Why I Used to Hate Men

And how I learned to move past damaging generalizations

Once upon a time ago, when I was a maiden of 19, I hated men. It was a very generalized hatred, obviously. I loved my brothers. I loved my father. I loved my male cousins and my male friends.

But I couldn’t handle the sexism I was experiencing anymore. I was overwhelmed with anger at the way our world favored men, centered men, empowered men. I was drowning in the feeling that I didn’t matter, and my experiences didn’t matter.

At the time, yes, I would have called myself a feminist, but it’s funny to think of that now. Who I am as a feminist today is nothing like who I was then. At the time, I, myself, was embedded in the misogyny of our culture. I bought into the messages, even as I recognized them as sexist, patriarchal propaganda. I judged women for everything — particularly how they expressed their sexuality.

Basically, I thought I was supporting feminism, but really, I was still completely brainwashed by the patriarchy.

But ultimately, what had me twisted up in knots were the experiences I had endured in middle and high school. For six years, I was brutally victimized by male classmates at one school after another. When I call it sexual bullying, harassment, and assault, it doesn’t feel like enough. Those words have so little weight compared to what happened to me.

I went to eight different schools during those years and no matter where I went, it happened: systemic violence against female students perpetrated by male classmates. And no matter how hard I tried to fight back, I was told that I was overreacting, misinterpreting the situation, or that this was normal behavior for boys.

I didn’t even fully understand the weight of what happened to me until #MeToo. I didn’t understand so many of the issues I had in the years that followed until that movement finally gave me the language to define it.

I didn’t overreact. It was sexual assault. In fact, there are even some definitions of rape that include what happened to me.

Again, I’ll emphasize that this wasn’t a one-time deal or something that happened during one school year. It happened at every school I went to for six years. That’s how normalized it was. That’s how I came to know the world and to understand how I fit into it.

Only in recent years have I come to understand that I suffered severe PTSD both during those years and for many years after. I only recently gained the language to define my experience, to share it, and to own it, instead of letting it be something that “happened to me” because that’s “just what boys did.”

Only now do I look back and see that it’s no wonder I felt such hatred for men when I was 19.

Rape was inevitable. That was genuinely the climate in which I grew up.

My dad always told me that once a man got turned on, there was no stopping the train. He implored me to be careful about that — don’t say the wrong thing, don’t wear the wrong outfit, don’t do anything that might make a man think I “wanted it.” Because if a man thought I was interested in sex, that was a) my fault and b) my duty to comply.

Clearly, the rest of the world thought this, too, as evidenced by what I experienced during my school years. Bobby stuck his face in my vulva because I was wearing a skirt that didn’t cover my knees, one teacher said. Francisco snapped my bra and pinched my ass because I must have given him the idea that I liked him, another said. Tyler and his gang pushed me against the wall and dry humped me because maybe I said something that implied I was interested in one of them, my principal insisted.

I was so angry all the time and I didn’t know who to be angry at. It seemed like no matter where I turned, the story was that everything was my fault and that men could do whatever they wanted to women.

By the time I was 18, I was sleeping with a pair of scissors under my pillow and a steak knife on my bedside table. When I moved into my first apartment by myself, I would barricade the bedroom door closed with my loveseat, just in case a rapist made it through the locks on my front door or broke in through the windows.

After my boyfriend and I moved in together, a young man selling magazines came to our door while I was alone. I told him I wasn’t interested and as I closed the door, he body slammed himself against it and walked into my house, then sprawled out on my sofa.

I froze, terrified. I couldn’t even run. This was it, I realized. I had tried to avoid it as long as I could, but clearly my time was up. He was going to rape me.

“Get me a glass of water, would ya?” he asked, waving his hand toward the kitchen. “I’ve been out all day and I’m parched.”

Incredibly, I did what he told me. I got the water and brought it back to him instead of calling the police or running out the back door. I thought I had asked for it. I thought I deserved whatever he was going to do to me.

He drained the glass in a series of long gulps, then got up and said, “See ya,” and walked out the door.

I fell on the floor and wept.

I spiraled into the worst of my hatred after my boyfriend and I broke up. I literally became the stereotype of the enraged feminist. I was listening to Tori Amos’s Little Earthquakes album on a loop, writing angry poetry, and reading books about female anatomy and feminist theory.

I couldn’t get past my anger. I was so mad that my boyfriend had emotionally and physically abused me to the point where I didn’t even feel like a person anymore. I was angry that he and my best friend had slept together and then lied to me about it. I was angry that every day at work, male customers talked to me like I was an idiot. I was angry that after the breakup, several of my ex’s friends asked if I wanted to fuck, as if I’d just been returned to the swap meet and was waiting for someone else to purchase me.

I felt like I would never be seen as good enough, smart enough, or competent enough just because I was a woman. I felt like I would never have a relationship in which I felt we were equals just because I was a woman. I feared I would never feel safe in this world just because I was a woman.

And I was sick of it. I didn’t want to be in a world like that.

But one day, while talking with a male friend after his breakup, he said, “I fucking hate women. They’re so irrational and hateful. I’m glad to be rid of them.”

I sat there staring at him in shock.

“Not you,” he added, when he noticed my reaction.

But suddenly I realized the folly of my perspective.

Over time, I realized that I didn’t hate men — I hated the patriarchy. And those are two very different things. Yes, there are some men who gleefully and aggressively uphold the patriarchy. There are many who unwittingly uphold it. (Women, too.) But men represent a vast category of humans who are all wildly different. I already knew that it was dangerous to make generalizations about large groups of people. It just took me a while to realize that that’s exactly what I was doing.

I worked very hard to start looking at men as individuals. I wanted to get to know them as humans, not as a gender. And through that practice, I came to notice how damaging the patriarchy is to men, too. It’s true, it is a man’s world — but the price of benefiting from that privilege is incredibly high.

My relationship with my last partner helped me dive even deeper into this exploration of men and my own feelings about how men and women interact in this world. My ex was deeply misogynistic (something I repetitively ignored) and harbored a deep distrust of women — something that came to the surface whenever we spent time with his father, who shared those feelings.

It was painful for to me observe, and to receive, being a woman. But it made me more determined than ever to not be that way. To not turn around and do the same thing to men. I knew in my heart that equality is a road we have to travel together and that attacking or blaming each other will never get us where we need to go.

I haven’t hated men for a long time now. In fact, as I said, I never really did. I hated the system that damages and ultimately oppresses all of us.

I think the journey of every person who is marginalized by a system of oppression begins with hating the perceived oppressor. I suspect that this is part of the process of healing.

Eventually, if we keep doing our inner work, we get to the truth. Men are humans, just like any other gender. We all share that one commonality and that’s enough, in my eyes, to make us more alike than different. To make us allies and not enemies.

That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t speak firmly about gender biases or that we shouldn’t continue to make an effort to center women (meaning anyone who identifies as a woman) as we correct the gender imbalances in our culture.

But I also think it’s deeply important to work toward healing the illusory divide between the genders. We are all in this together, after all.

I’m doing my work with the greatest hope and enthusiasm that we will get there. And yes, I still listen to Little Earthquakes and rage-sing with Tori. I still sometimes write angry poetry — and essays. I still hate the patriarchy.

But I love men. And I always will.

© Yael Wolfe 2020

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