What is up with men these days?

I just have a question...

Why do men in many of the stories I am reading for English need to be in control of women? Or why do they have to have a side woman to satisfy their ego?

In a reading I did for class called: "The Lady with the Dog," this Guvor decides that he just needs to have casual relationships with other married women because he pretty much hates his wife. He meets this woman with a dog and her name is Anna and they decide that they both want to have this fake relationship that isn't actually a relationship because they are both married, and they agree that it wouldn't go any further than sexual relations, but yet in the end of the story, Guvor just has to go and stalk this woman and find her because he can't stop thinking about her and Anna is like, no please leave even though she also thinks about him a lot. They then end up seeing each other at the same opera house and decide that she will meet him in Yalta (where they first met) and then she does and they are so happy and they wonder what they will do with their current marriages. They both state that they don't want a relationship with each other, but they also hate the relationship they are in, and yet they sort of have a relationship and think it could go further, but they odds are, they will both get bored again because it will be the same situation just with different people. I'm just so confused. Women are just treated so poorly in the time periods that these stories are written in. In "Hills like White Elephants" a woman is possibly pregnant and this man is basically telling her to get an abortion, but it is up to her to decide (EVEN THOUGH HE PRETTY MUCH DECIDED FOR HER.) This poor woman just goes along with whatever he says and it seems like she is just so over this relationship and being told what to do. She has a very sarcastic tone in the way I read it and they seem to just keep fighting about the same thing even though the "man is always right" and she will most likely go through with whatever he thinks is best because she wants the topic put to rest.

I just cannot believe that this is what society was like at that time, and honestly I feel like society is coming back into this form. Yes- feminism and women's empowerment have taken flight, but there are still cultures and people in general in the world that just think that this is true. There is so much inequality in the world it is baffling.