Usually I'd not rise to the ramblings of some unknown blogger but Ali has written for some prestigious publications and claims this post "was ranked 22nd on the list of most-shared articles on all of Facebook in 2011." Now, part of me agrees with what Ali is saying because one of the most common mantras I hear from men - even when there are no women around to "emotionally manipulate" - is "chicks are f---ing crazy". You can make this statement to almost any group of men (except dudes with tumblr accounts and ironic tattoos who live in Melbourne) and it gets enthusiastic nods of agreement. You also only have to consider this reaction for about three seconds to see it's a method many blokes use for rationalising their disinclination to examine their behaviour in relationships. Any grievance a woman has can easily be filed under "she's f---ing crazy", so why even listen, let alone consider personal growth?

Ali, however, goes further, comparing the use of such phrases to a practice known as "gaslighting". "Gaslighting is a term, often used by mental health professionals (I am not one), to describe manipulative behaviour used to confuse people into thinking their reactions are so far off base that they're crazy," writes Ali. "The term comes from the 1944 MGM film, Gaslight, starring Ingrid Bergman. Bergman's husband in the film, played by Charles Boyer, wants to get his hands on her jewellery. He realizes he can accomplish this by having her certified as insane and hauled off to a mental institution. "To pull of this task, he intentionally sets the gaslights in their home to flicker off and on, and every time Bergman's character reacts to it, he tells her she's just seeing things. In this setting, a gaslighter is someone who presents false information to alter the victim's perception of him or herself," writes Ali. I know all about gaslighting - having detailed the practice in a 1998 film script I wrote, titled Revenge Inc. It's also the subject of a very informative little book of the same title by Victor Santoro printed by the alternative publishing company Loompanics.

Me and my Revenge Inc. script-writing partner decided "gaslighting" needed to be updated from the 1944 version, so we instead siphoned fuel from a character's petrol tank each night - sometimes even adding fuel - so that our target's gauge went up and down wildly, causing him to doubt his sanity (we might have stolen this idea from Santoro's book, I can't remember). You might also recall a similar tactic used by Hawkeye Pearce in an episode of the TV show M*A*S*H*, where he changed the sizes of Major Charles Winchester's fatigues to make him think he was getting fatter, then taller. So "gaslighting" been around for a long time. What bothers me about Ali's denotation is that he's ascribing a malicious motive to largely unconscious behaviour, then sketching this more widely into some kind of meta-conspiracy that blokes use to keep women on their knees. He says: "The form of gaslighting I'm addressing is not always premediated or intentional, which makes it worse, because it means all of us, especially women, have dealt with it at one time or another.

"Those who engage in gaslighting create a reaction - whether it's anger, frustration, sadness - in the person they are dealing with. Then, when that person reacts, the gaslighter makes them feel uncomfortable and insecure by behaving as if their feelings aren't rational or normal." Again, I agree with Ali. It is incredibly frustrating to have your natural reactions characterised as destructive, irrational or abnormal. I know this because it happens to men as well. What men get instead of "you're so sensitive, emotional, calm down" is "stop being so aggressive, lower your voice, you're being a bully, calm down". I like to think of myself as reasonably self-aware and, having spent three days dressing as a woman back in 2006, I had some powerful epiphanies about the nature of male aggression; how standing close to a woman, using your larger frame, even talking in an deeper vocal tone, can be enormously threatening to females.

Suffice it to say, I reckon I've got a pretty good handle on being "aggressive", especially in heated situations with women, where I am always careful to use a neutral tone and non-threatening body language. However, this hasn't stopped women from characterising my behaviour as "aggressive" or "bullying" - and I can't help wonder if this is a fall-back position for some females when they simply don't agree with you or feel like making the difficult compromises human interaction sometimes involves. Ali goes on to say "because women bare [sic] the brunt of our neurosis, it is much easier for us to place our emotional burdens on the shoulders of our wives, our female friends, our girlfriends, our female employees, our female colleagues, than for us to impose them on the shoulders of men. "It's a whole lot easier to emotionally manipulate someone who has been conditioned by our society to accept it. We continue to burden women because they don't refuse our burdens as easily. It's the ultimate cowardice. Whether gaslighting is conscious or not, it produces the same result: it renders some women emotionally mute." I gotta say I shook my head reading those paragraphs because I felt if you'd switched the genders, it would have been just as valid. Women do this stuff all the time - and you know what - guys do it all the time as well.

I cannot tell you how many times my grievances have been dismissed as "bullying", or my appeals for common sense as "aggressive" - and the net result is you walk away wondering if you're losing the plot. What bothers me most about Ali's article is that it tries to pass itself off as some kind of breakthrough in male/female dynamics, a solicitous, earnest monologue about how hard it is to be a woman, but it falls into the same trap almost every feminist hardliner and sandal-wearing male rights activist does. It looks at one side of the coin. It stokes the battle of the sexes myth. It is not in any form constructive because it addresses one part of an symbiotic relationship.

Men f--- with women's heads - no doubt - and many of them even do it consciously, intentionally and maliciously. But sweet baby Jesus, let not forget the women who do the same to men. Stoking this kind of "us versus them" attitude (Ali is writing an e-book on the subject as well) is not caring, it's not empathetic, it's not even enlightened. It's exploitative. Sam de Brito's latest novel Hello Darkness is in bookstores now. You can follow him on Twitter here. His email address is here.