The bar for progressive men is underground, and this week it got a shovel.
Graham Platner suspended his Senate campaign this week after a former partner accused him of rape. And look, by the time we got here, nobody could claim they hadn’t been given a heads-up. There was already reporting about women describing troubling experiences with him. There was the tattoo situation. (The Nazi-adjacent tattoo situation, which is a phrase I’d love to stop typing about men running for office.) And through it all, a reliable chorus explaining why each new revelation was actually fine, actually context-dependent, actually not the dealbreaker it would obviously be if the guy had an R next to his name.
Watching this unfold, I kept coming back to one thought: the sheer, luxurious, spa-day levels of grace we extend to progressive men. Not because they’ve earned it as partners or colleagues, but because at some point we collectively decided that voting the right way is the same thing as having good character. It’s very much not.
One of the left’s most cherished bedtime stories is that misogyny is someone else’s problem. It lives over there, with the andrew tate podcast bros and the MAGA guys who think women shouldn’t be allowed to vote. Progressive men, we’re told, are built different.They’ve read the books, or at least they’ve read the goodreads reviews of the books. They went to therapy. They have pronouns in their bios. Somewhere along the way, fluency in feminist vocabulary got upgraded to immunity from patriarchal thinking. I made that upgrade myself, more than once, and I have the mistakes to show for it.
Every man alive was raised marinating in a misogynistic culture. That’s not a personal attack, that’s just the water. The question was never whether patriarchy shaped you (congratulations, it did!) but whether you’re willing to keep asking how it still does. Present tense. Ongoing. Forever!!
Which is exactly why my hackles go up around men who announce they’ve “done the work.” Done... what work? Handed in the assignment? Received the certificate? Reading bell hooks does not vaccinate you against entitlement any more than reading James Baldwin vaccinates you against racism. If anything, knowledge without humility calcifies into armor. Once a man decides he’s one of the enlightened ones, accountability stops feeling like information and starts feeling like defamation. Just watch his ten-minute selfie video blaming everyone but himself. It's a perfect illustration of a particular kind of progressive man, the one who's convinced misogyny is a political affiliation instead of socialization. He can identify sexism from across the aisle with remarkable accuracy. The only place he never seems to find it is in the front-facing camera. The brosocialist believes sexism is real, rampant, and located exclusively in the republican party. Convenient, since that's the one place he'll never have to look.
My working theory: the men most likely to disappoint you aren’t always the openly sexist ones. They’re the ones who believe they’ve transcended sexism entirely, ascended, floated up past it, achieved feminist nirvana. Because once a man decides he’s beyond critique, he is, in my experience, roughly five minutes away from proving otherwise.
And oh, have I seen this movie. Progressive men don’t reject feminism. That would be gauche. They reject feminism in a far more sophisticated and covert way: they simply decide it doesn’t apply to them. Feminism is a practice for other men, worse men, men who need it. And that self-exemption doesn’t just make them the same as the guys they sneer at. It makes them better equipped. The openly sexist man announces himself at the door. The enlightened one gets invited in. One gets your defenses. The other gets your trust and the benefit of the doubt.
Thse men absorb feminism’s vocabulary like a sponge. They become dazzlingly articulate about systems of oppression. Malle allies can spot sexism in other men from space. Feminist fluency gets these men into rooms, relationships, and bodies that would stay locked to them otherwise, and once inside they feed. They drain trust, labor, softness, years. They metabolize your best instincts, your empathy, your urge to believe men can be better, and convert it all into cover. Then the criticism lands on them, and *poof* the structural analysis evaporates. Suddenly it’s a misunderstanding. It’s a smear. It’s just a vindictive ex. Context you, silly woman, are simply missing. Watch how fast “everything is systemic” becomes “except me, I’m an individual.” Watch how the same mouth that quoted bell hooks to get in the door uses her vocabulary to call you crazy on the way out.
THESE MEN ARE NOT FEMINISTS. THEY ARE CON ARTISTS. We like to think of the right as being the ultimate purveyor of this but the left does it too. Trump performs the rich chauvinist because his audience wants a king. Brosocialists perform the evolved man because their audience, us, wants an exception. Both are drag. Both are fantasy. And both performances have the exact same subject, which is never women. It’s him. It’s always about HIM. It’s still steeped in misogny.
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May 21
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This is why these stories keep landing as shocking to everyone but women. Every time a progressive man implodes, there’s this collective gasp of betrayal, as if left politics come with a warranty. A man agreeing with me about healthcare tells me precisely nothing about how he handles rejection, conflict, power, intimacy, or being told no. If you exist in a female body, you have met these men: the ones desperate for you to recognize their safety without ever providing a shred of evidence for it.
And *deep breath* we have to talk about our part in this. Progressive women want so badly to have found the exception that we start doing pro bono defense work on behalf of these guys. A conservative man says something unsettling: red flag, next. A progressive man does something unsettling, and suddenly we’re out here with a magnifying glass and a corkboard, connecting strings, hunting for the innocent explanation. He’s self-aware! He’s been to therapy! He couldn’t possibly have meant it that way! Babe. WHY NOT? I am guilty of this. I am so so so guilty of this. We live in fantasy too. We want to believe in men so badly.
The bar for progressive men is so low it’s practically geological. We throw parades for them knowing things women have had to know just to survive. We hand out gold stars for baseline emotional literacy like it’s the nobel. Putting these men on pedestals doesn’t make our movement better it just makes us weaker.
Here’s the thing: the men I actually trust have never once told me they’re one of the good ones. Not once. They understand that misogyny isn’t something you opt out of by voting correctly or by calling yourself an “ally.” It’s a system you spend your whole life unlearning, knowing you will never, ever be done.
And now that I’ve been through the wringer with my own brocialists and faux feminists, that’s the only answer that has ever made me feel safe. Because the man who’s convinced he graduated from self-examination stopped doing it a long time ago. So no, I’m not lowering the bar another inch. Not out of bitterness, out of respect, for myself and honestly for men, because the real ones can clear it. Raise the bar and the good ones don’t disappear. Only the performative men do. And that’s why I actually believe this Graham Platner fiasco is a good thing. We don't win by lowering the bar. We win by believing it can be met. High standards for men aren't cynicism about them. They're the last remaining form of optimism.
If you want to hear from a man who would never call himself an ally but quietly does the work anyway, this week's episode of Boy Problems features the inimitable Matthew Broussard. We talk dating, masculinity, comedy, relationships, and all the ridiculous ways men and women misunderstand each other. It's thoughtful, it's hilarious, and it's one of my favorite conversations we've had!!
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