I am currently reading Bimbo by Ashley James, which is proving to be one of those books where I keep having to put it down, stare into the distance for a while and think about some of the things I believed and did as a younger man.
Ashley writes about the gender pain gap and her own experience of childbirth but what really stopped me was the history she gives of women having their pain, distress and experiences dismissed by the very people who were supposed to be helping them, invariably men in general and male doctors in particular.
Men who were and are physically incapable of experiencing what the woman in front of them was experiencing but nevertheless feeling perfectly qualified to decide whether she was experiencing it correctly, whether she was overreacting, whether she was irrational, too emotional or, of course, if she was being hysterical.
The word hysteria, I learned, comes from the Greek word hystera, meaning uterus. For centuries female hysteria was considered a legitimate medical diagnosis and this wasn’t some wonderfully ridiculous idea that disappeared with bloodletting and Victorian gentlemen wearing enormous moustaches. Hysteria remained in psychiatric diagnostic language up to 1980!
Women could be labelled hysterical for an extraordinary range of reasons and the successful outcome of treatment seemed remarkably consistent: the troublesome woman became less troublesome, quieter, more submissive, less emotional and less likely to complain.
Which left me thinking about a question that will probably sound outrageous to all women reading this.
Who gets to decide whether a woman’s experience is real?
The answer of course is her and because it’s real, she’s experiencing it. The considerably more uncomfortable question for me is why on earth, in 2026, am I still asking the question?
The answer of course is her and because it’s real, she’s experiencing it. The considerably more uncomfortable question for me is why on earth, in 2026, am I still asking the question?
When I stopped looking at this as some dreadful piece of history and started looking at myself, I recognised considerably more of it than I would have liked to. As I have written before, one of the reasons I am reading Bimbo is that Ashley’s experiences of men keep triggering memories of the boy and man I used to be and the man I am still working with and on.
I am looking at those memories now with what I understand today, partly because I think it might help women understand some of the behaviour they’ve experienced and also because I think men need other men to talk openly about how this stuff actually works inside us.
Looking back, when a female friend or partner told me she was unhappy about something I had done, I didn’t naturally become curious about what she was experiencing. Instead, I assessed whether her reaction was reasonable. Just sit with the arrogance of that for a moment. She was telling me what she was experiencing and I was deciding whether she was entitled to experience it or not and I thought nothing of that at the time.
I can also pretty much guarantee that if accepting her version of events meant facing something uncomfortable about myself, I could find a reason why her reaction wasn’t entirely reasonable.
As a man brought up in the Patriarchy, I was brought up with so many ways to dismiss an emotional woman or one confronting me with something uncomfortable. Surely she was overreacting, she was taking it too personally, she’d misunderstood what I meant, she was reading too much into it, she was being too sensitive, she was being overly emotional, she was hormonal or she was thinking too about it too much.
My particular favourite go to as a younger man was this: “That’s not what I said.” This was so effective and useful because now we’re no longer discussing the impact of what I did, we’re discussing whether she’s interpreted me correctly and I get to remain the reasonable one and she gets to start questioning her own experience. How extraordinarily convenient for me.
I never consciously thought; ‘I’m going to undermine this woman’s confidence in what she’s experiencing because that will protect my fragile male ego.’ Of course I didn’t, that would have been far too obvious.
Patriarchal conditioning is considerably cleverer than that. It doesn’t announce itself as: I’m going to oppress a woman now. It sounds much more reasonable and is far more likely to whisper: She’s overreacting, she’s taking this too personally, that’s not what I meant, why can’t she just let it go, I’ve already apologised, she’s getting emotional for no reason, nothing I say makes her happy or there’s nothing I can do.
One I now regard as an enormous red flag is:
“I’m not discussing this with you while you’re like this.”
I used versions of that too. I thought I was being calm and rational but what I was actually saying was that I would only listen to what she needed me to hear once she had removed enough of her emotion to make hearing it comfortable for me.
Yet what if her anger was partly there because she’d already tried telling me five times? Well, that would be even better because then the anger could become the problem rather than the thing she was angry about. I could dismiss the anger, criticise the way she was speaking to me or withdraw from the conversation and never have to get anywhere near the inconvenient truth underneath it.
The really interesting thing is that when we as men do this, it often doesn’t feel like dismissal to us, it feels like we’re being rational. That’s something I think men need to understand.
We’ve had centuries of teaching men that we’re the rational sex and women are the emotional one. That men think logically, women feel; men remain calm, women become hysterical. It’s nonsense, obviously but those ideas don’t disappear simply because we’ve stopped saying them quite so openly. They sit underneath things and I can see them underneath my behaviour as a younger man and still some of them today.
If a woman I loved became upset, I wanted to calm her down as I thought that was helping. Sometimes I undoubtedly did help and sometimes comforting somebody you love is exactly what they need in the moment.
However, looking back, I can also see something considerably less flattering going on, her no longer being upset made me feel better. If I could calm her, fix the problem, explain what I meant or persuade her that things weren’t quite as bad as she thought they were, then the uncomfortable emotion disappeared and crucially, I didn’t have to sit in it long enough to discover whether any of it belonged to me.
That’s not really so different from the ancient idea that successful treatment of a troublesome woman meant that she stopped being troublesome. Obviously the methods and consequences don’t remotely compare but the underlying instinct interests me enormously.
Why is our first response so often to ignore and stop the woman feeling what she’s feeling rather than understand why she’s feeling it?
This becomes particularly destructive in relationships because eventually something completely predictable happens, she either stops telling you or she leaves. Interestingly, the insecure man can actually experience the former as progress. There aren’t as many arguments anymore, she isn’t complaining as much, she seems to have finally let things go and the relationship feels easier. Brilliant. Except she hasn’t necessarily become happier, she’s just learned that there’s no point talking to you about it.
The man actually thinks that he has improved the relationship through his rational and logical behaviour and handling of the situation yet I can confirm with 100% accuracy that he hasn’t, he’s simply put another nail in its coffin.
What I have learned over the years is that as a man, all I’ve ever really wanted is to feel loved and wanted and I have been both of those things and I have had both of those things for much of my adult life with wonderful, amazing and deeply loving women. I have also sabotaged pretty much every single one of those relationships because whilst I was always on a journey to grow and develop, my own insecurities would never let me hear any feedback about my behaviour and its impact.
I desperately wanted the relationship to become deeper whilst repeatedly defending myself against the very conversations that would almost certainly have deepened it.
That’s the tragedy in this for men. The woman standing in front of you saying, “This is hurting me”, isn’t necessarily an attack on you. She is almost certainly giving you incredibly valuable information about how to remain close to her. She’s telling you what she needs, she’s telling you what is happening inside her, she’s telling you how your behaviour affects her and she’s telling you something about yourself that you may genuinely not be able to see.
She’s also probably telling you because she still loves you and desperately wants the relationship to work.
Yet we defend ourselves against it; we explain, correct, minimise, withdraw, tell her what we really meant, tell her why she’s misunderstood, tell her she’s making too much of it or tell her we’ll discuss it when she’s calmer. So she eventually just stops and/or she eventually leaves and the man has no idea why and there’s the tragedy because very probably, if not always, if only he’d been able to listen, she had given him everything he ever needed to know to grow that relationship in line with both of their desires.
So if you’re a man reading this, I think Ashley’s chapter leaves us with a couple of questions that have almost nothing to do with childbirth or medicine and everything to do with us.
1. How much of the ancient patriarchal belief that men are rational and women are emotional is still alive and well inside us?
2. When a woman tells us something is wrong, are we listening to understand what she is experiencing or listening for the evidence we need to explain why she’s wrong?
There is an enormous difference and I wish I’d understood it much earlier.
Being able to sit in front of somebody we love while she tells us something about ourselves that we really don’t want to hear isn’t weakness. We don’t become less of a man because we were wrong. We don’t become less worthy because something we did hurt somebody. We don’t become less lovable because there are still parts of us that need work and we don’t protect a relationship by protecting ourselves from everything our partner is desperately trying to tell us.
Quite the opposite in fact.
Very often our greatest opportunity to grow, to deepen and to become genuinely happy in ourselves and in our relationships comes in the form of the deeply wonderful and loving woman standing in front of us trying everything she can to tell us about it and to tell us what we need to do in order to deepen that relationship.
So perhaps it’s time we stopped deciding whether she’s entitled to feel whatever it is that she’s feeling and started just listening because:
…the happiness so many of us as men say we want might actually be standing right in front of us, trying desperately to help us have it.