I'm Afraid of Men.

by Vivek Shraya

I’m afraid of men because it was men who taught me to hate and eventually destroy my femininity.

She came in hot

Or rather, to what extent is sexuality shaped and constrained by childhood experiences of male violence? What might desire feel like if the construction of sexuality didn’t take place in tandem with childhood experiences of violence from men? Would I have been as allured by your soft curls and passion for reading had I not already experienced the violence of other boys?

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? —

Where is the line between supposed “playful touching” and grabbing women’s body parts as a manifestation of hatred, if not exclusion? Why is this different or more acceptable than violence enacted by straight men?

This gay permissiveness also generously extends beyond the body. When I’ve tried to maintain other boundaries with gay men, such as providing a new friend an email address instead of a phone number, I’ve been called pretentious or offensive. This is because queerness is associated with freedom from boundaries. Thus, any boundary is inherently un-queer. And yet this entitlement has only reinforced my cautiousness with gay men. —

I never feel like you’re secretly wooing me or waiting for me to change how I feel about you. My friendship with you marks the first time in my adult life when a man not only makes me feel that I can offer what I’ve chosen to offer, but also that it will be welcomed.

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.

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.”

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.

How cruel it is to have endured two decades of being punished for being too girly only to be told that I am now not girly enough.

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. I’m afraid of women who adopt masculine traits and then feel compelled to dominate or silence me at dinner parties.

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 the women who, like men, reject my pronouns and refuse to see my femininity, or who comment on or criticize my appearance, down to my chipped nail polish, to reiterate that I am not one of them. 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. But I’m especially afraid of women because my history has taught me that I can’t fully rely upon other women for sisterhood, or allyship, or protection from men.

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?

I need this on a shirt