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.
And that’s how you started excavating, Céline! You’ve gone deeper than affirmation and into that uncomfortable, necessary territory of calling out the masquerade of progress when it begins to mirror the very systems it claims to dismantle. And yes, when we reduce men to a glitch, and women to a gospel, we aren’t moving forward anymore, we’re simply rearranging the furniture in the same old room of power and punishment….
Your phrase, imbalance dressed as progress, is memorable because so much of what now passes for empowerment is simply rebranded retribution. We’ve made it trendy to weaponise one gender’s pain and another’s history of harm into a new orthodoxy of suspicion. And in doing so, as you rightly say, we’ve silenced good men…. not those avoiding accountability, but those earnestly seeking to participate in something better.
What strikes me most is your insistence on nuance, that you can see patriarchy clearly, and still insist on a vision of manhood that isn’t hollowed out or shamed into passivity. You want the man who carries and doubts, that exquisite tension, not the cartoon of masculinity, but the soul of it. Not a man posturing to pass a purity test, but one acting imperfectly out of belief, not fear.
And no, that belief doesn’t make you “unfeminist”. It makes you radical in the truest sense… willing to go to the root. Feminism that cannot hold space for the full, flawed, evolving humanity of men is a theatrical experience. And you, clearly, are not here for the performance.
Thank you for bringing your voice to my essay, it belongs here, in the complicated, beating center of it!
"I don’t want a neutered man." I think this is a powerful idea. Much anti-feminist thought is a reaction to it "neutering" men, taking away their status, power, and even agency. Which is largely bullshit; an equal world is no threat to anyone. But to a generation of men who grew up under female (single parent/teacher) authority, hearing "don't make that crude joke" loses any power once he gets to be an adult. Andrew Tate is a nasty POS and general wanker, but he's seen as the type of guy who Doesn't Take Shit From Bitches, and every 12-year-old (or grown man who's never moved past that stage) hears that, and thinks back to having to throw out his porn, or that videogame/movie was Violent, or whatever finger-wagging schoolmarm behavior that tends to stick in our psyches. And the current kakistocracy of Very Divorced Men is similar.
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.
No apology needed, what this piece is not was just as painstaking to shape as what it became. We have become addicted to tribal shorthand, where identity and ideology are flung like branded grenades, and restraint isn’t passivity, it’s insurgency. So your reading, your recognition of that restraint, means everything.
Correct, generalisations can be scaffolding or straitjackets. They can help us see patterns or blind us to exceptions. But when they become the architecture of our worldview, they flatten others, yes, but they also dull our own capacity for thought. It’s the lure of the clean answer over the complicated truth. And that, as you so brilliantly put it, is either lazy thinking or deliberate manipulation. Sometimes both.
I’m especially grateful for your line about “the lizard-brained itch”… it captures perfectly how seductive it is to outsource nuance for the comfort of slogans. But I believe the real cultural work, the brave and often thankless work, is done in the messy middle: not in shouting from the ramparts, but in writing from the ruins, when you still believe in what can be rebuilt.
Your comment joins my essay with clarity, courage, and that rare mix of intellectual rigour and emotional intelligence. This deeply flawed woman returns the salute, Andrew!
This is a rare, necessary act of intellectual courage, a lucid defiance of the cultural tide that reduces men to flat archetypes in the name of progress. As someone working in the art world, I see the same trend: male complexity flattened into slogans, creative vulnerability dismissed if it doesn’t conform to the "approved" script. Thank you for reintroducing nuance.
Two thoughts to build on this:
Art suffers when nuance dies. The best male characters in literature, film, and visual art—from Caravaggio’s saints to Tarkovsky’s protagonists—are compelling because they embody contradictions. Erasing male ambiguity for ideological tidiness sterilizes culture itself.
Compassion is not capitulation. Making room for flawed masculinity isn’t regressive—it’s revolutionary. Not as an apology, but as a framework for mutual becoming. Culture won’t move forward through punitive purging, but through reciprocal witnessing.
Bravo, Tamara. This is the kind of risk that breathes life back into the discourse.
What a galvanising, gorgeously articulated response, thank you, Alexander! You’ve stated, with precision and poetry, exactly what I hoped my essay might stir, evidently I didn’t want it as a backlash against critique, but as a rebirth of discernment. Because yes, when we flatten male complexity into sanitised binaries or aestheticised guilt, we are harming men, and simultaneously amputating something vital from our cultural imagination.
Your point about art is essential. From Caravaggio’s chiaroscuro saints to Tarkovsky’s searching loners, male ambiguity has always been a vessel for the sacred and the savage, for contradiction as character. When we begin to script men according to ideological templates (whether of penance or perfection) we don’t liberate art, we lobotomise it. And in doing so, we lose the strange, flickering truths that only ambiguity can reveal.
And of course, compassion is not capitulation. That line should be carved above the door of every cultural institution. Making space for flawed masculinity doesn’t mean abandoning accountability, it means trusting that real change grows not from humiliation, but from complexity held in shared light. Reciprocal witnessing, as you so beautifully say, is not weakness. It’s the only thing that has ever truly changed anything.
Thank you for seeing the risk my essay and for standing in it with me! This is the kind of dialogue I need.
This is impressive. If I’ve read a better piece of writing of a woman writing about men, I don’t remember it. And I’ll remember this one for a while. Well done Tamara! And thank you for your words.
We’re so often encouraged to write about men in tones of irony, indictment, or sociological detachment, but rarely with the layered, unglamorous affection that truth actually demands. I wanted my essay to be both mirror and magnifying glass, to say, yes, here is the damage, but also: here is the depth. The doubt. The trying. The unspoken poetry of their presence.
If it lingers with you, even briefly, then I feel I’ve done something worthwhile. Thank you for reading with memory, Matt, not only with your eyes! That’s the kind of reader every writer hopes for.
Today, your writing feels like a matriarchal, resuscitation paddle.
The absence of matriarchy, the long lost poetry of women, has squared their jaws, and hardened their faces.
It's given them better pay cheques and a megaphone but destroyed their creative ability and made men impervious to their whispers.
Once upon a time, a man's heart would jolt at seeing a woman's lips purse, or frustration so much as wrinkle on her brow. Now they are indifferent if she stands up for forty minutes on a train ride, and don't attend the birth of their own children as a subconscious, spiteful reflex, disguised as an ick to gore.
Your essay reads as brave accountability, unafraid to stand alone and raise its hand whilst everyone pretends not to see, not to know.
I could go on and on, but I don't have the energy to write and rewrite, explain and justify to those who sit at the gates of the obtuse waiting to pull things apart, but never wanting to put things together.
And that's what your piece feels like, the words of a put together woman, as fragmented and mosaic as she is, still CHOOSING grace and kindness, compassion over competition and knowing full well, she'll receive all of a man, when she allows herself to be all of a woman.
This endless request for men's emotional vulnerability needs a cradle, and some of us are not dumb enough to lay in a glass filled bed.
Your comment reverberates. It feels like its own reckoning, the kind of lyrical lament that both wounds and wakes. Thank you for writing it, and for refusing to sand it down for anyone standing, as you so sharply put it, “at the gates of the obtuse”.
What you’ve named, the brittle reward of the performance of strength, the hollow megaphone of success without autonomy, is something I feel in my bones. We traded the whisper for the podium, and in doing so, many have mistaken volume for voice. And I say that not as nostalgia for some imagined softer past, but as a call to remember: there was once a matriarchal presence that could silence a room with a glance because she was felt (not feared).
Your metaphor of the cradle broke something open in me. Yes, men’s emotional vulnerability needs a cradle, not a critique, not a curriculum, but a place. A warmth. An architecture of trust. And that doesn’t mean women must abandon themselves to soothe men’s wounds. It means we must return to ourselves, to that deep inner matriarch who does not compete, but creates. Who doesn’t barter in superiority, but breathes life back into connection… when she decides it’s worth it.
And you’re right to note the danger in laying down without discernment. Grace without boundaries is martyrdom. But what you describe is not submission but generosity. The erotic strength of a woman who chooses not to harden, even when the world demands it. That’s a power men feel in their marrow… even if they’ve forgotten how to name it.
You didn’t need to rewrite or explain a thing. You wrote it once, and it struck clean, like always! Thank you!
you're absolutely right. I want men to have the right to have all the nuances and flaws and emotional bandwidth and spectrum as i want them to finally give me the right to have too, and i allow everyone the possibility of mistakes to make on our paths. (Goes back to your essay about erotic decisions.) that's real equality, the right to be wrong for every person but the responsibility to try to not do harm, to accept one's own failure and messiness and if possible to mend. Compassion and solidarity are key. And love. Nobody wins inside a patriarchic system. It is harming everyone, even the ones who think to benefit if only they stick to its rules. There truly is no them and us. As there is no real binary.
Yes, precisely this, Ivy! Equality that’s only granted in virtue or excellence isn’t equality at all, it’s conditional permission, still ruled by the old metrics of worth. Real equality, as you so beautifully say, is the right to be wrong, to stumble, to be messy and unfinished, and still be seen as fully human. Not excused, not idealised, but met with the same standard we wish for ourselves: the responsibility to try, to do less harm, to mend where we’ve fractured.
Your note draws a direct thread between this piece and “Erotic Decisions”, and I’m grateful for that. Because this, too, is an erotic choice in the truest sense… to see someone else’s becoming, not as threat or inconvenience, but as a mirror to our own. Not the cold calculus of identity performance, but the trembling, sacred act of making room for another’s contradiction.
And you’re right, nobody wins inside the machinery of patriarchy, not even those temporarily perched at its levers. They are stifled too, trained into silence, distance, rigidity. What you’ve written here is the heartbeat of solidarity, of course not a truce between enemies, but the remembering that there is no “them”, only “us,” with the hard task of unlearning the scripts and writing something braver, more human, more alive. I am so happy I am not the only one seeing it this way.
Thank you for weaving that into this conversation!
I am just going to indicate a ‘like’, as well as add in a deep breath, and a lot of introspection into this comment in lieu of actual insight. Because I am struggling to keep up with the thoughts whirling as a result of this post.
I’ll take that deep breath and raise you a knowing silence, the kind that holds more weight than a dozen hurried insights ever could. Sometimes the most honest response to being stirred is precisely what you’ve offered, the pause before articulation, the whirl of thoughts not yet sorted, the recognition that something inside has shifted and you’re not quite ready to name how.
That’s more than enough. In fact, it’s everything. We live in an age obsessed with immediate commentary, quick takes, and polished reactions, but I like letting a piece work on you slowly, in the background hum of your day, as thoughts rearrange themselves.
So thank you, Adam, for the pause, the presence, and the generosity of feeling before formulation. That’s the kind of reading I cherish the most.
Yes :) Cracks, after all, don’t negate reflection, they animate it. We see truer through the fractured, because the perfect surface shows only our performance. The cracked mirror shows our selves….
You’ve touched something essential: the dignity in not knowing, and the quiet courage it takes to admit it aloud. We all need someone who “rounds us up”, who gathers our scattered selves without judgment, who doesn’t rush to solve or correct, but simply stays. That presence, that rounding-up, makes humility possible. And without humility, how could intimacy begin?
I read so .any articles written by women about men. Thus by far has been my favorite.
As an older, single man the relationships between men and women are quite confusing to me. Most times I quietly step back listening to what is said and try to understand it. I will be the first to admit I don't understand everything. I know that the conversations between men and women in this culture is real....meaning what women and men both feel is real.
I have reached the age understanding... understanding I can't figure this out. I'm not sure I can ever be the kind of man that any woman wants simply because I no longer know the rules. I'm not sure what feelings are appropriate for me to feel. I'm not sure what level of sexuality is acceptable. I'm not sure what attracts a woman to a man anymore. That being said, I have decided all of that is ok. I love women secretly by what they say, what they feel, how they present themselves. Even if I don't share my thoughts with women, it does not stop me from loving them deeply. It may be a lonely existence but it is how my life has evolved.
Thank you for your honesty, your vulnerability, and your deep, contemplative heart. To say, I no longer know the rules, and I’ve made peace with that… that’s wisdom. That’s maturity forged through experience and reflection.
What moves me most is your quiet love, the way you hold space for women without demanding anything in return, simply bearing witness to their presence, their stories, their contradictions. That’s not loneliness in the sad sense. That’s devotion. It may not always feel seen, but I want you to know: it is felt.
You may not think you’re the kind of man any woman wants but from where I stand, you’re exactly the kind of man many women need: attentive, self-aware, tender, and unafraid to admit what you don’t know.
What a lovely response! I hear a lot of openness to having the conversations. I am only one woman, but one who is also open to having the conversation. Beautifully said. Thank you!! XO
Why make yourself lonely so much? You're not going to hurt women just by showing interest. I had similar feelings but there's a wide variance of things you can do and many women like or complain about different things, making the sum total of complaints very restrictive, but the complaints for a given individual is pretty loose.
I feel redeemed. So very redeemed. As a survivor of several types of abuse from men beginning in my childhood, the fact that I did not hate them and believed in their inherent goodness was something I mostly kept secret. I never wanted to appear an apologist. I didn’t condone how I and other women were treated my some men. But I knew not all men did those things, and I had empathy for what men endured, particularly those with whom I share African ancestry. I never excused harmful behavior, but working in sexual and domestic abuse survivor communities, I often heard tropes that suggested all men were damaged and bad for us.
The way you convey this is so beautiful and I wish the world could see it. I wish we could find each other in the middle and heal there. This essay would be a great starting place.
Your words moved through me like a hush… thank you for this! To speak of redemption as something felt in your bones while reading… that is the highest kind of grace. And for you, a survivor, to write with such clarity, such complexity, and such refusal to collapse into bitterness, it’s astonishing.
You should never have had to keep that empathy secret. Never had to fear that your compassion for men, for their pain and possibility, would be mistaken as betrayal. What you held was discernment, and not denial. The kind that can separate harm from humanity. That can see both the wound and the wounder without erasing accountability for either.
And yes, I hear you deeply on the space you’ve held in survivor communities. I know that exhaustion, the grief of watching pain harden into doctrine. Of watching the language of protection slip into generalisation. Of knowing, intimately, that healing cannot flourish in an atmosphere of suspicion. That some men harm, yes, and that some, even in the face of ancestral trauma, systemic injustice, and personal grief, choose not to. And those men deserve to be seen, they are not necessarily exceptions, but evidence that transformation is possible.
You said, “I wish we could find each other in the middle and heal there”. I can’t think of a more radical hope. That’s strength with an open palm. That’s where real change begins, we could shout across a divide, but why when we could be kneeling in the space between, hands extended, wounds visible, still believing in what might rise from shared ground.
Thank you for bringing your story here, and for meeting my essay with that wide, brave heart of yours. You are exactly why I wrote it!
Your writing is excellent. So happy to have discovered you. I’ve never read an account of masculinity so aligned to my experience of it. Reading this actually made me love my husband more. I look forward to reading more of you!
What a beautiful thing to say, thank you, Ann! If this piece deepened your love for your husband, even by a small degree, then it’s already done more than I could have hoped. That’s the magical power of language when it resonates, not to explain, but to reveal what was already there, waiting to be seen anew.
I’m honoured that my essay aligned so closely with your lived experience of masculinity. That kind of recognition, especially when it leads to more love rather than more suspicion, is the best reward a writer could ask for.
I’m so glad you found my work, and I’m thrilled to know you’ll be reading more. There’s so much still to explore, and it means the world to know you’re along for the ride!
Tamara, this essay makes me feel a sense of hope that the struggles I see in myself and other men can be acknowledged constructively by women. This kind of complex, grounded, even prayerful openness in your writing is what I hope others see in my whole project here on Substack. I write "unsent emails" to other men, using this sort of "speculative nonfiction" genre to say the kinds of things I wish men generally took the chance to say to each other, but often refrain from. I'm hoping to not only further a more self-aware and psychologically integrated kind of masculinity, but also show the reckonings that come with unlearning destructive behaviors and harmonizing one's energy with the needs and desires of others, women in particular.
You hit on a lot of the same territories I have been thinking about, but this part particularly resonated with me and my writing:
"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."
Your writing is outstanding, and I hope you keep digging into this area. I think your perspective isn't as common as it should be. Thank you for this.
This means a great deal, thank you, Brandon! The way you’ve described your own project, these “unsent emails,” feels quite unique and interesting. Using speculative nonfiction to speak into the spaces where men often remain silent, especially when those words aren’t aimed to impress or convert, but to connect is profoundly moving. That’s where healing begins, in the delicate, unseen repairs made possible through language that dares to feel.
And I’m struck by your phrase “prayerful openness.” Yes, if there’s a tone I hoped would resonate beneath all the complexity, contradiction, and critique, it’s that: a kind of reverent attentiveness. Not purity. Not perfection. But presence. The idea that even when we don’t have the right words, or the permission, we still try. Because trying is itself a form of love.
You caught something essential in that section about male friendship. I’ve always found it hauntingly beautiful, the tenderness hidden in ritual, the intimacy encoded in routine. It’s a language many women don’t see because it’s rarely translated. I think your project might just be offering that translation, and how necessary that is.
Please keep writing! The kind of masculinity you’re cultivating, self-aware, embodied, relational, is urgently needed.
We need more unsent emails. And more men like you sending them into the world.
Thanks for the encouragement. I do hope that my writing helps show the value of "self-aware, embodied, relational" masculinity, not only because both sexes would benefit in relationships, but I wonder what problems people could accomplish if they didn't have such mistrust of each other broadly in society.
First and foremost, I resonate with every sentence in this essay. I've often hesitated to label myself as a feminist because I don't want to be part of a movement that seeks to punish men. Referring to your (as always) brilliant choice of art in this essay, Hercules's mother is a mortal princess. He embodies her strength and determination to survive and protect her legacy, even in the face of gods. He also inherits the softer traits, the capacity to feel and experience humanity. So, where am I going with this? We must recognize that we complement each other, and our relationships with men can be incredibly beautiful, whether they are friendships, romantic connections, or purely physical bonds. Each interaction serves as a learning experience that helps us thrive as a society - if only we can see through the smoke. We could all be demigods just by learning to get along.
Thank you, Otilia, for this beautifully articulated reflection! You’ve echoed the spirit of the essay but extended it into the realm of myth in a way that feels both intimate and universal. Yes, Hercules, the symbol of brute strength, so often cast in marble and muscle, is also, as you remind us, born of a mortal woman. And it’s in that inheritance, the vulnerability, the humanity, the capacity to suffer and feel, that his heroism becomes more than spectacle. It becomes story. Legacy. Myth made mortal.
Your hesitation to adopt the label of feminist is understandable, and I think shared by many who long for justice but recoil at the trend of retributive rhetoric, myself included. Feminism, at its best, should not be about punishing men, but about unshackling all of us, from outdated roles, from punitive systems, from the illusion that power must always be wielded over rather than with. You embody that spirit in what you’ve written here.
Agreed, we could all be demigods, if only we chose collaboration over conquest. That’s the tragedy and the hope at the same time. The smoke you mention (the fog of fear, projection, performance) obscures who men are, and who we are beside them. The idea that our encounters, whether fleeting or lifelong, physical or philosophical, could all be portals into deeper becoming… it’s a worldview I wish more people would embrace. Less transaction, more transformation.
Thank you for weaving your thoughts into the conversation with such grace by conjuring a new layer of meaning.
Thank you for this thoughtful, human piece. Reading it, I felt a mix of gratitute and unease - gratitude at seeing complexity named with care and in good faith; unease at how often that very complexity is reduced to a binary tension that men find very hard to navigate.
To tease this out further: the current social and cultural zeitgeist increasingly encourages us to relate to one another as adversaries - or, perhaps more insidiously, as negotiators in a transactional landscape of social capital, performance, and economic independence. For men, the legacy of patriarchy has long been rooted in dominance. For women, the necessary and ongoing struggle for autonomy has, understandably, led to fortified spaces of defence - and, at times, a calculating pragmatism.
But within that dynamic, the possibility of relational generosity, of meeting rather than maneuvering, is often foreclosed.
This adversarial framing makes it difficult to be soft without being perceived as weak, or strong without being read as oppressive. Your portraits of male complexity point to something profound, yet problematic: the ability - often unconscious - to shift between emotional registers, to be either/or, strong or soft, stoic or sensitive.
But what does it mean to embody the “right” trait at the “right” moment without calculating performance, context, or audience? To be able to do so unconsciously, naturally, authentically without forethought. To essentially just be in resonance, to use Rosa's definition of it.
I don’t mean to say that you are doing this in your piece. You reflect beautifully on complexity, on flaws, on failure, on emotional uncertainty. But the world is rarely as nuanced or forgiving.
Men often shift shapes to survive contexts rather than integrate selves. Vulnerability, whether in front of women, men, or society at large, feels too risky. Too often, it is met not with empathy, but with skepticism, silence, or ridicule. Humiliation, in particular, is a difficult emotion for men to process, and in many corners of today's world, humiliation has become a currency of power.
What may be needed is a rearticulation of intimacy not as vulnerability in opposition to power, but as a different mode of power altogether. One grounded in attentiveness, co-presence, and mutual witnessing, something your piece gestures toward with subtle grace. I realise I’m not saying anything groundbreaking here, but it bears repeating.
I was struck that you mentioned The Will to Change. I read that book too. I can’t recall if I ever did so on the subway, but it was a good faith act, a step in the kind of “becoming” you speak of. And yet, reading your reflection, I found myself self-conscious: Am I pandering? Am I a false, performative ally?
Maybe that discomfort is part of the work. So thank you writing on this with care.
I thank you, Dario, for this rare and generous response. You’ve extended and stretched my essay by adding the kind of intellectual and emotional resonance that makes dialogue feel possible and sacred.
You’re absolutely right to name the adversarial dynamic that has seeped into so much of our relational landscape. We are, far too often, encouraged to show up not as selves but as strategists, measuring words, gestures, timing, affect. Not out of malice, but out of survival. And what gets lost in that performance loop is precisely what you’re pointing toward: the unguarded, uncalculated state of simply being in resonance. I might call erotic authenticity, the moment when we are not performing connection but inhabiting it.
Your line about men shape-shifting to survive rather than integrating to live is essential. It names this crisis with such clarity. Integration isn’t rewarded; camouflage is! And as you so rightly say, even vulnerability has been folded into the new power economy as a transaction, judged for its strategic value or lack thereof. It becomes a trap: be soft and risk ridicule; be strong and risk accusation. And so many men end up suspended between roles, unable to rest in either…. I see it, I know it.
Correct, humiliation has become a kind of dark currency. What was once a tool of oppression is now repackaged as social critique, but when used indiscriminately, it kills the very conditions required for transformation. We don’t become better humans through shame, we become…. quieter ones. More hidden. More brittle.
That’s why I’m moved that “The Will to Change” still echoes in you. Even the self-consciousness you name (the doubt, the wondering), “Am I performing?” — is, ironically, proof that you’re not. It’s a signal of care, of wanting to get it right without defaulting to rote scripts or safe slogans. That discomfort is the work. And very few are willing to sit inside it without reaching immediately for justification or applause.
You say you’re not offering anything groundbreaking, but I would argue otherwise. What you’ve written is a blueprint for the new kind of intimacy we must learn to build, one not premised on exposure-as-vulnerability, but on mutual attunement, on co-presence, as you so beautifully put it. A power that listens, that lingers, that stays even when the room is hard to stay in.
Thank you, truly, for bringing such layered thoughtfulness here! It affirms what I hoped my essay might open and it deepens it.
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.
And that’s how you started excavating, Céline! You’ve gone deeper than affirmation and into that uncomfortable, necessary territory of calling out the masquerade of progress when it begins to mirror the very systems it claims to dismantle. And yes, when we reduce men to a glitch, and women to a gospel, we aren’t moving forward anymore, we’re simply rearranging the furniture in the same old room of power and punishment….
Your phrase, imbalance dressed as progress, is memorable because so much of what now passes for empowerment is simply rebranded retribution. We’ve made it trendy to weaponise one gender’s pain and another’s history of harm into a new orthodoxy of suspicion. And in doing so, as you rightly say, we’ve silenced good men…. not those avoiding accountability, but those earnestly seeking to participate in something better.
What strikes me most is your insistence on nuance, that you can see patriarchy clearly, and still insist on a vision of manhood that isn’t hollowed out or shamed into passivity. You want the man who carries and doubts, that exquisite tension, not the cartoon of masculinity, but the soul of it. Not a man posturing to pass a purity test, but one acting imperfectly out of belief, not fear.
And no, that belief doesn’t make you “unfeminist”. It makes you radical in the truest sense… willing to go to the root. Feminism that cannot hold space for the full, flawed, evolving humanity of men is a theatrical experience. And you, clearly, are not here for the performance.
Thank you for bringing your voice to my essay, it belongs here, in the complicated, beating center of it!
"This piece strikes a nerve, one I rarely see touched with such clarity"
Tamara's forte! An absolute delight to have stumbled across her Substack just 3 or so weeks back. I thought I was smart. Huh!
Welcome to a club of smart ones :)
"I don’t want a neutered man." I think this is a powerful idea. Much anti-feminist thought is a reaction to it "neutering" men, taking away their status, power, and even agency. Which is largely bullshit; an equal world is no threat to anyone. But to a generation of men who grew up under female (single parent/teacher) authority, hearing "don't make that crude joke" loses any power once he gets to be an adult. Andrew Tate is a nasty POS and general wanker, but he's seen as the type of guy who Doesn't Take Shit From Bitches, and every 12-year-old (or grown man who's never moved past that stage) hears that, and thinks back to having to throw out his porn, or that videogame/movie was Violent, or whatever finger-wagging schoolmarm behavior that tends to stick in our psyches. And the current kakistocracy of Very Divorced Men is similar.
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.
No apology needed, what this piece is not was just as painstaking to shape as what it became. We have become addicted to tribal shorthand, where identity and ideology are flung like branded grenades, and restraint isn’t passivity, it’s insurgency. So your reading, your recognition of that restraint, means everything.
Correct, generalisations can be scaffolding or straitjackets. They can help us see patterns or blind us to exceptions. But when they become the architecture of our worldview, they flatten others, yes, but they also dull our own capacity for thought. It’s the lure of the clean answer over the complicated truth. And that, as you so brilliantly put it, is either lazy thinking or deliberate manipulation. Sometimes both.
I’m especially grateful for your line about “the lizard-brained itch”… it captures perfectly how seductive it is to outsource nuance for the comfort of slogans. But I believe the real cultural work, the brave and often thankless work, is done in the messy middle: not in shouting from the ramparts, but in writing from the ruins, when you still believe in what can be rebuilt.
Your comment joins my essay with clarity, courage, and that rare mix of intellectual rigour and emotional intelligence. This deeply flawed woman returns the salute, Andrew!
Beautifully put.
Thank you, M!
This is a rare, necessary act of intellectual courage, a lucid defiance of the cultural tide that reduces men to flat archetypes in the name of progress. As someone working in the art world, I see the same trend: male complexity flattened into slogans, creative vulnerability dismissed if it doesn’t conform to the "approved" script. Thank you for reintroducing nuance.
Two thoughts to build on this:
Art suffers when nuance dies. The best male characters in literature, film, and visual art—from Caravaggio’s saints to Tarkovsky’s protagonists—are compelling because they embody contradictions. Erasing male ambiguity for ideological tidiness sterilizes culture itself.
Compassion is not capitulation. Making room for flawed masculinity isn’t regressive—it’s revolutionary. Not as an apology, but as a framework for mutual becoming. Culture won’t move forward through punitive purging, but through reciprocal witnessing.
Bravo, Tamara. This is the kind of risk that breathes life back into the discourse.
What a galvanising, gorgeously articulated response, thank you, Alexander! You’ve stated, with precision and poetry, exactly what I hoped my essay might stir, evidently I didn’t want it as a backlash against critique, but as a rebirth of discernment. Because yes, when we flatten male complexity into sanitised binaries or aestheticised guilt, we are harming men, and simultaneously amputating something vital from our cultural imagination.
Your point about art is essential. From Caravaggio’s chiaroscuro saints to Tarkovsky’s searching loners, male ambiguity has always been a vessel for the sacred and the savage, for contradiction as character. When we begin to script men according to ideological templates (whether of penance or perfection) we don’t liberate art, we lobotomise it. And in doing so, we lose the strange, flickering truths that only ambiguity can reveal.
And of course, compassion is not capitulation. That line should be carved above the door of every cultural institution. Making space for flawed masculinity doesn’t mean abandoning accountability, it means trusting that real change grows not from humiliation, but from complexity held in shared light. Reciprocal witnessing, as you so beautifully say, is not weakness. It’s the only thing that has ever truly changed anything.
Thank you for seeing the risk my essay and for standing in it with me! This is the kind of dialogue I need.
This is impressive. If I’ve read a better piece of writing of a woman writing about men, I don’t remember it. And I’ll remember this one for a while. Well done Tamara! And thank you for your words.
We’re so often encouraged to write about men in tones of irony, indictment, or sociological detachment, but rarely with the layered, unglamorous affection that truth actually demands. I wanted my essay to be both mirror and magnifying glass, to say, yes, here is the damage, but also: here is the depth. The doubt. The trying. The unspoken poetry of their presence.
If it lingers with you, even briefly, then I feel I’ve done something worthwhile. Thank you for reading with memory, Matt, not only with your eyes! That’s the kind of reader every writer hopes for.
Women and men must read this. We all needed to read this one!
Thank you so much, Liliana!
Today, your writing feels like a matriarchal, resuscitation paddle.
The absence of matriarchy, the long lost poetry of women, has squared their jaws, and hardened their faces.
It's given them better pay cheques and a megaphone but destroyed their creative ability and made men impervious to their whispers.
Once upon a time, a man's heart would jolt at seeing a woman's lips purse, or frustration so much as wrinkle on her brow. Now they are indifferent if she stands up for forty minutes on a train ride, and don't attend the birth of their own children as a subconscious, spiteful reflex, disguised as an ick to gore.
Your essay reads as brave accountability, unafraid to stand alone and raise its hand whilst everyone pretends not to see, not to know.
I could go on and on, but I don't have the energy to write and rewrite, explain and justify to those who sit at the gates of the obtuse waiting to pull things apart, but never wanting to put things together.
And that's what your piece feels like, the words of a put together woman, as fragmented and mosaic as she is, still CHOOSING grace and kindness, compassion over competition and knowing full well, she'll receive all of a man, when she allows herself to be all of a woman.
This endless request for men's emotional vulnerability needs a cradle, and some of us are not dumb enough to lay in a glass filled bed.
Your comment reverberates. It feels like its own reckoning, the kind of lyrical lament that both wounds and wakes. Thank you for writing it, and for refusing to sand it down for anyone standing, as you so sharply put it, “at the gates of the obtuse”.
What you’ve named, the brittle reward of the performance of strength, the hollow megaphone of success without autonomy, is something I feel in my bones. We traded the whisper for the podium, and in doing so, many have mistaken volume for voice. And I say that not as nostalgia for some imagined softer past, but as a call to remember: there was once a matriarchal presence that could silence a room with a glance because she was felt (not feared).
Your metaphor of the cradle broke something open in me. Yes, men’s emotional vulnerability needs a cradle, not a critique, not a curriculum, but a place. A warmth. An architecture of trust. And that doesn’t mean women must abandon themselves to soothe men’s wounds. It means we must return to ourselves, to that deep inner matriarch who does not compete, but creates. Who doesn’t barter in superiority, but breathes life back into connection… when she decides it’s worth it.
And you’re right to note the danger in laying down without discernment. Grace without boundaries is martyrdom. But what you describe is not submission but generosity. The erotic strength of a woman who chooses not to harden, even when the world demands it. That’s a power men feel in their marrow… even if they’ve forgotten how to name it.
You didn’t need to rewrite or explain a thing. You wrote it once, and it struck clean, like always! Thank you!
LOL! "a matriarchal, resuscitation paddle."
you're absolutely right. I want men to have the right to have all the nuances and flaws and emotional bandwidth and spectrum as i want them to finally give me the right to have too, and i allow everyone the possibility of mistakes to make on our paths. (Goes back to your essay about erotic decisions.) that's real equality, the right to be wrong for every person but the responsibility to try to not do harm, to accept one's own failure and messiness and if possible to mend. Compassion and solidarity are key. And love. Nobody wins inside a patriarchic system. It is harming everyone, even the ones who think to benefit if only they stick to its rules. There truly is no them and us. As there is no real binary.
Yes, precisely this, Ivy! Equality that’s only granted in virtue or excellence isn’t equality at all, it’s conditional permission, still ruled by the old metrics of worth. Real equality, as you so beautifully say, is the right to be wrong, to stumble, to be messy and unfinished, and still be seen as fully human. Not excused, not idealised, but met with the same standard we wish for ourselves: the responsibility to try, to do less harm, to mend where we’ve fractured.
Your note draws a direct thread between this piece and “Erotic Decisions”, and I’m grateful for that. Because this, too, is an erotic choice in the truest sense… to see someone else’s becoming, not as threat or inconvenience, but as a mirror to our own. Not the cold calculus of identity performance, but the trembling, sacred act of making room for another’s contradiction.
And you’re right, nobody wins inside the machinery of patriarchy, not even those temporarily perched at its levers. They are stifled too, trained into silence, distance, rigidity. What you’ve written here is the heartbeat of solidarity, of course not a truce between enemies, but the remembering that there is no “them”, only “us,” with the hard task of unlearning the scripts and writing something braver, more human, more alive. I am so happy I am not the only one seeing it this way.
Thank you for weaving that into this conversation!
I am just going to indicate a ‘like’, as well as add in a deep breath, and a lot of introspection into this comment in lieu of actual insight. Because I am struggling to keep up with the thoughts whirling as a result of this post.
Oh, and a thanks, Tamara. This is… excellent.
I’ll take that deep breath and raise you a knowing silence, the kind that holds more weight than a dozen hurried insights ever could. Sometimes the most honest response to being stirred is precisely what you’ve offered, the pause before articulation, the whirl of thoughts not yet sorted, the recognition that something inside has shifted and you’re not quite ready to name how.
That’s more than enough. In fact, it’s everything. We live in an age obsessed with immediate commentary, quick takes, and polished reactions, but I like letting a piece work on you slowly, in the background hum of your day, as thoughts rearrange themselves.
So thank you, Adam, for the pause, the presence, and the generosity of feeling before formulation. That’s the kind of reading I cherish the most.
I did hit the like button, so I scratched the itch… a little bit. 🤭
I love you,
not like a gift,
but like a mirror: cracked,
but still reflecting something worth seeing.
a little poem hidden in another beautiful piece
Yes :) Cracks, after all, don’t negate reflection, they animate it. We see truer through the fractured, because the perfect surface shows only our performance. The cracked mirror shows our selves….
Thank you, Vlad!
We all need someone who rounds us up. How else could we dare admit we don’t know? Thank you for your contribution. /A man
You’ve touched something essential: the dignity in not knowing, and the quiet courage it takes to admit it aloud. We all need someone who “rounds us up”, who gathers our scattered selves without judgment, who doesn’t rush to solve or correct, but simply stays. That presence, that rounding-up, makes humility possible. And without humility, how could intimacy begin?
Thanks, Jörgen!
I read so .any articles written by women about men. Thus by far has been my favorite.
As an older, single man the relationships between men and women are quite confusing to me. Most times I quietly step back listening to what is said and try to understand it. I will be the first to admit I don't understand everything. I know that the conversations between men and women in this culture is real....meaning what women and men both feel is real.
I have reached the age understanding... understanding I can't figure this out. I'm not sure I can ever be the kind of man that any woman wants simply because I no longer know the rules. I'm not sure what feelings are appropriate for me to feel. I'm not sure what level of sexuality is acceptable. I'm not sure what attracts a woman to a man anymore. That being said, I have decided all of that is ok. I love women secretly by what they say, what they feel, how they present themselves. Even if I don't share my thoughts with women, it does not stop me from loving them deeply. It may be a lonely existence but it is how my life has evolved.
Thank you for your honesty, your vulnerability, and your deep, contemplative heart. To say, I no longer know the rules, and I’ve made peace with that… that’s wisdom. That’s maturity forged through experience and reflection.
What moves me most is your quiet love, the way you hold space for women without demanding anything in return, simply bearing witness to their presence, their stories, their contradictions. That’s not loneliness in the sad sense. That’s devotion. It may not always feel seen, but I want you to know: it is felt.
You may not think you’re the kind of man any woman wants but from where I stand, you’re exactly the kind of man many women need: attentive, self-aware, tender, and unafraid to admit what you don’t know.
What a lovely response! I hear a lot of openness to having the conversations. I am only one woman, but one who is also open to having the conversation. Beautifully said. Thank you!! XO
Why make yourself lonely so much? You're not going to hurt women just by showing interest. I had similar feelings but there's a wide variance of things you can do and many women like or complain about different things, making the sum total of complaints very restrictive, but the complaints for a given individual is pretty loose.
I feel redeemed. So very redeemed. As a survivor of several types of abuse from men beginning in my childhood, the fact that I did not hate them and believed in their inherent goodness was something I mostly kept secret. I never wanted to appear an apologist. I didn’t condone how I and other women were treated my some men. But I knew not all men did those things, and I had empathy for what men endured, particularly those with whom I share African ancestry. I never excused harmful behavior, but working in sexual and domestic abuse survivor communities, I often heard tropes that suggested all men were damaged and bad for us.
The way you convey this is so beautiful and I wish the world could see it. I wish we could find each other in the middle and heal there. This essay would be a great starting place.
Your words moved through me like a hush… thank you for this! To speak of redemption as something felt in your bones while reading… that is the highest kind of grace. And for you, a survivor, to write with such clarity, such complexity, and such refusal to collapse into bitterness, it’s astonishing.
You should never have had to keep that empathy secret. Never had to fear that your compassion for men, for their pain and possibility, would be mistaken as betrayal. What you held was discernment, and not denial. The kind that can separate harm from humanity. That can see both the wound and the wounder without erasing accountability for either.
And yes, I hear you deeply on the space you’ve held in survivor communities. I know that exhaustion, the grief of watching pain harden into doctrine. Of watching the language of protection slip into generalisation. Of knowing, intimately, that healing cannot flourish in an atmosphere of suspicion. That some men harm, yes, and that some, even in the face of ancestral trauma, systemic injustice, and personal grief, choose not to. And those men deserve to be seen, they are not necessarily exceptions, but evidence that transformation is possible.
You said, “I wish we could find each other in the middle and heal there”. I can’t think of a more radical hope. That’s strength with an open palm. That’s where real change begins, we could shout across a divide, but why when we could be kneeling in the space between, hands extended, wounds visible, still believing in what might rise from shared ground.
Thank you for bringing your story here, and for meeting my essay with that wide, brave heart of yours. You are exactly why I wrote it!
I don’t know how I missed this! It’s like you’re speaking from inside of me. Thank you. I am without words. Just, thank you💙
You are the most welcome!
Your writing is excellent. So happy to have discovered you. I’ve never read an account of masculinity so aligned to my experience of it. Reading this actually made me love my husband more. I look forward to reading more of you!
What a beautiful thing to say, thank you, Ann! If this piece deepened your love for your husband, even by a small degree, then it’s already done more than I could have hoped. That’s the magical power of language when it resonates, not to explain, but to reveal what was already there, waiting to be seen anew.
I’m honoured that my essay aligned so closely with your lived experience of masculinity. That kind of recognition, especially when it leads to more love rather than more suspicion, is the best reward a writer could ask for.
I’m so glad you found my work, and I’m thrilled to know you’ll be reading more. There’s so much still to explore, and it means the world to know you’re along for the ride!
Tamara, this essay makes me feel a sense of hope that the struggles I see in myself and other men can be acknowledged constructively by women. This kind of complex, grounded, even prayerful openness in your writing is what I hope others see in my whole project here on Substack. I write "unsent emails" to other men, using this sort of "speculative nonfiction" genre to say the kinds of things I wish men generally took the chance to say to each other, but often refrain from. I'm hoping to not only further a more self-aware and psychologically integrated kind of masculinity, but also show the reckonings that come with unlearning destructive behaviors and harmonizing one's energy with the needs and desires of others, women in particular.
You hit on a lot of the same territories I have been thinking about, but this part particularly resonated with me and my writing:
"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."
Your writing is outstanding, and I hope you keep digging into this area. I think your perspective isn't as common as it should be. Thank you for this.
This means a great deal, thank you, Brandon! The way you’ve described your own project, these “unsent emails,” feels quite unique and interesting. Using speculative nonfiction to speak into the spaces where men often remain silent, especially when those words aren’t aimed to impress or convert, but to connect is profoundly moving. That’s where healing begins, in the delicate, unseen repairs made possible through language that dares to feel.
And I’m struck by your phrase “prayerful openness.” Yes, if there’s a tone I hoped would resonate beneath all the complexity, contradiction, and critique, it’s that: a kind of reverent attentiveness. Not purity. Not perfection. But presence. The idea that even when we don’t have the right words, or the permission, we still try. Because trying is itself a form of love.
You caught something essential in that section about male friendship. I’ve always found it hauntingly beautiful, the tenderness hidden in ritual, the intimacy encoded in routine. It’s a language many women don’t see because it’s rarely translated. I think your project might just be offering that translation, and how necessary that is.
Please keep writing! The kind of masculinity you’re cultivating, self-aware, embodied, relational, is urgently needed.
We need more unsent emails. And more men like you sending them into the world.
Thanks for the encouragement. I do hope that my writing helps show the value of "self-aware, embodied, relational" masculinity, not only because both sexes would benefit in relationships, but I wonder what problems people could accomplish if they didn't have such mistrust of each other broadly in society.
First and foremost, I resonate with every sentence in this essay. I've often hesitated to label myself as a feminist because I don't want to be part of a movement that seeks to punish men. Referring to your (as always) brilliant choice of art in this essay, Hercules's mother is a mortal princess. He embodies her strength and determination to survive and protect her legacy, even in the face of gods. He also inherits the softer traits, the capacity to feel and experience humanity. So, where am I going with this? We must recognize that we complement each other, and our relationships with men can be incredibly beautiful, whether they are friendships, romantic connections, or purely physical bonds. Each interaction serves as a learning experience that helps us thrive as a society - if only we can see through the smoke. We could all be demigods just by learning to get along.
Thank you, Otilia, for this beautifully articulated reflection! You’ve echoed the spirit of the essay but extended it into the realm of myth in a way that feels both intimate and universal. Yes, Hercules, the symbol of brute strength, so often cast in marble and muscle, is also, as you remind us, born of a mortal woman. And it’s in that inheritance, the vulnerability, the humanity, the capacity to suffer and feel, that his heroism becomes more than spectacle. It becomes story. Legacy. Myth made mortal.
Your hesitation to adopt the label of feminist is understandable, and I think shared by many who long for justice but recoil at the trend of retributive rhetoric, myself included. Feminism, at its best, should not be about punishing men, but about unshackling all of us, from outdated roles, from punitive systems, from the illusion that power must always be wielded over rather than with. You embody that spirit in what you’ve written here.
Agreed, we could all be demigods, if only we chose collaboration over conquest. That’s the tragedy and the hope at the same time. The smoke you mention (the fog of fear, projection, performance) obscures who men are, and who we are beside them. The idea that our encounters, whether fleeting or lifelong, physical or philosophical, could all be portals into deeper becoming… it’s a worldview I wish more people would embrace. Less transaction, more transformation.
Thank you for weaving your thoughts into the conversation with such grace by conjuring a new layer of meaning.
Thank you for this thoughtful, human piece. Reading it, I felt a mix of gratitute and unease - gratitude at seeing complexity named with care and in good faith; unease at how often that very complexity is reduced to a binary tension that men find very hard to navigate.
To tease this out further: the current social and cultural zeitgeist increasingly encourages us to relate to one another as adversaries - or, perhaps more insidiously, as negotiators in a transactional landscape of social capital, performance, and economic independence. For men, the legacy of patriarchy has long been rooted in dominance. For women, the necessary and ongoing struggle for autonomy has, understandably, led to fortified spaces of defence - and, at times, a calculating pragmatism.
But within that dynamic, the possibility of relational generosity, of meeting rather than maneuvering, is often foreclosed.
This adversarial framing makes it difficult to be soft without being perceived as weak, or strong without being read as oppressive. Your portraits of male complexity point to something profound, yet problematic: the ability - often unconscious - to shift between emotional registers, to be either/or, strong or soft, stoic or sensitive.
But what does it mean to embody the “right” trait at the “right” moment without calculating performance, context, or audience? To be able to do so unconsciously, naturally, authentically without forethought. To essentially just be in resonance, to use Rosa's definition of it.
I don’t mean to say that you are doing this in your piece. You reflect beautifully on complexity, on flaws, on failure, on emotional uncertainty. But the world is rarely as nuanced or forgiving.
Men often shift shapes to survive contexts rather than integrate selves. Vulnerability, whether in front of women, men, or society at large, feels too risky. Too often, it is met not with empathy, but with skepticism, silence, or ridicule. Humiliation, in particular, is a difficult emotion for men to process, and in many corners of today's world, humiliation has become a currency of power.
What may be needed is a rearticulation of intimacy not as vulnerability in opposition to power, but as a different mode of power altogether. One grounded in attentiveness, co-presence, and mutual witnessing, something your piece gestures toward with subtle grace. I realise I’m not saying anything groundbreaking here, but it bears repeating.
I was struck that you mentioned The Will to Change. I read that book too. I can’t recall if I ever did so on the subway, but it was a good faith act, a step in the kind of “becoming” you speak of. And yet, reading your reflection, I found myself self-conscious: Am I pandering? Am I a false, performative ally?
Maybe that discomfort is part of the work. So thank you writing on this with care.
I thank you, Dario, for this rare and generous response. You’ve extended and stretched my essay by adding the kind of intellectual and emotional resonance that makes dialogue feel possible and sacred.
You’re absolutely right to name the adversarial dynamic that has seeped into so much of our relational landscape. We are, far too often, encouraged to show up not as selves but as strategists, measuring words, gestures, timing, affect. Not out of malice, but out of survival. And what gets lost in that performance loop is precisely what you’re pointing toward: the unguarded, uncalculated state of simply being in resonance. I might call erotic authenticity, the moment when we are not performing connection but inhabiting it.
Your line about men shape-shifting to survive rather than integrating to live is essential. It names this crisis with such clarity. Integration isn’t rewarded; camouflage is! And as you so rightly say, even vulnerability has been folded into the new power economy as a transaction, judged for its strategic value or lack thereof. It becomes a trap: be soft and risk ridicule; be strong and risk accusation. And so many men end up suspended between roles, unable to rest in either…. I see it, I know it.
Correct, humiliation has become a kind of dark currency. What was once a tool of oppression is now repackaged as social critique, but when used indiscriminately, it kills the very conditions required for transformation. We don’t become better humans through shame, we become…. quieter ones. More hidden. More brittle.
That’s why I’m moved that “The Will to Change” still echoes in you. Even the self-consciousness you name (the doubt, the wondering), “Am I performing?” — is, ironically, proof that you’re not. It’s a signal of care, of wanting to get it right without defaulting to rote scripts or safe slogans. That discomfort is the work. And very few are willing to sit inside it without reaching immediately for justification or applause.
You say you’re not offering anything groundbreaking, but I would argue otherwise. What you’ve written is a blueprint for the new kind of intimacy we must learn to build, one not premised on exposure-as-vulnerability, but on mutual attunement, on co-presence, as you so beautifully put it. A power that listens, that lingers, that stays even when the room is hard to stay in.
Thank you, truly, for bringing such layered thoughtfulness here! It affirms what I hoped my essay might open and it deepens it.