Heterosexual relationships and misogynistic damage

Men do terrible things to women, terrible, life destroying, life shattering, wounding, traumatic things to women, we know this and we talk about this. We talk about how to change this, how to challenge men that do this, how to challenge a system that this happens in.

But what we don't talk about is the insidious erosive damage that most heterosexual men do to the women they are in relationships with - even the "good" men, even the men who are not overtly abusive. They leech energy and time from their female partners while not giving anything back. They expect their female partners to know every detail of their lives while being completely uninterested  back. The female partner is expected to have no hobbies or interests of her own, or if she does to always put her partners wants before them, to have them last on the list of things she is doing with her life after taking care of all his emotional and practical needs. She is expected to do the bulk of the housework: the washing, the food shopping, the laundry, the tidying, without any thanks or appreciation from him, yet when he does one thing that he doesn't usually do or that is considered domestic she is expected to shower him with praise.

He doesn't take her relationships with her friends seriously and yet expects that she will be fine with him spending hours and hours doing tedious immature stupid shit with his male friends. His career invariably comes first, he will demand that they live where he wants to live, he will demand that her career fits in with his need to be paid attention to at all times whether it fits in to her life plan or not. Even if it means giving up on the things she had her heart set on

And if she is brilliant, creative, passionate, as so many women are he will slowly erode her sense of self, her sense of place in the world until she believes she is none of these things, until she believes she's lucky to have him. Until she believes that all the choices she made to give up her brilliance, her creativity, her place as an individual in the world were her choices

and I am so sick of this, and I am a ball of fury, I am angry with a world that lets men not grow up, that allows them to avoid learning how to be self sufficient. I am angry with women who make excuses for them and I'm really angry with feminism that really seems to have dropped the ball on this issue. Theres an increasing trend in feminism thats all about trying not to upset men, about making feminism comfortable and accessible for men. and this is at the expense of many many women in heterosexual relationships who, if they really felt supported by feminism, by other women, might find the strength to say to their partners "grow the fuck up or get lost"