Men, Actually
Beyond blame, beyond bravado, toward the beauty of becoming
This isn’t an apology for men. It’s not a eulogy, either. It’s what you write when you have loved them deeply, been disappointed often, and still believe they are worth the ink.
We’ve made a sport of dissecting men, living in a culture that profits off male downfall and packages contempt as currency, and I’m risking something unfashionable: affection. Before we reduce them further into slogans, diagnoses, parodies, I want to say I’m not here to defend men. I’m here to witness them. In their mess, their misfires, but above all in their trying. And maybe even to say: I love them. Not in spite of their flaws, but because of what they do with them.
Give me the man who has built a sailboat from scratch but still hesitates before touching your bare back, as if reverence might short-circuit pleasure. Not the algorithm-approved “ally” with a tote bag of pre-approved opinions, but the one who once cried at a puppet theatre in Prague and never told anyone because it felt too large to explain. I want the man who rewatches Tarkovsky alone and doesn’t know if he’s moved or merely disoriented. Who can shatter a walnut with his palm but falters when asked where it hurts. The one who drafts elegant emails and manages businesses, and at the same time writes about his own grief to the woman who rejected him. That man, the one who startles himself with his own softness, who doesn’t know if wanting is still allowed in this new world of mirrors and minefields… yes, him. He’s the story I want to follow.
Let me begin, then, not with a theory or a thesis, but with something uncomfortably honest: I don’t trust perfection. I’ve been cornered by it too many times, at fancy dinners, in spectacular boardrooms, even beneath bedsheets. It’s a chilling presence, smooth and performative, quoting Judith Butler to justify its emotional aloofness, pairing organic wine with Instagram humility, but incapable of real apology. A man who has learned to imitate reflection, without ever having been undone by it, is profoundly unsexy. Give me the man who is still becoming. Becoming what, exactly? God knows. But isn’t that the point?
Yes, of course we live inside patriarchy – the bruising, silencing, shape-shifting machinery that has stalled the full bloom of women for centuries – not metaphorically, not symbolically, but structurally, architecturally, as a material condition and ideological scaffolding that bleeds into rental agreements, family law, job descriptions, first kisses, and second chances. It’s the reason we instinctively glance behind us on a dimly lit street. It’s the same reason a woman’s ambition is praised until it competes, her voice admired until it interrupts. And yet, and this is not a betrayal of feminism, but an extension of it, there are men attempting to walk away from the fire without pretending they lit none of it. They are not the ones reading The Will to Change on the subway while sneaking glances at their own reflection in the window. They are quieter, uncaptioned. They pause in conversations not to signal emotional intelligence, but because they are genuinely thinking… not about how they appear but about what they might be missing.
There are men who choose to disinherit that legacy without performing penitence for applause. Men who don’t posture as allies but stay quiet just long enough to hear something. Who ask not “What should I say?” but “What don’t I understand?” These men aren’t threats to feminism, they are its duet partners. Because let’s be honest: a future built entirely in monologue isn’t liberation. It’s loneliness.
And here’s the part that might get me canceled, or at least side-eyed in certain circles: I find that erotic. Not the self-flagellation-as-foreplay eroticism of the Instagram feminist boyfriend archetype. But the messy, trembling eroticism of a man interrogating his own inheritance, not only intellectually, but spiritually, physiologically. When a man unlearns something he didn’t know he had absorbed, when he says, “I don’t know”, and it isn’t a manipulation but a naked offering – that is not submission. That is eros. Not as sex, but as yearning. As possibility. As the divine ache to evolve.
But let’s not romanticise effort into sainthood. There’s a growing market for contempt these days, and women, having learned the language of survival, are fluent in it. Who could blame them?! But ridicule is not revolution anymore, it is theatre. The online appetite for male failure has morphed from justice into genre, and now we speak of men as if they are failing hardware, outdated operating systems to be debugged or discarded. We have reduced entire psychosexual histories to hashtags: weaponised incompetence, toxic masculinity, emotional unavailability. The branding is neat. Too neat. And what it conceals is a deeper poverty, one that’s not male so much as human: the poverty of curiosity, of patience, of context. And I, for one, am exhausted by precision without mercy.
Masculinity is not the enemy. But our reduction of it – our unwillingness to let it evolve beyond caricature – is. Real masculinity is weird. It stumbles. It gets turned on at funerals and cries during shampoo commercials. It wants to fix things, not to silence you, but because it was taught that silence is death. It apologises badly and overdoes the redemption arc. It tries. And when it stops trying to perform strength, something else begins to glimmer… something almost tender. Like watching a dog dream, paws twitching, caught between instinct and imagination.
I love men. Not symbolically, not through clever hashtags or reclaimed slurs, but men in their specific, maddening, endearing detail, men who are difficult to love but, once loved, remain lodged in your psyche like splinters you stop wanting to remove. My father, who mumbled through grief but showed up at dawn with tools when my world fell apart. My friend who had nothing comforting to say when I got a horrible diagnosis, so he just sat beside me in silence, holding a chipped tea mug, the heat of it the only warmth he knew to offer. The lover who moved on after I left him, then wrote to me, years later, when he saw a painting I would have liked. These are not saints. They are not tragic heroes or broken boys in need of redemption. They are men – flawed, present, remembered because they remained when it would have been easier to vanish.
Male friendship deserves its own literature. We write elegies to female bonding and memes about the sacred group chat, but men? Men share a joke that stretches over decades, held together by ritual and repetition, by silence and shoulder nudges, by the unspoken agreement that affection must be disarmed before it can be displayed. Their love is less novel and more architecture: a shed built in bad weather, no blueprint, just nails and instinct. Women draft essays in real time; men build stories retroactively, constructed backward from barbecues, flat tires, the fifth time they’ve helped move an aging couch. And maybe that’s not less intimate. Maybe it’s just a different grammar of care.
And yes, the body. That flawed, glorious, awkward canvas on which so much myth and expectation has been painted. I don’t want the too polished gym-selfie physique, not really. I want shoulders that have lifted too many boxes for people who didn’t say thank you. I want hands calloused not from kettlebells, but from fixing a sink that wasn’t theirs. The way a man moves when he doesn’t know he’s being watched is very erotic, not titillating, but sacred. The back bent over a stubborn task. The moment he forgets his own performance. That’s when I see him. That’s when I want him.
Still, let’s not ignore the rot! There are men who ruin. Who leave wreckage in their wake and wear your trust like a borrowed coat they forget to return. I have known them too. The ones who promise transformation and deliver repetition. Who mistake emotional constipation for depth, cruelty for clarity, silence for strength. This essay is not absolution. It is not an anthem. It is a reckoning.
But reckonings, if they are to be real, must make space for contradiction. So here is mine: I still want men in the room. I want them not because they are harmless, but because they are dangerous and learning not to be. I want them not as allies but as interlocutors. Not as saviours but as witnesses. Because feminism without men listening is monologue. And monologue is not freedom. It is exhaustion.
We don’t get better men by mocking them into numbness. We get them by making it safe to feel, to fail, to return. By refusing the false binary between critique and love, between justice and grace, between analysis and affection. Some men will not make it. But some, quietly, slowly, clumsily, already are.
And to those men, the ones becoming: we see you. Not with worship, not with suspicion, but with the complicated tenderness reserved for those who are trying, failing, and returning again.
And if I say I love you, I mean it not like a gift, but like a mirror: cracked, but still reflecting something worth seeing.
So no, I won’t lower my voice, but I’ll leave space in the sentence for yours, dear men,
Tamara
This piece strikes a nerve, one I rarely see touched with such clarity. Because yes, it has become fashionable to deride men, to flatten them into a composite of errors, and to treat femininity as inherently virtuous by contrast. That isn’t justice but imbalance dressed as progress. I’ve watched intelligent, good-hearted men shrink themselves into silence, not out of guilt for real harm, but out of fear that their very being has become a liability. And we’re expected to call that growth?
It’s curious but the same culture that celebrates “holding space” for women’s contradictions has very little patience for men’s. We forgive a woman’s sharpness as trauma, her mistakes as context. But a man’s fumbling attempt at feeling? Often dismissed as manipulation or clumsiness. I’ve known men, deep, strange, aching men who are better listeners, more loyal friends, and more emotionally available than many of the “feminist” allies who disappear at the first sign of complexity.
Yes, patriarchy is real. But dismantling it by humiliating men is seen as strength, but it’s only projection. We’ve turned critique into cruelty and called it empowerment. But there’s nothing subversive about contempt. It’s the same old dominance, just in a different outfit.
So no, I’m not interested in a feminism that requires me to distrust what I love most, strength wrapped in vulnerability, effort without show, protection without performance. I don’t want a neutered man. I want one who carries, doubts, but still acts because he believes it matters.
And if that belief makes me “unfeminist,” so be it. I’d rather be human.
Thank you , Tamara.
To me, all broad generalizations are an intelligence test of sorts. Generalizations are necessary to talk about anything, because otherwise it's all anecdotes and counterexamples with no progress being made. But there's a big difference between using generalizations to make a broader point, and building your entire view of the world using a generalization as the foundation.
Men whose entire worldviews revolve around "women are this", and women who do the same to men, are either incredibly shallow thinkers, or incredibly bad actors. There is no other way to square making sweeping moral claims about half of the world's population. It's completely absurd, yet it clearly plays well for academics, writers and other content creators, which suggests is scratches some deep lizard-brained itch that strives for oversimplification.
Tamara, what's beautiful about this piece isn't that it's merely a balanced take on men that is neither a defense of "patriarchy" or an excoriation of feminism; rather, it's your integrity in declining to take the easy, click-bait modus operandi of picking a side to signal virtue and provoke the other, and it's the humility in recognizing that perfection is the enemy of the good. Only someone who recognizes their own imperfections and limitations is capable of expressing themselves that way. You've avoided all of the dumb stereotypes and shallow analysis of the armchair pathologists or traumatized activists who exist on both sides of this divide, and who see the world purely in terms of anecdote and antagonism, while pushing plausible but unprovable narratives that are morally and intellectually bankrupt.
Bravo. I apologize for praising this piece more for what it's not than what it is, but to shed all of that psychological, political and sociological baggage is the accomplishment, in my opinion. This deeply flawed man approves.