There’s a particular conversation that happens online and in living rooms that makes me deeply uncomfortable. A man will say, tentatively or angrily, that he feels loved only for what he provides, not for who he is. And almost immediately, the shutters come down. We tell him he’s wrong. We remind him of his privilege. We point out that women have it worse. We accuse him of playing the victim or wallowing in toxic masculinity.I understand the impulse. When you’ve spent your life fighting against systems that diminish you, when you’re exhausted from explaining your own pain, the last thing you want to hear is complaints from someone who seems to benefit from those very systems. But here’s what we miss in our defensiveness: when we refuse to hear what men are telling us about their experience of masculinity, we’re actually reinforcing the exact dynamics we claim to oppose.
The patriarchy doesn’t just harm women. It sets up a brutal trade for men too. It tells them their value is instrumental, not intrinsic. It teaches them from boyhood that love must be earned through achievement, provision, and utility. Be strong. Be successful. Be useful. Protect and provide. Your worth is measured by your output, your paycheck, your ability to fix things and solve problems. A man who cannot provide is a failed man. A man who needs help is weak. A man who expresses pain is pathetic.
This is the water men swim in, and when they surface to gasp that they’re drowning, we often push their heads back under. We do this because we’ve conflated describing a problem with endorsing it. When a man says he feels valued only for what he provides, we hear him defending that arrangement rather than lamenting it. We hear him demanding that women’s unpaid labor continue to shore up his ego. We hear entitlement when he might be expressing grief.
But consider what happens when we shut down these conversations. We confirm the lesson patriarchy already taught him: your feelings don’t matter, your pain isn’t real, you don’t get to be vulnerable, nobody wants to hear about your inner life. Suck it up. Be useful. That’s all you’re good for anyway. The message lands exactly where patriarchy needs it to land, keeping men isolated in their prescribed roles, unable to imagine or build different ways of being.
The cruel brilliance of patriarchy is that it conscripts its apparent beneficiaries into their own oppression. Yes, men receive real advantages from these systems, often at women’s direct expense. But the deal comes with terms that hollow them out from the inside. You can have power and status, but you cannot have emotional honesty. You can be respected, but not soft. You can be needed, but not needy. The system gives with one hand and takes with the other, and it requires our participation to maintain itself.
When we refuse to acknowledge men’s experiences of these dynamics, when we treat their pain as either invented or deserved, we make it impossible to build solidarity against the actual enemy. We create a situation where men learn that feminism means their feelings are illegitimate, that challenging patriarchy means shouldering its expectations alone and in silence. We make patriarchy look like the better deal because at least it pretends to offer something in return for men’s sacrifices, even if that something is ultimately hollow.
This doesn’t mean we’re obligated to be men’s therapists. It doesn’t mean women need to do the emotional labor of deprogramming men from patriarchy while still fighting their own battles against it. It doesn’t mean we pretend the playing field is level or that men’s pain from patriarchy equals women’s oppression by it. The impacts aren’t symmetrical and we don’t need to pretend they are.
But we can do something much simpler: we can stop actively reinforcing patriarchal messages when men dare to question them. We can recognize that “I feel loved only for what I provide” is actually an anti-patriarchal observation, not a defense of male privilege. We can acknowledge that this feeling, even when it comes from a place of partial understanding or self-pity, is pointing at something real about how gender roles cage everyone.
The conversation we should be having is this: yes, that feeling is real, and it’s a feature of patriarchy, not a bug. The system that elevated your grandfather and diminished your grandmother also taught him he was only as good as his last paycheck. The same forces that gave you certain advantages also trapped you in a very narrow definition of manhood. And the answer isn’t to go back to some imagined past where these trades felt more worthwhile, where your utility was rewarded with unquestioned authority. The answer is to dismantle the system that treats anyone’s worth as transactional in the first place.
We need men to want liberation from patriarchy, not just women. We need them to see how these systems harm them too, even as we remain clear-eyed about who bears the heaviest costs. When men start to articulate the ways masculinity constrains them, that’s not the time to shut them down. That’s the opening, the crack in the edifice, the moment when we might actually find common cause.
Because the alternative is what we have now: men who feel unheard, who double down on patriarchal promises because at least those promises claim to see them, who become easy recruits for movements that tell them their pain is women’s fault, who never develop the analysis that would help them understand how gender hurts everyone in different ways.
We don’t have to choose between acknowledging men’s pain and fighting for women’s liberation. In fact, we can’t achieve one without the other. The same system is playing us all, and refusing to see the water everyone’s drowning in doesn’t make anyone safer. It just ensures we’ll keep treading water in the same poisoned pool, exhausted and alone, instead of working together to drain it.