In the previous essay, I thought about virility as a defensive construction: a kind of cultural armor built against everything that, within the traditional masculine imagination, might evoke fragility, dependence, tenderness, hesitation, or femininity. But every armor has its price. Some merely harden the person who wears it. Others wound those who stand nearby.
Perhaps this is precisely where the discussion needs to move forward. It is not enough to ask what virility does to men, although that question is already uncomfortable enough. We must also ask what certain ways of being a man do to women. What happens when the masculine need to appear strong turns into control? When insecurity becomes contempt? When the fear of losing power begins to organize emotional life as a territory of surveillance, punishment, and suspicion?
After listening to the episode Toutes des folles, from the French podcast Les Couilles sur la table, I had the sense that the focus needed to shift. The figure of the “crazy,” “unstable,” “hysterical,” or “manipulative” woman does not appear merely as a vulgar insult, the kind that circulates in bar conversations, message groups, or social media comments. It can function as a strategy. An old, efficient, and often devastating strategy: discrediting a woman’s word before it has even had the chance to be heard.
The manosphere, red pill discourses, incel resentments, and the current market for restoring masculinity did not invent misogyny. It would be naive to attribute to the algorithm a violence that has crossed centuries. But they have given this old structure a new grammar. Forums, videos, courses, gurus, memes, diagnoses of decadence, and promises to lead men back to their supposed place of strength now form a diffuse pedagogy of male resentment.
The problem begins when that strength can only exist by weakening someone else. When a man, unable to work through his own fragility, needs to turn a woman into a threat, an enemy, a culprit, or a madwoman. At that point, virility is no longer merely an impoverished performance of the self. It becomes a machine for producing suffering in another.
The “Crazy Woman” as a Convenient Character
Calling a woman crazy is one of the oldest ways of avoiding the task of listening to her. The word seems banal, almost domestic, the kind that moves easily through the corridors of everyday life: “my ex is crazy,” “she lost it,” “she’s unstable,” “she manipulates everything,” “she makes things up.” Small sentences, apparently harmless, but carrying out a brutal operation: they shift the question away from violence and onto the victim’s credibility.
The gesture is familiar. Before responding to what a woman says, people begin to question who she is. Before examining the aggression, they examine her emotional stability. Before asking what happened, they ask whether she might be exaggerating, confused, dramatic, fantasizing, or distorting the facts. The scene is displaced. Violence leaves the center, and the woman becomes the suspicious object of her own narrative.
With this in mind, I propose that we think of the cliché of the “crazy woman” as something more serious than an insult. It works as a strategy of delegitimization: it organizes doubt around women’s speech before it can even be heard. Pauline Chanu (2025), in revisiting the persistence of the imaginary of hysteria, shows how certain women continue to be trapped in categories that make their pain less legible and their outrage less trustworthy. The woman who suffers too much loses authority. The woman who reacts too much loses reason. The woman who insists too much loses humanity.
This mechanism is cruel because it turns the effects of violence into evidence against the victim herself. If she is anxious, she is unstable. If she is depressed, she is fragile. If she contradicts herself, she is lying. If she remembers details, she is obsessive. If she does not remember, she is unreliable. If she screams, she confirms the accusation of being out of control. If she remains silent, she seems to consent. Every possible exit has already been captured by suspicion.
Rebecca Solnit (2014) observes that silencing someone rarely means simply preventing them from speaking. Very often, it means allowing them to speak while dismantling, in advance, the possibility that their speech will have consequences. This may be one of the most sophisticated forms of erasure: a woman may tell her story, as long as the world has already been trained to hear it as exaggeration.
That is why the figure of the “crazy ex” is not an anecdotal detail of masculine culture. She is a convenient character. Convenient because she absolves the aggressor before judgment has even begun. Convenient because she offers friends, family, colleagues, courts, and even professionals of listening a ready-made narrative: there was no violence, only conflict; no control, only jealousy; no manipulation, only misunderstanding; no subjective destruction, only a difficult woman.
The deepest cruelty lies precisely there: when psychological violence manages to present itself as a dispute between versions, the aggressor has already won half the battle. The woman does not merely have to prove what she lived through. She has to prove that she is still lucid enough to deserve to be believed.
Control, Doubt, and Fear: The Architecture of Psychological Violence
Psychological violence rarely begins as a spectacle. It prefers to enter through the side door of everyday life. It comes as a comment, a correction, an irony, excessive concern, a doubt planted at just the right moment. It does not need to shout at first. Sometimes it is enough to calmly repeat that it never happened, that she misunderstood, that she is too sensitive, that she always takes everything the wrong way. The terror, here, is not only in the aggression. It is in the meticulous administration of reality.
Gaslighting operates precisely on this terrain. It is not merely a matter of lying, denying, or manipulating isolated facts. It is about corroding someone’s trust in her own perception. The victim begins by defending her version of events. Then she starts doubting her memory. Later, she no longer knows whether she has the right to her own reaction. Evidence becomes exaggeration; discomfort becomes drama; fear becomes “overreacting”; and violence becomes a “communication problem.”
This is a particularly sophisticated form of power because it relocates the conflict inside the victim. The aggressor no longer needs to be present all the time. His voice begins to operate internally. She wonders whether she was unfair, whether she provoked him, whether she misunderstood, whether she really is going mad. Violence, then, is no longer only something that comes from outside. It becomes a kind of inner tribunal, installed in the consciousness of someone who has already been wounded.
Marie-France Hirigoyen (1998), in her work on moral harassment and perverse forms of psychological violence, showed how subjective destruction can happen through repeated, ambiguous, and apparently small gestures. A single major traumatic event is not always necessary to disorganize a person. Sometimes devastation lies in the repetition of disqualifications, veiled humiliations, reversed accusations, and small scenes in which the victim learns that her word will never carry the same authority as the aggressor’s.
Coercive control deepens this logic. It is not limited to an outburst of rage or to an isolated episode of violence. It is a regime. A way of organizing the relationship through surveillance, threats, blackmail, isolation, guilt, dependence, and fear. Evan Stark (2007) insisted on this dimension by arguing that certain forms of intimate violence must be understood less as separate incidents and more as a continuous deprivation of freedom. The problem is not only what happens on a given night. It is the way an entire life begins to adjust itself to another person’s mood, desire, and control.
In this context, the question “why didn’t she leave?” reveals less curiosity than ignorance. Leaving seems simple to those looking from the outside, imagining freedom as an unlocked door. But a relationship marked by coercive control does not imprison only the body. It imprisons through guilt, threats, material dependence, fear of judgment, isolation, shame, children, the hope that things might return to what they once were, and the slow destruction of self-trust. Those who ask too quickly may not really want to understand. They may only want to preserve the comforting fantasy that, in her place, they would have acted better.
Judith Herman (2015), writing on trauma, reminds us that interpersonal violence affects not only physical safety, but also the possibility of trusting the world, others, and oneself. Traumatic experience breaks the continuity of psychic life. In the case of psychological violence, this rupture can be even more insidious, because there is often no single scene, no definitive proof, no visible wound. There is a sequence of events that, taken separately, seem too small to move anyone. Together, however, they make the world narrower.
That is why reducing these dynamics to “couple fights” is a socially acceptable form of complicity. The word “fight” suggests symmetry. It makes it seem as if there are two subjects in conflict, two equivalent versions, two difficult temperaments. But control is not conflict. Humiliation is not disagreement. Surveillance is not care. Fear is not intense love. And a relationship in which one person has to measure every word to avoid punishment has long since left the territory of reciprocity.
When reality becomes a battlefield, winning does not mean convincing. It means surviving without entirely losing trust in one’s own perception. Perhaps that is why psychological violence is so difficult to narrate. How do you explain to someone who was not there that the destruction was not only in what was said, but in the repetition? Not only in the sentence, but in the tone. Not only in the gesture, but in what came afterward. Not only in the explicit threat, but in the atmosphere that made every gesture feel dangerous.
It is at this point that defensive virility finds one of its darkest forms. The man who cannot bear being contradicted, abandoned, frustrated, or disidealized may try to restore his position by attacking the woman’s reality. If she does not confirm him, she will be accused of being ungrateful. If she does not obey him, she will be called out of control. If she denounces him, she will be turned into a liar. If she becomes ill, her suffering will serve as proof that he had been right all along.
Psychological violence, in this sense, does not only wound. It edits the world. It rewrites scenes, erases traces, swaps the guilty and the wounded, turns self-defense into aggression and suffering into instability. Perhaps this is its greatest perversity: it forces the victim to fight not only for justice, but for the elementary right to trust what she lived through.
The Manosphere as a Pedagogy of Male Resentment
The manosphere did not invent misogyny. It would be far too convenient to imagine that violence against women was born in obscure internet forums, videos made by resentful men, or communities that turn romantic failure into social theory. Misogyny is much older, more sophisticated, and more widely distributed than that. It runs through institutions, families, religions, jokes, courts, diagnoses, novels, inheritances, silences, and seemingly neutral ways of organizing life. What the manosphere has done is give this old structure a shared language, a sense of belonging, and the promise that everything can be explained. For many frustrated, lonely, insecure, or resentful men, these spaces offer a seductive answer: the problem would not lie in their difficulty loving, listening, desiring, losing, elaborating, or sustaining their own lack. The problem would lie with women, feminism, modernity, moral decline, the inversion of roles, the supposed destruction of traditional masculinity.
It is an efficient narrative machine. It gathers real experiences of male suffering, such as rejection, loneliness, romantic failure, bodily insecurity, economic precarity, fear of comparison, and humiliation, and reorganizes them through a persecutory lens: someone has stolen from men what supposedly belonged to them. From that point on, pain is no longer worked through; it is politically armed. Suffering becomes resentment; resentment becomes doctrine; doctrine becomes community. The woman, then, comes to occupy the place of the one who allegedly rejected, humiliated, betrayed, exploited, or weakened the man. She becomes the central character in a narrative in which the male subject does not need to question himself. He only needs to accuse.
This is why certain red pill and incel discourses are so dangerous: they offer a false sense of clarity. They promise to reveal “how women really work,” as if women were a code to be cracked, a threat to be neutralized, a market to be mastered, or an enemy to be exposed. This rhetoric borrows the tone of science, strategy, and evolutionary psychology, adds a dose of combat-style self-help and second-rate philosophy, and tries to turn resentment into a worldview. It speaks of nature, hierarchy, sexual value, domination, masculine energy, submission, selection, and power. Everything appears rational, but very often it is just an old narcissistic wound dressed up in concepts.
bell hooks (2004) observed that patriarchy teaches men to mutilate parts of themselves in order to fit an image of strength. A boy learns early that tenderness is threatening, that dependence is humiliating, that crying diminishes him, that loving too much makes him weak. The problem is that this emotional amputation rarely remains confined to the man himself. What he cannot recognize in himself gets fought in the other. The woman becomes the depositary of everything defensive masculinity had to expel: fragility, ambivalence, fear, care, dependence, and pain.
Olivia Gazalé (2017) shows how the myth of virility traps both men and women in a brutal fiction: from men, it demands performance, domination, and invulnerability; for women, it reserves suspicion, subordination, and control. The virile promise is grand, but it reveals its fragility precisely when it needs to turn female autonomy into a threat. Rita Segato (2016) expands this point by showing that violence against women cannot be reduced to individual impulses or private deviations; it often functions as a pedagogy of power, reaffirming hierarchies and restoring, through force, a threatened masculine authority. Of course, not every man who speaks about masculinity takes part in this. There are men trying to think seriously about fatherhood, mental health, friendship, the body, aging, sexuality, loneliness, and male psychological suffering. The problem begins when the conversation about men organizes itself against women, when male pain can only exist as accusation, when the question “how can we live better?” is replaced by “how do we take back control?” Perhaps this is the decisive point: the manosphere sells men the fantasy that they have been betrayed by modernity, when perhaps they are merely being asked, for the first time with some historical seriousness, to share the world. And sharing the world, for those educated to possess it, can feel like a form of castration.
The Market for Restoring Masculinity: Lighthouses, Forges, and Other Nostalgias for Authority
In times of emotional disorientation, promises of direction are never in short supply. When bonds become more unstable, gender roles lose their former rigidity, and women no longer seem quite so available to occupy the silent place once reserved for them, some men experience this shift as a loss of ground. The problem begins when that loss of ground is quickly translated into a loss of power and sold as a civilizational tragedy. It is in this context that the market for restoring masculinity grows: courses, mentorships, retreats, communities, profiles, and discourses promising to give men back something they supposedly lost. People speak of essence, mission, leadership, honor, potency, direction, presence. The language is almost always epic, as if the contemporary man were a knight lost in the shopping mall of modernity, looking for a sword somewhere between the food court and the supplement store.
The formula is seductive because it offers grandeur to those who feel lost. Instead of asking why so many men struggle to sustain intimacy, listening, frustration, limits, and vulnerability, it proposes a more comfortable narrative: men have been weakened, culture has domesticated them, feminism has confused them, modernity has castrated them. The problem is not that men seek spaces to think about their own experience. Male loneliness is real, as are affective precarity and the difficulty many men have in naming their pain without turning it into anger. The critical point appears when these spaces do not invite men to think, but to restore a wounded authority. When they do not ask, “How did you become unable to listen?” but rather, “Who stole your place?” As bell hooks (2004) reminds us, patriarchy also teaches men to distance themselves from their own emotional lives. But that does not absolve them. If a system mutilates people affectively, the task is not to turn that mutilation into the right to wound others. It is to interrupt the transmission of the wound.
There is something deeply regressive in this nostalgia for a lost masculinity. It often presents itself as a return to strength, but it frequently carries a poorly disguised longing for obedience: for a time when female desire mattered less, when provision could be mistaken for authority, care for command, protection for control. Olivia Gazalé (2017) shows that virility has always been an unstable construction, sustained by tests, rituals, and exclusions. The virile man must prove he is not weak, not childish, not feminine, not passive, not dependent, not insufficient. That is why this masculinity, so secure in its pose, lives haunted by everything it tries to deny and must be constantly restored. Truly solid strength would not require so much symbolic maintenance, so many manuals, so many metaphors of iron, fire, lighthouses, swords, war, and forges. We should be suspicious of the beauty of these images when they come wrapped in hierarchy. Who holds the hammer? Who will be shaped? Who stands at the top of the tower? Who must be guided? And who will be considered lost if they refuse that light?
This discourse of masculine restoration approaches the manosphere, even when it tries to appear cleaner, more elegant, or more spiritualized. Both begin from the same premise: something is wrong with the world because men have lost their place. The difference is packaging. Some speak of hatred, others of mission; some of domination, others of leadership; some openly insult women, others merely lament that women no longer recognize a “real man.” Rita Segato (2016) helps us understand that, in many contexts, masculinity is not only something a man “is.” It is also a position he must prove within an order of power, especially before other men. In that scene, the woman often appears as proof, possession, threat, or territory. That is why we should be wary of discourses that promise to “restore masculinity” without saying what loss they are talking about, who benefited from it, and who will be made to pay the price for its restoration. Perhaps contemporary masculinity does not need a forge, but a capacity to listen; not a lighthouse pointing toward the decadence of the world, but some light turned inward, toward the old male difficulty of admitting: “I do not know what to do with what I feel.”
Writing as an Implicated Man
There is an important challenge in this text. I do not want to turn women’s pain into raw material for the moral sophistication of a sensitive man. That trap exists, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. Men, too, can turn listening into a performance; they can speak of feminism in order to seem lucid, of violence in order to seem ethical, of toxic masculinity in order to quickly separate themselves from “other men,” as if criticizing machismo automatically placed us outside it. It does not. To write about this from a masculine position means accepting an uncomfortable truth: I am not outside the problem I am trying to think through. I may disagree with the manosphere, criticize red pill discourses, reject incel resentment, and distrust the markets of virile restoration. Even so, I was formed within a culture that taught men to take up more space, interrupt more, explain more, defend their own image more fiercely, mistake female silence for consent and female discomfort for exaggeration. No one crosses intact through a culture that distributes privileges as if they were personality traits.
Perhaps, then, the more honest question is not “what kind of man do I want to be?” but “what kind of man have I already been without realizing it?” In what situations have I confused insistence with desire, care with control, argument with imposition, silence with victory, intelligence with superiority? At what moments have I listened to a woman only up to the point where her words no longer threatened my image of myself? This question is uncomfortable because it pulls the debate out of the convenient field of caricatures. It is easy to condemn the violent man when he appears as an extreme figure, crude, brutal, almost cinematic. It is harder to recognize the socially acceptable versions of the same logic: the reasonable man who calmly disqualifies; the intellectual who turns his partner’s pain into an object of interpretation; the progressive man who defends women in public and diminishes them in private; the sensitive man who listens only as long as he continues to be admired for his sensitivity. There is a form of male narcissism that survives even inside the critique of machismo. It whispers: “look how different I am.” The point here is not to appear to be a good man. It is to shorten the distance between discourse and practice, knowing that this distance is usually greater than we like to admit.
It is also necessary to recognize a limit: men do not know from the inside the everyday fear that many women learn to manage. The fear of being followed, discredited, ridiculed, touched without consent, punished for saying no, judged for reporting violence, exposed for ending a relationship, killed for leaving. We can study, listen, read, observe, come closer. But there is a dimension of experience that does not belong to us. Recognizing this does not weaken the text; it prevents it from becoming arrogant. Perhaps writing in an implicated way means precisely accepting that this text does not place me outside the scene. It places me inside it, with fewer excuses. It is not about speaking for women, but about speaking to men, among men, against certain pacts of silence that benefit us. Because masculinity will not be transformed simply when men learn to speak better about women. That may become only another refined aesthetic of good conscience. It begins to change when men can endure frustration, refusal, love, and listening without turning all of them into control, persecution, possession, or dispute.
Final Considerations
Perhaps the question is no longer whether men are in crisis. That question has become too small, almost domesticated. The more uncomfortable question is this: what do certain men do when they realize they no longer occupy the center as naturally as they once did? What do they do when a woman no longer confirms their greatness, manages their fragility, translates their control as care, accepts their aggression as intensity, or offers her silence to preserve the peace of the home, the family, the couple, or his reputation?
There are men who say they want to be heard, but confuse being heard with being absolved. They want to speak of pain, as long as that pain never touches responsibility. They want to speak of loneliness, as long as loneliness can be turned against women. They want to speak of masculinity, as long as no one asks what kind of power that masculinity is still trying to preserve. This is where listening becomes unbearable for defensive virility: when it stops receiving male grievance as tragic destiny and begins to ask about the trail of destruction it leaves behind.
To listen to a woman, in this context, is not merely to allow her to speak. It is to accept that her words may disturb the most convenient version of the facts. It is to bear the fact that a report of violence may not arrive clean, that pain may not arrive docile, that wounded memory may not present itself as an impeccable report meant to reassure those who listen. To listen is to abandon the old position of judge over female credibility. It is to renounce the privilege of deciding, before listening has even begun, which suffering deserves recognition and which will be filed away under the name of madness.
Masculinity does not need to be rescued. It needs to be held accountable. As long as a wounded woman can be quickly turned into a crazy woman, virility will continue doing what is most cowardly in it: calling its own privilege of narration lucidity. The final question is not comfortable, but it is necessary: how many women will still have to doubt themselves so that some men can continue feeling innocent?
References
Chanu, P. (2025). Sortir de la maison hantée: Comment l’hystérie continue d’enfermer les femmes. La Découverte.
Gazalé, O. (2017). Le mythe de la virilité: Un piège pour les deux sexes. Robert Laffont.
Herman, J. L. (2015). Trauma and recovery: The aftermath of violence: From domestic abuse to political terror. Basic Books.
Hirigoyen, M.-F. (1998). Le harcèlement moral: La violence perverse au quotidien. Syros.
hooks, b. (2004). The will to change: Men, masculinity, and love. Washington Square Press.
Segato, R. L. (2016). La guerra contra las mujeres. Traficantes de Sueños.
Solnit, R. (2014). Men explain things to me. Haymarket Books.
Stark, E. (2007). Coercive control: How men entrap women in personal life. Oxford University Press.
Titti, N. (Host). (2025). Toutes des folles (2/2) [Audio podcast episode]. In Les Couilles sur la table. Binge Audio.
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