Soft Misogyny and Man Heroes

In today’s cultural landscape, overt misogyny is easy to spot. We know what it looks like: hostile rhetoric, online harassment, gendered slurs, and outright denial of women’s rights. It’s the stuff of angry incels, red pill forums, and hyper-masculine influencers raging against feminism. But what about the men who claim to be allies? The ones who speak the language of empathy, growth, and equality? The ones who publish books on vulnerability, host long-form conversations about mental health, or tell boys it’s okay to cry?

They are the "good guys." And sometimes, they traffic in a more insidious form of misogyny: the kind that hides behind intention, cloaks itself in nuance, and insists it’s just being misunderstood.

This is soft misogyny — and it is just as corrosive, precisely because it is harder to call out.

Take Joe Rogan, for example. He is the everyman podcast host who insists he’s just "asking questions," just opening space for dialogue, just having honest conversations. But what often happens on his show is the normalization of conspiratorial thinking and pseudoscience, much of which subtly or overtly delegitimizes women’s voices, labor, and knowledge. When he platforms guests who peddle anti-feminist rhetoric or COVID conspiracy theorists who frame public health as a form of emasculation, he doesn’t push back with rigor. Instead, he chuckles, shrugs, or nods along.

That may seem benign. But in practice, it elevates a worldview in which masculinity is framed as being under siege, and femininity as either suspect or overbearing. It creates a kind of narrative permission structure for men to feel aggrieved, silenced, or condescended to by the mere existence of feminist critique. That sense of persecution is the emotional fuel of the manosphere. And Rogan, despite his broader appeal, offers a gateway to it.

Now consider Justin Baldoni. A self-styled male ally, Baldoni has given TED Talks on "man enough," written books on healthy masculinity, and publicly advocated for more vulnerable, open-hearted men. On paper, he is doing the work. But in practice, his recent personal fallout—in which he framed himself as a victim after a woman challenged the gap between his values and his behavior—revealed something deeper: the refusal to be accountable when the moment isn’t scripted.

Baldoni, like so many men who publicly align with feminist ideals, missed the emotional cues. He was praised for his posture of empathy, but when challenged, he defaulted to self-protection and self-narration. His actions echoed a familiar dynamic: the man who publicly champions growth, yet privately evades the consequences of his own shortcomings. And then, when called out, reframes the woman as vindictive, unstable, or unforgiving—using the privilege of the very system he claims to reject. In doing so, he engaged in a soft form of gaslighting: reframing her reaction as disproportionate, his intentions as pure, and the conflict as a misunderstanding—rather than a reckoning.

Sound familiar? That’s not new. Think of Matt Lauer—who, after decades of violating trust in the workplace, had the audacity to publicly align himself with calls for accountability in the Clinton era. Behind the scenes, the machinery of protection was already in motion: legal teams retained, stories silenced, and restraining orders avoided through influence and institutional insulation. The contradiction wasn’t just hypocrisy—it was a power play. A man using the language of justice while still insulated by the very system he exploited. The same dynamic plays out when modern "good guys" like Baldoni retreat from accountability and weaponize the optics of persecution. The difference is in the tone. But the blade is still sharp. And the key difference? Some men don’t pretend to be allies first. When harm comes from someone who never claimed empathy, it’s expected. When it comes from someone who built a brand on trust, care, and growth—it cuts deeper. The betrayal is layered. Because it’s not just what they did—it’s who they said they were. It is the emotional difference between being harmed by a stranger, and being harmed by someone you knew, trusted, and perhaps even admired. The former is traumatic. The latter is disorienting in its betrayal—it reframes memory, intention, and reality all at once.

Soft misogyny doesn’t shout. It sighs.

It doesn’t attack. It explains.

It performs empathy while quietly withholding it.

And that’s what makes it so difficult to confront. It feels like allyship. It sounds like progress. But it plays out as the same old dynamic with better branding.

Where hard misogyny says, "Women are the problem," soft misogyny says, "Why is she so upset?"

Where hard misogyny demands submission, soft misogyny demands endless emotional labor and forgiveness without transformation. It is deeply invested in the performance of understanding, but allergic to the discomfort of real accountability.

The core wound that soft misogyny creates isn’t just betrayal—it’s cognitive dissonance. It’s the psychic gap between what a man claims to be and how he actually shows up when emotional substance is required. When a woman is hurt by the disparity between his stated values and his actual behavior, he often responds not with clarity or contrition, but with confusion. Or worse, with a narrative of his own victimhood. That demand's the woman do the emotional work of making him feel whole about his duplicity.

And when that happens, the woman is left holding the emotional weight and the blame. She is seen as overreacting. She is told she’s attacking. She becomes the problem, the aggressor, the canceler. Her clarity is recast as cruelty. Her pain becomes a liability to his image.

This is how soft misogyny gaslights. Not with overt denial, but with plausible deniability. Not with violence, but with story—or a website, or a carefully worded text, or an influencer campaign crafted to reframe harm as heartbreak, critique as cruelty, and consequence as persecution. Baldoni’s response mirrored this precisely: a long, emotionally polished essay accompanied by a media rollout that subtly repositioned him as the heartbroken one. He published his reflections on a branded website, referencing therapy and spiritual growth, leaning on the familiar language of healing while avoiding direct engagement with the allegations or the woman’s perspective. In interviews and social posts, he emphasized how much he had loved, how deeply he had hurt—centering his pain over hers. By turning the aftermath into a story of his personal transformation, he preemptively reframed critique as misunderstanding and turned potential accountability into another opportunity for brand reinforcement. It’s not an outright erasure—it’s a repackaging of the truth in a more flattering container.

It often shows up in the space of emotional intimacy: the romantic partner who says, "I want to grow," but collapses when asked to be emotionally present. The co-worker who praises diversity but talks over every woman in the room. The influencer who posts about trauma and healing, but privately engages in manipulative or dismissive behavior. The man who calls himself an ally until it becomes inconvenient.

And the stakes are not abstract. These aren’t just bruised feelings or personal misunderstandings. The gap between male self-image and lived integrity has real consequences: it erodes trust, destabilizes movements, retraumatizes survivors, and turns moments of reckoning into performances of fragility.

It’s easy to say, "Well, at least they’re trying." But trying isn’t always enough—especially when trying becomes a shield from critique. Especially when the image of being a "good guy" becomes more important than the reality of doing good work. Consider Johnny Depp: a man who was recorded in private behaving in ways that directly contradicted the image he projected publicly. He lost a defamation case in the UK after a judge found the allegations against him to be "substantially true." Yet he won in the U.S., where the courtroom became a stage and public sentiment shaped the outcome. His case became less about fact and more about performance—an inversion of justice shaped by charisma, optics, and cultural capital. It’s a reminder that accountability isn’t always aligned with truth, especially when the audience is watching—and the real story lies in what happens when no one is. It is about violence or manipulation behind closed doors that is dismissed, excused, or romanticized as the emotional cost of love or the complexity of relationships. When private harm is recast as passionate struggle, it allows public personas to remain intact. And that dissonance—between what’s shown and what’s hidden—becomes the very space where soft misogyny thrives.

Soft misogyny is not about monstrous men. It’s about mediocre accountability wrapped in emotionally intelligent language. It’s about self-preservation disguised as openness. And the result is not always rage, but confusion. Disorientation. A kind of emotional hangover that leaves women wondering if what they experienced was real.

This is why calling it out is so difficult. It doesn’t leave bruises. It leaves questions. And the woman who names it often becomes the target of public doubt, subtle shame, or collective minimization. "He didn’t mean it like that." "He’s a good guy." "You’re overreacting."

We have to stop measuring misogyny by tone alone. Harm does not need to be loud to be real. Sometimes, the softest voices carry the most damaging scripts.

If we want to raise the bar for men, we need to stop confusing performance for practice. We need to examine not just what men say in interviews, but what they do in conflict. In private. When the camera isn’t rolling. When accountability costs them something real.

Because that’s where allyship lives or dies: not in the curated image, but in the unscripted moment.

The cultural space between Joe Rogan and Justin Baldoni may seem vast. But both men illustrate how easy it is to perform nuance while enabling narratives that hurt women. One does it through casual platforming of grievance masculinity. The other does it through soft-focus feminism that flinches when challenged.

They both say they value truth. But the truth that matters is in the follow-through.

The truth that matters is whether you can hold a woman’s reality as valid even when it disrupts your own.

The truth that matters is whether you can stay when it's messy. Listen when it's inconvenient. Change when it costs.

Soft misogyny says: "I believe in growth."

Real accountability says: "And here's how I've changed."

The good guy isn't the man who says the right thing.

It's the one who does the right thing—when it's hard, when it's unflattering, and when no one is watching. I know these guys. They exist.

Until then, soft misogyny will keep passing as progress.

And the rest of us will keep cleaning up its mess.