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“I know that many men and even women are afraid and angry when women do speak, because in this barbaric society, when women speak truly they speak subversively—they can’t help it: if you’re underneath, if you’re kept down, you break out, you subvert. We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.” — URSULA K. LE GUIN
As important as it is to make these incidents visible by reporting them, sensationalizing and digesting these stories is also a form of social control, a reminder that I need to be afraid and to try to be as invisible as possible.
When I have to send emails to men, including male colleagues and artists, I carefully compose each message and include several exclamation marks.
I realized only after I began transitioning that my lifetime of independence and self-reliance had been largely a result of male privilege.
I’ve also witnessed gay men grabbing women’s breasts many times on the dance floor. When asked to stop, some have responded, “Don’t worry, I’m gay. I’m not into girls.” Not being into girls, however, is sometimes less about sexual preference and more about disdain. Is grabbing women’s breasts a way to make women feel unsafe and therefore keep them out of gay bars? When gay men have discovered I was dating a woman, many have declared how repulsive they find vaginas. Where is the line between supposed “playful touching” and grabbing women’s body parts as a manifestation of hatred, if not
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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. Why is my humanity only seen or cared about when I share the ways in which I have been victimized and violated?
Women who behave “badly” are ultimately not given the same benefit of the doubt as men and are immediately cast off as bitches or sluts. Men might be written off as “dogs,” but their reckless behaviour is more often unnoticed, forgiven, or even celebrated—hence our cultural fixation with bad boys.
because 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.
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?
Reflecting on this broader picture of Nick and our relationship, I had a choice. I could either mourn the loss of the idealized man I had thought Nick was, which somehow rendered me both powerless and at fault, a victim of my own imagination, or I could see Nick for who he is—dependable, devoted, and also fallible.
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.”
at a young age felt entitled to experiment with or even exploit a female body. Where and how did I learn that this behaviour was permissible?
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.
The history and current state of Western masculinity is predicated on diminishing and desecrating the feminine. Therefore, a healthier masculinity must be one that honours and embraces femininity, as many non-Western cultures have long prescribed.
And so, I’m also afraid of women. I’m afraid of women who’ve either emboldened or defended the men who have harmed me, or have watched in silence.
