Terrible Bargain Follow-Up 1

On Friday, I wrote a post called The Terrible Bargain We Have Regretfully Struck, which hit a nerve with a lot of readers.

As I explained in the comments of that thread, one of the things I notice in comments a lot here are references, sometimes oblique and slightly embarrassed, sometimes blunt and angry, to female Shakers' upsetting interactions with the men in their lives about whom they care. The subject is one of the most popular themes of emails I get from Shaker women: I'm paying more attention to the things my male partner/my father/my brother/my male best friend says, and I'm challenging him more, and I am scared that if I said everything I wanted to say, our relationship would explode into a million pieces.

It is a discussion that Shaker women talk around a lot, but never quite have in detail, that men we love express misogyny, and that it is alienating, functionally undermining the intimacy of the relationship and, sometimes, the entire relationship itself. It's so much easier to talk about misogyny emanating from men who don't care about us, and about whom we don't care. This is a much more difficult subject—and I have been trying to find a way to broach it in a meaningful way for awhile.

I was asked in comments to find a way to keep this conversation going, and I plan to do that with a series of related discussion questions. This is the first post in that series, and I'll begin with some questions (for both women and men) that is a logical continuation from where the thread had naturally progressed and what (I think) is what people now want to discuss: What has the fall-out been, if any, since reading that post? Any internal realizations? Any consequences for your relationship? Did you direct a partner, friend, or family member to the post? What was hir reaction?