I'm Afraid of Men.

by Vivek Shraya

I’m afraid of men because it was men who taught me to fear the word girl by turning it into a weapon they used to hurt me. I’m afraid of men because it was men who taught me to hate and eventually destroy my femininity. I’m afraid of men because it was men who taught me to fear the extraordinary parts of myself.

Being a girl has required me to retrain myself to think of depending on others or asking for assistance not as weakness or even as pathetic, but rather as a necessity.

You had somehow gleaned what was required to succeed in a predominantly white junior high: Don’t stand out.

How many sexual desires and fantasies are formed out of potential or actual male violence? Or rather, to what extent is sexuality shaped and constrained by childhood experiences of male violence?

What would my body look like if I didn’t want affection from gay men and protection from straight men? What would my body look and feel like if I didn’t have to mould it into both a shield and an ornament? How do I love a body that was never fully my own?

Why is being touched by strangers—strangers who refuse to identify themselves—a form of flattery?

Trans people aren’t afforded the luxury of relaxing or being unguarded.

I’M AFRAID OF MEN not because of any singular encounter with a man. I’m afraid of men because of the cumulative damage caused by the everyday experiences I’ve recounted here, and by those untold, and by those I continue to face.

I have always been disturbed by this transition, by the reality that often the only way to capture someone’s attention and to encourage them to recognize their own internal biases (and to work to alter them) is to confront them with sensational stories of suffering.

This was a quote that really stood out to me. In order to believe that all of these -isms are bad, that the violence and trauma that comes out of them are harmful, those who have been impacted by discrimination based on their race, class, gender, sexuality, and intersections of these are forced to relive their suffering to prove the harm it does. It’s as if their suffering puts the humanity that has been unconsciously removed for being different back into them.

Why is my humanity only seen or cared about when I share the ways in which I have been victimized and violated?

good is a nebulous standard, and our desire for something that can’t really be measured outside of religious teachings and morality only sets us up for disappointment, and sets up every gender for failure.

This praise highlights another problem with the idea of the “good man”—the bar is ultimately a low one, and men are heralded every day for engaging in basic acts of domestic labour like washing dishes.

If we want masculinity to be different, we must confront and tackle the baseline instead of longing for exceptions. Loving your mother, holding a door open for a woman, being a good listener, or even being a feminist doesn’t make a man an exception. Experiencing oppression—including racism, homophobia, and transphobia—doesn’t make a man an exception. If we are invested in perpetuating and glorifying the myth of the “good man,” we are also complicit in overlooking, if not permitting, the reprehensible behaviour of the “typical man.”

The theme of entitlement to space that emerges in many of my recollections of men, and in my own masculine development, is colonial code for claiming someone else’s space. Whether it’s through an emphasis on being large and muscular, or asserting power by an extended or intimidating stride on sidewalks, being loud in bars, manspreading on public transit, or enacting harm or violence on others, taking up space is a form of misogyny because so often the space that men try to seize and dominate belongs to women and gender-nonconforming people.

Therefore, a healthier masculinity must be one that honours and embraces femininity, as many non-Western cultures have long prescribed.

I’m afraid of women who have internalized their experiences of misogyny so deeply that they make me their punching bag.

I’m afraid of women who, when I share my experiences of being trans, try to console me by announcing “welcome to being a woman,” refusing to recognize the ways in which our experiences fundamentally differ.

Unfortunately, any ambiguity or nonconformity, especially in relation to gender, conjures terror. This is precisely why men are afraid of me. Why women are afraid of me, too.

Consider how often you have dismissed your own appearance, behaviours, emotions, and aspirations for being too feminine or masculine. What might your life be if you didn’t impose these designations on yourself, let alone on me?

What if you were to challenge yourself every time you feel afraid of me—and all of us who are pushing against gendered expectations and restrictions? What if you cherished us as archetypes of realized potential? What if you were to surrender to sublime possibility—yours and mine? Might you then free me at last of my fear, and of your own?