I’m so sick of (writing) advice from men

It’s all the same, often unsolicited, and lacks any kind of heart.

Everywhere I look online, there’s another man giving me advice about writing. Most of the time, it’s the same bullshit over and over and over again, and it stinks of bromarketers. If you’re not familiar with bromarketers, they’re the dudebros of online marketing. 

Y’know, they’re those guys who’ll tell you to get up at 4 am, have a cold shower, go for a 16-mile run before your breakfast of black coffee and scrambled eggs, so that you can work an 18-hour day, putting in the hustle so that your budding Facebook ads agency can 10x its growth, 20x your income, and 30x your motivation to move out of your parent’s basement.

Mostly what I can’t stand about advice from men is the smugness. They just leap atop their high horse to claim moral high ground without a second thought to if it’s any good. And then they sell that advice in neatly packaged online courses to other men, who turn around and start parroting that same BS back into the void.

Eventually, each individual just starts to sound like a copy of every other guy. And Chat GPT entering stage left has only 10x’ed that phenomenon, turning the internet into a self-fulfilling echo chamber (because the more content Chat GPT writes for the internet, the more it ends up feeding itself).

I always wonder where the bromarketers get their confidence, too. I grew up unknowingly autistic, was there for the advent of consumer internet, and lived through social media becoming a thing. There was no way I was ever going to grow up anything other than strung-out and anxious with those odds.

Some days, when I feel bad about myself, have a dip in my confidence, I ask myself, “If I was a middle-aged white man, what would I do? Would I care that my hair is a mess or would I just show up as-is? Would I spend so much mental energy on worrying about how I look?”

Usually, the answer is that I wouldn’t care about any niggling doubts. I’d just blaze through with a confidence installed in me by deus ex machina and believe my way to success.

I mean, narcissists and psychopaths regularly get into positions of power. Often we, the people, even put them there! CEOs will often exhibit narcissistic and even psychopathic traits, some experts estimate from anywhere between 4 and 12 per cent. In the normal population, psychopaths make up about 1 per cent, in prisons that number goes up to 15 per cent.

People with psychopathy crave power and dominant positions, experts say. But they are also chameleons, able to disguise their ruthlessness and antisocial behavior under the veneer of charm and eloquence.

 —Jack McCullough, “The Psychopathic CEO”

Psychopathic behaviour is when you know right from wrong, but engage in immoral and illegal behaviours anyway. You sabotage and manipulate others, pit others against each other, display empathy but don’t really feel any, engage in criminal activities and lack any remorse for the things you do or how you use people. And you hide this all behind a facade of charisma.

But I have a daughter now, I can’t just give in to every anxious impulse. I have to be a better person so I can show her how to deal with the world better than I did growing up. I can’t change the patriarchy, so what can I change?

For centuries, women have been oppressed.

And oppression is traumatic. Trauma is passed down through the generations. Dr Valerie Rein termed this inherited trauma, the Patriarchy Stress Disorder (PSD).

In a groundbreaking study, researchers introduced the smell of cherry blossoms to mice while simultaneously zapping their feet with mild electric shocks. The mice were then bred, and their children and grandchildren, when exposed to the smell of cherry blossoms, showed a strong fear and anxiety reaction. Let that sink in. The researchers saw that these traumatic experiences had been genetically transmitted.

So what is PSD? PSD is women fearing the smell of cherry blossoms. What are the ‘cherry blossoms’ in this context? For us, they are everything that we desire and everything that has historically been forbidden and dangerous and punishable for women: shining brightly, expressing ourselves unapologetically, being in touch with our desires and going after them, loving who we love, being wealthy, being visible, being powerful.

These are all cherry blossoms, that women have been taught to fear, through oppression, that have spanned countless generations. Women who reached for cherry blossoms were burned at the stake, drowned, and locked up in asylums.

 — Dr Valerie

She argues that our inheritance, this trauma, comes with survival instructions like:

• “Be seen, but not heard”
• “Don’t be too smart”
• “No one would want to marry you” 
• “Don’t be too sexy or you’ll be raped”
• “Don’t be too powerful or you’ll suffer and die”

It isn’t that we consciously believe these things to be true, but this is information that has been passed down to us from our foremothers. Our collective trauma gets triggered and our subconscious still raises the alarm, reacting to protect us from harm.

You can go into freeze/fight/flight mode which can show up as self-sabotage, a loud inner critic, imposter syndrome, procrastination etc. Even if you’re playing big in the world, claiming space and going after the things that you want, societal expectations be damned, you might still live in a state of hyper-vigilance, constantly signalling your brain and body that you’re not safe. 

This can look like difficulty relaxing or sleeping without a pill or a glass of wine. It can look like anxiety or trouble with intimacy, because you struggle to be fully in your body, feeling pleasure and feeling peace, joy, happiness.

So, sisters in the patriarchy. This is the work. This is the journey. Healing so that we can leave this place better than we found it. Healing so that our children don’t lose touch with themselves. As Clarissa Pinkola-Estés points out in Women Who Run With Wolves, there’s nothing more dangerous to the patriarchal status quo than the woman who is in touch with herself, her true desires.