I am angry at men, and I've been this way long before the #MeToo movement, which has made me feel validated and vindicated and all the more angry. Sometimes I feel white hot rage toward them, and sometimes I feel more of a passive impatience. I just don't want to deal with them.
My anger stems from things like looking at the list of Oscar nominations for Best Director and realizing, year after year, that there is not a single woman on it. It stems from having been required to read Shakespeare and Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Eliot throughout my schooling but not even knowing what feminism was until I was well into my twenties. My anger stems from being told since childhood that I should be attracted to men. At age 26, I was finally able to proclaim that I am not. My anger stems from all the times men touched me without my consent.
In the #MeToo era, and in the age of Trumpism, so many women and nonbinary people are right here with me. We. Are. Pissed. And it shows. I've been noticing this especially in my reading. I read almost exclusively female and nonbinary authors, and I've observed that horrible, odious men keep on showing up, wreaking havoc on the characters' lives (and, in one case, centuries of women's lives), and fueling my misandry.
I will not say any titles in an effort to avoid spoiling the novels, but here are some of the men I've been reading about. In a novel written by a prolific female author, there is a man who sexually assaults numerous women at college parties, gets away with it even after facing disciplinary hearings, and grows up to be a businessman who makes money off of the objectification of women. In a novel written by a romance writer who strayed from the genre this time, there is a white teenage boy who takes a photo of a half naked Latina classmate who is blackout drunk, captions it with a racist comment, sends it to his friends, convinces the girl that he didn't do it, and then seduces her and has sex with her while they are sober. Ultimately, he also gets away with it, even after facing disciplinary hearings.
In a science fiction novel written by a nonbinary person, there are numerous men who are so committed to eradicating the rights of women that they travel back and forth in time to do so, enter into feminist spaces to spread misogynistic propaganda, try to destroy all time machines so that their feminist rival time travelers do not have a chance to erase their "progress," and ultimately cut off women's hands so all they can do is breed. I hope you do not figure out which novels I am talking about, because I have sufficiently spoiled things, but I hope your head is spinning now. These elaborately constructed, despicable actions of odious men are enough to make your brain explode. They're enough to make you go out and attempt smashing the patriarchy with your bare hands (which you still have, for now).
And I, for one, did not need any help with that. I did not need any of these writers to stoke my anger and discomfort. I'm doing just fine with that already. However, looking outside myself for a moment, I am so glad these novels exist. They are truly zeitgeisty, and they capture our rage and incredulity at the sorts of things men do and get away with. Post-2016, it'd be weird if women and nonbinary people were not writing about men this way.
While I think that the women and nonbinary people of the world need to take some time to be angry, I've noticed that I personally can take it too far. When I feel threatened by a man or just feel uncomfortable around him, my way of coping is to ignore or avoid him. This has happened at parties and even at work. And, as it turns out, people notice when you ignore them. People notice when you work hard to maintain a ten foot radius between yourself and them. By behaving the way that I do, I end up hurting myself and others.
In a move that might seem antithetical to the spirit of the times, I have been working on being kinder to men. More open-minded. I need to be able to move through the world, and men are a part of it. They are around. They are everywhere.
I always appreciate the work of Natalie Wynn aka Contrapoints, and I especially appreciate her recent video about men in which she is both incredibly empathetic and scathingly insulting. She is in her early thirties and began her gender transition several years ago, so she spent the bulk of her life living as a man, and she knows what it's like. She offers the following as an example of the differences between the day-to-day lives of men and women: When women walk down the street, men benignly compliment them, crudely catcall them, or follow them in a predatory manner. On the other hand, while walking down the street, women treat men as invisible or dangerous. As a woman, at least there is the potential for a benign compliment. As a man, the ways that others treat you feel bad across the board. When she walked down the street while living as a man, Wynn was not going to hurt anyone and did not want them to find her threatening. She said that it is hurtful for others to make that kind of assumption about you.
She also provided an empathetic perspective on our current masculinity crisis. This is not true for every person and every social group, but sizable pockets of our society have realized that traditional masculinity has no place in modern-day life. So what is the role of men today? How are they supposed to act? Wynn says that it is genuinely distressing for them not to have a model for how to live a good life as a man in today's world. Feminists are telling men that they are toxic, but a large part of their "toxicity" has to do with a social construct that they were born into, and it is a gargantuan task to create something new. Wynn ends the video with a call to action, asking men to work together and figure out how to move forward. Nobody else can do this for them.
The part of the video that most appeals to me, and that will help me control my anger, is Wynn's discussion of how much it hurts to have someone assume that you are dangerous. This helped me have empathy for men. I have definitely been guilty of making negative assumptions about men as well as projecting negative things onto them. But something that I've been trying to do, that helps me get through the day, is to take each man at face value. I try to respond to what is there, and if a man does not show me that he is dangerous, threatening, or crude, I do not act as though he is. This is hard for me because I hold so much anger, but I also try not to see any single man as a symbol of men in general. A man is a man. I can't be thinking of all these odious literary characters, and odious real-life characters, whenever I interact with 50-ish percent of the population.
I don't really have sympathy for men in their time of masculinity crisis, but I am grateful to Wynn for framing it as something that is possible for them to work through. Thinking that men might work together to create a contemporary masculinity that fits into today's world gives me hope.
It is hard to reconcile all of my feelings towards men. I am enraged, empathetic, and hopeful, all at the same time. It's a mess. But a complicated issue begets complicated emotions. As much as I want to generalize about men, they are not a monolith. Some of them are entertaining these very same ideas. They are looking at masculinity and at their own actions through a critical lens. Some of them are not, and those are the ones we represent in fiction as people who cut off women's hands and use the rest of their bodies for breeding. That's just how it is right now.
The question that Wynn poses at the beginning of her video, and the one that has most been on my mind, is "What are we going to do about men?" And nobody knows the answer. For now, what we're going to do about men is to write ugly fictional ones, I guess? And we're going to hope to god that they figure out how to make things better. I think it's possible, and I think they are capable of it.
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