I have no interest in a future where we cannot find our way back to one another.
A few weeks ago, I posted about the men who have taken to sliding into my DMs with unsolicited opinions and spectacular ignorance. Underneath the post, someone commented, “Dash weh di whole a dem.”
I paused, partly because I understood the sentiment and partly because I thought of a male friend who regularly encourages me to share more balanced perspectives when I write about gender, concerned that my commentary might come across as man-hating. I appreciate that he feels comfortable enough to challenge me, although I’ve never been convinced that every criticism of men’s behaviour requires an accompanying acknowledgement of the men who behave well.
“If yuh fling stone inna pig pen, a di one weh squeal it lick.”
If what I’m saying doesn’t apply to you, why are you so bothered?
There is an expectation that women should constantly reassure men of our affection for them whenever we discuss the harm some men cause. I can write about sexual violence or the everyday indignities of misogyny, and somewhere a man will emerge to remind me that good men exist, as though I’ve somehow managed to live four decades without encountering one.
I know good men. I love quite a few of them, actually.
My brother Christopher is one of the most devoted fathers I know. He wakes up with his daughter, makes her milk, knows what she had for breakfast (even when she insists she had pasta instead of toast), and enthusiastically encourages her love for Elmo and the rest of the Sesame Street gang. He was there for her first day of school and is there every evening for bedtime stories and prayers. He often says that his favourite thing to do is anything involving his two favourite people: his wife and daughter. I love watching the ease with which he moves between being a husband and a daddy, without finding either responsibility an inconvenience.
My friend Kenneth, who doesn’t have biological children of his own but has become Pops to a pure soul he has taken under his wing. Kenneth teaches him sports and helps with school, but what strikes me most is how thoroughly this kid has become part of his life. I’ve watched him give quite literally the shoes off his feet and shirt off his back to make sure his son knows he is loved. There are few things more beautiful than watching a man decide that someone deserves his love and then build his life around making sure that they feel it.
Daddy was born in Cuba in 1926 and raised in Jamaica, a man with firm ideas about discipline, respectability and how his children ought to conduct themselves. For much of my childhood and early adulthood, our relationship was complicated. There were years when we were relatively estranged, when I struggled to understand why he hadn’t shown up for me in the ways I needed him to, and when his expectations left little room for the person I actually was.
Daddy was well into his seventies when he visited me in the UK, climbing three flights of steep, narrow stairs to reach my flat. One evening we sat together, split a Guinness and talked for hours about our relationship. We spoke about the times he hadn’t been there, the choices he had made and how he felt about his parenting. I had spent years wanting him to acknowledge the ways he had hurt me, and there we were, having a conversation I had never imagined possible.
He never said the words “I’m sorry.”
But he began calling more often. He wrote emails that I still return to whenever I want to hear his voice. When I moved home, he bought me a puppy, Charlie, who turned out to be just as untamed and reckless as I can be. He wanted to spend time together, going to church or reading the newspaper on Sundays. He even stopped judging me for smoking, which, if you knew my Daddy, was no small achievement.
I believe people can change because I’ve watched them do it. I’ve also learned that love is something people practise, sometimes imperfectly, through the choices they make and how they treat one another. What concerns me is how many seem unwilling to know better, perhaps because knowing would require them to do something about it.
Patriarchy is a rather comfortable pillow until you discover the peas underneath it. Your partner starts questioning arrangements that have always worked conveniently in your favour. Your daughter challenges the rules you’ve taken for granted. Suddenly, the pillow is lumpy, and no matter how you position your neck, you can’t quite get comfortable. Some men would rather live with a stiff neck and a lumpy pillow than remove the peas.
In The Will to Change, bell hooks explores how patriarchy teaches men to suppress their emotional lives, equate masculinity with dominance and distance themselves from the relationships that might make their lives richer. She also insists that men can learn to love differently, provided they are willing to confront what they have been taught.
My interest in understanding why people cause harm, and what it takes to change the beliefs behind that harm, eventually became central to my academic and professional work. It also led me to volunteer with Circles of Support and Accountability, a programme supporting people convicted of sexual offences as they return to their communities.
One of the men I worked with was Peter.
Peter isn’t his real name. He was an older man who had served his sentence and was trying to rebuild his life. He had expressed remorse and volunteered for a programme requiring him to discuss his offending openly and accept ongoing accountability. There was a waiting list to join. No early release, no parole, no reduction in sentence. The only incentive was support in doing the difficult work of ensuring he never caused that kind of harm again.
Circles of Support and Accountability brings together trained volunteers and professionals to support reintegration while managing risks and maintaining safeguards. Its guiding principle is no more victims.
When I met Peter, I knew what he had been convicted of. I also knew that preventing further harm required getting to know him as a person. We talked about his family, childhood trauma, losing the majority of his sight at an early age and finding his place in a world that had moved on while he was in prison. We also discussed his offending, the decisions that had led him there and the situations he needed to recognise before they became dangerous.
Over time, Peter became more willing to acknowledge difficulties and concerning thoughts, knowing we would take them seriously and involve the professionals supporting the circle when necessary.
Imagine the magnitude of that seemingly simple act: creating a space where someone with a history of sexual offending can acknowledge a concerning thought before it becomes another person’s experience of violence.
Peter could be funny. He had people he cared about and stories to tell. He was someone’s Daddy and someone’s uncle. None of this erased what he had done, but recognising his humanity was essential to the work, particularly when his future choices could have serious consequences for others.
I’ve sometimes described this approach as accountability with love. Acknowledging someone’s humanity means taking seriously their capacity to change while holding them responsible for the harm they’ve caused. It requires honesty, appropriate safeguards and no illusions that everyone who participates will change.
I wanted Peter to succeed because I wanted there to be no more victims. I’m still not sure what that is considered a controversial ambition.
The World Health Organization estimates that nearly one in three women globally has experienced physical or sexual violence by an intimate partner, or sexual violence by someone other than a partner, during her lifetime. I know women who have been raped by relatives, beaten by husbands and threatened by men whose advances they rejected. I’ve worked with women whose attempts to seek help exposed them to further indignity from the institutions meant to protect them.
We teach boys that their worth depends on their ability to provide and exercise authority, while vulnerability is treated as weakness. Anger becomes acceptable where sadness and tenderness are not. These expectations can be especially cruel when men themselves experience violence, leaving the majority afraid to report abuse for fear of ridicule or disbelief.
The growing conversation about male loneliness is important, but it’s extraordinary that some have turned it into an indictment of women’s independence. Apparently, women’s increasing access to education and economic autonomy has created a crisis for men who can no longer rely on traditional arrangements governing intimate relationships. If a man’s sense of worth depends on a woman’s subordination, we should be questioning the conditions that produced that understanding, and why he remains so invested in preserving it.
These ideas follow us home. A man struggling financially may feel he is failing at the very thing he has been taught defines him, while his partner may be working just as hard and carrying much of the domestic responsibility. Resentment flourishes when people cling to ideas about authority that bear little resemblance to the lives they’re actually living.
And children are watching. They notice who gets to be angry, whose feelings must be accommodated, who provides care and whether adults acknowledge when they’ve caused hurt.
In In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, Alice Walker describes the womanist commitment to the “survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female.”
I’ve always loved that formulation. I’m deeply invested in women’s freedom, while recognising that men in our communities are also shaped by histories of exclusion and dispossession. A man can experience racism and economic marginalisation while exercising power over women. A woman can have education and money and remain vulnerable to violence in her own home.
I want communities where women and men can live with greater freedom and dignity. Where boys can express affection without shame, men can experience love without having to prove their authority, and women can enjoy their lives without constantly calculating the risks associated with where they go or whom they trust.
Surely these are things worth wanting for one another.
Which brings me back to the men who become defensive whenever women speak about violence. Have they considered how little is being asked of them in some of these everyday moments?
When a friend jokes about forcing himself on a woman, imagine saying, “Dude, shut the fuck up.” When someone describes treating his partner badly, try, “Fam, you can’t treat a woman like that.” Or perhaps, “I love you, bro, but I need you to do better.”
Attitudes that excuse violence rarely announce themselves as dangerous. They appear in jokes among friends, in assumptions that buying a woman dinner entitles a man to something in return, and in the reluctance to challenge another man’s behaviour for fear of losing his approval. I know where that thinking can lead.
Yet whenever women raise these issues, we’re expected to reassure men that we know some of them are decent human beings. I reserve the right to discuss the harm women experience without turning the conversation into an awards ceremony for men who haven’t caused it.
And if you’re tired of hearing women complain about violence, imagine how tired we are of organising our lives around the likelihood of it.
I understand why some women express hatred towards men, particularly when their experiences have taught them to associate men with violence or betrayal. I would never dictate how a woman should feel about someone who has harmed her. I have my own reasons for being angry.
There are women who will spend the rest of their lives managing the consequences of violence committed against them. Others did not survive. I’ve spent much of my professional life working with women who have experienced harm, and deliberately chosen to spend some of it working with men who have caused it.
I want men to take responsibility for changing themselves and challenging one another. I want us to invest in sustained support that helps people confront the beliefs behind their behaviour. Women can encourage that transformation, but we cannot undertake it on men’s behalf, and loving men should never mean accepting the harm they cause.
I love men. I want them to have lives richer and more emotionally fulfilling than the narrow version of masculinity patriarchy has offered them, and I want them to progress alongside the women whose freedom I’ve spent my life fighting for.
Because what’s the point of liberation if we can’t find a way to live together?
I love men enough to believe they can do better, and I love women too much to accept that we should have to keep suffering while we wait for them to try.
