Choosing the Bear: Identifying as a Woman in the Darkest Timeline

I’m feeling the weight of everything today. The devastation of living in this specific timeline. It’s definitely not grief; it’s the other shoe finally dropping, and the floor you were unaware of holding you up, giving way. It’s walking up stairs in the dark and your foot coming down unexpectedly when you realise you’re at the top. Safety and goodness are all gone, and I’ve come to realize in full-fledged force, little by little and now all at once, that the basic goodness of men has eroded. in increments, in headlines, in the small daily cuts of being talked over and looked through and dismissed, until one day you read a CNN investigation and something in you just stops being surprised. And that's the most devastating part of all. Not the rage. Not the fear. The fact that you are no longer shocked.

CNN's months-long investigation confirmed what too many women already felt in their bones, what we’ve been screaming from the rooftops for what feels like ages. There are men, husbands and partners who are gathering online to share techniques for drugging and sexually assaulting their sleeping wives. This isn’t a fucked up Law and Order episode or a fringe 4Chan rumour. A website with tens of millions of monthly visitors. A Telegram group called "Zzz." Men crowdsourced information like they were crowdsourcing a household DIY project. And when the numbers started circulating online, when women started screaming about it, some men's very first instinct was to argue the statistics. Not all men, but sixty-two million visits to the site, not sixty-two million perpetrators, actually. As if it was even the point - the point is 62 million creeps looked at this shit, and that makes them complicit.

I had a man talk down to me today. Cut me off mid-sentence multiple times and talked down to me. I clenched my fists so tight I left half-moon holes in my palms to stop myself from screaming at him. It was small, as these things go. A bad customer on a bad day. I would usually call it nothing, a minor annoyance, and chalk it up to a bad day for everyone and I would find seventeen ways to explain his behaviour before I ever considered taking my experience of it seriously. 

But it lands differently today. Every dismissal, every interruption, every moment a man decides my voice is noise, it all lives on a spectrum. It all comes from the same source. The same deep, conditioned, culturally reinforced belief that women are lesser. That we are context for the patriarchy, we exist in relation to men's needs, men's pleasure, men's comfort, men's loneliness, and that our own interiority, our own experience, our own voices, are at best a secondary concern and at worst an inconvenience.

I've been reading Laura Bates' The New Age of Sexism, and what strikes me hardest is not any single horror story, though there are plenty to choose from. It's the infrastructure of it. The way misogyny has found new architecture online. New tools, new language, new pipelines that reach boys at twelve and thirteen and start building a worldview before they've had a single real intimate relationship to test it against. The language of this version of misogyny makes it sound almost philosophical, almost like a movement with legitimate grievances, rather than what it actually is, which is old contempt with some Neutrogena Zit Cream in front of a game of Fortnite.

The AI girlfriends. The bots and robots designed to respond, to comply, to anticipate, to never say no and never ask for anything back. We are actively building a generation of men whose earliest and most formative intimate relationships are with objects engineered solely to serve them, and then we wring our hands and wonder why they struggle to see women as full human beings with full lives that exist independently of male attention and male desire. We are conditioning men to experience connection as a transaction, and that their loneliness is women's fault and women's problem to solve. If the real world won't deliver what they feel entitled to, the internet will, because the internet will never ask them to grow, or compromise, or sit with discomfort, or do the grinding and unglamorous work of becoming someone worthy of intimacy.

And I want to talk about what we lose when we do that. Because vulnerability is not weakness, and we have spent so long letting men believe that it is. Vulnerability is the entire mechanism that allows human beings to actually connect. It is the thing you have to bring to the table before any real relationship, friendship, partnership, community, any of it, becomes possible. When you outsource it, when you replace it with a bot that will simulate closeness without requiring any of the risk, you don't get a connection. You get a simulacrum that makes you greedier and less equipped to find the real thing. Then, when it turns outward, it finds an ideology that tells you that greed is someone else's fault. And now we have a mass of young men turning to bullshit influencers who have reduced women to nothing more than breeding machines. 

The male loneliness epidemic is a disgusting turn of phrase. Not because the loneliness isn't real, but the way it gets deployed, and it becomes an explanation and almost an excuse. As though loneliness simply happened to men rather than the predictable result of a culture that told boys to shut their feelings down and then acted shocked when they became men with no idea how to access those feelings or ask for help or be present in a relationship without making it entirely about their own needs. The way male loneliness gets weaponized, aimed outward at women, at feminism, at anyone who suggested that men might benefit from doing some internal work, as though we are the cause of the wound we keep getting blamed for not healing fast enough.

We did not take vulnerability and kindness away from men. We watched men build entire ideological systems to defend against the necessity of both, and then we got handed the bill for the loneliness those systems produced.

And so I go looking for proof that goodness exists, because that is what women do when they are scared and furious, I look for it in real men. I watch John Cena hug a man with so much love after finding out he has cancer. I watch Jack Black throw himself into everything he does with full-bodied joy, generous and unashamed to be loving and tender with the people around him. I watch Keanu Reeves move through the world with a quiet decency that feels almost countercultural, a man who has been through devastating loss and came out of it softer rather than harder, kinder rather than closed off. I watch Eugene Levy get older with warmth and self-deprecation, and a genuine gentleness that has nothing to prove. And I feel something I can only describe as grief for young women, because these men exist, and they matter, and they are not the dominant story being told to boys right now. They are not what the algorithm is optimizing for. They are not getting the millions of views and the parasocial loyalty. They are not the ones who are shaping the next generation's understanding of what manhood looks like.

And then there's Shoresy.

I watch this show as solace that a man can create a character that isn’t ashamed of being feminized or of appearing weak. Jared Kesso created this crass hockey player, the archetypal tough guy, but who’s also vulnerable, loving, and most importantly, kind. I want to be clear about what Shoresy is and isn't, because it matters. He is not gentle. He is not soft. He is foul-mouthed and relentless, and he will say the most savage, personal, and the most specifically targeted thing to Ziigwan without blinking, and she will turn around and give it right back to him, because she is equally capable, she knows the rules of engagement. She never once needed him to protect her from his mouth. That's the first thing. He doesn't condescend to her. He doesn't soften himself for her out of some misguided chivalry. He plays with her at full strength because he respects her enough to do that. And then when she needs him, not the trash talk, the real thing, the showing up when it counts, he is there. No performance. No expectation of credit. He never lets her feel bad about herself and always makes sure she understands her worth. He is just there because that is what you do for people you care about.

With Nat, it's different and somehow even more honest. There is a mutual recognition there that goes beyond friendship or loyalty or even love, though it's all of those things. Two people who have looked at each other completely, respecting each other, their values, and who they are, without flattering distortion in either direction, and decided that they are in each other's corner no matter what. The respect between them is so fundamental that it doesn't require gestures. It's load-bearing. He works his ass off for her. Not to be seen doing it, not to be thanked for it, but because she deserves it and because he has decided, somewhere quiet and non-negotiable inside himself, that being the kind of man she can rely on is worth more than being comfortable.

And with Laura Mohr, Shoresy does something that I think is actually the hardest thing, and the thing that matters most: he knows where the line is. He doesn't test it. The ball is in her court “What do I have to do?” And she tells him to run a marathon, and he does it. He doesn't make it her job to enforce it by constantly making her say no. He has done the internal work of figuring out what she deserves, and he stays on the right side of that line because he has decided to, not because she's watching. He has decided that she is worth that kind of care. He earns her. He listens to her. In a world where we are having serious mainstream conversations about whether women are safe in their own beds, this trash-talking, borderline feral fictional hockey player has figured out something that apparently requires active re-teaching right now: that the women around you are people, full people with full lives, and that they deserve your presence and your protection and your restraint and your honest attention.

That is not a high bar. It should not feel like a revelation. Why is this not the content that our young men are consuming? Learning that they are more than the sum of their gender stereotypes?

I watch men like Cena, Jack Black, Keanu, and Eugene Levy getting older, and I feel that ache again, because I am watching young women grow up right now. I am watching what they are navigating: the laws being written against their bodies, the rights being chipped away at, the AI-generated images of their classmates being circulated in school hallways, the boyfriends who have been conditioned since puberty with content that teaches them women exist for consumption. And I want so badly to be able to tell those young women that it gets better, that the men around them will grow into something kinder, that the culture is moving in a direction that will make their lives easier rather than harder. But it feels like a lie, because will it get any better?

How did we forget that to be truly known, you have to be willing to be truly seen, and that being seen is terrifying, and that the terror is not a reason to opt out but the very reason real connection becomes possible? How did we forget that community is not a product, that it cannot be delivered or downloaded or optimized, that it is built slowly through presence and inconvenience and the willingness to show up for people when it costs you something real? How did we decide that intimacy could be automated? Do you train a machine to simulate closeness and call it enough? That you could skip every hard and humbling and character-building part of being in a relationship with another human being, every part that requires you to be vulnerable and patient and sometimes wrong and sometimes sorry, and still somehow end up with a life that feels like it means something?

I am angry. I have been angry for a long time, and today it has nowhere left to go. I am scared in a way that has moved past the anxious adrenaline and settled into something quieter and colder and much harder to shake. And I will be honest, for the first time, real hopelessness has walked in and sat down, and I don't know how to make it leave. Not the kind of hopelessness that means nothing matters, but the kind that means I genuinely do not know how to fix this. I don't know if the men who need to change have any idea that they do. I don't know how many women will be hurt and dismissed and legislated against and drugged in their own beds and objectified in the space between now and any kind of “better”. And I am sitting here with that, not knowing, and it is devastating in a way I don't have a solution for.

But I know that the men who show up are real. The men who listen without waiting for their turn to talk. The men who know where the line is and stay on the right side of it, not because anyone is watching but because they have decided that the women around them deserve that. They exist. Shoresy, ridiculous and fictional and foul-mouthed as he is, is a blueprint for something real: that you can be flawed and difficult and hard ass and still be a safe person. Safety isn’t about being “weak”, it's about being trustworthy. It's about showing up and knowing what people deserve and deciding they are worth the effort of giving it to them.

It’s men like this that are the prototype, and there’s not nearly enough of them, it feels. They are evidence that it was always a choice and it still is a choice. You can choose to believe that women are humans, and you can treat each other with kindness and vulnerability. What we are watching unfold in real time is not inevitable. It is a failure of courage and community, and it can be chosen against, every single day, by every single man who decides that the women around him are worth more than his ego and his feed telling him his loneliness belongs to someone else.

We did not forget vulnerability and kindness. We just were never honest enough about how hard we have to fight, every day, to protect each other.