To Fight Your Other Half Is To Fight Yourself.

There is no victory where half of humanity loses.

I find it strange that men and women have learnt to hate one another.

I'm not speaking of individuals and their personal grudges. We've been irritating each other since we first developed enough language to complain about it. I mean men and women as collectives, political constituencies, and competing tribes, each treating the other as though one's flourishing requires the other's humiliation.

Men are told that women exploit them, manipulate them, abandon them, and then demand their protection. Women are told that men oppress them, endanger them, objectify them, and then resent them for noticing. Each side gathers evidence. Each side has its statistics, anecdotes, screenshots, and the occasional podcast clip. Each becomes convinced that it has finally proven nature wrong for the ancient mistake of sexual dimorphism.

The trouble is that much of the suffering behind this conflict is real. Women have good reasons to speak about sexual violence, harassment, unequal burdens of care, and reproductive vulnerability. Men have good reasons to speak about suicide, educational decline, social isolation, and the peculiar expectation that male suffering must remain dignified enough not to inconvenience anyone else.

But one wound doesn't become imaginary because another bleeds elsewhere.

We've developed the curious habit of treating suffering as a competitive market. If women suffer, the patriarchy is responsible. If men suffer, feminism is responsible. One person's pain becomes evidence against another's right to be seen.

I find this exhausting. More importantly, I find it intellectually bankrupt.

The difficulty begins with the fact that men and women really are different. Any serious argument about the sexes has to admit this. Otherwise, we risk correcting one error by adopting another. Men and women differ, on average, in physical strength, hormonal profiles, some aspects of temperament, and the social expectations placed upon them. These differences matter. They shape families, workplaces, relationships, and considerably more than our politics is comfortable admitting.

But difference doesn't make us enemies. We're members of the same species, with far more the same than not.

We share the same fundamental needs. We want affection, respect, competence, and security. We want to be desired by someone we desire. We want someone to be there when no one else is. We want someone to notice when we're gone.

Consider a lonely man and a lonely woman. They may construct entirely different explanations for their loneliness. He concludes that women see him as disposable. She concludes that men see her as interchangeable. Both spend hours online finding communities eager to confirm their suspicions. Both become increasingly sophisticated in explaining why the other sex is responsible for their unhappiness.

And yet, both still go to bed alone.

We've become remarkably good at describing one another from the outside. Men explain women to men. Women explain men to women. Neither thinks to stop and ask the very people they're discussing. Nothing deserves more scepticism than an unusually confident opinion about a person one has never met.

Eventually, the person disappears, and only the category remains.

A woman ceases to be someone's mother, sister, or girlfriend. A man ceases to be someone's father, brother, or boyfriend. A woman cheats, and a stranger on the other side of the world discovers misogyny. A man commits an act of violence, and another stranger discovers misandry. The process repeats. Every offence becomes evidence against millions of people who had nothing to do with it.

The irony is that men and women know one another more intimately than almost any supposedly opposing groups in history. We don't live on opposite sides of a border. We're born into one another's arms.

Civilisation itself depends on our cooperation. We raise children, build institutions, share workplaces, care for ageing parents, create culture, and sustain the network of relationships through which society survives from one generation to the next. Even when we perform different roles, those roles belong to the same shared system. It's a system we're supposed to maintain together, not a prize for one sex to seize from the other.

Perhaps there's a reason why resentment between the sexes runs so deep. We're unusually vulnerable to those we need.

We dress to attract them. We rehearse conversations, adjust our personalities, and pretend to be rather more interesting than we are. We pose for photographs, post them online, and return to our phones to see whether a particular person has noticed. We expect things from one another, often things we're reluctant to admit. When those expectations fail, disappointment becomes resentment. Resentment becomes suspicion. Suspicion becomes a habit of finding further evidence.

Eventually, confirmation bias becomes a snowball, gathering everything in its path until it has consumed our entire worldview.

But a wound isn't a worldview.

And this raises a question. What, precisely, are you trying to achieve?

Suppose you win. Suppose women emerge victorious, having finally dismantled the patriarchy and liberated themselves from the tyranny of men. Suppose men emerge victorious, having defended what they consider their rightful place against the supposed encroachments of feminism. Let's grant both sides their fantasies of triumph.

What then? What exactly have you won?

You've spent years fighting your war on the great battlefield of the Internet. You've humiliated your opponents, defended your convictions, and perhaps even persuaded a few strangers that half of humanity is fundamentally defective.

Congratulations. You may now close your laptop.

And then what?

You return to your ordinary life. You sit at the dinner table, and your enemy is sitting beside you. Your mother. Your father. Your sister. Your brother. Your husband. Your wife.

You'll still want someone to understand you, to take you seriously, and perhaps, if you're fortunate, to love you. Or perhaps you won't. Perhaps this whole war was merely your way of lashing out at someone who should've loved you but didn't. Whatever the case, it's difficult to imagine a more decisive defeat disguised as victory.

You can't win a war against half your species without wounding yourself. And even if you somehow could, your resentment would remain. You can't defeat an abstraction. It has no body to wound, no conscience to persuade, and no surrender to offer. You can only spend your life fighting the people you've mistaken for it.

As a man, I personally find many of the girls in my life annoying.

Some ask for my opinion only to explain, at considerable length, why it's wrong. Others spend entire evenings complaining about the attitude a coworker gave them, only to go to bed late on a worknight and suffer the same thing tomorrow. Some insist nothing is wrong when I ask, only to be disappointed when I make the mistake of believing them.

But I adore them.

Their peculiarities make them the people I know, rather than pieces of a grand unified theory of the universe. I can find a friend unreasonable on Tuesday and still look forward to seeing her on Wednesday. I can disagree with her, complain about her, and occasionally wonder how we've managed to stay friends without concluding that her behaviour reveals a fundamental defect in half of humanity.

If anything, those defects are probably my own as well. She is, unfortunately, more like me than I'd care to admit.

It would be a strange friendship if affection required the absence of irritation. Stranger still if every irritation demanded a theory of sexual difference.

I like to think I'm capable of finding someone insufferable without making enemies of an entire sex. At least I can say I'm good at making my enemies. You don't even know who you're fighting.

My mother is the person I love most in this world.

She's been there through every stage of my life. Every success, every failure, and every occasion on which I've made an exceptional case for being an unexceptional son. She continued to love me through periods when I struggled to find much reason to love myself. When I hear the contempt with which men and women speak of one another, I find myself thinking of her. It's difficult to reduce half of humanity to a theory when you know even one person well enough.

Of course, loving one's mother doesn't settle every dispute between men and women. Nor does affection excuse injustice. We can recognise differences, criticise behaviour, demand accountability, and defend our interests without making enemies of each other.

Disagreement doesn't require contempt. Neither does suffering give us a monopoly on it. It would be a strange achievement to destroy our capacity for understanding while arguing about who deserves it.

Men and women aren't strangers separated by some civilisational border. We sit beside one another on buses, in libraries, at work, at universities and schools, and at every social event that isn't otherwise boring. We depend on one another in ways that no political victory can abolish.

There can be no victory in which half of humanity loses.

To fight our other half is, ultimately, to fight ourselves.