I have been surrounded by men my entire life β as a daughter, sister, mother, aunt, and yes, the occasional sexual object β and yet I still do not understand them. The more I try to make sense of the male experience, the more my fear seems to grow. Not fear of an individual man, but of the collective weight of masculinity as I have encountered it. A lifetime of interactions that taught me to brace, to shrink, to anticipate.
So where do you even begin when the fear has roots deeper than logic?
Where does a woman turn when the emotions simmering beneath the surface are not just fear, but anger⦠rage⦠and at times, something uncomfortably close to hatred?
Are men, as a gender, hopeless?
I hate that the question even forms in my mind. But it does.
Sometimes my indifference comes from exhaustion. Sometimes it comes from watching society bend itself backwards to justify male behaviour β shelter, excuse, explain, reroute β while expecting women to contort themselves into saints. βMale needs,β they call it. As if the rest of us are decorative objects in the room.
Is masculinity the problem?
Or is it my own distorted lens β shaped by trauma, by culture, by centuries of stereotypes that refuse to die?
The old binaries still run deep.
Tenderness = feminine. Domination = masculine.
Love = female. Power = male.
We pretend we no longer believe these things, but our bodies remember what our minds try to modernise. I grew up learning that to be loved by a man was to be chosen, protected, understood, valued.
And yet, my lived experience showed me that βbeing chosenβ often meant being controlled.βBeing protectedβ often meant being silenced. And βbeing understoodβ meant shrinking myself into whatever version of womanhood made him most comfortable.
So I ask myself: Do I want a manβs love β or do I want fatherly acceptance? Do I want to be held β or do I want to be safe? Do I want intimacy β or do I want to be seen without being punished for it?
These are not the same questions, though they look similar on paper. And then there is this other question β the one I am ashamed to name:
βIf they die, then I can live.β
It is not a literal wish. It is a metaphor for powerlessness.
For the feeling of being so overshadowed that the only imagined escape route is the removal of the oppressor.
A fantasy of relief, not violence.
Because when you grow up in a world where a manβs desire can become your danger, your mind learns to calculate escape routes long before love.
But there is another angle we rarely talk about.
What if men are not only the ones causing harm⦠but also the ones unequipped to understand their own?
How can men change if they only ever hear what they are doing wrong? Who teaches men how to love gently? How to exist without dominance?
How to feel the feelings they have been told to swallow since childhood?
If vulnerability has been culturally coded as weakness, how are they supposed to become soft enough to be intimate?
If they have never been taught to sit with fear, how are they meant to recognise ours?
This is not sympathy. This is curiosity.
Because understanding our fathers, brothers, sons, and lovers might be one way to understand ourselves.
Not to excuse their violence.
Not to justify our trauma.
But to dismantle the myth that either gender is doomed to repeat what hurt us.
We try to control what we do not understand.
And whatever we resist simply persists.
If men are taught to dominate because domination keeps them safe,
and women fear men because domination has never kept us safeβ¦
then we are locked in the same prison, just in opposite cells.
What, then, is the way out?
Perhaps it begins here:
To know love β real love, not possession β we have to let go of the need to dominate.
Men must learn that force is not intimacy.
Women must learn that fear is not prophecy.
And all of us must learn how to hold power without crushing each other with it.
This is not a solution.
It is a starting point.
And maybe that is enough for today.
