Why You're Afraid Of Women - A Man's Guide
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all right team welcome back to the man talk show connor beaton here and let's dive straight in today i'll be talking about understanding your fear of women as a man and what to do so this is one of those man's guides episodes

I'm going to break down a few concepts. I'm going to go into evolutionary psychology. I'm going to go into analytical psychology, existential psychology. I'm going to talk about how a man's fear of women develops. Now, I touched on this in a previous video, and it seemed to have sparked a lot of stuff for men. There was a lot of men being like, I'm not afraid of women. This is ridiculous. What kind of beta cucks are afraid of women? All this sort of normal nonsense.

And it really sort of proved the point that I was referring to. And so I'm going to get into this today. Obviously, let's just start with the groundwork. The majority of men are not physically afraid of women.

When most men hear this phrase, some men or all men have a fear of women, right? Men are naturally afraid of women. They immediately think, well, I'm not physically afraid of women, so what's this dude talking about? Now, the majority of you are likely not afraid of women in a physical sense. You feel safe around them. You're okay. Obviously, there are some examples of

of being in abusive relationships where you as a man have maybe been abused by women and that happens. And so I don't want to downplay that. But the majority of people, the majority of men, are not physically afraid of women. What we are talking about is a type of emotional and psychological anxiety

and evolutionary fear, a biological fear. So let's start with evolutionary psychology. Evolutionary psychology would say that there's a few different reasons that men are afraid of women. The most striking one is called paternity certainty. Now, maybe you've heard of this.

It is really the uncertainty that men carry that a child is theirs. And so for women, when they get pregnant, there's no questioning whether or not that child is biologically theirs. However, for men throughout the course of human history, pretty much all

always, there was no way to actually know if that child was really truly yours. And so for a lot of men, there's a paternity uncertainty that starts to come up. Was my wife, was my girlfriend, was this woman that is pregnant faithful to me? Is that child really and truly mine? And what this does is this creates a little unconscious fear baked into a lot of men. And you see this in a

a lot of family systems, a lot of dynamics where a couple will have a kid, and people almost seem to rush to want to reassure the man specifically that the baby or the infant looks like him in some way, shape, or form, that there's some genetic sharing that is happening there. And this is

This is something that has gone on for a very, very long time. It's like, oh, look, he's got your eyes or she's got your nose or, you know, like he's got your hairline, like whatever it is. So that biological uncertainty has existed within men for a very, very long time.

And different animal cultures, different species have adapted to this differently. The human species has adapted with this through trying to be more monogamous and trying to have some boundaries and agreements that couples follow. So paternity uncertainty or paternity certainty is a very real thing that causes a man to

some, not all men, but some men, some very real stress, especially if they have a lack of self-worth or there's a lot of insecurities internally, or their wife or their girlfriend has a highly promiscuous past.

There might be a question mark there of like, is this really mine? Was she really faithful? Was I really able to land the plane on this? And so all of those questions can brew in the back of a man's mind, especially in today's culture where men know the stats around how testosterone is plummeting and sperm counts are plummeting. More and more people are having trouble getting pregnant.

And so this can be front and center for a man. Evolutionary psychology would also talk about selection preferences. So in dating and in relationships between men and women, women are the ones who really grant access to sexual connection, right? So their saying goes that women are the gatekeepers of sex, men are the gatekeepers of marriage or commitment. And so in many ways, women are the ones that...

choose whether or not you as a man get selected to procreate, to mate, to have just casual fun, you know, fornication. And

For a lot of men, what ends up happening is that their masculinity, their maleness, their manhood is sort of attached to how successful they can be with women. And it kind of gives you a sense or a test, let's just call it, of where you stand on the hierarchy. And generally speaking, men that are able to get more women or have an easier time with women, it's a signal that they are higher up

on the hierarchy of men to women, right? So women are saying these type of men are more desirable, more wanted to me as a woman than these other men. And so if you are a man who has a really hard time getting any type of attention from women or getting dates from women,

That can feel really frustrating and you can fear women, you can fear interacting with women or really going after women because you fear the rejection of a woman because the rejection of a woman might signal to you as a man that you are lower down on the male hierarchy, on the selection hierarchy of what women desire than you maybe thought you were.

So a lot of men get engulfed by this fear of rejection from a woman for many, many reasons, right? It might validate their internal insecurities. It might validate that they lack self-worth. But underneath all of that, evolutionary psychology would say something along the lines of, you might be afraid of a woman telling you for real where you stand on the hierarchy of men specifically in terms of the desirability towards men.

So that can produce a fear within men of not wanting to really know, how do I stack up compared to other men? Where do I really stand with other men when it comes to women's selection preferences? Next, let's talk about analytical psychology. So in analytical psychology, and I'm going to really focus in on Carl Jung. I love Carl Jung's work. I have studied it.

for a very, very long time, probably about 11 or 12 years now. Had a mentor for two and a half years and apprenticed with him and went deep into Jungian psychology. And Jung created a framework that was really interesting. He said, within the psyche, there is the archetype of the anima and the animus. And the anima represents the feminine and the animus represents the masculine.

And everybody has both a masculine and a feminine energy or archetype within them. And this isn't a new thing, right? I mean, all the way back to like alchemical studies and different forms of religion throughout human history have all said relatively the same thing. There is a

binary, energetic, gender-based archetype within you, psychologically and emotionally. And for Jung, his framework was that for men, your consciousness is your masculine archetype and your unconscious is your feminine. So animus, forward, feminine.

feminine hidden, right? The feminine is this sort of unconscious part of you. And what happens in Jungian analysis and in a lot of psychological analysis is that we as men can project our feminine nature onto women. And so I had a saying in my book that how a man treats

a woman is how he treats his unconscious. Now remember, your unconscious is just all of the parts of yourself that you don't know about, you don't necessarily like, you don't want other people to see, you don't like engaging with. And so this can encompass your emotions, some of your stronger emotions like grief,

some of your hidden emotions that maybe you haven't developed, right? Things like maybe you're really harsh to yourself and you're just a crippling inner critic and you really criticize yourself and you beat the crap out of yourself constantly and you lack a sense of deep compassion. Well, that compassion is not that it doesn't exist within you. It's that it's buried in your unconscious. It's that your ability to have compassion

of compassion towards yourself is in your unconscious mind. And so what will happen is that you'll project all of these unconscious desires onto the women that you date. And a really interesting thing happens. When a man feels like he lacks something internally, he will often seek that exact thing from a woman.

So he might feel like he lacks a sense of power or a sense of masculinity. And he will seek validation from women to reaffirm or reassert that he actually has those characteristics or skills, what have you. The other thing that will happen is that when you as a man lack certain characteristics or traits internally, like self-compassion,

Those are the things that you will look for in a partner and you will need them. You'll desire them. You'll project that onto her and it will become a constant source of, I need this from you because I don't feel like I have it within me.

So this can create a great deal of fear because unconsciously, what happens for a man is this dynamic of neediness. I need women to validate my level of self-worth. I need a woman to give me some compassion because I don't have it within me. I need women to be nice to me. I need women to always be kind to me. And I can't really bear when they're not

Because when they're not, it's so unbearable to me because I lack self-compassion and I can't stand when the woman that I'm dating doesn't give me that compassion. And so for a man, this is the big realm of emotional fear. There's a very deep amount of emotional fear that can show up within this dynamic between him and a woman. And there's one really interesting piece, which is that the stronger your attraction is to a woman,

the stronger these unconscious projections become. I'm gonna say that again. The stronger your attraction is to a woman, the stronger these unconscious projections become. So the more you're attracted to a woman, sexually, physically, emotionally, relationally, you're like, yes,

I really love this woman. I want to be with this woman. That's when all of these unconscious things are going to get spewed out onto her, even if you don't want to. And I hear this all the time with guys, guys that have been kind of like players, ladies' men. And all of a sudden, they find this woman that they really want to be with, that they really like, that they really love spending time with.

And all of a sudden, he starts acting super needy. He doesn't really know why. He's just like not his normal self. He's kind of needy. You know, he's all over the place. He's emotional. He finds himself becoming like sappy. And he's like, what is going on?

And it's a representation of all of these feminine characteristics that have lived within this man that have been suppressed or repressed into his unconscious mind all of a sudden come blasting out into his life. They get like geysered out of his unconscious mind.

and they oftentimes get projected onto her, or they get spewed up into his consciousness, and he has to learn how to deal with them. So that, in many ways, is this fear of women. Men know that women possess a very immense amount of emotional power,

And that when women are upset, that emotional dominance, emotional coercion, emotional manipulation can be deployed.

And so another subsequent fear that arises in different forms of analytical psychology is the fear of a woman's emotional prowess. And you see this in all types of mythologies and stories where a woman will coerce a man, right? So seduce him, right? The sirens, right? The siren songs that capture the

the pirates or Odysseus as they're out to sea calling in the sailors, right? Luring them in, that there's this kind of seductive power that women have, that they possess because of their beauty, because of their emotional openness, because of their sort of seductive nature, and that there's something about them that is very different from men that draws us in. And if we're not careful, we can literally lose ourselves to them. And you've

probably experienced that where you've been in a relationship, even if it was in your teens or your twenties or whenever it was, where you found yourself in a relationship with a woman where you, you all of a sudden started to recognize I'm really losing myself in this relationship. And when that happens,

What you're losing is a conscious sense of who you innately are because the repressed hidden aspects of yourself are starting to emerge, pressing up into your conscious behavior, causing you to act in ways that you normally wouldn't, causing you to make decisions that you normally wouldn't. You know, you start acting erratically. Normally you're a

a good communicator and all of a sudden you're text bombing the crap out of her and you just can't stop messaging her and you're like gushing out how you feel or you know you're playing games with her you're finding yourself being super needy whatever it is

And you're like, what is going on? Well, that's the power of the feminine that all men know about. Every single man knows that women have a different form of power than men do. The last thing that analytical psychology would say is that men are very afraid of some type of

Betrayal that there's, there's a very deep fear that a woman has a power to betray him and crush him emotionally. Right? You might come onto the battlefield with another man and feel totally capable and competent of handling yourself physically. But when you get into a relationship with a woman, it's a very different type of battle.

And I think a lot of men find themselves being afraid that they are going to be emotionally crushed by a woman because she betrayed him or, you know, she wasn't honest or truthful. And so for a lot of men, what's hidden in the depths of their psyche is a mistrust of women because they know that they cannot fight with a woman in the same way that they would fight with a man.

And a lot of men feel woefully ill-equipped to deal with that battle. The last thing that I'm going to talk about, and there's many other things that I could pull in here, but I'm just going to bring in existential psychology. And in existential psychology, the big piece of where and how a man fears women comes up in how a man relates to women with reference to his identity. So you'll see that in a lot of different cultures and parts of society,

A man defines his sense of self-worth in opposition to a woman. And so what some men will do is they'll say, if I can move farther

farthest away, the farthest away that I can get from being like a woman, that is what it means to be a man. And so a lot of this becomes about a proximity battle and it requires that you move away from any characteristics that would reference that of a woman or act feminine. So a lot of men will start to be afraid of anything that has to do with being associated with a

a woman or being associated with being feminine. So emotions, certain types of art, you can see this in our culture and some types of sub parts of society and culture and masculine culture is that anything that might correlate to being feminine or being a woman is feared. It is literally the antithesis of being masculine or like being, being a male or being good at being a male. And so a lot of guys are disconnected from simple things like art

artistry, poetry, dance, music, emotional expression, having a certain level of emotional intelligence. And because of this, men are afraid of those characteristics and traits that would pull them closer to being a woman. Now, as we all know, when you look at the majority of societies and you look at the Stoics and you look at the Spartans and you look at pretty much

male or masculine oriented and dominated culture where men had a good balance, those men were taught how to integrate these aspects of them. The surest way to sort of safeguard yourself against this fear that I'm talking about, because a lot of it is unconscious. A

A lot of it is just buried in what you don't know about yourself and what you're subconsciously afraid of. And the truth is that the majority of men, they don't like to talk about their fears. They don't like to get into it. They don't want to get close to them. And so they try to remove themselves from them as far as humanly possible. But when you look at all of these cultures, the thing that they've done is that they've integrated these more feminine oriented aspects into themselves. So

So the Spartans, for example, part of their training was not just learning how to fight and go to battle and hold a shield and use a sword and fight alongside all the other men, but they had to learn poetry and dance and they had to learn how to write music. This was an integral part of their actual training because they knew that there was something about building relationships.

not sequestering those parts of yourself away, right? This like, as soon as you try and cut those parts off of yourself, psychologically, you empower them, you embolden them. And we've known that throughout human history, except we seem to have lost the thread on that. And so what

What's interesting about even some of the most quote unquote red pill guys in today's culture and society, the ones that seem to be the most well-rounded, they're like the long haired dudes playing guitar. They've got a family, you know, they have like an artistic outlet and the guys that seem to have lost the thread entirely are the ones that are trying to move away from any feminine quality whatsoever. They are trying to like

disassociate or disconnect from any type of feminine quality or characteristic or trait for fear of being labeled as a woman, for fear of being labeled as feminine. So what do you do?

How do you actually battle this fear that can absolutely wreck your relationships with women? Like, you've probably experienced this. A lot of men come to work with me because their internal unconscious projections or fears of women are just...

are just ruining their relationships with their wife, with their girlfriend, creating disconnection, creating neediness, pushing women away, destroying the dynamic. So what you do is a couple of things. Number one, you get really clear on what you are projecting onto women.

that you date, that you fall in love with. What are you afraid of? Really, truly, are you afraid that a woman will betray you? Are you afraid that you can't trust them? Are you afraid that you're not really worthy of the women that you date and so you need their validation? Do you lack a sense of internal compassion? This is a big one I see for a lot of men. They are so harsh in their inner dialogue and what they've done is they've offloaded any type of compassionate relationship

inquiry or a compassionate communication onto the women that they're with. So they require that from the woman that they're with because they don't have any type of internal self-compassion. So what have you projected onto your partner? Starting to get very clear on that and then beginning to cultivate those things within your life. Maybe it's artistic expression. Maybe it's some of these softer skills that we've been talking about like self-compassion or nurturing or whatever it is. But beginning to

those things and integrate those things into your being so that they are not so heavily required from women in your life. Because when they are so heavily required from women in your life, you're not only pressurizing that relationship and creating a neediness, but there's an

automatic fear that comes along with that. What would happen if I don't have this? What would happen if I don't get this compassion or this nurturing or this validation? And that pressurizes the relationship and can really, really degrade it.

So share your thoughts below. I'd love to hear from your perspective what causes men to be afraid of women. What have you found to be helpful? And as always, do not forget to man it forward. Share this episode with somebody in your life that you know will enjoy it and have something to contribute to it. See you next time.

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