men need to decenter men too
the male gaze, the loneliness epidemic, the violence, it all leads back to how men center men. it's time they stopped. for everyone's sake
Women have been on an ongoing journey of decentering men. We're decentering them in our identities, our stories, our ambitions, our friendships, our wardrobes, our aesthetics, our sense of self-worth, even in our ideas of safety, romance, and success.
It’s a hard process, one of peeling back centuries of programming. Often painful, sometimes freeing, always necessary. We write about it. Cry about it. Joke about it. Heal through it.
I’ve been on that journey too. And somewhere along the way, I started to wonder:
Do men try to decenter women?
Do they need to?
Do they even want to?
And then it hit me, men don’t need to decenter women.
They have nothing to peel back. Because they never centered us to begin with.
They’ve never centered women a day in their lives.
Men center other men. Their obsession, rage, softness, ambition, fear, shame, and even their violence all trace back to how they measure up in the eyes of other men. The hierarchy. The approval. The shadow of the alpha.
It’s not women they’re chasing. It’s each other.
The people who haunt them, inspire them, compete with them, break them, and save them, are other men.
If anything, men need to decenter themselves, and each other.
Men need to decenter men.
Let’s talk about their egos for example, men are constantly performing, but the audience isn’t us, it’s other men.
The car, the job, the watch, the girlfriend — she’s a prop, not the point. The point is to be seen having her. The point is what the boys will say. Whether it’ll inspire jealousy or dap. Whether it earns a place in the pecking order.
Even “being a man of your word” is often less about integrity and more about being seen as solid by the boys. Loyalty isn’t necessarily about love, it’s about rank.
I’ll say it: most of these guys don’t even like women that much.
Even the men who seem like they live for women, the ones who chase, obsess, lust over, aren’t really doing it for women. Their desire isn’t about closeness, curiosity, or connection. It’s about access, ownership, gratification. It’s about proving something to themselves, or to other men. Even when it looks like it’s about us, it’s always about them. Their impulses. Their wants. Their feelings. Their relief. Their image. Their control.