A few weeks ago, I felt like I was in a fog and couldn’t see my way out. My work and writing were feeling empty, like I was just going through the motions. But then I read the anthropologist Hilary Agro’s essay, “Men are not trash.”
Agro researches political activism and organizing, which means she brings a particular perspective to her work, as she puts it, “inject[ing] some compassion and critical thinking into public discourse.” A perspective I vibe very much with.
That word “compassion” is what shook me back awake. “Approaching everyone with compassion just feels best in my body,” she writes in a footnote aimed at women who feel understandable rage toward men. “As a point of personal and abolitionist values (and based on my education and personal experiences) I hold the belief that everyone is doing their best and the core of harmful behavior is just fear.” That’s what my work is all about. I believe that hurt people hurt people. It’s why I became a therapist in the first place.
After going through a painful breakup over a decade ago, what kickstarted my healing was my therapist’s empathy. Not for me, exactly. For the parts of me that I hated and felt ashamed about. The part of me that had hurt my partner by ignoring her desire for more emotional connection. The part that was more focused on work and being productive than on my relationship and friendships. The part that froze up from anxiety when she wanted to talk about the growing problems in our relationship.
Eventually, months after the breakup when I started dating again, the part that felt tense and nervous when trying to have sex. So tense and nervous that I sometimes couldn’t get it up.
I walked into my therapist’s office feeling horrible about myself, broken, less of a “real man.” But her compassion encouraged me to change and grow. She made me feel like I was worth it—like my feelings were valid and worth paying attention to, even if I didn’t think I had any feelings in the first place.
That’s what I want more people to experience, especially men. Everyone needs more compassion in this society (except for the facists and billionaires), but men tend to have a particular hangup with feeling it for ourselves. We’re told we’re supposed to be the tough one, the steady one, the one with no emotional needs. We’re told that our value comes from being reliable, never phased, stoic, calm, cool, and collected. So we bury our feelings or aren’t even aware we have any. And we beat ourselves up inside if they do come spilling out, as emotions tend to do.
I love Agro’s essay because she acknowledges this conditioning and does something I’ve been trying to figure out how to do with my writing: She communicates in a clear, simple way how this conditioning benefits the rich and powerful in this patriarchal capitalist society.
“There is a reason men are not okay,” she writes. “It takes a lot to program a human to hate, fear, and dominate others, but several thousand years of internal and then external European colonization managed to do it, and now children in the settler colonies of North America on Turtle Island are raised with experiences that enforce those unnatural values on them from day one: blind obedience to authority, chronically ignoring our bodies, strict gender role enforcement.”
She then connects this with her argument (which I agree with) that shitting on men isn’t how we stop men from hating, fearing, and dominating others. Or how we change the underlying political and economic systems that perpetuate that hate, fear, and domination.
“We subject boys, literal children, to the most unimaginably dehumanizing conditions at a massive cultural scale,” she continues, “and then we participate in the same dehumanizing dynamics that are hurting us all by calling them pieces of shit for not fighting off structural forces when they were seven.” Reading that made me tear up. I thought of my four-year-old nephew. My friends’ boys. The boys in my neighborhood who annoy me when they throw baseballs close to my car. Myself as a boy who used to throw baseballs close to cars.
Again—as Agro puts so clearly in her footnote—this doesn’t mean women should be expected to put up with harmful behavior or not trash men. “It is absolutely not your job [to fix men],” she writes. “But it is my job! I’ve taken on this task willingly.” It is my job too, as a man who’s convinced that men (like anyone else) need compassion—not more shame—to heal, change, and grow.
That’s the North Star that I lost track of: Everyone needs compassion, but as a man who’s undoubtedly hurt people myself, my job—my calling—is to help men feel it for ourselves with the goal of changing how we relate to others. Not the rich and powerful men who are duping the rest of us into hating feminist women, queer, and trans people so they can divide and control all of us who aren’t rich. The other men, like me, who have some relative privilege and power compared to most women but very little compared to Donald Trump or Elon Musk.
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