Whoops! I Married A Misogynist — Why Even 'Woke' Men Can Still Exploit Women
morrowlight | ShutterstockI married a politically progressive man. That he believed in gender equality was, I believed, a given. He listened to NPR, read The New York Times, and jubilantly kissed me in the middle of a crowded bar when Obama was elected President. Eight years later, he voted for Hilary Clinton, and six years after that, he decried the Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade.
When his misogynistic father gave him flak for “not wearing the pants” in our relationship, we laughed that it was sometimes literally true, as he had taken to wearing kaftans. He also wore long dreadlocks and, on occasion, sparkly blue polish on his toenails.
I am not the first woman, nor will I be the last woman, to enter into a marriage with a progressive man and find myself blindsided. Not all at once. It happened over the course of decades, and had I not eventually divorced him, I might still be giving him the benefit of the doubt.
Alas, there are so many of us, so many bright-eyed women who believe ourselves to be enlightened and empowered, who believe that our male partners see us as full humans with equal rights to autonomy, dignity, ambition, and leisure. We even call them our partners, so confident are we that the arrangement we’re committing to will, in fact, meet the criteria of a partnership.
Sure, we’ve seen the same patterns play out again and again. We’ve witnessed the exhaustion and resignation of the married women in our lives, and we’ve watched married men obliviously take up space as their wives recede into shadows.
Why even woke men can still exploit women
A. C. / Unsplash+
We are all quite certain that in our own marriage, things will be different
Maybe things will be different, for a time. Maybe as newlyweds, we will talk openly about the division of labor. Maybe our partners will celebrate our work promotions and take on half the cooking. Maybe we will even catch ourselves feeling smug.
And if we decide to throw one or two babies in the mix, maybe some doubts will begin to seep in, but maybe we will push them away. After all, we can’t blame our partners for not birthing the babies or breastfeeding them in the middle of the night. Our partnership is still as equitable as it can be, given the laws of nature. Right?
The foundation of equity we believe we’ve so intentionally co-created doesn’t crumble overnight. Hairline cracks surface and slowly spread. We entered into the institution of marriage — an institution, let’s not forget, that was explicitly created to control and contain women — believing that through the power of love, communication, and commitment, we could reinvent it. No matter that so many had failed before us. Their love wasn’t as true. Their communication wasn’t as open. Their commitment wasn’t as strong.
But we underestimated the power of social conditioning. We underestimated the depth and vigor of misogyny’s sprawling roots. We underestimated how much of ourselves marriage and motherhood would demand.
And at the end of the day, we overestimated how much our partners would care
I once staunchly believed that so much prejudice would dissolve if we could dismantle the barriers that segregate us. It’s easy to hate or judge a group of people when they are Over There. It’s a lot harder when members of said group are entangled in the fabric of our lives. When we see them as full humans with human hopes and dreams.
There is merit to this line of thinking. Despite the inevitable, and often horrifying, backlash, the swiftest progress on LGBTQ+ rights has come on the heels of a massive migration out of the proverbial “closet,” bringing LGBTQ+ populations from segregated neighborhoods and nightclubs into our homes, friendship circles, and workplaces. (To be fair, these same people had always been in our homes, friendship circles, and workplaces, but we just preferred not to talk about it.)
Now nearly one in four Gen Zers identify as LGBTQ+, and one in 10 people across generations, making it harder and harder for anyone to go through life without a close, personal connection to someone who is negatively impacted by homophobia and anti-LGBTQ+ legislation.
For my part, though I had long considered myself antiracist, my personal connection to the cause reached new depths when I married a Black man and gave birth to biracial children. It is one thing to feel incensed about the incarceration and slaughter of Black men at the hands of our criminal “justice” system and quite another to bail your husband-to-be out of jail or fear for the safety of your son.
The empathy we gain from having a personal stake in the cause is markedly different from the empathy we might gain from books, articles, podcasts, or news stories. This empathy won’t dismantle all the various -isms on its own, but it is often a crucial first step. And it is first and foremost forged through human connection. Through seeing, through knowing, through caring.
Except … when it comes to women. The patriarchy, i.e., the system of power intentionally established to grant disproportionate social and economic influence to men, distinguishes itself in this regard. You would be hard-pressed to find a man who doesn’t know at least one woman on a deeply personal level.
While colonizers built their massive homes and fences, while government officials redlined neighborhoods and “relocated” indigenous populations, while church communities sent gay members into exile — throughout all the years and years of intentional segregation and marginalization, men always had, and continue to have, mothers, grandmothers, sisters, daughters, and wives.
That’s precisely why the patriarchy sneaks up on so many of us. Because it does, of course, segregate men and women, but in ways we don’t always see coming. Especially not in this day and age, when women have scratched and clawed their way out of the home and into the public sphere.
We’ve told men, in no uncertain terms, that we belong in boardrooms, science labs, sports stadiums, and all branches of government. We haven’t won that fight, not yet, but we’ve gained a lot of ground. The majority of progressive men would never publicly doubt a woman’s capacity to be a CEO, scientist, athlete, politician, or any other representative of a historically male-dominated field.
If you look at the rising influence of women in the public sphere, you might think the patriarchy is on its way out, albeit excruciatingly slowly.
But it’s a crafty one, that patriarchy, because it maintains its strongest grip behind closed doors
Stephanie Berbec / Unsplash+
To their credit, conservative men acknowledge that marriage and the nuclear family keep women tethered to the home. After all, someone has to care for the house and children. This labor is important enough that it deserves to be prioritized, even if it will never be as important as whatever it is that pays for the home and consumes their precious time.
As poet and author Maggie Smith points out in her moving memoir, You Could Make This Place Beautiful, at least a woman knows what she’s getting into when she enters into a relationship with a conservative man. She knows she will be largely responsible for the home and children; she knows his work will always take precedence. She might not understand exactly what this feels like in practice, but she understands the parameters of the legally binding contract she’s signing.
Progressive men, on the other hand, purport to care about their wives’ ambitions, hopes, and dreams beyond the home. It goes without saying that they will chip in to “help” at home because that’s what modern men do. Modern men change diapers, wear babies, and do laundry. It’s not fair for all the chores to fall on the woman, particularly when that woman is also working outside the home.
But Smith, who refers to many progressive men as wolves in sheep’s clothing, questions the tacit “deal” implicit in heterosexual marriage: “Was the deal that he could grow and change, and that I would have to put my own dreams on hold, was that the deal?”
Yes, that’s generally “the deal.”
Before we got married, before we had kids, my modern, progressive man celebrated when my startup magazine was acquired by a big, fancy company, and he moved with me to another state, where I commuted each day to a big, fancy office.
In our one-bedroom apartment, we divided the chores and began to make a life together. First comes love. Check. Then comes marriage. Check. Then comes the baby in the baby carriage. Check. And check again.
Even before the babies in their respective baby carriages, we co-parented my stepson when he came to spend the summers with us. It was interesting, I thought then, that I handled the logistics of those visits — the plane flights, the summer camps, the weekend plans — but then again, I told myself, I was better at Googling things.
Unlike the dishes, my modern man and I did not negotiate this silent, behind-the-scenes labor; I simply took it on, and he let me
The questions niggled at the edges of my mind:
- Why does my husband only wake up with the kids on the weekends when I ask him to?
- Why doesn’t he know their shoe sizes?
- Why doesn’t he add things to our family calendar?
- Why doesn’t he read the emails from the schools and childcare providers?
- Why do I need to specifically ask him to “watch the kids” when I leave home without them, whereas he just leaves the home?
As long as I didn’t get too caught up in these questions, and the many more that surfaced and nettled, things could be more or less okay. I just couldn’t think about anything too deeply, which was all right because I didn’t have time to think about anything too deeply. I was focused on getting through each day more or less intact.
Our babies evolved from small humans with largely physical needs to bigger humans whose needs were more complex. The visible and easily divisible labor decreased; meanwhile, the invisible labor expanded exponentially.
I turned 40, and as I emerged from the fog of early motherhood, I had more time to think. I started coming into my own. I felt the weight of exhaustion deep in my bones. Our relationship dynamics came into sharper focus.
My husband, along with society, had always told me I needed to be better about asking for help. So I did. Not for one-off tasks, but for perpetuity. I wanted him to see the invisible labor, and I wanted him to take initiative. I wanted him to be curious. I wanted him to care that I felt tired and isolated. I wanted him to want to understand.
Sometimes he said the words I needed to hear. But his eyes were hard and cold, his face a mask of defensiveness. I realized, with a horror that seeped in slowly over the course of many years, that he was angry. Angry that he was losing access to my quiet labor. Angry that I was prioritizing my needs. Angry that I was reclaiming my autonomy and my time.
Looking back, the entitlement had always been there. At first, I did not want to see it. Then I grudgingly accepted that this was just the way things were, and that my husband’s cluelessness was as funny and charming as all the sitcoms portrayed it to be. Then I started pushing back, and that’s where the trouble began.
Society bakes this sense of entitlement into our boys and men; I don’t fault them for it. Relationship dynamics in marriage are entirely predictable because the institution was created for the explicit purpose of erasing a woman’s autonomy and exploiting her time and labor.
I couldn’t ultimately blame my husband for his misogynistic tendencies — just as I can’t ultimately blame myself for my own internalized misogyny — but it wasn’t just the mere existence of these tendencies that bothered me. It was how fiercely he held on to them when challenged.
When I told my husband I couldn’t do this anymore, he let me go with readiness and viciousness
Hannah Olinger / Unsplash
After our separation, the misogyny intensified in ways I never saw coming. Even those close to me, many of whom never particularly cared for my husband, were surprised. We had a few good months initially, rotating between living spaces and sharing in the care of our children. I called it a “healing separation,” and I had hope that as we both underwent our own respective healing journeys, we’d find some common ground.
But in retrospect, my husband was just treading water, waiting for things to go back to “normal.” He couldn’t really fathom the threat of losing me because my care, time, and labor had become a given in his life. I’d gone a little crazy, sure. Women are prone to that kind of thing. But I would come back around.
When the lease on our temporary alternative living space was about to expire, and I started looking around for other options, everything hit the fan. That’s when his text messages turned nasty, when he disappeared from his children’s lives, when he stopped contributing financially to the family.
During the divorce, he successfully squeezed every last dollar he could from me, and then some. It was the last thing he could take.
Where does interpersonal abuse end and misogyny begin? It’s a question I’ve grappled with quite a bit over the last few years. After all, men and women are emotionally abusive at comparable rates, and the mistreatment of ex-spouses is not behavior solely confined to men.
When it comes to male patterns of behavior in heterosexual relationships, however, abuse and misogyny are hopelessly entangled. It is nearly impossible to extricate one from the other. It should also go without saying that “patterns” mean just that. Not all men, but enough men to see predictable, repetitive trends.
These patterns manifest in a stubborn sense of entitlement to a wife’s disproportionate sweat equity and emotional support, as well as predictably defensive reactions when women try to call attention to disparities in household, caregiving, and invisible labor. As Substack author Zawn Villines consistently points out, this exploitation of time and labor is its own form of abuse, especially when women’s needs are consistently minimized or dismissed as hysteria.
If a heterosexual marriage ends, particularly if it ends at the woman’s request, these patterns can magnify tenfold. When a man loses access to his wife’s labor and emotional support, while also losing the coveted social status as “head of household,” he may abandon his parental responsibilities altogether, immediately latch on to another woman to do his emotional and household labor, and/or tell anyone who will listen that his wife “went crazy.”
Again, not all men. I know some men who engaged in misogynistic behavior during their marriages and subsequently underwent periods of intensive self-reflection after their divorces. Men who stepped up as co-parents developed a new appreciation for and understanding of their ex-wife’s invisible and household labor, took accountability for their role in the divorce, and made a concerted effort to do better in subsequent romantic relationships.
But we still can’t ignore the fact that fathers are far more likely to disappear, or parent recreationally, after a divorce. Or that twice as many men as women say they want to remarry, and they often do so with surprising speed. Or that the “crazy woman” trope is still widely perpetuated and readily believed, whether men are referring to ex-wives or female politicians.
If you’re a currently married heterosexual woman who sees, but doesn’t really want to see, misogynistic tendencies in your husband, the absolute best way to test him is to ask for a divorce. I say that somewhat in jest, but unfortunately, I’m not the only ex-wife who has been caught off guard.
I was caught off-guard that my husband was a misogynist because he was such an outspoken progressive
I thought I’d nabbed one of 'the good ones.' Why do we continue to believe that progressive men are “safe,” even when so many consistently prove otherwise? Exhibit 1: the profoundly disturbing allegations of abuse by Civil Rights icons like Gandhi and Caesar Chavez. Exhibit 2: the list of men the left idolizes that shamelessly cheated on and were otherwise terrible to their wives. This list is so long, I can name five without even thinking: JFK, MLK, Bill Clinton, Nelson Mandela, John Edwards … shall I go on?
Dating, marrying, or being otherwise in a relationship with a self-proclaimed progressive man is no guarantee of emotional, physical, or psychological safety. There is no guarantee that a man who claims to support women’s rights, labor, and bodily autonomy will actually extend that respect to the women in his personal life.
Perhaps that’s why heteropessism is running so rampant right now. Because women who entered into unions believing gender equity was a given are realizing, with horror, the terrifying depth of misogyny’s roots, the sheer force of men’s collective denial, and the distressing lack of curiosity many of these men exhibit when it comes to exploring the ways they perpetuate patriarchal norms behind closed doors.
I’ll say it a third time: Not all men. But enough that this essay will likely resonate with the majority of heterosexual progressive women. Oh, how I wish my story were just unique to me. How I wish my own experiences weren’t so widely shared.
Kerala Goodkin is an award-winning writer and co-owner of a worker-owned marketing agency. Her weekly stories are dedicated to interrupting notions of what it means to be a mother, woman, worker, and wife. She writes on Medium and has recently launched a Substack publication, Mom, Interrupted.
