Yes, All Men - Including Me
Men keep waiting for the day we graduate from the work of being trustworthy. That day isn't coming, and the people we love know every deflection is a confession.
1
A month ago I published a post arguing that progressive male candidates should reckon honestly with their own patriarchal conditioning before asking women to trust them with political power: Progressive Men Keep Failing the Same Strategic Leadership Test.
Nearly a thousand comments followed across platforms.
The women arrived with knowing and scars. They named what they’d lived. They cited chapter and verse from their own histories — the workplace, the marriage, the parking lot, the emergency room. They bonded with each other. They held the line together as the men overwhelmed the comments sections roughly 4:1.
The men arrived with objections.
Not all men.
What about women who cheat?
What about Susan Collins? This is a purity test! This is a witch hunt! This is why Democrats lose! You sound soft and naive like most women. You need realpolitik. But Platner went to therapy. But his wife made a video saying all was forgiven.
BUT IT WAS CONSENSUAL!
I watched it for days. The same moves, over and over, from different men who had never met each other, running identical plays like they’d all attended the same training camp.
They had. So did I. It’s called growing up male in America.
The playbook has a small number of core moves. Debate teachers have been warning students about most of them for generations. Here are a few:
Whataboutism. Redirect the accountability. Point out a man’s documented pattern of harm toward women and the reply arrives in seconds: What about women who cheat? What about Republicans, who are worse? The original point sits unaddressed while you defend your right to make it.
False equivalence. Make unlike things look equal. A man sexting strangers behind his wife’s back gets compared to a woman reading a romance novel. Once everything is the same, nothing is a pattern.
Shrinking the list. Dispute every case one at a time. Name the roster of progressive men who harmed women and torched their careers, and each entry gets its own asterisk. That one was consensual. That one was just an affair. Keep going until the list no longer exists.
The pragmatism shield. Concede the argument, then bury it. The concern isn’t wrong — just badly timed. Not now. Not this election. There is always a greater emergency, and the greater emergency always outranks women. They were told to wait during the Civil War, both World Wars, and every election since. The right time has never once arrived.
Mechanism substitution. Accept the facts, swap the explanation. It wasn’t entitlement, it was neediness. It wasn’t power, it was trauma. A softer cause generates sympathy instead of accountability, and once the cause is sad enough, demanding change looks like cruelty.
The purity test accusation. Attack an argument nobody made. Ask a man with a history of harming women for an honest accounting and a concrete plan, and watch it get restated: Saints only need apply! Nobody can clear this bar! Nobody asked for saints. The ask was honesty and a plan.
Exhaustion. The larger goal all the other moves serve. The deflections don’t have to win the argument. They only have to make it too expensive to keep making. Every redirect demands a response. The women grow tired. The women go quiet. The media’s attention moves on. The playbook counts that as victory.
Aristotle catalogued half of these two thousand years ago as the signature moves of people who cannot defend their actual position.
I recognize them because I’ve run most of the plays in this book.
2
My ex-wife and I are on good terms. We were married 23 years. The divorce was brutal and angry on both sides. We have done a lot of healing and forgiveness since then, and we love our wonderful adult son.
She can also tell you what an asshole I can be.
Not the domineering kind in the movies — the loud man, the debater, the kitchen-table bully. That was never me. I never once out-argued my ex-wife. She’s too formidable and I’m the introvert so scared of conflict I get tongue-tied in every argument. Anyone looking for a domineering patriarch in our house would have left disappointed.
My asshole moves were on the passive-aggressive end of the spectrum. The strategic silence. The sulk. The forgetting — the errand, the promise, the thing she’d asked for three times — not quite deliberate, not quite innocent. Withdrawing warmth as punishment, deniable as tiredness. Agreeing to things I had no intention of doing because agreeing ended the conversation.
Each play was small, deniable, almost invisible. Run them for years and they deliver the same message the loud men deliver at volume: what you say or want doesn’t fully matter to me.
Entitlement doesn’t require dominance. An insecure, conflict-avoidant, soft-spoken man can run entitlement all day. I was never the loudest man in any room, and the conditioning had me anyway.
I started working on this when I was a teenager. I’ve been consciously deprogramming male entitlement for almost fifty years. Being queer helps because queers have to deconstruct patriarchy too. Experiencing r@pe from a neighbor starting at age 5 and being the fat nerdy kid always bullied by other boys gave me the scars inside and out to understand male violence and sexual violence first hand.
I’m remarried now, very happily. The marriage is peaceful, calm, caring. I like to think part of that peace exists because I was able — eventually — to really hear what my ex had to say. Ditto for female friends and colleagues over the years.
So when I say yes, all men, I am not pointing at the bad ones from a safe distance. There is no safe distance. The conditioning got planted in all of us before we were old enough to refuse it, and no amount of progressive political planking uninstalls it.
Fifty years in, I still catch myself running plays. The work never finishes.
3
I’ve been thinking about the stories of male heroes I love in movies. The ones I’ve watched twenty times.
Luke Skywalker walks into the Dark Side Cave on Dagobah. Yoda tells him his weapons won’t be needed. He brings them anyway. Inside he meets Vader, ignites his saber, takes the head off his enemy — and the mask burns open to reveal his own face. The lesson could not be plainer: the thing you’re fighting is also in you. Luke fails the cave. He ignores the lesson, rushes off half-trained, and loses a hand to the truth he wasn’t ready for. The reckoning keeps coming back until he stops fighting it. Luke’s final test comes in the evil Emperor’s throne room. Goaded into rage, he beats Vader down and severs his mechanical hand — then stops, staring at his own mechanical hand, the one Vader took from him. The same rage. The same inheritance. Invited to finish the kill and take his father’s place, he throws his weapon away. The line he says next isn’t I’m nothing like my father. It’s I am a Jedi, like my father before me. The angry inheritance fully named. The choice for good made anyway.
Jason Bourne wakes up with no memory. A clean slate. No record of the harm he’s done. Which is the deal every man running the deflection playbook is trying to negotiate — no record, nothing to account for. Bourne gets that deal handed to him for free, and he turns it down across four films. He crosses continents to recover exactly the memories that indict him. I can see their faces, he says. Everyone I ever killed. And once he has the truth, he finds the daughter of a man he murdered and tells her what really happened to her parents. Nobody would ever have known. He does it anyway. An honest account of his own harm — that’s what separates him from the conditioning that built him.
T’Challa in Black Panther becomes king and inherits a lie. His father murdered his younger brother and abandoned his nephew, and the kingdom buried it. When the abandoned son comes home as Killmonger, T’Challa’s reckoning is with what came down through his bloodline. He doesn’t get to say that was my father, not me. He stands before his ancestors and says it to their faces: You were wrong. All of you were wrong. Then he takes the wrong on as his own and changes what Wakanda is. He doesn’t defeat his shadow. He carries him to the mountainside to watch the sunset, and mourns him.
I’ve loved stories like these my whole life. Most of us have.
Every one of these heroes is required to do the same thing before the story will call him a hero. Face what’s inside. Name the inheritance. Make an honest accounting of the harm — his own, his father’s, his nation’s — and let the accounting change how he lives. Not once. As many times as it takes, because the conditioning that lives inside doesn’t stay conquered.
Somehow we keep identifying with the wrong scene. We want the redemption in the throne room without the suffering and revelation found in the cave.
And for many of us who lead private lives, we might get away with that. But the point of my prior post was that if you’re a man who’s asking for our votes then you need some receipts to show you’ve done the work, to prove to us that you’ve gone to the Dark Side Cave, you’ve got lessons you can name and not hide behind “my trauma made me say misogynistic things and cheat on my wife, but I’ve gone to therapy since then so it’s all good.” That’s not enough.
The mythology we love has been telling us the requirement all along. Not all men is what a man says when he refuses to go in the cave and look at his own face that awaits in the helmet.
4
There’s a scene in Batman Begins that I love to quote. Young Bruce Wayne has fallen down a well. His father carries him home and asks: Why do we fall, Bruce? So we can learn to pick ourselves back up.
It’s a good line. I’ve leaned on it myself and I use it with my son when life deals him a blow.
Bruce fell down a well. The ground gave way. Later, a villain took his parents. Every fall in that story comes from outside — life, fate, the bad guy. The whole mythology of masculine resilience runs on that assumption. Getting knocked down by something else, training in the mountains, returning stronger.
There’s no scene for the other kind of fall. The one where you look around from laying on the floor and slowly realize nobody pushed you. Where the harm in the room is harm you caused, and the person hurt is someone you love. No Rocky-style training montage exists for that.
Our mythology goes silent right at the moment we need it most, and into that silence rushes the whole playbook — the deflection, the whataboutism, the quiet sulk, the counterattack. We were handed no script for standing back up from a fall we caused or from the harm we have done to others we care about.
But one community did write that script. It’s not perfect by any means. But it holds lessons for what is required of men conditioned by patriarchy.
I’ve spent forty-five years around twelve-step rooms. I grew up in the wreckage of alcoholism and found my way to the rooms built for people like me. Recovery culture solved the exact problem our hero mythology skips. The rooms are full of people whose falls were self-inflicted. People who hurt the ones they loved most, who ran every play in the deflection book for years, and then stopped. Where you learn that the wounds you carry are not necessarily your fault — but your recovery and the work required to not transmit that harm forward to others is absolutely your responsibility.
The script they wrote goes something like this. You admit the problem is real and that willpower alone hasn’t touched it. You take a searching and fearless inventory of your own conduct and character. You name what you find out loud to another human being. You make amends — repair, demonstrated over time, which asks far more of you than an apology. You keep taking inventory daily, because the condition gets managed, never cured. And you carry what you’ve learned to others still struggling, because the work was never only for you.
Powerless over the old conditioning. Responsible for the recovery going forward.
That paradox maps onto patriarchal conditioning with almost no adjustment. No man chose the conditioning. It got poured into us before we could consent — the entitlement, the scripts, the violence, the quiet certainty that our comfort comes first.
And none of that is an alibi. The inventory, the honest naming, the amends, the daily practice — all of it stays ours to do. Nobody graduates and recovery is 100% your responsibility no matter who or what caused your troubles in the first place. The rooms have two key phrases for how it works: one day at a time; progress, not perfection.
They also expect the relapse. That might be their deepest wisdom. The fall is built into the program’s assumptions. You will slip. You will run an old play. You will catch yourself mid-sulk or mid-deflection after years of knowing better. The rooms don’t treat the fall as failure of the work. What they won’t abide is hiding it.
5
So why do it? Why sign up for an inventory that never closes, a practice with no graduation ceremony, a cave that doesn’t stay conquered?