Truthfully, though, we kind of deserve it. Any woman person who has tried online dating knows this. Anyone who reads the news knows this.
I think we (men) are letting the worst examples define us. Andrew Tate. Donald Trump. Joe Rogan. Ben Shapiro. Jordan Peterson. A veritable cornucopia of incel influences. I truly think these are outliers… reprehensible outliers, sure, but outliers just the same.
The problem is: if the rest of us men don’t speak up against their content, then we’re just as culpable as they are. We allow negative content into the atmosphere without rightfully pushing back against it. We let them poison the well. I’d use the proverb about one bad apple here (“One bad apple doesn’t spoil the bunch”), but actually the opposite is true.
If you are in a room with other people when someone says something terrible, and you don’t speak up against it, you implicitly show your acceptance of what they said. Others in the room will believe you agree with it, or that you are a coward, which is almost as bad. You may not truly agree with it, but it doesn’t matter: you’ve let a poisonous statement stand, and missed a chance to show others that you oppose it.
So I thought I’d start this blog just to describe my experience of being a man in the world today. Maybe some more positive thoughts being put out into the internet could counteract some of the terrible racist/sexist/homophobic stuff out there in the public consciousness. That is my fervent hope, at least.
In the next few posts I’ll talk about my own personal history, to provide my bona fides, so to speak. I plan to practice radical honesty here. That may mean, for instance, revealing intimate, personal details about my life. If you know who I am, be prepared. However, I will omit select details if they would reveal something intimate or personal about some other person’s life. Or I will simply change names and other personal details.
I do not currently plan to reveal my name or identity, simply because that will allow me to be more forthright about people around me who would not want to themselves be identified. Maybe someone could infer my identity from my life story, but I think it’s better not to explicitly confirm it. I could decide differently in the future.
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