Men are Broken. And Only Men Hold the Solution.

How to Evolve humanity when more than 30% are embracing regression?

Image by Steve Buissinne from Pixabay

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Making generalisations is problematic. Is my husband of 25 years broken? Only in his mitochondria. Is my youngest son broken? No, he had a rough few years, but now he’s happily partnered and is googling birth plans and how to care for newborns. Are my male readers and supporters broken? Hell no. They are reading words written by a woman, which instantly puts them in a heroic minority.¹

But my eldest son, and the #NotAllMen men, who feel called out when women complain about the behaviour of far too many of their sex and the men who jump into my comments to call me a bitch who is doing more harm than good? Yes, the patriarchy has fucked them all over, in numerous different ways.

The rule of good writing means a headline can’t say ‘Some men are broken.’ That doesn’t trigger male outrage, but it triggers ‘So what?’ Yes, so what? Some women are broken, too. Some ATMs are broken. Some dishwashers are broken. If something exists in the world, you can bet a percentage of examples of that thing will be, in some sense or other, broken. We lose sight of the problem. Which is this: there are an increasing number of men who think women are dishwashers, and a decreasing number of women who think men are ATMs.²

Enough men are broken in dangerous ways — dangerous to women, children, the planet, and yes, other men — for me to call this piece ‘Men are broken.’ On the whole, it is men rather than women who are panicking about their inability to find sexual partners. Men, rather than women, are ill-equipped for a reality where women don’t need them to live good lives. As Lyle W Fass so beautifully puts it

men have been running things forever and the returns are in. This is the resume. War, hierarchy, domination, environmental ruin, financial predation, loneliness, fascism, pornographic ego, and a giant digital bunker for men who cannot process that women are no longer structurally obligated to choose them.

Feminism has led to women’s independence and self-sufficiency, and rather than adapt to the new landscape, a solid percentage of men want to squeeze the genie (women’s freedom) back into the bottle.

What percentage is hard to judge. What do we measure? 50 per cent of British young men believe that feminism “has gone too far and makes it harder for men to succeed.” Globally, men under 30 are twice as likely as their grandads to think wives should obey their husbands. And the result of this attitudinal regression? Yep, the male loneliness epidemic. Too many men think they should be able to dominate women, and women are less and less interested in being dominated.

Because no, we are not ‘naturally submissive.’ And we’re clued up now: we know that deferring to men leads to our abuse. We are done with being treated as subordinate creatures who exist for men’s pleasure. And the men who don’t adapt to this landscape, men who don’t evolve, are going to have to say goodbye to their sex lives and bloodlines.

From frontline reports, dating these days is a nightmare. In The Real Reason Dating is So Hard Right Now (That No One is Naming), Celeste Davis points out dating behaviour reflects the realities of earlier centuries rather than this one: men are behaving like they don’t need committed relationships, which on all measurable outcomes, benefit them excessively, and women continue to desire them, despite the fact that single women are the happiest, healthiest and wealthiest demographic. This is understandable when one is seeking love, companionship, and perhaps someone to raise children with, but statistics show this is an extremely risky business with far too many poor outcomes for the women involved.

The solution Celeste proposes is equality. And yes, speaking from within an equal partnership, happiness is the outcome for both parties. We each do what we like and are good at. He cooks, does the shopping and laundry. I bring in and manage the money, do gardening and DIY. We split the housework, and when someone’s load increases or someone gets ill, the other steps up. When the kids were young, we shared most duties, but he was our daughter’s main carer.

A genuinely loving relationship is based on choice, rather than dependence. But it requires embracing risk. As Celeste Davis points out,

Relationships based on choice rather than need [are] way scarier. Our partner could leave at any time. There are no guarantees. We’ve got to behave in a way where our partner keep choosing to stay with us day after day.

It’s so much more secure to set things up so that our partner is dependent on us.

And yet, that’s not love. That’s a cage.

Embracing the risk that your partner can choose not to be with you takes a level of emotional maturity that far too many people appear not to possess, and particularly those men hamstrung by distorted ideas of masculinity that require that they dominate partners they view as subordinate. In that quote now doing the rounds on the internet, “Marriage ensures even the poorest man gets a free slave.”

So how to move society as a whole towards equality? How to make equality the norm, thus making everybody happier? Not through women writing about it, I suspect. The men who read feminist writing and agree with it aren’t the people we need to reach, and the people we need to reach the most don’t listen to, or read, the words of women.

In It’s Not Only The Violence: Women are Enraged by Men’s Cultivated Ignorance Soraya Chemaly writes of the reluctance of (80%) of men to read women’s words.

In this 2023 study and numerous other measures over the years, men overwhelmingly read only books by other men, and if they do read women’s work, prefer them dead.

Dead women who authored ‘classics’ are safe. They’re never going to turn around and tell you to pull your socks up (or indeed, pick them up off the floor, and learn to use the washing machine).

So the men have to do this thing. Embrace equality, and write about it, and talk about it, with/to other men. Only men are going to solve the problem that men created.

I’m not saying it’s easy. A lot of self-awareness is required. This attempt, for example, is well-meaning but missing the mark. In ‘A Mile in Her Shoes,’ a straight man stuck in drag (for laughs) when the parade is over, the men around him are drunk and his friend (with the key to the apartment) is missing, finds out what the male gaze (and evading male horniness) feels like, for a night. But the way he talks about women stops short of getting it. Here’s a scene from his youth, where he’s one of a drunk group of guys, late at night, approaching an elevator:

Inside was a lone woman. She wore a tight blue dress with heels, probably coming home from her own version of a terrible frat party. She saw us approaching, several intoxicated men, and so she leaned forward and started pressing the door close button.

This was taken as a challenge.

One of us ran towards the elevator, trying to catch it before it closed. She saw him coming and desperately pounded the button, forgetting all pretense. But my friend won the race, managing to place his hand through the sensor and prevent it from closing.

“What the fuck?!” He asked her with righteous indignation. She didn’t say anything. Instead, she slid sideways past him and hurried to the stairwell.

“Nice try!” he shouted at her as she fled.

After being sexually assaulted (which he calls being ‘sexually harassed’, a minimising mis-naming), he feels experienced enough to reframe it:

I thought back to that moment in the elevator. When that woman repeatedly pressed the door close button. At the time, I thought she was just being a rude bitch.

But now I had lived her perspective. She saw several grown men approaching her, all of us seemed just as big compared to her as this guy was to me. She knew that, most likely, we had nothing but good intentions. But fear is instinctual, and it manifests of its own accord. She decided that there was no fucking way she was going to be stuck in an elevator with several intoxicated grown men, so she tried to shut the door on us. When that didn’t work, she ran away.

It’s nice that he no longer thinks she’s “a rude bitch”, but he still doesn’t get it. Imagine thinking, “She knew that, most likely, we had nothing but good intentions”! No, she didn’t know that. We never know that. A bunch of drunk men want to pile into a lift with a solo woman? The chances of being raped or sexually assaulted are high, and sexual harassment is pretty much a certainty.³ It’s clear from everything else in this essay that, despite having a small taste of what it’s like to have to deal with horny men, the author is a long way from seeing us as human.

So who is doing it well? The previously tagged Lyle W Fass, whose full awakening as a feminist ally is described in The Fraternity of Contempt. His article Bring Me the Matriarchy is worth reading too:

Because women did not need to “catch up” to men in some grand civilizational race. They were always there. They just had to get their ankles out of the trap. And now that they have, even partially, the backlash is everywhere, in abortion politics, in online culture, in dating, in education, in the ecstatic cruelty of male resentment turned into content. Men are furious because women have become harder to control.

So yes, women are the most marginalized group in history. They are also, increasingly, the clearest measure of whether a society deserves to call itself civilized. Show me how a culture treats women and I will tell you what it is. Show me its laws, its jokes, its religious codes, its marriage customs, its educational gaps, its rape statistics, its childcare policies, its men, and I can tell you whether it is serious or sick.

There is also A.R.Moxon, who garnishes his essay for men, ‘Fix Your Hearts or Die’, with the subtitle ‘It's an invitation, not a threat. The path to liberation for lonely men is feminism.’ It’s the same solution to relationship misery proposed by Celeste Davis: equality brings both men and women love, support, and feeling seen. His framing of patriarchy/feminism is as clear as it gets.

The system that holds that women are property of men is called patriarchy.

The system that holds that women are human beings is called feminism.

The path to a better version of humanity than the one we’re currently living with is littered with potholes and twists. Each of us can only do what we can.

Women can’t reach the men who don’t think of them as human, but men can. Male writers can’t reach the men who don’t read, but podcasters can. Though those who speak to the pain of lonely men and don’t blame women for it are fairly thin on the ground (and I’m open to recommendations). Your male friends can be challenged to be less sexist wherever they show up: social media, football, the pub. Sure, we women can challenge them too, but when they only really care what men think, then it’s men who must take the lead. A lot of us women are frankly sick of being ignored and mischaracterised.

Feminism truly is the solution to a whole raft of problems humanity is facing: the anger, depression and loneliness of both men and women, the unacceptable rates of domestic abuse and sexual violence, and all the anxiety, trauma, and generational damage that engenders. But only men are really in a position to bring it home. We women will keep doing what we can, and all the non-binary and gender fluid folk will, I hope, pull on whatever ropes they can, but it is men who have the power to make other men listen. I really hope more of you fellas can be persuaded to use it.

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Exciting Announcement :-)

I spent EIGHT years researching and writing the novel my agent says I was born to write — and calls ‘Booker-worthy’. But in the eight years it took to create, the publishing world shrank away from historical epics. Paper costs are high, margins are squeezed, and fat novels now require superstar status, not mid-range platforms.

Long-time subscribers will know what a ridiculously bumpy road I’ve travelled with this in the three years since: I’ll write it up next week in full. But in the meantime, I will tell you the upshot. After a recent London Book Fair Substack event I attended, which featured novels picked up from this platform, a Substack piece in The Bookseller and discussions with my agent, I’ve decided to publish it here, on Substack.⁴

Why I Stole Your Life tells the story of real-life footman, soldier, and (eventually) pirate Mary Read. It’s coming, a chapter a week, every Tuesday, in the old Dickens mode. It will take just under two years for the whole tale to unfold, so I hope you have patience. I’ve now had more than a decade to develop mine.

Paid subscribers will get every chapter a week in advance, starting this coming Tuesday, 14th April. Free subscribers will get the first chapter on 21st April.

I’m really excited to share this epic adventure with you. It’s going to be a huge amount of fun getting real-time responses and discussions as we experience it together. Let’s consider the comments section as some kind of lively Dickensian coffee-house!

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Make Money Good Again!

In the How to Evolve yourself corner, we looked last month at the need for good-hearted people to improve their income, and our practical session ‘Tap Into Wealth’ brought some great results. The recording is available on this link for paid subscribers, and all previous recordings can be found at this tab on the How To Evolve website.

This month, we are deepening our money work by upgrading our ‘worthy-deservingness’ quotient. Our live session is next Friday, 17th April, at 7pm BST. Paid subscribers can register to attend here: ‘I Deserve to be Comfortable and Happy’. If you say these words out loud and they don’t ring 100% true, consider coming along. Because we all, I promise you, deserve to be comfortable and happy. And you’ll only need to make the tiniest vibrational shift to manifest the money to pay for it!

1. Women writers can assume only 20% of our readers are men, unless we are Harper Lee: https://womensprize.com/gender-bias-in-mens-reading-habits-still-exists/

2. This study from the Netherlands shows that the number of economically independent women rose from 20% in 1977 to 70% in 2022. https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/news/2024/22/number-of-economically-independent-women-has-risen-from-20-to-70-percent. For the increasing number of men thinking women are dishwashers, see the doubling of sexism from the Boomer generation to Gen Z (i.e. a similar 50 year period) reported in this Guardian article: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/mar/05/gen-z-men-baby-boomers-wives-should-obey-husbands

3. If you wondered where I got my ‘more than 30% of humanity’ stat in the sub-title, it’s this depressing study where 63.5% of men admitted to rape and other forms of forced/coerced sexual activity. “Computer-assisted self-interviews were completed with a random sample of 163 unmarried Caucasian and African American men in a large metropolitan area. Almost a quarter (24.5%) of these men acknowledged committing an act since the age of 14 that met standard legal definitions of attempted or completed rape; an additional 39% had committed another type of sexual assault involving forced sexual contact or verbal coercion.” https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4589184/

4. I am not looking for any publishing advice! You can assume I am fully conversant with all the options. Thanks for understanding :-)