I'm Afraid of Men.

by Vivek Shraya

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?

This is because queerness is associated with freedom from boundaries. Thus, any boundary is inherently un-queer.

By this time, we’ve become a daily, if not hourly, “I love you” couple who share a home. For the first time I’ve allowed myself to imagine a future in which I don’t eventually kill myself.

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.

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

In order to reimagine masculinity, the quest for a good man—for an anomaly, an exception—must be abandoned. The good man is a fiction. Instead of yearning for a good man, what if we made our expectations for men more tangible? What if, for example, we valued a man who communicates?

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.”