Do Straight Men Know the Difference Between Love and Hate?

There are either a lot of confused men out there…or something much worse is at play

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As a woman, I know a common question among my gender is: Do men know what love is?

Obviously (or at least, it would be obvious to anyone observing in good faith), I’m not talking about all men. But certain circumstances, beliefs, and behaviors in a culture like ours are common enough that many women find themselves asking this question.

Nearly fifty years into life, however, I’ve found myself asking a slightly different question. Now what I’m curious about is: Do men know what hate is?

Do they recognize what it feels like? Do they understand what it looks like? Do they know when their behavior is demonstrating hate? Do they care?

Questions like these used to be little more than an inner exploration, born from the curiosity I’ve always had about men and my hope to understand them better.

But now that I’ve come to this question — now that I am less and less certain that men (in general) don’t understand what hate is, let alone love — I think this needs to be more than individual women’s contemplative attempts to relate better to men.

I think it’s time for a collective intervention.

“Any woman who openly hates men is a ‘lesbian’ as far as male perception is concerned. She may not identify as such, but the point is she’s disqualified as a potential partner.”

This comment appeared, along with many other inappropriate comments from men, on a piece I recently wrote about the ever-popular tactic that men often use to dismiss a woman as a viable sexual partner, or even someone who meets the standards of “real” womanhood (according to patriarchy) by calling her a lesbian.

Much of my focus in that article was to point out the way straight men often only see women only in relation to their own sexual fulfillment. Either we are a potential sexual partner — or nothing. In the former category, they define us as a woman. In the latter, lesbians. (Though take note that the qualifier of woman is not synonymous with human.)

With their full chests, many male commenters, like this one, confirmed exactly what I said, including the erroneous and prejudicial conflation of the terms feminist, lesbian, and misandrist.

As you can imagine none of that surprised me. There’s a reason I wrote the article that inspired these comments in the first place.

But it was the second half of this man’s comment that really interested me:

“Imagine a guy who constantly shits on women and seems to want nothing to do with them. You’d likely assume he’s gay, and even if he isn’t, he is as far as you’re concerned.”

I laughed when I read this.

This is literally a description of most straight men.

Ask any woman who has dated men to name the defining feature of straight men and you will often hear, “They hate women.”

Now this is a bit of a joke, of course, and certainly a generalization. None of us think every straight man hates women.

But the fact that we make this joke-that’s-not-quite-a-joke so often should tell you just how common it is for a heterosexual relationship to be a playground for a man’s misogyny.

When I look back on my relationships with men, I’m astounded by the open contempt they had for me and my body — and that I was socially conditioned to accept this as a normal part of a heterosexual relationship.

All but one man I’ve dated openly hated everything about my body except for my breasts, and they were never shy about telling me how much the sight of me turned them off.

Based on what I’ve seen in the world, I’m confident that my body is pretty average for a woman…and yet that turned these men off? My big butt and jiggly thighs deflated their boners, as they so often told me?

If they were turned off by an average female body, what exactly would arouse them?

And speaking of sex, I didn’t have a boyfriend who would go down on me until I was in my thirties — an experience that turned into trauma when he ran into the bathroom afterwards and started spitting violently into the sink, and then rinsing his mouth out like he’d just swallowed battery acid.

Later, he told me the same thing previous boyfriends had told me. He thought vaginas were disgusting — he didn’t want that “slime” in his mouth.

I can’t help but wonder how many straight men there are out there who hate pussy, considering how many of them my friends and I have encountered. Again, I have to ask: What exactly do they like about women?

And that’s not even to mention the constant string of culturally-sanctioned degrading and misogynistic comments past boyfriends have made. The things that men say and do to their wives and girlfriends that most people wouldn’t say or do to their friends, but that are considered evidence of a strong heterosexual partnership.

Like when men call their female partners “the old ball and chain.” Or when their most cherished social outlet is meeting their male friends at a bar where they verbally trash their partners while publicly ogling 20-something women across the room. Or when they forget their partner’s birthday and yell at her if she brings up her disappointment.

Or when they purposefully humiliate their partner at a public event (like smashing cake into her face at their wedding when she specifically asked him not to) and then pump their fist and holler like someone who just won an Olympic race. Or who act as if spending quality time with a partner outside the bedroom is the worst possible thing that could ever happen to him.

These actions are not the actions of a man who loves his partner. And yet they are socially accepted demonstrations of heterosexual “love.”

Back to our original question. Do men understand what hate is?

I can’t help but wonder based on what I’ve observed.

I actually don’t think these men understand that what they feel is hate. Or, more accurately (and importantly) that they’ve been conditioned into this hate.

I don’t think the endless stream of men who leave me hate comments or send me hateful emails actually realize that they are expressing hatred. I think they believe they are simply reminding me of their authority, and if that happens to include telling me what a man-hating bitch I am, then surely they must be justified in that action. They are men, after all.

And when it comes to romantic relationships of the heterosexual variety, I absolutely do not believe that men understand that their behavior toward women — potential partners and the partners they end up with — is often extremely hateful. Again, that’s all social conditioning that has programmed them to behave a certain way in romantic relationships with women.

You see, even though many men are unable to deprogram from the patriarchal belief that women are objects that exist solely to fulfill the well-being of men, and therefore, are not human beings, women — yes, even feminists — recognize men, no matter how hatefully they behave, as fellow human beings. And that means that many of us know that men, as humans, want, need, and deserve love.

We know that if patriarchy magically disappeared tomorrow, men would no longer fear being called “simp” and “pussy” by their male friends just for treating their wives and girlfriends with respect. Men would no longer have to focus on dominating their partner, but instead could admire and love her and her body, as is.

And best of all, they would be free to focus on building and maintaining strong pleasure bonds with us, which would include diving face-first into their partner’s pussy any time they’re invited to do so.

That’s right, I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that a straight man is biologically designed to enjoy the smell, shape, and texture of a woman’s vulva. The only reason they claim not to is because they’ve been so deeply brainwashed to feel revulsion for everything femme.

What a confusing world we live in. Straight men treat their female partners in a way that, by every objective standard there is, suggests hate, while expecting those partners to treat them with love and respect, and to make themselves sexually available to a man who likely treats them worse than any other person in that woman’s life.

Meanwhile, those same men accuse women who are fighting for a society that would increase every man’s quality of life of hating men. It doesn’t matter if we’ve never said “all men,” never called men names, and never demonstrated actual hate. If we are fighting against the system that singularly benefits them while simultaneously disenfranchising them, we are misandrists in their eyes.

And this is why I have to ask if men actually know what hate is.

But since I’m a mere woman, I’m going to share what my old friend Alan Tegel recently said (also in the comments of the aforementioned article). Alan wisely noted that “the #1 misandrists in the world are not women…but men.”

I mean…hel-lo.

What demographic represents the greatest threat of physical violence (up to and including murder) to men? Other men, as Alan pointed out.

Men actually know that one and bring it up frequently. Whenever feminists talk about the prevalence of violence against women, these men will counter by saying, “Most murder victims are men!”

They think they’ve achieved a gotcha moment, but it falls flat when you consider that those murders are mostly committed by other men.

But let’s lower the stakes a bit and look at social behaviors. For instance, why do so many men treat their wives and girlfriends at best like a nuisance, at worst like a parasite they’d do anything to rid themselves of? Because if they don’t conform to patriarchal standards of masculinity (which include treating women like shit), it threatens their standing among other men, disrupting their social stability.

We’re talking about a man’s father, uncles, brothers, and friends. Those closest to him will often be the ones who tease, insult, and shame him for “not being a man.”

And this, if you ask me, is at the heart of the male loneliness crisis. Because a masculine man can’t accept or reciprocate love from a woman. And love between him and his male friends and family is absolutely forbidden, except for what passes for love in a dominance hierarchy.

Whatever that is, I feel pretty confident that it’s nowhere near love and doesn’t know anything about love.

It’s closer, I’d suggest, to hate.

A year after my most significant partner ended our relationship in order to marry a very young co-worker he’d fallen in love with, telling me on his way out the door that he’d never loved me and hadn’t even liked me, I became increasingly enlightened to the fact that he had downright hated me during our time together.

That was solidified when my brother, who had been my ex’s friend during our relationship, told me how angry my ex would get every time I texted him.

He said he regretted not telling me at the time, realizing too late that my ex’s behavior had been a huge red flag. “He acted like you texting him to say I love you was the most inconvenient, annoying thing that could happen to him.”

Then he added, “But that’s just how guys act when it comes to their girlfriends.” Therefore, he hadn’t thought much of it at the time.

As is almost always the case, I found clarity in hindsight. It hadn’t surprised me at all to hear that my boyfriend angrily complained when I texted him. His disdain for me wasn’t exactly something he hid even when we were in the same room.

I hadn’t thought anything of it at the time. As my brother said, that’s just how men act when it comes to their girlfriends — and that’s just what we’ve been taught to consider both normal and healthy, even though that kind of behavior is neither.

But I get it. Being perceived as strong and masculine was immensely important to my ex — and as such, he didn’t have any choice but to treat me with contempt.

To love a woman is weak in a patriarchy. A man can see himself as her protector — but never someone who loves her.

Hatred can be twisted, however, and called love, something we are very good at in this culture. So good that I fear a lot of men don’t know the difference between the two.

As a woman who would have loved to have had a healthy romantic relationship with a man, it is heartbreaking to understand their propensity to confuse hate for love.

And even more so to see them do the same to each other and themselves. Because I think Alan was right. I’m not sure there’s anyone who hates men more than they hate themselves and one another.

© Y.L. Wolfe 2025

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Y.L. Wolfe is a writer and artist on a quest to wholeness in the transformative fires of middle age. You can find more of her work at ylwolfe.com.

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