I have a cousin, 35, Male, who has always been susceptible to conspiracy. He listened to Rush and other right wing favs when we were younger, and after a mildly messy divorce, I’m afraid he’s pivoted to blaming women for everything (including, and especially, male urges).
Along with his heroes, he’s committed to anti-intellectualism. I almost miss the tea party days.
Recently he’s been reading self published books with titles like “Analyzing the ROI on Pursuing Women,” and “Why women deserve less.” They bizarrely juxtapose tidbits from economics onto ravings about value and gender that don’t make sense. Weird that he trusts random opinions and not researchers who at least provide rigorous reasoning for their theories, but I digress.
As a lady, it’s hard to care about the dude, but I do feel like I should say -something-. Does anyone have ideas?
Wait… Rush is right wing? Like… the prog rock band? I never knew their music was super political to begin with.
Edit: it wasn’t the rock band. It was something worse :c
Anyway! As a guy who has seen some friends fall down that rabbit hole, unfortunately you can’t reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into. A lot of the time those extreme and radical positions are a reaction to a skewed perception of reality. Perhaps he feels his wife wronged him and is projecting that pain onto other people (women in this case), or perhaps the reason his wife divorced him is because he’s so committed to his misogynist beliefs, he would rather let his marriage go down the drain.
In any case, he probably feels the need to always reaffirm his worldview because the alternative (that he can improve as a person and that his personal shortcomings can only be blamed on himself) is probably too painful to face.
Very frequently, these people probably need to build a safety net, a support group, and go to therapy, but they’re so off the deep end, it’s too hard to take any of those steps, so it becomes a vicious circle of blaming others because they’re alone, and staying alone because they always blame others.
The best thing that can happen to any of these people is an experience that fundamentally shakes their reality. Getting into Buddhism, or moving to a different country, or going back to college, basically anything that changes their status quo, because their status quo has been inherently built and curated around their own beliefs and worldview. They can’t leave it now.
If you want to help him, you have to find a way to disrupt his status quo and perhaps hope that leads him down a more positive path, but unfortunately, once someone has started buying into heavy incel theory, they feel more comfortable staying there than looking beyond their own noses. I’m not sure you could do much for him. I’m sure deep inside he knows blaming women for his own faults is stupid, but he also refuses to blame himself, so… someone like that won’t be likely to improve. Ever.
💀
Sounds like he is not well, messy divorce can push someone over that line of hate.
Question is what happened? No one just wakes up and starts hating women. That would count their mother, grandmother, sister, friends, colleagues… something happend (probably in the same order) and he ended up over the limit.
Therapy helps a lot. I don’t think you can fight irrational fear with with any kind of rational proofs.
