Looking for the Good Men
Why we must not fall victim to another of patriarchy’s divisions.
Notes: This post contains mention of violence against women, girls and trans people. It references murder and suicide. If these topics aren’t something you’d like to read about, feel free to return next time when I promise things will feel a little safer.
Meanwhile, as this is a pretty long post to read, you’ll also find an audio version just below the image at the top of the page.
Over the past few months I’ve heard the same thing over and over again: Men are terrifying and I’m afraid of them.
It’s an issue I’ve worked through with client after client, one I’ve seen reflected back all over social media and, weirdly, one I’ve also had to work on in my own house.
You see recently Lagertha has developed a really dramatic fear of men. One that has her barking like she’s possessed every time someone a little too masculine for her liking dares to come close or arrives in a place she isn’t expecting them.
In each of those moments, I’ve found myself repeating the same words: “Men can be friends, you are safe.”
It’s an affirmation that has run through my mind in so many client sessions lately too, which is an interesting thing to contend with. Not only because it seems to go against everything the world is telling us right now, but also because it’s not something I think I could have said and believed for myself 18 months ago.
Yet the more I’ve said those words, the more I’ve realised they are vital ones to remember — not only for our own nervous systems but for the whole of the battle against patriarchy.
The terror around men
Lagertha’s fears around men can probably be traced back to an over-exuberant vet back when she was a tiny puppy. For the rest of us though, such a fear is rarely down to such an innocent misunderstanding.
Let me be very clear; I know that, as people identifying as women (and as many others besides) we have many reasons to be afraid of men at this point in time.
The statistics of violence against women and girls are increasing month by month, while the rights of women, girls and Trans people are being rolled back right across the globe as governments comprised largely of cisgender white men who think they have a right to our bodies and all of the answers to fixing a problem they can’t admit that they’re a part of make decisions that still have their own best interests at their core.
Like so much of the Western world, I watched Netflix’s Adolescence recently, and was both heartbroken and terrified at the reminder that this issue is, if anything, even more concerning to the younger generation than it was in my own teenage years, thanks to the rise of online extremism and a severe lack of action to call the “manosphere” what it is: Terrorism.
Not that any of us need a reminder of course. Here in the UK, the lost lives of Holly Newton, Ava White, Eliane Andam, Brianna Ghey and the three little girls murdered at a dance class last year are, amongst too many others, a stark reminder that all too often, women are not safe in our world.
Believe me, I’ve had good reason to feel the fear too.
My story
The Christmas Eve I was six, my house was woken up by a ringing phone. I remember dashing into my parents’ room expecting to hear something exciting and festive. Instead, we were told that a family member — a 19 year old woman who lived close to my grandma — had been murdered.
Years later I learned the full story; that she had slapped a man who’d groped her in a nightclub, only to have him lash out with a broken bottle that left her bleeding to death on the dancefloor.
Though that is by far the most violent story in my own life, the theme of male violence and entitlement over women is one I’ve seen play out again and again in my life. Through terrible exes who allowed their insecurities and frustrations to shape their treatment of me, and through a job so toxically misogynistic that the actions of my colleagues there traumatised me for years afterwards.
We don’t need to go into the details of those experiences; the people behind them have taken up enough lines of my story already. But I will tell you about the impact those things had on me.
I’ll tell you that for a number of years I was terrified. I retracted back from the world, I shrunk back in all of the ways that I possibly could and, most determinedly of all, I hid from any man I didn’t know, because in my mind every one of them was a threat to my body, my mind, my power and my safety.
It wasn’t until perhaps my third bout of therapy after that time when the wise woman I was working with said, “It sounds to me as though you’re frightened of men.”
At first I laughed. Of course I wasn’t frightened of men! I have stacks of really good men in my life who I love dearly and I would trust with every fibre of my being. Don’t be so ridiculous!
“What about,” she pressed, “Men you don’t know?”
To that question, I had no answer. Except that she was right.
Though I count some wonderful men in my family, saw some of the incredible guys my friends were in partnership with, and even had a handful of really good male friends myself, when it came to men I didn’t know, I was terrified.
Whether it was that they would actively set out to harm me, steamroll straight past any boundaries I set, ignore my own needs in favour of their own, treat me like an object to be disrespected and disregarded, or simply do what they could to make me feel small, I was absolutely terrified of men.
But was that really a bad thing? After all, in my years of hiding I’d had some lovely experiences. I’d met some incredible women and was having a great time in all sorts of ways.
Yet I had to admit I was missing out on a lot. And not just when it came to connections with other people, not even just in terms of connecting with my own inner masculine and all that it represented, but also when it came to opening up to life itself.
There was no space for beautiful surprises when I was constantly on guard, no energy for joy in a life where I was forever expecting the worst, and nowhere near as much opportunity for stepping into my full power when I was watching around every one of those steps for potential threats or danger. And that’s without considering that there was much less of a possibility for romantic partnership when I — a woman who, despite everything, is attracted to men — was immediately ruling out half of the world!
Something had to change.
Looking for the good men
I don't remember whether the next step was born out of that therapy session or from a subsequent conversation with a good friend. But I do know that, somewhere around two years ago, I began to make looking for the good men an every day task.
Each night when I sat down to write my gratitude list, I would write a second list of the good men I had encountered that day.
At first the names on there were: my dad, brother, cousin and uncles; my male friends and the husbands of my favourite women. But in just a handful of days I started to find new names to put on there too.
There was the lovely optician who helped me after an eye injury, the man around the corner who is one of only four Lagertha isn’t terrified of, a fellow driver who offered his parking pass to me, and a dad of two kids I got talking to during a game of mini golf for starters.
Maybe it was confirmation bias, or maybe it was proof that my powers of discernment had been honed over recent years, but the longer I kept my list, the clearer it became that not all men were scary. That the vast majority of the men I encountered were respectful, kind and not in any way frightening.
I vividly remember the first day I felt my jaw unclench during a conversation with a man in a restaurant and allowed the smile to go all the way up to my eyes.
And I remember the realisation afterwards that relaxing in that way didn’t mean I would be unprepared for any potential threats in future, only that I would be better placed to call in more support from the good men out there if and when I needed it.
Because let me be clear, this article isn’t a #notallmen — I know only too well that even many of the good men have stood back over the years and allowed misogynistic jokes, sexist behaviour and more to go unchecked around them. And that’s not OK — we need allies who speak up and take action.
But honestly, unless we make space for apologies and changed behaviour, we will never heal the divisions in our societies. And my gods do those divisions need to be healed.
A divided world is a poorer world
If you’ve read my book, The Divine Feminist, you’ll know that I believe there is one enemy more than any other which we must overcome in order to move forwards: Division.
I know, I don’t need to tell you about the many divisions we see in our world today. I’m sure we could all reel off stacks of examples of them, each offering its own accompanying example of inequity, vitriol, or even violence as a result.
And as I’ll talk about until I’m blue in the face; evidence from throughout the entire history of the world shows us that the best way to heal those divisions is almost never to allow one side of that division to be classed as “best” and, therefore gain power over the other.
No. When it comes to so many of the divisions within our lives and our societies, only one thing will really help: Move into a place in which we can recognise that we are not only all interconnected, but that it is in that interconnection we find our deepest strength, our deepest power, and the recognition that the synergy created when we come together is far, far greater than the sum of all of our parts.
Don’t get me wrong, I know the world is awash with male violence — a threat that is only getting worse thanks to so many of the channels available and the pressure cooker energy of a world that only seems to be getting more out of balance.
I know also that as we women talk more about our own experiences of violence and violation — something that is absolutely crucial if we are to tackle those things — examples of them become more visible, closer to home, more potentially triggering than ever before.
I do not for one second suggest that we should all put our fingers in our ears and avoid those topics; head out running after dark with earphones in and pretend that we will be safe doing it. I firmly believe that a big part of this topic is in our honesty about the problems we face and the many, multifaceted issues behind those problems.
The truth is this: Patriarchy has been as damaging for masculinity as it has for femininity. And if our world is to truly change for the better, that damage needs to heal. For all of us.
What men learn at present about the world and the ways they “should” exist within it is, by and large, oppressive, ridiculous, and opening the door to only more violence — not only towards women but towards others too.
I know it’s a cliché to highlight that men are over three times more likely to take their own lives than women but come on, it’s a cliché because male violence towards themselves is another direct result of patriarchy and something else we so desperately need to change.
Of course, aside from our own sons, it is not the job of anyone but men to change what men learn about the world and how they exist within it.
That’s not because women hate men (no matter what certain “alphas” might try to tell the young boys who idolise them); last year I was fortunate to watch a live TedX talk by Chloe Laws on the subject of the misandry myth and the ridiculous idea that us calling out bad behaviour, asking for equity and/or refusing to be the ones to teach men a different way means that we somehow hate them.
No, we women don’t hate men, but we are also not responsible for changing their conditioning — we can and should only be doing that for ourselves. We also should not stop talking about our own experiences, spreading awareness, calling out bad behaviour and demanding change. After all, as so many of us have seen from history and learned from our own bitter experience, it’s in doing those things that we actually make tangible change.
But perhaps that’s a lesson men could learn too. In a recent mini episode of Pete Wicks’ Man Made podcast (one of a host of new media on the subject of masculinity and male role models that have been giving me more than a little ray of hope for the collective), the author Caitlin Moran spoke about the need for men to rebel about the patriarchal perceptions of them and their lives. It’s what woman have done after all, how else do you think we made the progress we have so far?
So now men have a choice — as we all do when we see others making progress while we feel stuck — keep complaining and feeling pushed out, or start a rebellion of their own towards a masculinity that doesn’t seek to oppress women or anyone else, but instead to thrive alongside them.
But here’s the thing; there’s one part of that rebellion towards a true masculinity that I do think we all need to get involved in. Because without it we’ll be afraid not only of one another, but of ourselves too.
The inner masculine
When I completed my Master’s Degree last year, the dissertation was focussed firmly on women’s connection with their own inner masculine.
As part of the study, I asked participants what that part of themselves felt like and there were a number of really clear common themes. They spoke about support, structure, the evergreen nature of the Green Man and the power of the father. One incredible woman even spoke about what it meant to be a true partner to herself after years of being in unhappy romantic relationships with men.
Of course I don’t believe that all of those qualities are solely masculine — though the wider world will rarely talk about it, the work of Seren Bertrand and others has taught me a lot about the feminine approach to structure for starters!
But I do think that the energy we call masculine; that yang-focussed energy, can be beautiful too. And though I know that years of imbalance towards that energy has left many of us vilifying and trying desperately to avoid that part of ourselvesourselves, I fear that may be just as damaging to us and our planet as the oppression of the true inner feminine.
If we want to find power, progress, peace, we have to honour the whole of ourselves from a place of true balance.
The power of alchemical partnership
In all my years of working with past lives, one of the things I’ve seen most consistently is an age where priestesses would frequently travel in pairs with knights.
They would work together; holding and guarding space, sharing and practicing wisdom and ritual, and tending and protecting one another and the planet in their own unique but complementary ways.
Before anyone starts to think this might be a little too simplistic, let me be clear; though I’ve seen myself as a female priestess with a male knight, I know that wasn’t always the case and that the pairs were not always one biological male and one biological female. I also know the relationships between these pairs weren’t always romantic or sexual.
I do, however, believe that there was a power and a magic in these pairs embodying equal parts of the sacred feminine and sacred masculine energies; energies that weave and flow together to create something truly beautiful.
Time and time again I’ve seen the way that, in those partnerships, each person was supported to grow, learn, practice, and be fully in their power.
The kind of power that comes when we allow that alchemical blend of the yin and the yang, the masculine and the feminine, and so many more things besides to flow in their fullness within us.
The kind of power that can’t be found when we’re too afraid to connect with an entire half of our energetic spectrum.
It makes me wonder, you know, whether there isn’t a deeper agenda to keeping us separate. Whether somewhere beneath the well-intentioned aims to protect and to guide, to educate and to support, there is another group of people rubbing their hands together in joy at the fact that the divisions between us seem ever more prominent, and at the fact so many of us are too damned afraid of the world around us to even think about stepping all the way into our own fullest power.
To do that we must come back to safely.
To do that we must find a way to help true alchemy unfold — in our world and within our selves.
That’s not to say we ignore the men who are not good, nor give them a free pass in the hope they might somehow step into their true masculine.
Nor is it to say we should carry the burden for bringing them — or anyone — into a place of their own flowing masculine, feminine or wholeness.
Instead, this is an invitation
An invitation for us not to tar everyone we meet with the same brush.
And an invitation for us to work on our own fear amongst the campaigning and the awareness spreading.
How do we do that? We call out the bad behaviour, we reassert our needs, we even talk about our fears where it feels safe and comfortable to do.
And we also take a pause to keep our hearts open and ask what the true masculine really looks and feels like — in ourselves and others.
From there we can stop seeing those true masculine energies as something to be cast out or criticised, instead choosing to own and honour them within ourselves — in balance, of course.
Looking to the outside world, perhaps we even compile our own good men list based on the people we love and those we come in contact with, simply to remind ourselves that there are good men out there.
And we try to build a vision in our minds and our hearts of what the true masculine and the true feminine — both energies that existed long before patriarchy and have little to do with gender or biological sex — look like, and how they can flow together.
Because when we do that, I truly believe that all of our power, and the power of the whole world, will start to rise.
Thirteen Keys to Balance and Flow
If you’d like to journey deeper with that idea of sacred balance and flowing synergy, then I’ve got just the next step for you.
Following on from the audio publication of the Divine Feminist, I’m launching an opportunity to dive deeper with the themes of the book, and perhaps with your own journey to sacred balance and flow.
Launching on Tuesday, 27th May to coincide with the next new moon, I invite you to join me on Thirteen Keys, a 21-day audio journey exploring the 13 keys outlined within The Divine Feminist together with the elemental energies that comprise the sacred circle within which the book is based.
Interested? Visit this page to learn more.
For now though, thank you so much for being here, and for being part of this journey.
This is so serious, and I think everyone has a work to be done.