There’s an idea from Carl Jung that has largely disappeared from modern conversation, but once you see it, you begin to recognize it everywhere.

He called it the animus.

In simple terms, the animus is the inner masculine side of a woman’s psyche. Just as men have an inner feminine (anima), women have an inner masculine. But that simple definition doesn’t go far enough, because the animus doesn’t just sit quietly in the background. At times, it can take over.

What the Animus Looks Like in Real Life

Jungian writers like Emma Jung and Marie-Louise von Franz described this very clearly. When the animus is active, it tends to speak in opinions that feel like absolute truth—not reflections, not curiosity, not a back-and-forth, but conclusions delivered with certainty.

Most men have experienced this moment, even if they didn’t have a name for it. You’re in a conversation, and suddenly you’re no longer being heard. Your words don’t land. The tone becomes sharp, certain, even prosecutorial. You are no longer an individual—you are “men.” And perhaps most telling: it doesn’t feel like her.

That’s the moment.

A Simple Tip-Off: Listen for “Should”

One of the clearest signals I’ve found is a small word that shows up again and again: “should.”

“You should know better.”
“Men should…”
“You shouldn’t feel that way.”

“Should” often signals that the conversation has shifted from what is happening to what must be true—from reality to judgment, from relationship to prosecution. It’s not that the word itself is bad, but when it shows up with certainty and heat, it often marks the moment when you are no longer in a discussion—you’re in something else.

Not Every Argument Is the Animus

This matters. Not every disagreement is an animus moment. Two adults can argue, disagree, challenge each other, and even get emotional while still being in a real conversation. That’s not what we’re talking about here.

A real argument still allows for movement. Animus possession does not.

So these strategies are not for normal discussions. They’re for those moments when nothing lands, everything is certain, and you can feel the shift.

The Bait

The animus, much like relational aggression, offers something very specific: it offers bait. The bait is emotional, and the hook is reactivity. If you take it—even for a moment—you’ve already lost, because now the conversation is no longer about what happened. It’s about how you reacted.

What Works Instead

Over time, I’ve seen something else work. Not perfectly, not always, but often enough to matter. When a man can stay calm, clear, and grounded while simply stating the truth, something changes.

Not immediately. In fact, the attack often continues in the moment. But without a counterattack, the conflict has nowhere to go but inward.

What This Sounds Like

Staying grounded doesn’t mean staying silent. It means speaking clearly—without heat, without defensiveness, and without trying to win.

For example:

“I care about you, but I’m not going to accept being spoken to as if I’m the enemy.”

“I’m willing to talk about what happened. I’m not willing to stand here as a symbol for all men.”

“I hear that you’re upset. I don’t agree with how you’re describing me.”

“I’m open to this conversation—but not in this tone.”

“I don’t think more arguing is going to help us right now.”

“I’m going to step away for a bit. I’m open to talking when we can both speak to each other as people.”

These responses don’t escalate, don’t submit, and don’t take the bait. They simply hold reality steady.

The “Next Day” Effect

I’ve seen this pattern many times. When I don’t take the bait—when I stay steady and speak plainly without heat—the moment doesn’t resolve right away. But later, something shifts.

Sometimes hours later. Sometimes the next day.

The woman comes back—not because I won the argument, but because I didn’t give the argument anything to grow on. Without escalation, she’s left with something different: she has to sit with what happened. And when there is maturity, that can lead to reflection.

But This Only Works With Maturity

This is important. This approach is not a universal solution. There are women who, in the heat of the moment, lose themselves and later come back, and there are women who never come back.

You need to know the difference.

If there is no reflection, no softening, and no awareness afterward, then you are not dealing with a moment—you are dealing with a pattern. And continuing to offer calmness into that pattern does not fix it. It sustains it.

This Takes Practice

None of this is easy. In the moment, your body is activated, your instincts are to defend or counterattack, and the pressure to respond is real. Staying calm and clear under those conditions is a skill, and like any skill, it takes practice.

You won’t do it perfectly. You’ll take the bait sometimes. Everyone does. But over time, you begin to recognize the moment sooner—and respond differently.

Calm Is Not Weakness

One of the challenges today is that this kind of steadiness is often misunderstood. Calmness is labeled as avoidance, logic as cold, and non-reactivity as disengagement. But those labels often miss something essential:

There is a difference between withdrawal and discipline.

I saw this growing up. Men who could sit with intensity, listen without collapsing, and respond without heat. They didn’t always fix things in the moment, but they didn’t make them worse either—and that mattered more than we realized.

As a man, you likely have strengths in logic, calmness, and clarity. These natural masculine qualities have been steadily undermined and, at times, openly shamed by feminists and modern cultural currents. Don’t give them up—use them.

The Real Skill

The real skill is not dominance, and it’s not submission. It’s something far more difficult: clarity without reactivity.

Because clarity doesn’t escalate, and reactivity is what the conflict feeds on.

The Line You Don’t Cross

This is not about becoming endlessly patient. It’s not about absorbing attack indefinitely. At some point, a man has to recognize:

If my steadiness is never met with awareness—only more attack—then I am no longer helping the relationship.

That’s where a different kind of strength is required—the willingness to stop participating in a pattern that does not change.

Final Thought

You can’t force someone to see themselves clearly. But you can refuse to cloud the mirror.

And sometimes, when you do that, they come back and see it on their own.

Men are good, as are you.

Fatherhood matters.

That’s the message at the heart of Tucker Carlson’s documentary Fathers Wanted—and it’s a message worth hearing.

A man who gives his time, his energy, and his life to his children is doing something deeply meaningful. There’s no controversy there.

But as I watched the film, I kept noticing something else.

Not what it said.

But what it didn’t.

Because by the end, the story felt strangely incomplete—like watching a documentary about lung cancer that never once mentions smoking.

The framing begins immediately.

Within the first moments, we are told that young men are choosing pornography, video games, and drugs over marriage and family. The implication is clear: the problem is not just that fatherhood is declining, but that men are turning away from it—opting for comfort, distraction, and indulgence instead.

That may be true in some cases.

But starting the story this way does something important. It establishes, from the outset, that the primary driver of fatherlessness is male behavior.

Everything that follows is filtered through that lens.

The film goes on to frame fatherlessness largely as a cultural and moral failure.

Men, we’re told, are retreating. Avoiding responsibility. Choosing comfort over commitment. Losing faith. Losing purpose.

By the end, the message is unmistakable: good men step up, bad men walk away.
And if a father abandons his children, Carlson makes it clear—he deserves contempt.

That’s a powerful claim.

But it rests on a narrow frame.

Because what the film barely examines—if at all—is the system in which modern fatherhood actually exists.

There is no serious discussion of:

• family courts

• custody outcomes

• child support structures

• no-fault divorce

• or how fathers often lose daily access to their children

These are not minor details.

They are central to understanding what happens to fathers in the real world.

In many cases, fathers do not simply walk away.

They are separated—from their children, from their role, from their identity as fathers—by processes largely outside their control. A man can go from being an everyday presence in his child’s life to being a visitor—or, in some cases, a paycheck. And yet, culturally, the outcome is often interpreted the same way:

He left.

But that is not always what happened.

There is another layer here the film only partially acknowledges. For decades, men have been broadly portrayed as:

• oppressive

• emotionally deficient

• disposable

• dangerous

• ​toxic

These ideas have been reinforced across media, education, and public discourse—under the influence of feminist frameworks that carry a deep skepticism and contempt toward men.

At the same time, we have seen something very different happen on the other side.

Single motherhood has increasingly been framed not as a difficult circumstance to be supported and stabilized, but as something to be celebrated—even idealized. Cultural messaging often elevates the strength and independence of mothers raising children alone, while saying very little about the cost of a father’s absence.

The contrast is striking. Fathers are questioned. Their role is diminished. Their presence is treated as optional. While single motherhood is often presented as sufficient—sometimes even preferable. The result is a contradiction we rarely confront: We tell men they are not needed. We question their value. We undermine their role.

And then we ask why they hesitate to step into it.

​When structural forces are ignored, a complex social problem ​can get reduced to a simple moral failure. And when that happens, the burden of explanation—and blame—falls almost entirely on individuals.

In this case, on men.

Carlson is right about something important:

Fatherhood matters.

But if we want more fathers present in their children’s lives, we need to do more than praise the ideal We need to examine the systems that shape the reality. Because until we do, we will keep asking the same question—

Why aren’t men stepping up?

—without fully understanding what they are stepping into.

Men Are Good, as are you.

In a recent piece for The Globe and Mail, Debra Soh takes on a topic that is long overdue for honest discussion: the growing hostility between young men and women, and the role online spaces play in fueling it.

To her credit, she does something that many commentators still avoid. She acknowledges that the problem is not confined to the so-called “manosphere.” She names the existence of a “femosphere” and recognizes that it, too, can promote distrust, manipulation, and even outright hostility toward the opposite sex.

That matters.

For years, the dominant narrative has been that toxicity flows in one direction—that men are the primary source of gender-based hostility, and women are largely reacting to it. Soh challenges that assumption. She points to polling data showing that young women, in some cases, hold more negative views of men than men do of women. She highlights the cultural double standards that allow anti-male messaging to pass with far less scrutiny than anti-female messaging.

All of this is important. And it takes a certain degree of intellectual independence to say it out loud.

But this is where her analysis stops just short of something deeper.

Soh ultimately frames the problem as a kind of mutual escalation—two sides locked in a feedback loop of resentment, each needing to step back, see the other more clearly, and abandon the worst impulses of their respective online cultures.

It’s a reasonable conclusion. It’s also incomplete.

Because it assumes that these two forces exist on roughly equal footing.

They don’t.

The hostility toward men that Soh describes is not simply emerging from fringe online communities. It is reinforced—often subtly, sometimes explicitly—by the broader culture itself. Media narratives regularly cast men as dangerous, deficient, or morally suspect. Academic frameworks frequently position men as privileged agents and women as vulnerable recipients. Institutional policies are often built on these same assumptions.

Over time, this does something powerful: it transforms a perspective into a kind of cultural default.

It begins to feel less like an opinion and more like reality.

By contrast, the hostility that emerges from the manosphere exists in a very different environment. It is not institutionally reinforced. It is challenged, criticized, and often condemned outright. Again, that does not make it accurate or healthy—but it does mean it operates under constraints that the opposing narrative largely does not.

This creates a playing field that is far from level.

One set of ideas is amplified and legitimized. The other is policed and marginalized.

And that asymmetry matters more than we often acknowledge.

Because when one narrative is embedded in institutions, it shapes not just opinions, but outcomes. It influences how boys are educated, how men are treated in courts, how male suffering is perceived—or overlooked. It becomes part of the background assumptions people carry without even realizing it.

Meanwhile, the reactive spaces that emerge in response—however flawed—are then judged as if they exist in isolation, rather than as downstream responses to an already tilted system.

This is the piece that Soh only partially touches.

She sees the hostility. She sees the polarization. She even sees that anti-male sentiment is more widespread than many are willing to admit.

But she does not fully account for the cultural forces that sustain and legitimize that sentiment.

And without that, the solution she offers—mutual correction—risks placing equal responsibility on two sides that are not equally empowered.

To be clear, none of this is an argument for excusing hostility—whether it comes from men or from women. We need to resist the pull of the worst elements on either side. Dehumanization, wherever it appears, damages everyone involved.

But understanding requires clarity.

And clarity requires us to ask not just what is happening, but where the weight of the culture rests.

Until we do that, we will continue to describe the conflict between men and women as a symmetrical breakdown in understanding—when in many ways, it is something much more lopsided than that.

Men are good, as are you.