And I truly did not know this until two weeks ago. Because consciously, I thought that I loved men. I really believed I loved men. And it’s given me so much insight because now I get to explore these beliefs. I get to explore why I feel the way I do, and how it’s affecting my relationships and how it affected my previous relationship.
Is that possible, what I just said? Is it possible to hold two completely contradictory beliefs about a subject? And the answer, according to science, is yes. It’s called cognitive dissonance. It’s when you hold two or more conflicting beliefs at the same time. It is completely possible. It obviously shows that human brains don’t know what the heck they’re doing. But basically, it causes extreme discomfort because the brain really wants to be certain of everything. And honestly, one of the main goals as you grow and get older is your brain wants to become more and more certain about more things. So by the time you’re old, like in your 50s, oh sorry, not old, in your middle age—by your 50s, you’re pretty set in your ways. And that’s why it becomes harder and harder to try to change somebody’s mind the older they get, generally, because you get more and more stuck.
It’s so natural, it’s normal, it’s not a horrible thing, because it’s a good thing actually for our survival. Because if we were in a constant state of unknowing or uncertainty, we would go insane. Like, imagine not knowing anything about anything. You would be in a constant state of panic and anxiety and overwhelm and just on the floor, screaming your head off because you don’t know what the heck you’re doing. Which is basically the place that I’ve been in the last year or so, where I’ve just chosen to accept and realize that I truly don’t know anything, and most people don’t know anything despite feeling they do.
Certain about things
But anyways, it’s a freaky place to be, so I actually admire people who are able to feel like they are certain of something. But today’s video is about challenging that. It’s about challenging those things that you think you know. And I’m so passionate about this, so let’s think: how did I have to ask myself,
“How was my internal belief formed about men? How did I get there? And why does my conscious belief differ, but my subconscious belief is still there?”
I’ll just go quickly through it because I know everyone can relate to this, but my personal experience was as a child: I had horrible, awful men in my life.
Hurt by men in childhood
I don’t know how much to share there, but let’s just say I was hurt a lot for years, constantly, by different men in my life. And pretty much in childhood, many men that were closest to me, who should be there to protect you, were actually either not protecting, or harming, and causing harm. So it’s pretty easy to trace back my belief on just thinking men are not good, because of my childhood experience. And that is natural, but is that right to form a belief based on your childhood experience, your limited experience?
For me it was only about maybe five or six men, male experiences that I based that entire belief system on? Is that rational? Is that okay? And the answer, obviously, is no. But that’s what we do. We form our beliefs, our strong subconscious, life-altering beliefs based on our own experience. Often our own experience is so miniscule, it’s tiny, it holds almost no merit, but we still do it. It’s natural, but it’s something we need to be aware of.
Confirmation bias
After we form our belief, our subconscious belief, our subconscious does even more work for us, which is usually in complete contrast to what we should be doing, and that is called confirmation bias. Once we have formed a belief, we will only accept information that supports the belief that we’ve already made.
That is huge. That’s the most important thing you should probably take from this entire thing, which is once you have a belief
men are bad, or women are horrible
You’re going to only take in the information that supports that. You’re going to pinpoint it, and also you’re going to project it onto people. You will see a stranger, I will see a stranger man, and I will think, “Oh, he’s going to attack me. He has this intention. He has that intention.” That’s not true. If you see a woman for the first time, you’ll think,
“Oh, I bet she’s really stuck up. Oh, I guess she’s this or that.”
You are projecting this belief onto a stranger, who you know nothing about. This is huge. Projection, confirmation bias. This is how we stay stuck in our ways, and it all comes down to our brains’ need for certainty. We must be certain on everything in life, or else we’ll be in a constant state of freaking out.
The most tragic part about all of this is, that not only do we accept the information that supports our opinion. The worst part is that we dismiss, we subconsciously just immediately dismiss anything that disagrees or conflicts with our opinion. For example, all throughout childhood or at least through teenagehood and adulthood, I have been surrounded by so many good men, good men, really good men. Especially now, especially this last year, I have met incredible men, so good. They are strong, good character, self-discipline, amazing men. But us humans, with our brains, with our neural stuff, the psychology of humans, it is so hard to change an internalized belief that we have formed as children. That’s wrong.
Guess what happens when you hear a conflicting viewpoint? Oh, your mind shuts off, shuts off immediately. Your walls go up, your defenses go up, and you immediately have an emotional response. I’m saying men as well. You get angry. People get angry when their viewpoint is challenged. And all of this was happening to me, and I didn’t understand why, exactly, because I didn’t understand how I felt about men, because it was a very internalized, very secret thing in my heart. I never would say it. I would never tell people. I would never talk out loud about it. I’m not an advocate in any way. I would not have conversations about this subject at all.
Man hating women
So that’s why it came as a complete shock to me. Since being on the internet, I’ve been on the internet a lot with YouTube, I’ve come across so much more men, who I would have to say have a genuine hatred or at least bitterness towards women, which is okay, because I understand that it is—it doesn’t just come out of nowhere. Men are not born with a bitterness and hatred towards women. It’s caused, for sure. I agree. It’s very valid. It is caused because of what they’ve experienced throughout life, and I can never understand or completely relate to it, because I’m not a man. I haven’t experienced their life, so I get it. It has merit. It’s very true and very valid for them. But the thing we have to realize, is, that everyone else has experiences too, and the experiences that other people have are often very conflicting, contradictory to your experience.
For example, my experience as a child was horrible abuse caused by men. Okay. We all have bad experiences. I just really feel that most men and most women have a subconscious bitterness towards the opposite gender. And I’m not addressing the actual bitterness, because guess what? They’re both valid, because we all have experienced something.
This is what always happened when I would hear men, especially on the internet, talk about how horrible women are. I was like,
“Oh, it’s not getting through, because I am thinking, ‘No, men are the bad ones. Men are the ones, and they’re wrong. Women are not the bad ones.’”
So when I hear that, I would instantly dismiss it every time. And it’s only been the last month or two, where I’ve decided to really hear it and to decide,
“They’re not just pulling it out of nowhere. It has value. It has—is valid. That’s their experience. It’s true.”
The thing is, we’re all too scared to say that. Both sides are too terrified to say,
“Oh, that’s valid. You have a reason to feel that way. That’s true. That’s your experience. It’s absolutely true.”
There are some bad men. There are some bad women. There are women — for me, it’s honestly been difficult for me to think and to say — there are women, who do horrible, awful things to men. There are women who destroy men’s lives. For some reason, just even saying it, I’m not used to saying it, but I truly believe it now.
It’s so hard to admit those things because it makes us feel like our side has no merit. It wounds our ego. It makes us feel like we’re saying that we’re wrong. No, I’m not saying that I’m wrong in my own experience, but I am validating your experience, and I agree. I completely agree. It’s true.
Why don’t we give the other side a little credit? We can admit and choose to see the other person’s viewpoint. Nobody comes to their conclusion without having a reason, without having experienced it personally. We have to understand that it is possible for two opposing views and two opposing sides to be right, because there’s not really a right. There is just people’s experiences and their beliefs formed by their experiences and what they’ve learned. I need to accept that women can be bad and not every man is bad.
Our brain is tricked
Because our human brain is so dumb, we assume that because these five guys were bad, it means four billion men are bad. No brain! Let’s not form an entire opinion on four billion people based on our childhood experience. There’s not one point of this video. There are many. And it’s basically become aware of what’s going on, understand a little bit about psychology and the human brain.
Don’t take your own experience as the truth. It’s not the truth. That only truth would happen if one person was able to have the experiences of every other person in the entire planet. That would be the only way for one person to know what the truth is, as far as human experience goes, okay? None of us can do that. So the best we can do is to acknowledge that there’s merit to every single side of every story.
And I now that I know that I have this internalized belief, it’s my responsibility to do everything I can to fix it. My belief is not on men. It’s not their problem. It’s my problem. It is something that is my responsibility to work on. It’s my responsibility to change it. It is not on me to try to go around and yell and scream to everybody on the planet,
“Men are horrible! Men are awful! Men are not to be trusted!”
By the way, that’s not how I feel at all. That is only my subconscious, by the way.
I hate men
I want to clarify what I meant when I said I hate men. It is not specifically a hatred. It is a mistrust, a distrust. It is a belief that men are there to hurt you, to use you, to abuse you, and they have bad intentions all the time. That is the internalized belief, not the conscious belief. My conscious belief is that I love men. There are good men. I know they’re good men. There are many good men, probably the majority. The majority of men are good men, and I can’t tell you how grateful I am for all of the love and support of good men in my community. Like I know my subscribers are good men, because of the comments of support and love and kindness. I know they have good intentions. So, I don’t want that to be misunderstood and misrepresented.
The point is, you can have two conflicting beliefs, and one of them is internalized. And I think a lot of us, if not most of us, have these internalized beliefs against the opposite gender. And it is our responsibility to fix it. It is not within ourselves. It is not our responsibility to shout and try to convince the other gender that they suck. Because I can’t tell you, I’ve gotten a lot of that here on the internet. I’ve gotten so many men trying to tell me that I am a horrible woman and that all women are horrible women. There have been a lot of men, who do this that I’m aware of, but I also know that tons of women do it as well. Both genders do it. It’s bad. It’s wrong. It’s immature. It’s not the right way to go about it.
In my belief, for me, the way to go about, it is become aware of it within ourselves, understand where it comes from, understand that it’s a lie. It’s a lie. I already said it: the majority of men are good. Well, guess what? Men, I hope you’re listening. I hope you haven’t unsubscribed and left a hate comment yet. Women are mostly good too. The majority of women are good as well. Majority, majority. Do you see this? Both sides, the majority are good people, are mostly good. And on both sides, there are bad. And again, it’s hard. It was hard for me to say, but I truly believe it and I truly accept it. And honestly, I haven’t accepted fully how awful women can be, like because since I’m a woman, I’m only focused on men. I’m only focused on the opposite gender. So it has taken me a long time to really think about it, and I’m going to think about it more, because that is my responsibility.
My responsibility is to hear men out. I need to hear out the opposite side. I need to hear out what’s going on, instead of immediately throwing up my walls and getting defensive and getting my pride hurt, my ego hurt. I’m trying to think if I can sum this up anyway, and one way I suppose is to say,
“I’m sorry.”
Truly, I’m not gonna break down in tears. I’m not going to be stupid about it, but I genuinely feel convicted. I feel convicted. I feel that I have been jaded, biased, that my opinions and my beliefs have been not right, not true at all. I have ignored men’s side. As much as I love men, as much as I’ve read about it, read about men, I just purposely would tune it out anytime they talked about how horrible women are, because I was just like,
“That’s not true. Men are the bad ones.”
That’s the wrong way to go about it. I’m sorry.
Acknowledging bias
I also want to say again, in my defense, I am not loud about this. This is my first time ever talking about it. I’m here to try to stand between both sides and yell at both of you and tell you, the problem is not out there. The problem is here.
It is on us to choose to open our minds and to see the good in whatever we think is bad.
All right. We have confirmation bias to look for only the bad. We project bad onto good. So let’s open our minds and choose to be aware, consciously aware of the good people that we know, the good experiences that we have had, and let those rise up on the balance and outweigh the bad, because it will, if we become aware of the good. The good experiences: anytime a man opens the door for me, anytime a man smiles at me in a kind way, I promise you there are millions of examples of good men doing good things for me with good intentions.
I am choosing to become more and more aware of that. And again, I am so sorry that I was biased. I thank God I wasn’t vocal about it. I didn’t tell men that they’re bad. I just had this thought in my heart. I wasn’t outspoken. Thank God, because that causes harm.
So I swear, I can’t say this enough: we’ve all had bad experiences. We’ve all been hurt. We’ve probably all been abused. We know people who have. We know people who have been destroyed by the opposite sex in some way. We all have merit. We all have — it’s all true. We’re all right. But that doesn’t mean we get to ram it down the other person’s throat, scream at them, yell at them, and tell them how awful they are.
We have to focus on ourselves, figure out why we believe what we believe, figure out who hurt us, and let’s not spread that hurt around to other people. Let’s work on ourselves. Let’s choose to see the good, because it is there. The majority is good. I don’t know how to word what I’m trying to say in a way where men — like, I hope you understand, because my audience is male, and probably whoever clicks on this video is male, and I hope you understand that I am not — I don’t hate you. I love you.
I love you. I want to hear you out. I am so grateful for the support that I’ve gotten, and honestly, it’s all due to men. Like I have only men to thank for having this channel, because you’re mostly my subscribers and mostly my audience, and I know it’s mostly because of my face, but I’m hoping that as you get to know me, it will be for a lot more reasons.
I really care about you, and I really care about hearing your side. And I want everyone to have that. I want everyone to decide to listen to the other side and to work on themselves. Okay, all right. Please don’t unsubscribe. Oh, okay. This is a crazy video to make. I have no idea what response it’s gonna get. No idea. But I’m gonna post it because I believe in it. I really strongly—I mean, you saw how passionate I was. I’m very passionate about this.
Okay. Bye.