Loving Men is Revolutionary

It is Liberation in Action

I have struggled with the relationship of myself and the concept of loving men for the broader part of my life; long before I understood intersectional feminism, or had read revolutionary texts, or realized that there were dark and devious culture wars that found value in pitting people against one another – I was struggling to understand why loving men was so difficult.

It takes a bit of background to understand that I wasn’t built around a man hating woman, nor were the women in my life particularly ‘anti-men’, it was that the men in my life were so complex, so unyielding, and I wasn’t given the tools early enough to be able to reconcile the reality of what loving myself necessitated, let alone what loving others would require.

Suffice to say, without either of these things – loving men felt like a chore in which I was obligated to do it, even at the detriment of myself, and moreover – perhaps, the purpose was to debase myself in the pursuit of loving men.

Of loving the concept of an ideal that both didn’t exist, and also couldn’t be called upon to do the same in return.

From a young age, I was made to experience an insufficient fatherly love, one that was not only apathetic, but violent; one that was not only not made for me, but seemed to be made lesser because I existed.

Then, I was introduced to what fatherly love could be, and it was astonishing, my world broadened, and my sky became a riot of color – only to have it ripped away from me through medicinal malpractice, and a deeply rooted structure of the human (and perhaps particularly American method) of de-prioritizing mental health both in praxis as well as child rearing.

As I got older, my relationship to men was shaped by sex crazed boys, and the relationship that love always seemed to have with manipulation – with the hard fought ways that emotion and compassion were weak in the face of desire and passion.

I learned that my body was not merely a gift, it was a bargaining chip.

I learned that my body was both my responsibility, and also at the whim of the men in the world around me.

I learned, in short, that my relationship to my body was to take place outside of my relationship to myself.

When I got married – I quickly realized that the only way I’d been taught to love men, was to quite literally un-love myself to do so. It meant unmaking myself every day, in the pursuit of making the man that I was married to. It meant becoming and unbecoming minute by minute to the future not of me, and rarely of we, but of him.

It was not entirely his fault, he too hadn’t been shown a good model of love. Broken families, and components of self that were deeply rooted in fractures; no one taught either of us how to heal, only how to survive.

Honesty became a mine field, where sometimes stepping on the truth was liberating, and sometimes it was devastating.

Earnestness was lost for contrived storytelling. The parts and pieces that I’d once been, lost to the what the idea of me should be.

Between late nights, and beautiful moments, there was an ever growing darkness that neither of us knew how to speak about – most of the time, we didn’t even acknowledge that it was in the room with us, slowly swallowing the light in the periphery.

It was safer to just continue, and hope that eventually I would love him enough for the both of us.

That eventually, my love for him would somehow replace the missing love of and for me.

When my marriage ended, I wish I could’ve said that it did so silently, that it did so easily, but that… would be a lie.

It was as if all the passion that had been missing in the act of loving thus far, had decided to explode in a catastrophic array of color and pain that uprooted any concept I had previously had of what love either was or could be.

Words were spoken in those weeks that I look back on now, and realize were almost a spell in the way they made truth real, made pain tangible, made love lost.

So it wasn’t a surprise when I moved home, that for a time… the idea of loving men became an act of a woman who didn’t love herself.

I hated the idea of that woman. The very concept that men somehow inherently deserved love, felt like a slap in the face when I was convinced that they didn’t deserve anything. In fact, that they only took from women, and left nothing in return.

I was utterly convinced that men were not worthy of redemption. They were not inherently valuable, because I had come to realize in the 28 years of my life that women were not inherently valuable, that we were never offered redemption, because we were not designed to make mistakes the same way that men were – they were given the leeway we weren’t, and therefore once we failed to uphold the concept of femininity, we were irredeemable in the face of ever becoming whole ever again.

In 2020, the world shut down, and I had to quickly shift my entire world to one where it was me, myself, and I. There were no distractions that could prevent me from facing myself in the mirror, none that could pull me to the flesh at night, when I was swirling the pit of my mind in the darkness.

In short, 2020 was a year where suddenly I realized I didn’t know who I was. I had no clue who I was without the lens of the other to see through.

It took an embarrassingly short time to realize that while I’d considered myself a ‘feminist’, there was no given day in which I could pass the Bechdel test in my own mind. Nothing I did was not done as if a man’s gaze was staring at me.

From the way that I dressed in my own home, the way I cooked in my own kitchen, the way I showered in my own bathroom, the way I lay in my own bed – it was done as if in preparation for the next big act. As if I was always practicing a script of who I was eventually going to be, when I convinced a man once again to leer at me.

This narrative shook my very core, and left me disgusted… but for the first time, not with men, but with myself.

Of all the moments of accountability that I have partaken of in my life, this was without a doubt the most self-immolating one that I had to consistently partake in. Minute after minute, day after day, night after night.

There was not a corner of my life, of my mind even, where I was not living as if in a performance of self. A mating dance, that often obligated me to move for men, even if they weren’t in the room with me.

It was excruciating, exhausting, and more than anything… devastating.

Who was I? Was a question that previously had been answered by a sort of history, a role out of facts as if a CV, a school record, and a list of accomplishments – but upon inspection, I had no clue who I was.

Was I someone that was kind? Generous? Merciful? Was I happy? Content? Compassionate? Was I greedy? Loyal? Persistent? Was I Gracious? Wise? Thankful? Was I rude? Conniving? Manipulative? Was I ambitious? Contrived? Ethical?

These questions constantly led to even more extrapolations of self.

Did I like myself? Did I like who I was? Did I have any control over the way that I reacted to things? Did I understand my reactions to the world? What did I really feel about my body? Not through the lens of others, but through my own eyes? Did I understand the weight of the world that I carried in my heart? Did I actually like my hair, or was I still wearing my ex-husband in the flattened curls? Did I like my style? Did I even have a style? Did I have goals? Did I have an idea of self and future and aspirations?

Every single question was another act of self-destruction, often the first answer was almost inherently and unwittingly through the lens of a man in my life, or for the men that I wanted to be in my life.

I had to not only unlearn the answers that I thought came naturally, I had to unlearn the metric by which I had come to those conclusions, and then… in the absence of both, I had to learn who I was, and find a way to not only honestly identify that person, but then… even more terrifyingly, become her.

I began practicing Radical Vulnerability in Spring 2021 online. Sharing stories on Instagram where I would share the raw and unfiltered journey that I was going on. Realizing that if I did this completely in isolation, I would not only lose who I had been, but I wouldn’t be able to know how to structurally root who I wanted to be in the world around me.

I would go on long drives and talk to my phone, I would get ready in the morning or unready at night and share my thoughts. I would make food, and between the slices of meat and butter, the dices of tomato and olive, I would slowly become me.

During all of this, I realized that there was something fundamentally changing in my relationship to the men in my life. No longer were they an audience, but I didn’t quite know what else they were supposed to be. I had to conceptualize a reality in which men existed, and they did so both outside of my lived experience, but moreover, alongside it.

Not for them, but acknowledging that there was no reality in which they didn’t also exist.

In short… I began to realize that men were human.

Fallibly, wonderfully, and brokenly human.

Just like I had been for what I’d come to realize, my whole life.

Along the way, Radical Vulnerability became Radical Authenticity. The praxis of not only being vulnerable about myself, but being an authentic rendition of myself, at all times.

Admitting to the fact that there would be many moments when I would get it wrong, and learning through it all to not blame others, and in most cases to not be angry with myself – but to commit to being better, and learning, and being a blueprint for others unlearning themselves, and remaking themselves in the echo left behind.

A particularly catastrophic event happened to a man in my family in 2022 that radically shifted my reality. This man was not someone that I typically got along with, in fact, nearly everyone in own world knew that we didn’t not get along. He didn’t love me, and more to the point, he didn’t even like me – both of these things meant that he rarely felt the need to tolerate me.

And it wasn’t entirely mutual, but you’d never know.

I treated him with open contempt, a disgust at his values, his baseline, his misogyny, in my every action. I sniped, snarled, and griped at him. Believing from a young age that I was simply better than him, and as I got older and stepped into the more wizened version of the woman that I was becoming, it became harder to not see the way that he’d treated me my whole life as evidence that some men were not worth kindness.

But in the quiet moments of my heart, I could admit the truth.

I loved and respected him, and I hated myself for the fact that even in a world where I was practicing vulnerability and authenticity, I didn’t believe that this man was worth the same honor of stripping myself bare in admitting that I had been wrong often about him, and toward him.

In 2022, it all came crashing down. In many ways, he became suddenly very human.

I watched him shatter, and in the pieces, I realized he was going through the very same thing that I had gone through when I had divorced my ex-husband nearly 4 years prior.

Watching him unravel was painful. Because as much as I had been at odds with him my whole life, there was no question that he was the epitome of ‘masculinity’, he was a good father, and above all things, he always appeared to have it all together.

So seeing him be less than this, was unnerving, and it broke something steel hard in my heart.

I watched him voluntarily go on an apology tour in the family, and while he never apologized to me – I did, finally, apologize to him. Sometimes the most radical act of love that we can do, is seeing when someone is falling apart at the seams, and being strong enough to tell them that you yourself were wrong about them.

In Spring of 2023, I read bell hooks’, The Will to Change, Men, Masculinity, and Love… and it was the kintsugi to the bowl that I had long been repairing of myself.

The book is written to men, but it stands as the single more powerful text that I believe women should be obligated to read. It humanizes men, and humanizes the male struggle of self and identity in a world that treats patriarchy not only as a modus operandi, but also as if patriarchy doesn’t inherently break our men.

It obligates you as a reader into the voyeuristic act of the grief of men, their pain, and through the lens of a woman who is not attempting to break them – but to help them see that they are worthy of being whole.

You learn, as a woman, that we must not believe that men are irredeemable, and further that we must remind our men that they must believe themselves worthy of redemption. That they’ve not been taught the praxis of love, which is different than not being able to love. That they have been informed they are unworthy, not that they are inherently valuable for merely existing, from their very conception – to be loved.

It steels your breath over and over and over again, and leaves you reeling with the knowledge that while we’ve believed in the very real truth that patriarchy is detrimental and harmful to women, that we do not allow ourselves to admit just how harmful and detrimental it is to men. We blame all men for the reality of their station at birth, and we shame them for not fighting it, when they’ve never been provided the tools to do so.

We tell them they are disgusting and incapable of kindness, and then we shun the men that attempt to be softer.

In short, women (of all races) uphold the same structures of patriarchy, because we are too focused on liberating ourselves, rather than realizing that to end patriarchy would liberate men as well.

Suddenly, it became all too clear that my relationship to the concept, the very idea of men, had to change. No longer were they something to be performed for, but they were someone to be perceived. No longer were they an ideal, they were human.

I began realizing that I didn’t actually care for men, not merely that I didn’t love them. I had been conditioned to hate them. That even in my performance for them, I never valued them as people, with hearts, souls, and minds – I saw them as bodies, lusts, and broken objects in need of tending.

I had never realized that the reason it bothered me when my dad cried, was not because he was a man and he shouldn’t cry, but because his tears felt like an extension of me. His tears felt like I was being honored to witness a soft part of a man who had raised me, who had for so many years been cruel because of a system that had forcibly taken that softness from him.

When I began realizing this, I saw just how many men in my life were holding on by a thread. How many of them used “I’m fine,” and “I’m okay,” like crutches to walk, without any of them realizing that they had two broken feet.

Compassion became a tool of liberation. Hearing, and more importantly, listening, became a revolutionary action. Making space in my life for men and their problems, and truly not only caring about them, but helping them demand better for themselves, helped me realize how many men are unaware of how much they are waiting to be heard.

How many men are walking through life drowning.

Suffocating on need and mistaking it for desire, they do not understand that they crave touch, and confuse being held with lust.

Earlier this year, I read bell hooks’ Communion, a book that was written long before TWTC. It was written for women, and steadfastly about female love, and I am so grateful that I read it in the order that I did.

One, it helped me see how far she had come in the years between the two books.

Two, it helped me identify just how much of myself I had already healed, and where the remaining gaps were in my own relationship to myself.

I believe thoroughly that both of these books should be mandatory reading for all men and women. Period.

One of the things that she extols in Communion is the idea that women are not somehow better capable, or better designed toward the act of nurturing and loving, and that by believing that we are – we are not only perpetuating patriarchal concepts, we are also further unable to take accountability for the roles that we play in also crafting the men that we live alongside.

If we believe that we are inherently more capable of loving, caring and nurturing, then we are stating quite clearly that men are inherently incapable of loving, caring and nurturing.

This fundamentally means that we are incompatible, which makes no sense scientifically as a species, but moreover makes no sense when we look at history and real life statistics.

Women can be and often are bad mothers, as much as men can be and are bad fathers.

Women can be violent, sexually abusive, and emotionally manipulative.

These are all the same things that we can speak plainly about men, but struggle to admit with respect to women.

This narrows the potential for an anti-patriarchal world, when we cannot have room and leave space for the complex truth that will obligate accountability.

We must take into account that women are not absent in the making of men, and in all cultures, and all races, there are complex and nuanced ways that abuse can be crafted in the relationship of the mother to the son, and how that is done either in absence of the father, or in tandem with the father figure.

Once we accept this, suddenly we realize just how revolutionary it is, how liberating it is, to love men.

Period.

I want to be clear, it isn’t a matter of condoning their actions whole hog, and blindly forgiving them. No more than we would do for the women in our lives (I should hope), but it is a praxis of starting from a place of love, a place of kindness, of compassion, and giving them space to unlearn themselves, and be safe in falling apart.

I am currently, for the first time in 35 years, finally being given the praxis of loving a man with all of this scaffolding inside me. All this room, not in replacement of myself, but alongside myself. I am learning that the foundations that I had long poured gold in, are now firm places for which to stand and provide comfort to a man who pulls from me an ease of self that I couldn’t have come to without all the lessons, unlearning, and accountability in the previous 10 years.

Moreover, I am learning that loving men, is beautiful. It is easy. It is representative of what I want not only for myself, but for the world ret large. That I can be what I want in the world, and when done through the lens of genuine care, it leaves no room for anything other than healing.

I am learning that tears when shed in my presence, is not only an honor, it is an act of generational repair, it is a promise for my descendants that I will be part of a world that makes room for all of the parts of all of us.

In short, I am finding that loving men is no longer merely easy sometimes, it is an on-going and beautiful act that has become intrinsic to my very self. No longer a performance, made in the echo of ideology – but rather an extension of my full self, into the world as both a healing balm to others, and a reflection of the softer parts of me.

Revolution is not merely in the act of setting fire to the systems that made us, it is in the loving that will be required to rebuild in the ashes of what is to come.

x o x o - J