yes, all men

a few thoughts on what good guys inherit from bad men

Good men love to tell you they’re not like the others. Like the bad ones. They say it like a disclaimer, a shield, a little stamp of moral exemption. And they wear it like a badge, proof that somewhere, somehow, they opted out of the ugliness stitched into the world. They want you to see them as different, as above it all.

But what they don't say, what they rarely even seem to notice, is how much they benefit from the damage those "others" cause. They inherit the exhausted trust, the lowered standards, the desperate hope. They get to walk through doors that bad men slammed shut behind them. And they barely have to knock.

It's not enough to be good if goodness only exists in contrast to the violence someone else committed. It’s not enough to float just above the wreckage and call that flight. If your morality only exists because someone else did worse, then it isn’t really morality. It’s convenience.

And before anyone decides to get offended, let me be clear. This isn’t an attack on men. It’s not about hating them or punishing them or grouping them all into some monolithic villain. This is about observation. It’s about patterns. It’s about looking around at the world and asking: who gets to feel safe here? Who gets rewarded? Who gets excused? And it’s supposed to serve as a reminder that being decent in a broken system is not the end of the work, it’s barely the starting point.

We’ve all been in those conversations. You know the ones. Where women or anyone on the receiving end of male entitlement is sharing their experiences. And someone interrupts with that tired, anxious phrase: "Not all men!" Like it's a legal objection. Like the mere suggestion of complicity is slander. But not all men what? Not all men are cruel? Okay? Kudos to you! You want a medal for behaving like a person should? You want a parade for doing the bare minimum? Congratulations on not being a monster. Now what?

The truth is, good men benefit from bad men. Not because they actively choose to, but because they live in a world shaped by the harm those men have caused. And in that world, simply not doing harm becomes its own kind of performance. A shortcut to praise. A way to be seen as heroic without actually doing anything brave.

They get applause for not crossing lines that should never have been an option in the first place.

They get labeled as safe, different, special, not because they have built anything better, but because they have managed to stand still while others burned everything down.