Can You Hate the Patriarchy and Still Love Men?

Short answer: yes.

Long answer: It’s complicated.

The cringiest thing I can admit (and I hate that it feels cringy):

I love men. Truly. And I carry an ache in my being to be loved by men. My hunger has been ferocious at times and complicated. Not just for the romantic kind of love, but for love to be the foundation of the many different kinds of relationships I have with men.

But right alongside the love, the hope and the ache, lives distrust, rage and grief. And I don’t always know how to hold it all.

My story begins like many people’s stories.

My papa is standing over my tiny newborn body wrapped in a pink baby blanket, his heart feeling a multitude of truths at once.

“I can’t believe you’re mine,” he whispers to himself, and then he speaks sweetly to me. “You’re so beautiful, even with your crooked nose and dented head. Birth is pretty intense, huh, my love? Don’t worry, your nose will straighten. Your head will fill out. But even if it didn’t, you’d still be the most beautiful girl in the world.”

My papa promises to keep me safe. To protect me. To love me forever.

Parents are supposed to fall in love with their babies. It’s how the species survives. But I think we spend the rest of our lives chasing that original moment of being so fully loved, the one that says: you are lovable simply because you exist. And even more so if we did not receive it. Something deep inside us knows it’s our birthright to be loved so purely.

My father did love me. He promised himself he would never be like his father, and he kept that promise. He didn’t drink. He wasn’t violent. He was loving, playful, gentle and truthfully, to this day, one of my most favourite people in the world. And, he was also sometimes like a ghost, physically present, emotionally elsewhere. trying to outrun his own demons that haunted him.

Years later, I would read bell hooks and find language for what I had felt but couldn’t name. In The Will to Change, she writes about how patriarchy asks men to sever themselves from their own emotional lives. Not because they are incapable of feeling, but because they were never safely held in their feeling.

It is a system that privileges men, but it also wounds them. Where does my father turn to let himself be held in the healing hands of another when men are taught to bury their pain, to be “strong”, to rise above. My father loved me inside a system that had taught him to amputate parts of himself and keep his most wounded self hidden.

And that is where my story begins.

Years later, I am eight years old, and my papa finds me crouched between the car and the garage as I hide from the neighbourhood bully.

“What are you doing, buddy?”

“Shhh,” I whisper. “It’s Percy.”

Percy seems so big to me. At the age of 9, he’s a whole year older, and he’s terrifying. With a fist full of dirty fingernails waving in the air, he’d hurl threats as he drove by on his BMX bike. My father laughs. “Ah, he’s just full of piss and vinegar. I bet you could take him. I just need to teach you a few fighting moves. My girl’s gotta learn how to defend herself. I won’t always be there to protect you.” Playfully, he tries to get me to “put up my dukes!”

“I don’t want to learn how to fight,” I say on my lower lip, quivering, trying to hold back tears. “I want him to be less scary.”

He drops his fists and pulls me into a hug.

Even then, I began to understand something: the burden was already shifting toward me. Learn to fight. Learn to defend. Learn to manage the danger.

At thirteen, my father blocks the front door, and he looks like he’s about to burst into cartoon-like smoke billowing from his ears. “We are not leaving the house with you looking like that!”

It’s the 80s. I look like a teenage Madonna – Lucky Star edition. I’m dressed in tight leopard print pants, neon pink heels, an armful of bangles and a black bra peeking through a white lace tank top.

“You will change before we go to church!” he commands

My mom bursts into a dramatic lament, “Why do you have to embarrass your father and me like this?”

But looking back, I don’t think it was embarrassing. My father had started to clock the way grown (married) men at church let their eyes linger over my body. How they would sneak peeks at my curves. The way lust would pool at the corners of mouths. I was thirteen years old.

I noticed too. And lust to a girl with a hungry heart feels a little like love, or something close enough to it. Grasping onto the empty promise that it will somehow blossom into love.

Before I ever knew the word patriarchy, I was negotiating it with my body. What I didn’t yet understand was that patriarchy teaches girls that love must be earned through performance, accommodation, and desirability. It teaches boys that intimacy can be detached from responsibility. Neither lesson is rooted in mutual humanity.

bell hooks writes, “The first act of violence that patriarchy demands of males is not violence toward women. Instead patriarchy demands of all males that they engage in acts of psychic self-mutilation, that they kill off the emotional parts of themselves.” That mutilation does not excuse harm. But it does explain why so many men struggle to show up in ways that are tender, accountable, and fully present.

Patriarchy distorts love for all of us.

By the time the # MeToo movement went viral, I had collected far too many # MeToo stories for one lifetime. My fingers remained frozen over the keyboard as I watched them all roll onto the screen. It was all of us, every woman I knew. And I was frozen. I couldn’t figure out how many #metoo’s to write to encapsulate my story. And this is when I started to discover something that was equally twisted: compassion runs dry when people have too many of these kinds of stories. We start to turn on the victims. There must be something you’re doing wrong to have this happen over and again. We victim-blame when the truth is too much to bear witness to.

10 years ago, in training to become a spiritual-relational-somatic psychotherapist, I sat unravelling in front of my dear and very kind teacher, Michael. At the core of my wounds was a question that haunted me daily:

Why am I so unlovable?

It was the wrong question. But I didn’t know that yet.

“You need to get more love in your life,” Michael said gently.

A growl rose in me. “No shit! How the eff am I supposed to do that? In a world that’s hateful, violent, dismissive of one another’s humanity, where do you find love?”

I was angry that he made it about me. Shouldn’t it be the world that needs to work on being more loving?

That was over a decade ago. The lesson I’ve been in ever since is this: love is not something you contort yourself to earn. It is something you learn to allow, recognize, and co-create carefully and with discernment.

It has meant embracing more complicated forms of relationality. It has meant letting men witness my hurt. let their grief, their rage, their love reach me. And for me to see them more clearly, in their complexities, how they’ve been taught to disconnect from the most tender parts of themselves.

And this is where the conversation about dismantling patriarchy becomes nuanced.

We are living in a time when headlines about powerful men escaping consequences barely shock us anymore. Violence and misogyny are not anomalies; they are ambient. They are the water we swim in.

The rage inside of me runs deep. I growl with an intensity my body does not always trust I can hold.

But rage alone will not dismantle the system.

The question becomes: how do we engage men in the work without collapsing into either “not all men” defensiveness or dehumanizing blame?

Loretta J Ross offers a powerful framework. She writes, “Calling people in is a call out done with love.” Her work insists that we can hold people accountable without discarding them, that transformation requires relationship rather than humiliation. And I’ve been pondering how revolutionary love must also embrace redemptive love. Are we ready for that kind of work? I’m not always sure.

If we want men to fight patriarchy with us, we cannot simply position them as the enemy. We must invite them into their own liberation.

That does not mean minimizing harm. It means believing men are capable of more than the scripts they were handed.

Can you hate the patriarchy and still love men?

Yes.

Because patriarchy is not synonymous with men. It is a system that shapes men, often against their own wholeness.

I hate violence.

I hate misogyny.

I hate the silence that protects abuse.

But I do not hate men.

I love my father, who tried to rewrite the story he inherited.

I love the men who have felt deeply for how they have hurt me, and embraced the complicated work of rupture and repair.

I love the men who have sat across from me and said, “I didn’t know how to let myself feel before.”

I love the men who are willing to look at the water we’re swimming in and say, “This isn’t right, we need change.”

Engaging men in dismantling patriarchy means creating spaces where they can confront their socialization without collapsing into shame. Shame freezes. Accountability transforms. Redemptive love heals.

bell hooks reminds us, “The moment we choose to love we begin to move against domination.” If patriarchy is a system of domination, then love, real love, accountable love, is revolutionary and redemptive.

But love is not passive; it’s not permissive. It requires raw truth-telling. It requires deep listening with careful eyes on our defensive strategies. Then we can be transformed by the heart of another.

It requires men to listen when women say, This hurt me.

It requires women to resist collapsing all men into caricature.

 It requires all of us to tolerate the discomfort of humans dwelling with one another in our subjective experiences. Am I willing to hear the secret stories you tell yourself about being a man? The pressures you feel to conform and perform? Will you hear the pain of what it means for me to be in a relationship with you as a man?

It also requires discernment; we cannot enter conversations with one another when the presence of harm or even violence continues. I choose to enter conversations with those who are willing to be changed by them, those who are curious, who can sit in discomfort, who are not just defending themselves but searching for something truer.

What would it mean for us to be in deep, nuanced conversation as human beings shaped by the same violent water? What if we lower our swords and shields and truly listen? Everything I’ve learned as a relationship (couples) therapist has taught me that this is the key to true liberation and transformation. And it’s also truly daunting at times.

I am no longer three days old under my father’s loving gaze. I am a grown woman with plenty of scars on my being. I carry evidence of harm. I also carry evidence of love.

It is complicated.

But I know this: when men have been willing to witness my pain without defensiveness, something shifts. When I have been willing to see their conditioning without contempt, something opens. When the men in my life rise with me against what has hurt us all, I feel hopeful.

“To be truly visionary we have to root our imagination in our concrete reality while simultaneously imagining possibilities beyond that reality.” bell hooks

Patriarchy thrives on disconnection. Dismantling it will require connection. Courageous, messy, and continuous.

Can you hate the patriarchy and still love men?

Yes.

And if we are going to build something different, we will have to.

All of my hunger and desire for radical, transformative love has been poured into a series of storytelling shows with the hope that the more we listen to each other’s stories, the more we can start working together.