On Intelligent Masculinity

On Intelligent Masculinity

I’ve been asked — sometimes sincerely, sometimes as a trap — why a man spends this much of his platform lifting up female creators, defending women’s rights, and standing beside survivors of assault, abuse, and rape. So let me define the thing plainly, so there’s no room left to misread it.

I call it intelligent masculinity. (I’ll give Nick Paro credit for the terminology)

And I want to speak, for a moment, directly to the women who’ve decided the safest position is that all men are bad — that any man who shows up is either a predator or a predator-in-waiting who hasn’t been caught yet. I understand where that armor came from. Someone earned your distrust the hard way. But when the test becomes a purity test — when no man can pass because passing was never the point — you’ve stopped protecting yourself and started building a wall that keeps out the ones who came to stand with you.

That’s the trap I’m asking you to see. If every man is guilty by category, then the man who does the work and the man who does the harm collapse into the same figure, and there’s no incentive left for any of us to be better — because better was never going to be enough. You don’t dismantle a hierarchy by flipping it. You dismantle it by refusing to judge a person by the group they were born into. That principle has to run in every direction or it isn’t a principle at all.

Intelligent masculinity is not the masculinity that needs a woman to be smaller so it can feel larger. It’s not the reflex that hears a survivor’s story and answers but what about men — as if her survival were an attack. But it also isn’t the man who grovels, who performs guilt he didn’t earn to buy his way into your good graces. That performance is just a different way of making the moment about him. I’m not interested in either.

I promote female creators because their work is good and because the feed is engineered to make them compete instead of connect. I defend women’s rights because rights that can be withdrawn from anyone were never secure for anyone. And I stand with those who’ve been assaulted, abused, or raped because someone taught them to make themselves small — and my job, as I understand it, is to make the room bigger, not to make myself the center of it.

When I co-wrote Me Too Has Become Me Only, I wrote as a physician and said plainly that the lived experience of harm was not mine to narrate. I gave that ground to the woman who had earned it. That’s the whole posture: knowing which lane is yours, and holding the door open for the voice that belongs in the other.

So here’s what I’d ask of the women who’ve written us all off: judge me by what I do. Not by what I am. That’s the exact courtesy you’ve been demanding for yourselves — and you’re right to demand it. It just can’t only run one way.

A man can be clinical and still be moved. Blunt and still be kind. Certain of himself and still certain that the story on the table is hers, not his.

That’s not weakness dressed up in enlightenment. That’s what an intelligent man looks like when he’s paying attention.

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