An open letter to all the men who want to 'do better'

'Nice guy' isn't an identity, and if you're exploiting your partner or refusing to listen to women, you're not one anyway.

Dear men who want to do better,

Thanks for showing up. No, really.

I know that every man started as a little boy without a shred of patriarchy corrupting his soul. I know that so many men become bad because of socialization, not their innate nature. And I know that this socialization is often brutal to men and boys, too.

I believe deeply in the goodness of men, and in their important role in destroying patriarchy. We need you, and I am glad you are here.

That does not mean I am willing to give men a pass. The rest of our society grades men on a curve—giving them credit and accolades merely for not being abusive; assuming male competence; calling male hyperemotionality rationality; allowing men chance after change, while never giving women a single benefit of any doubt.

I don’t do that here. We need to talk about how you often behave in feminist spaces, and how you often fail to take seriously the full weight of the oppression you inflict on the women in your lives.

So if you’re a man who needs to do better, I need you to show up and work on yourself, not demand cheers and then storm off pouting when they don’t come. Men owe the feminist project significant work and self-reflection. They have a duty to talk less, listen more, and assume they have much to learn.

Doing better begins with ending your belief that you are a nice guy. You don’t get to label yourself nice. Men have, for too long, weaponized their belief in their own niceness against women.

Nice, for men, has become an identity. Much like the white people who identify as “allies” without actually earning the label, who think that being called racist is a far worse hate crime than actually being a racist, these men are more interest in claiming the label of decency for themselves than living up to any particular standard.

It works like this:

A guy gets into an argument with a woman, and pulls some misogynistic bullshit. She calls him on his crap, and then he retreats, telling her he’s a nice guy. Not a meanie like her. She’s irrational.

Or a guy decides he’s a nice guy, but doesn’t apply any specific standards of behavior to his niceness. Then he gets angry and aggressive when a woman questions his self-appointed nice guy status.

The humanity of the people you have been raised to oppress is far more important than your desire to be considered nice. You cannot be a sexist and be nice. You cannot be someone who replicates patriarchal tropes and be nice.

Patriarchy has socialized you to look for an easy out, for a loophole, for a technical exception. So if you find that not everything in this post applies to you, you’ll insist that this means you’re not like other men, that your partner is not exploited, that everything is fine. Just like all the other men do.

That behavior is in itself exploitative because it dismisses all of your partner’s suffering as irrelevant if you’re not doing all of the abusive things possible. If you really want to do better, then you won’t do that shit. You’ll see yourself in this letter. Because if your partner is reading my work and demanding change, rest assured you are here.

You tell me you’re on a journey. You’re learning. You want to do better. You love your partner.

Good. We were all socialized into systems we neither chose nor built. It’s not your fault that you were born into a patriarchy anymore than it is your partner’s. But it is your responsibility to identify how patriarchy damages your ability to care for your partner, and to actively subvert it. Otherwise, you’re helping construct the next generation of misogyny, actively wielding your male power as a weapon against someone you claim to love.

In men, patriarchy functions like a brain disease. It undermines critical thinking. It makes it more difficult for men to see objective reality. It causes men to continuously repeat the same false bullshit, or to all talk like one another.

One thing they all seem to want is more time and more understanding.

The absolute audacity of a person who has spent his whole life giving women zero understanding, zero space, and zero time demanding more of all three from her is stunning. It’s just another demand for emotional labor,

So I don’t have a lot of patience for men on “journeys.” You’ve had a couple of decades now to figure this out. You presumably recognize that your partner is, like you, human and, like you, has limits and needs. I’m betting that you only began to care about them when she started making threats.

She never got to go on a journey to be a better parent and spouse. Like millions of women across the globe, your partner was baptized by fire. She gave birth (or adopted, which produces different but qualitatively similar levels of exhaustion and trauma).

She birthed your child in terror and pain (and maybe without much support from you) and then, in spite of still recovering, in spite of probably not knowing much more than you did about how to care for the child, she got up, learned how to do it, and did it.

That’s womanhood: doing the shit other people don’t want to do, while not making the excuses that men reserve only for themselves (and never accept from women).

There’s no journey. No learning. No “wanting” to do better. Just doing the damn work.

You can do the damn work, too. Right now. Spend less time talking about your journey and more time fixing what you’ve broken.

That begins with understanding that household inequality and marital misogyny are about a lot more than libidos and dishes. It’s time to get real about how deeply harmful misogyny—even nice guy misogyny, even mild misogyny, even misogyny that comes with an “I love you” and a birthday gift—truly is.

Your partner had dreams for her future, for her life.

How many of those have you shattered?

Every hour of time you have taken from her is an hour she could have spent tending to her own needs, nourishing her soul, spending time with her friends, and working toward her dreams.

What has she given up for you? And what have you done to acknowledge that sacrifice? Do you have any intention of ever repaying it?

Begin there. Because at the core of inequality is the belief that women’s time, lives, and dreams just matter less. That asking her to spend seven or 10 or 20 extra hours a week on household labor that you refuse to do is a minor inconvenience, just a part of womanhood.

That’s only true if you think women are less valuable than men.

Imagine for a second that your wife leaves for a month. She doesn’t prepare you. You’re stuck caring for the kids.

Are you going to be able to do it to the same standard she does, in a clean and well-functioning house? Probably not. And are you going to be mad at her for not helping you do what she does every dam day? I’m betting the answer is yes.

Why is that? Why is it that when men are asked to do what women do, they become enraged, yet they treat the same work as meaningless, as unworthy of acknowledgment, when women do it for years or decades?

Now imagine your wife leaves for 6 weeks after you’ve had surgery or a medical crisis, and your kids don’t sleep, and she expects you to do it all.

That’s what the postpartum period is like for many women—with the added caveat that it’s a rite of passage that most men destroy, permanently damaging their partners’ psyches.

And then, imagine that after you tell your wife how hurtful all of this is to you, you have to tend to her feelings, and maybe field an onslaught of defensiveness or emotional abuse.

Somehow it all seems more real when it’s happening to you, doesn’t it?

So what are you going to do, right now, today, about all of it?

How are you going to actually become a nice guy and a feminist, rather than just demanding to be acknowledged as one?