I Don’t Hate Men

I’ve been thinking about men a lot lately.

Which, admittedly, is not always a peaceful place to put my attention. 😂

I’m a survivor of sexual abuse. I’m currently in therapy working through sexual trauma. I’ve spent a lot of time lately writing about consent, boundaries, entitlement, sexualization and what it means to inhabit a female body in a world that sometimes seems to believe our bodies are public property.

And I’m angry.

Some days, I’m really fucking angry.

But I don’t hate men.

I’ve heard women say that they hate men. That all men are the same.

I can empathize how someone gets there. I understand the exhaustion underneath it. I understand the rage.

But I refuse to go there myself.

Not because I want to make my anger more palatable. Not because I need to reassure men that I still think some of them are good. And certainly not because I want to minimize what women experience.

I refuse because it isn’t true to my experience.

And because the moment I declare that I hate men, I create a divide: us and them.

Women over here. Men over there.

Another war.

I don’t want to live there.

There are good men in my life.

I have male friends who have shown me kindness without trying to turn it into access. Men who have listened to me without trying to possess me. Men who have respected my no without punishing me for it.

I have a father and a brother I love.

And I’m raising a son.

A boy who will become a man.

I want him to grow up understanding consent, respect, tenderness, accountability and the autonomy of another person’s body. But I also want him to grow up knowing that being male does not make him inherently dangerous, predatory or responsible for the harm other men have caused.

I want him to understand that what matters is what he chooses to do with his humanity.

I sit in an Al-Anon room every week with men who listen to me speak about my life. Recently, one of them remembered something difficult I had shared weeks earlier and asked me what had happened. He cared about the answer.

Even my therapist is a man.

There is something strangely beautiful about that one.

A man is helping me heal from something another man did to me.

And maybe that's part of why I refuse to flatten men into one category.

I know what it feels like to have a man disregard my humanity.

I also know what it feels like to have a man honour it.

Both are true.

I don't need to hate men in order to tell the truth about male violence.

I don't need to soften what has happened to women in order to acknowledge the goodness I've experienced from men.

I don't need to make innocent men carry the guilt of men who have harmed me.

And I don't need to protect harmful men from my anger in order to prove that I don't hate men.

That last part feels especially important to me right now.

Because perhaps healing isn't becoming less angry.

Perhaps some of it is becoming more discerning about where the anger belongs.

My anger belongs to the people who crossed my boundaries.

My anger belongs to the systems and beliefs that excuse entitlement to women's bodies.

My anger belongs wherever responsibility actually lives.

It does not have to consume everyone else along with it.

I don't hate men.

I hate entitlement.

I hate violation.

I hate sexual violence.

I hate being told that a woman's body, clothing, sexuality, sensuality or expression somehow makes her responsible for what someone else chooses to do with their desire.

And I love the men who keep reminding me, simply by the way they move through the world, that none of that is inevitable.