Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle

by Emily Nagoski

This takes a lot of forms: Explicit misogyny. One example of this is a reality TV star declaring he can grab women “by the pussy” whenever he wants because he’s famous, and a flood of media coverage suggesting that this sort of thing is perfectly okay—“just locker-room talk.” Imagine if he (or a woman) had said he can “grab men by the dick” whenever he wanted. Or a young man goes on a murderous rampage, killing several people and injuring many more, and justifies it by saying women refuse to have sex with him. In response to one such mass murderer who identified as an “incel” (“involuntarily celibate”), The New York Times ran an op-ed that unjokingly argued that “redistribution of sex”—that is, sex for men, with women—was a reasonable idea.3 You see, women could be preventing these deaths, if only they did their job of meeting the sexual needs of dangerous men. In the time that we were writing this book, there were fifteen public mass shootings in the United States perpetrated by men or boys, several of whom were motivated, at least in part, by some form of jealousy, sexual frustration, or emotional rejection by a woman or girl.4 In more than half of all mass shootings, the perpetrator kills his intimate partner or family members, including his mother, his wife or girlfriend, or his children.5