Dear men of all kinds and ages,
Many of us grow up burdened with the mandate to “be good”: moral, exemplary, worthy of praise and attention, and by extension deserving of what we want for ourselves. Yet alongside the demand to “be good” is the heavy burden of “being bad”: immoral, worthless, inferior, undeserving of what we want. We can also call this state “shame.”
Shame is a social emotion, though we experience it alone, because it is the emotion we feel when we’ve been exiled, cut off, or disappoint the people we want to be admired by. The threat of it is terrifying to us, who are innately a social species, especially as children who cannot survive alone. Once we’ve felt shame, we quickly start figuring out how to avoid experiencing it again. These moments, sometimes lightning-quick, lay the emotional foundation for what we understand as “goodness” and “badness” later in life.
Once when I was a really young kid, like six to eight, I was roughhousing with another boy my age in the back of a car. My grandmother, who was driving, snapped, “You two are like a couple of faggots. You can’t keep your hands off each other.” None of this meant anything to me—I didn’t know what a faggot was and what we were doing, I can now say, was normal play between boys that is actually good for long-term development.
If my grandmother was calmer or of a different generation, perhaps she would have calmly explained to us that our playing in the car was inappropriate and distracting her. But she said this other thing, and from that all I could internalize was that whatever we were doing was bad and, based on her tone, being a faggot must be bad too.
What’s relevant here is that what I learned in that moment could have become a structure to the rest of my life, if left unexamined. I could have built a whole personality around the idea that being a faggot was bad and boys touching other boys even in non-sexual play was bad—I see even younger men imposing that upon each other in Reddit threads. In my efforts to be “good” and avoid shame I could have rigidly avoided ever doing anything like that again. Then, in my efforts to be good, that shame would have ruled my entire life.
But at a certain point in life, that shame came into conflict with other things I began to learn about myself and the world. Life conspired to force me to open up those and other memories, feel the shame, and find the truth that dissolved the intensity of those feelings. Later in life, that same grandmother came to my commitment ceremony between myself and my husband. Her ideas about goodness evolved with time and experience.
I see in so many men I’ve worked with over the years—straight and queer, cis, trans, and nonbinary—a profound struggle between their desires to “be good” and all the instincts and urges and necessities of life that do not fit into “goodness.”
Even men who reject the religious and cultural constrictions of their families of origin may end up replacing one standard of goodness with another, while relating to it the same way. Instead of internalizing the teachings and wrestling with all the contradictions and paradoxes that are always present in every ideology and system of ethics, some of us cling to a rigid application of behavior and shame ourselves or others who deviate from it. I observe this often among white people and men who are early in their awakening to oppression and social justice.
One wants clarity and consistency to know how to be good, because the threat of being bad is so emotionally severe and may result in further kinds of exile: communities aligning against us because of harmful behavior, losing employment or relationships due to a heavy call-out. Yet these norms are in ongoing evolution and transformation, where behaviors that may once have been ignored or tolerated move into the category of unacceptable, and vice versa.
At some point in the process of maturation, it becomes important to let go of our clinging to “being good” and allow ourselves to explore the depths of shame and misunderstanding contained in that box that we label “being bad.” Because that box may contain many necessary tools for surviving in this world that got accidentally covered in the shit of shame: self-assertion, playfulness, ambition, kindness, caring, or leadership.
One of the consistent messages I’ve found in anti-oppression communities is that people who are not targets of a particular kind of oppression should defer to those who are in conversations about the oppression and that community, because we don’t have the perspective or experience to truly understand them or advocate for them. That remains to me a useful practice, reminding myself not to immediately dismiss perspectives that do not match my experience.
Yet we can take this challenge to the extreme of dismissing our own personal judgment and critical thinking, not doing the work of developing our own analysis, and at its very worst allowing ourselves to be disrespected, coerced, and hurt.
In a book I reviewed, Queer Magic: Power Beyond Boundaries, there is an essay in which a writer offers the suggestion that it is important spiritual work to learn to have sex with people that you do not find attractive. When I read that, I paused. Many spiritual practices involve subjecting ourselves to unpleasant or distasteful experiences to learn about ourselves and get freedom from our reactions. So I can see the merits of this practice when freely chosen by a person who wants to take on this as a discipline.
To be certain, there are cultural, political, and economic forces that have shaped what kinds of people get held up as standards of beauty and which are considered ugly. I see an invitation for reflection and getting curious about desires and feelings. Am I truly not attracted to this person or am I afraid of my desire for other reasons? Am I truly uninterested in this partner or do I feel guarded against being seen?
On the other hand, I have seen versions of this argument wielded in toxic iterations that suggest any kind of preference or exclusion of sexual partners is immoral. That is, to be a good person, you should have sex with anyone. This suggestion then makes the practice socially coerced rather than freely chosen. And I can tell you, there are people who have learned to have sex with people they’re not attracted to, either out of pity, fear, or coercion, and for these folks the path of liberation is being supported in saying no and moving toward the connections they desire.
Attraction is informed by these social influences, but also by deeper emotional forces within your own personal body, history, and psyche. The sexual ethics I hold dear is that haranguing, pressuring, and guilting a person into having sex with you has never led to a meaningful, loving, long-lived relationship. And if I strive not to guilt, pressure, or harangue others in our lives, I have the right not to accept that for myself.
For those seeking to be good within these conflicting messages, we will experience moments when our desires or boundaries will be judged by others, or we fear they will. So we might try to ignore those needs, but they tend to win out over the things we think we “should” want. The longer we go before accepting the truth, the more messy the situation becomes.
Rather than whether or not I am good, I think more useful questions are: “Am I being in integrity with myself? Am I causing harm?” Integrity means I am acting with respect to my whole self, everything I know about myself, even if I do not like it. If I am not attracted to a person, even after self-reflection and unpacking my feelings, that is a truth I need to honor.
Telling the truth may be painful, but worse would be faking a connection that’s not felt and all the suffering that goes with that—including all the ways we might end up sabotaging the relationship hoping the partner will leave first.
“Harm,” in my opinion, needs to be as clearly defined as possible so it can be rectified. To simply say, “I am causing harm,” feels akin to the box of badness. If my not wanting to have sex with a person causes them harm, I want to be clear about that so I can be accountable to whatever harm it is without violating my own boundaries in the process.
Perhaps what becomes clear is that it’s the way I communicate desire that is harmful. Being unattracted to a person does not mean they are unattractive. Being unattracted to this person does not mean disliking everyone in their group. I am not naming an objective truth about this person’s desirability, I am only what is true for me about my desire.
The more we are able to accept our own truth, the easier it is to see how every one of us has a subjective, but valid, truth. I can name my own truth then in ways that are cleaner, with less reckless hurt.
Yet even the kindness, firmest, most direct boundaries may be met with anger and hurt. What’s sticky is that when we want to be good, we want to find a way to have our guilt and shamed relieved by a person who’s hurt, angry, and doesn’t have the capacity or desire to caretake your feelings. It’s a sad, painful, difficult conversation for everyone, but it’s important, and it’s also important to learn how to step away when the conversation stops being generative.
The more free we can become of our need to be seen as good, the more room we have to discover what it’s like to be ourselves and practice our values.