Well, you might want to revisit your beliefs on how folks' in the US experience their world.

There is certainly no excuse for bad behavior, and it is certainly the case that for many folks they absolutely know what they are doing.

If your point is that people are culpable for their bad behavior regardless of their claims about knowledge, then I agree.

At the same time most of the culture that raised me runs on people denying to themselves what they are doing, ranging from highly individualistic sublimations of the "fundamental attribution error" to renouncing culpability for their direct work at building the torment nexus.

The entirety of the mode of production here relies on ignoring how we exploit the people around us in almost every exchange so it's not at all surprising to me that, looking towards the OP, men in this culture commonly are able to hide their bad behaviors in layers of fantasy so deep that they aren't able to consciously understand how they are treating their lovers.

I don't know your context here, but if that kind of self-deception is news to you you might want to review the behavior of the people you're around (or your own), because either your threshold for bad behavior or your perceptions of peoples' capacity for self-delusion is perhaps a little low.