i know you probably have a list a mile long of reasons why you could hate all men forever and never feel bad about it. it is time to recognize that living your life through this lens of trauma responses is only perpetuating your own suffering, and holding back all of our liberation.
as a society, generally, most of us have come to realize that designating any group as deserving of our hatred is not kind, ethical, or useful. but i haven’t met many folks who haven’t gone through an era of doing this exact thing to half our population.
it makes sense, when viewed through a strictly emotional standpoint. many of us have experienced a lot of abuse at the hands of a man, been neglected or abandoned by one, victimized or targeted by one. or many. your life experience matters, AND, it is our hate of an entire gender that fuels the machine to keep these things happening. the fact that your anger is generalized to all men instead of specifically to the ones who have done harm is a direct symptom of this.
this entry today, is not the “not all men” that only comes out in response to you vulnerably opening your heart and sharing your stories. this is me telling you that men are a victim of the patriarchy too. and that on some level, you already know that.
i was not personally ready to reckon with this until i did a lot, a LOT, of internal work on my own triggers and mental health. if i had read this exact post this time last year i probably would have closed it in anger.
but when it comes down to it there are really only two ways to move through this, you know? i can hold on to my hate and anger as a security blanket to “protect” myself from future hurt, or i can choose empathy and compassion and like… seeing men as human beings… and learn to love them again.
might sound weird coming out of the mouth of a VERY queer woman. i get it. but i really do love men as i love myself.
there is a facebook group called “antmans hill.” i joined it to have a spider identified because at the time, to me, all spiders might as well have been black widows. i was terrified of all of them. i didn’t know which ones might hurt me, so all of them got stomped or very widely avoided.
for the first little while, whenever i scrolled my feed, every now and then i’d get a surprise spider post and itd almost shock me into dropping my phone. i’d get a jolt of anxiety, and then i’d read about the spider. found out its name, and then read the comments there and see how many folks were commenting on how beautiful it was, and how they kept them (!!!) in the corners of their kitchen or right outside their back door and would talk to them and watch them spin their meals into silk cocoons. the spiders now had stories, and when i learned them, my heart softened to them too.
there are two species of spiders in my area that have medically significant bites: the black widow, and the brown recluse. and i also now know how to safely remove these from my spaces so they will not be able to hurt me or my family.
my journey to loving men as myself again is very similar. i was in a place to listen to mens stories, to witness their humanity, to see myself mirrored in them. to see how i had been frankly abusive to men who didn’t deserve my wrath— but received it anyway
there are buttons that every person knows to press to tear a man down. emasculate them. tell them their bodies aren’t enough. flame them for not being the man their family needs them to be. tear them down for not being man enough (including in the eyes of the people who hate men—how confusing that must be). forcing them to adhere to standards they don’t want to be held to. ignoring their emotional needs. making fun of them for exploring different ways of expressing themselves (unless they do it in the right way—the manly way?)
arent all of those things that have also been done to me? to you?
is it any wonder how prevalent substance abuse is in a culture like this?
we talk about toxic masculinity like ANY masculinity is toxic. we say that’s not the case in our words but that’s not lining up with our actions.
our transmasculine brothers live ashamed in the closet because they’re afraid all their feminist friends will disown them, hate them too, if they come out and accept their identity as a man.
we are perpetuating their suffering. our hate is only fuel for this machine. it does us no good. the machine is to blame— the machine is what must be dismantled, not the men produced by it. but it is the men we shred, instead.
we do it because it is easier, i think. it is much more accessible to sink our teeth and claws into a single human than it is to tear down entire megastructures.
but it is not all or nothing. we don’t have to go straight to mangling the metal, and that wouldn’t even work if we tried. the system is self-righting in cases like that, and there are so many failsafes to keep it upright.
we start with acknowledging the harm done to us was by a man, not by All Men. it was done by a man produced by the patriarchy, and just as you have your social conditioning that wasn’t easy to shed— he has it too. this is a process that’s never finished. there is always unlearning to do.
we allow ourselves to feel the hurt that we’ve tucked away, so that we no longer wield our shadows as weapons. process this somatically. (you can hire me to help you do that.) one of my favorite ways, taught to me by my coach: throw yourself on your bed over and over until something is knocked loose and you can deflate. do this alone.
we reflect on how we are the same. think about how you talk to your male partner when you’re losing your shit. how much of what you say is about what he’s done, and how much of what youre saying reinforces the social masculine expectations he might be struggling to meet.
our anger with individual men can be and should be separated from Hating Men. we hate the concept of men. we hate how the world caters to men. we hate how clueless men can be about their own privilege and power. we hate how easy it is to be hurt by them. we must choose love anyway.
when it comes down to it, it must be men changing the system. we have to show them what’s wrong so they can figure it out. they must start with themselves. they need someone to love them through the process. this change cannot be fueled by shame, or else it won’t work.
but when it does… we all get free.
Leave a Reply