He Doesn’t Even Like Women

I was talking to my cousin recently about someone we have both known since childhood. Specifically, how this person treats women, how absurd his behavior continues to be even as he approaches middle age. Before my cousin could finish describing the latest incident, I stopped him and said: Let’s be honest. He does not even like women.

People like him are not rare. They are everywhere. I have watched this pattern run its course in too many men over the years to treat it as the failing of any one individual. It is a coherent psychological architecture that produces a coherent behavioral signature, and once you have seen it a few times, you can identify it almost instantly.

It begins with cat-calling. These men cat-call women and girls in public regardless of their age, regardless of whether she is alone or with her children, regardless of whether she has shown any sign of being open to conversation. They do not see her as a person. They see her as a target, an opportunity to perform, a chance to be witnessed by other men in the act of asserting their masculinity. They call out to her. They demand her attention. If she ignores them, they often escalate: louder catcalls, mocking insults, sometimes following her down the street.

When they actually approach a woman, the pattern shifts to aggressive pursuit. They lay it on thick. They call her queen, gorgeous, beautiful, the love of their life within thirty seconds of meeting her. The flattery doesn’t equate to connection. It is manipulation calibrated to overwhelm her, to flood her with praise so dense that refusing it feels rude, so excessive that her actual feelings about the situation become harder to articulate. They’re not trying to get to know her. They are trying to extract a yes from her by any means available before she has time to register what is actually happening.

If she gives them her number, they treat it as a victory. The pursuit was successful. They have proof, in the form of digits in their phone, that they were able to extract attention from a woman, and that proof gets shown to other men. The number becomes a tally mark. Whether anything actually happens between them is almost beside the point. The performance was witnessed. If they move forward and become intimate, the intimacy itself becomes something else to brag to their friends about.

If she refuses, the entire posture flips in seconds. The same man who was calling her queen will, the moment her refusal registers, call her a b*tch. He will tell her she was not even that pretty. He will tell her he was not actually interested. He will tell her she is going to die alone. He will say whatever cuts her down to the size his ego needs her to be in order for his refusal-shaped wound to feel survivable. That behavior and the speed at which it happens are one of the clearest indications of the type of man he is and his intentions. A man who sincerely admired her would not be able to hate her thirty seconds later. The admiration was never real. The admiration was a tool.

When this man enters an actual relationship with a woman, the pattern continues but becomes harder to see from the outside. He is controlling. He is jealous. He demands explanations for her time, her texts, her friendships. He punishes her for asserting any independent will. He cheats and feels entitled to. He may not call her a bitch in public anymore, because he’s performing the role of boyfriend or husband, but the contempt is still there underneath, ready to surface the moment she fails to meet his expectations.

Eventually, in many cases, the pattern reaches physical violence. He hits her. He says he is sorry. He says she made him do it. He says it will not happen again. It happens again. The pattern of escalation that began with cat-calling a stranger, that ran through aggressive pursuit and verbal degradation, ends here: in the home, with his hand on the woman who trusted him enough to be there.

The man my cousin was describing has done all of this. He has cat-called and harassed women in public for years. He has aggressively pursued, called women queens, and called them bitches the moment they refused him. He has beaten a past girlfriend. He recently got off a domestic violence case with a court-mandated anger management class. I wish his sentence had been far more severe. He has not learned any real lesson, and the next woman who pricks his ego will most likely learn the hard way.

For all of these men, including the one my cousin was describing, everything is calibrated to look good in the eyes of another man. Getting a woman’s number is not about connection. It is about a tally mark. It boosts his ego and his reputation among other men, and that is the entire point. The women involved are props in a campaign that is being waged for an audience that does not include them.

He is almost certainly a closeted man who cannot admit his own sexuality to himself. He tries to prove he is straight by performing a loud, aggressive masculinity that must constantly be witnessed and applauded by other men. The need for external approval is so desperate that it consumes his entire personality. Everything he projects is an image, a persona, something far removed from his authentic self, and that disconnect is the root of his violence.

He’s full of a hatred that begins with himself but never stays there. He does not love himself. He’s weighed down by self-hatred, and instead of confronting that internal wreckage honestly, he goes around pretending to be somebody he is not. He sexualizes and harasses almost every woman he sees, regardless of her age, including girls who are far too young to be subjected to that kind of predation. The moment he is rejected, he turns to verbal assault, and when words do not feel like enough to restore his sense of power, he turns to physical violence. This pattern is not exceptional. It is the predictable convergence of several forces in one person: deep insecurity originally formed in childhood, a history of being bullied or abused, a fragile ego that cannot withstand any slight, and a sexuality that has been suppressed so thoroughly that its only remaining outlet is a compulsive performance of dominance over women.

The childhood foundations come first. I have written about that maternal and paternal architecture at length in Every Woman Is Eve, and the broader structural argument lives there. What matters here is the specific psychological inheritance many of these men carry. Many boys who grow into this kind of man were themselves bullied or abused early in life. They were made to feel powerless, weak, and inadequate by peers or by adults who should have protected them. That powerlessness leaves an open wound. As they age, they develop a hyper-vigilant need to prove they are no longer the victim, and they often do so by seeking control over others. For boys who absorb patriarchal values early, the most available target for control is women. The wound that started as something done to them gets redirected outward, and women become the surface on which they enact the dominance they were denied.

At the same time, a boy who experiences same-sex attraction in an environment that tells him that attraction is disgusting or sinful will internalize that message as self-hatred. He learns that to be a real man, he must not only desire women but dominate them. The attraction he does not want to feel becomes a shame he cannot name, and that shame curdles into anger. He cannot punish the society that shamed him, and he cannot face the part of himself he has been taught to despise. So he punishes women instead. He punishes the women who reject him because their rejection reminds him, on some level beneath conscious thought, that his entire performance is a lie.

There’s a specific mechanism that explains so much of the violence we see. A boy who feels same-sex attraction and grows up in a homophobic environment learns first to hide it, then to despise it, then to bury it. The burial does not make the attraction disappear. It makes the attraction unconscious. What surfaces in its place is a continuous overcompensation: aggressive heterosexuality, contempt for anything coded as feminine in himself or in other men, and an obsessive need to be seen as straight by other men. Women, in this architecture, are not people he desires. They are tests he must pass. Each successful pursuit of a woman, each conquest, each visible heterosexual gesture, is evidence he can show to other men that his masculinity is real and intact. Women are auditions, and the audience does not include them.

When a woman refuses him, the refusal does more than wound his ego. It threatens the entire structure of denial that he has built to survive. He has told himself a story in which he is a desirable, powerful, unquestionably straight man, and a woman saying no crumbles the foundations of that story. His immediate response is rage, a tantrum that serves to reassert control. This is why the shift from queen to bitch happens so fast it can give a witness whiplash. He never respected her. He never liked her. He only liked what she could do for his reputation among other men. She existed in his mind as a means to an end, and the moment she refused to serve that end, she became an enemy who deserved any insult or blow he could deliver. In his own mind, her honest expression of disinterest was an act of humiliation that justified retaliation. He is the type of man who will call a woman a queen while secretly viewing her as property, and the moment the title is revoked by her own agency, the mask falls and the violence rises.

We cannot separate this individual pathology from the broader social conditions that produce it. In the United States and across Western societies, patriarchy systematically conditions men to view women as objects for male consumption and male competition. That conditioning starts from birth and works to diminish men’s humanity as surely as it dehumanizes women. Boys are taught that to be a real man is to be sexually aggressive, to conquer, to feel entitled to female attention and female bodies. When boys are also carrying the hidden wounds of childhood trauma and suppressed sexuality, these messages become accelerant on a fire that was already smoldering. The result is a population of men who move through the world as predators, sexually harassing women and girls of all ages, and who react with violence the instant their entitlement is challenged.

This problem exists across all racial and ethnic groups, but I am speaking specifically about the Black community because I am a Black trans man, and because I see a particular set of destructive dynamics playing out inside our community that we need to change. For Black people in America, the history of not having autonomy over our own bodies is not ancient history. Black women have endured an even longer and more brutal denial of bodily autonomy than Black men. We have not possessed full sexual freedom of expression for long, and that freedom remains fragile and contested. Even today, any expression of Black sexuality that falls outside a narrow, prescribed range is met with rejection and punishment. The legacy of slavery and colonialism did not disappear when the laws changed. It transformed into internalized systems of control that we now enforce on each other.

One of the most damaging ways this internalized control manifests is in the Black community’s refusal to accept queer people as full and equal members. The community as a whole does not accept gay people. It does not accept transgender people, bisexual people, or anyone else who falls under the queer umbrella. It refuses to treat them as human beings deserving the same rights and the same respect as anyone else. This compounds the external oppression that Black queer people already face from the wider world. We have to deal with rejection from society at large, and then we come home and face rejection from our own people. Our own people turn their backs on us because of a sexuality we did not choose, as if our queerness cancels our Blackness, as if we are no longer part of the community we were born into.

This division is often justified through religious dogma, specifically through the version of Christianity that was forced onto enslaved Africans. Our ancestors did not arrive in chains carrying this religion. They arrived with their own spiritual systems, their own cosmologies, their own ways of understanding the body and human relationships. Many of those traditions had different relationships with gender and sexuality than the European Christianity that would be imposed on them. Some West African societies recognized gender variance and same-sex relationships within specific spiritual or social roles. The European Christianity that was enforced on enslaved Africans came pre-loaded with the patriarchal and anti-queer theology I traced in Every Woman Is Eve. It was more than a religion. It was a tool of social control that taught enslaved people to police each other’s bodies and desires while submitting to the authority of their enslavers. The same Bible passages used to justify slavery were used to instruct the formerly enslaved and their descendants on how to be moral, how to live, who to love, who to reject.

That function has never fully stopped operating. The Black church became, after emancipation, the central institution of Black community life, and that role has been profoundly meaningful. But the theology the Black church inherited carried the same anti-queer and patriarchal content as the slaveholders’ Christianity. The political conditions changed. The theological framework continued to do its work.

The American government and its supporting institutions learned early that dividing the Black community along lines of sexuality and gender identity would weaken collective resistance, and they have used that knowledge for decades. This is documented history. Bayard Rustin, the chief organizer of the 1963 March on Washington and one of the most strategically brilliant minds of the entire civil rights movement, was sidelined repeatedly because he was an openly gay Black man. Adam Clayton Powell Jr. threatened to spread false rumors of an affair between Rustin and Martin Luther King Jr. unless King distanced himself from Rustin. King capitulated. Rustin’s contributions to the movement he had largely organized were minimized in the official histories for decades. He was the architect of one of the most important political events in American history, and he was punished by his own community for being who he was. The design was always working as intended.

Convincing Black people to hate other Black people who are queer was always a tactic of divide and conquer, and it is still working right now. Black people who would otherwise link arms against a common oppression are instead taught to see a queer brother or sister as the enemy. The energy that could be directed at the systems actually destroying our communities gets redirected at the people inside our communities who are different from the imagined norm.

Among Black-majority nations, South Africa stands alone in having full constitutional protection for queer people. The South African Constitution, adopted in 1996, was the first in the world to explicitly prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. Same-sex marriage has been legal there since 2006. Several other African nations have decriminalized homosexuality in recent years, including Cabo Verde, Mozambique, Botswana, Angola, and Mauritius, which is meaningful progress. But South Africa remains unique in having moved past decriminalization to constitutional and legal protection, recognizing queer people as fully equal under the law and worthy of state protection when they are attacked. South Africa is leading the way, and the rest of the Black world needs to follow. We are stronger together, bonded by love instead of separated by hatred. But the hatred is being fed every day by religious institutions, cultural traditions, and patriarchal structures that would rather see us fight each other than build power together.

All of this historical and social context is the breeding ground for the kind of man I described at the beginning. When a community teaches boys that being gay is a sin punishable by ostracism and violence, it creates a massive pressure cooker of closeted desire. Many boys grow up terrified of their own feelings and learn to hide them with performances of hypermasculinity. They learn that the surest way to prove they are not gay is to sexually harass women, to brag about conquests, to treat women’s bodies as public property upon which they can inscribe their manhood. When those women reject them, the rejection is not simply an insult. It triggers a deep existential terror, because if they cannot prove themselves to be the straight, dominant man the community demands, then the part of themselves they have spent a lifetime burying might be exposed. That terror translates instantly into fury, and that fury too often translates into physical violence against women.

This is the pipeline. Community homophobia, then closeted men, then the women they brutalize. So many men who batter their girlfriends are later discovered to be living on the down low. The pattern is too consistent to dismiss. They beat women in an attempt to feel powerful, to feel in control. They think the act of violence proves their masculinity. It proves only the depth of their self-hatred.

The full architecture of it looks like this: suppressed sexuality and the resentment it produces, a false definition of manhood built around domination and status, a culture that has conditioned him to view women as property available for male consumption and competition, and the fact of his own subjugation. A man who has been denied power and dignity everywhere else comes looking for somewhere to reproduce the only dynamic he has ever been taught. Women become the site of that reproduction. He subjugates them because subjugation is the only model of power he was ever given. All of it converges: the desire for control, the hunger for other men’s approval, the performance of heterosexuality that he cannot afford to fail. When a woman refuses to serve the performance, violence fills the space where his identity was supposed to be. According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime and UN Women, 9 out of 10 women who are murdered were killed by a man. An average of 137 women and girls are killed every day by a partner or family member. Those numbers describe a system.

When we examine this pattern honestly, we have to confront where to interrupt it. There are many threads to pull, and they are tangled. One of the most urgent is the lack of acceptance for queer Black people, because that lack of acceptance directly produces the closeted men who go on to abuse women. As long as the Black community refuses to embrace its queer members, we will continue to produce men who are at war with themselves, and Black women will continue to bear the brunt of that war. The homophobia that runs through the community is more than a moral failure toward queer people. It is a direct threat to the safety of Black women. The two struggles are linked, and we cannot solve one without solving the other.

There is another thread. The respect once extended to Black women in our community has eroded over time. There was a period when the community understood that the survival of the whole depended on protecting and honoring its women, when Black women were recognized as the stabilizing force in families and movements, when the indignity directed at Black women in the wider world made the indignity inside the community feel intolerable. That understanding has eroded under the pressures of systemic racism, poverty, mass incarceration, and the rise of cultural forms that explicitly devalue Black women through language, image, and economic exploitation. Some forms of contemporary entertainment have made the degradation of Black women profitable. The boys who consume that content absorb its messages early, and the men they become enact those messages on the actual women in their lives. The men who call themselves men today while treating Black women with contempt and violence should be ashamed to use the word. A real man does not treat another human being that way. The behavior I am describing is not manhood. It is predation. It is a lashing out that has nothing to do with strength and everything to do with weakness. Our women are being killed by us, and that is a crisis so vast it should shake the entire community awake.

Healing must begin with honesty. We have to stop pretending that the man who goes from calling a woman a queen to calling her a b*tch after being rejected is having a bad day or that his problem is poor anger management. His problem is his soul has been warped by self-hatred, by a sexuality he cannot admit, by childhood wounds he has never addressed, and by a society that feeds him the lie that violence is a valid way to reclaim his sense of control. The anger management class he was sentenced to attend may have taught him to count to ten before throwing a punch. It did not touch the inner rot. The root of his violence remains intact, and the next woman who pricks his ego will learn that the hard way. And I know how that sounds. I specifically said it that way because we do have the opportunity to learn from every experience. And the best possible outcome is for that woman to learn how to identify these types of men sooner rather than later. We need far more serious interventions that address the psychological and social roots, and we need a community that is willing to call this behavior out clearly and early, long before it escalates to physical harm.

We also need a community willing to examine its own complicity in producing these men. When we reject a boy because he might be gay, when we mock a boy for not being masculine enough, when we ignore the signs that a boy is being abused at home, we are laying the bricks of the architecture I described. We are building the man who will one day put his hands on a woman and feel righteous doing it. The work of undoing this pattern will take generations. But it can begin now with a simple, radical act: telling the truth about what we are witnessing.

The truth is that many men who violently disrespect women are driven by insecurities born in childhood, fragile egos that cannot sustain a single blow, and sexualities that have been suppressed so thoroughly that they have mutated into rage. The truth is that these men do not like women, do not respect women, and view women solely as instruments for proving their worth to other men. The truth is that the Black community’s hostility toward queer people is producing a pipeline of closeted men who take their internal warfare out on Black women. The truth is that patriarchy is a factory that strips men of their full humanity and turns them into agents of harm. The truth is that the religion we use to justify this hatred was forced onto our ancestors in order to control them, and we are still letting it control us. The truth is that South Africa has shown a better way, and the rest of the Black world is lagging behind. The truth is that we are stronger when we face these realities together, without flinching, and begin the slow, difficult work of healing, so that we can finally build something worthy of our people.

My name is Saipher Zureti. I am a visual artist and writer. All of the calligraphy in my essays is my original artwork, created specifically for the writing it accompanies.

This Substack is a body of philosophical essays on manipulation, identity, psychology, and the systems that shape how we see ourselves and each other. The essays build on each other deliberately. Each one extends, complicates, or deepens what came before, because these subjects cannot be understood in isolation from one another.

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Until next time, Namaste.

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