An Inherited Story About Men

For a long time, I believed a certain story about men.

Men were dangerous. Men oppressed women. Men were responsible for most violence, most wars, most harm. Women, by contrast, were framed as the corrective: more ethical, more relational, closer to whatever the world needed in order to heal.

I don't remember being explicitly taught this. That's part of what made it powerful. It arrived subtly and indirectly, through school, news, films, and later social media. It became the water I swam in.

Domestic violence is one of the clearest examples. It was almost always framed as male-on-female. Sometimes statistics were mentioned, sometimes they weren't, but the structure never changed. Men were perpetrators. Women were victims. Anything that didn't fit was treated as marginal or out of the ordinary.

It happened elsewhere too. Corporate leadership failures were discussed as a problem of men, rather than a problem of power. War was explained as male aggression, rather than political systems and incentives. Environmental destruction, economic inequality, institutional abuse. Again and again, "men" became the explanation for the problem, and "more women leadership" the solution.

I didn’t question it. I accepted it as fact. I thought that was what being informed and being progressive looked like. Over time, it became my worldview. Men became in my mind something that needed monitoring or correction. Women were the virtuous - the solution to the toxicity of man.

Women of the Future Awards Incident

Late last year, I attended an awards ceremony celebrating women’s leadership and future impact.

One of the male organisers opened his keynote speech by apologising on behalf of men. People laughed. There was applause. Later one, another woman who was presenting one of the awards responded to this reference and said, "We accept your apology." Of course, it was all meant lightly. But something felt off to me - in an event which was designed to uplift women, celebrating diversity and achievement... how accepted it was to publicly assign collective guilt to an entire gender.

Later that evening, one of the award recipients thanked her fiancé for being her steady support through her work. The room moved on. There was some applause, but it landed differently.

Around the same time, I was listed as one of 50 Leading Lights in Asia Pacific - Kindness and Leadership. I had been nominated by three women from Cambodia, and the judging panel included women as well. Standing there, I felt oddly out of place. Not marginalised, exactly, but not fully at ease. I still don't know how much of that came from my own assumptions and how much came from the environment. What I do know is that it didn't feel neutral.

Unbelievable Facts

The real shock came though, when I was presented with some hard statistics that challenged my worldview. Challenged all the stories I knew to be true.

For most of my life, I believed domestic violence was overwhelmingly male-on-female. If someone had asked me what proportion of victims were men, I would probably have said five per cent. Ten, at most.

However, when I looked at the Office for National Statistics (ONS) data for England and Wales, I had to read it several times over. Around 3.8 million adults experienced domestic abuse in that year. Approximately 2.2 million were women. Around 1.5 million were men. That's roughly 60% women and 40% men.

My first response wasn't curiosity. It was resistance. I assumed I must be misunderstanding something or there was an error in the methodology. So I double-checked definitions, examined the study's methodology, and looked for reasons the figures might be misleading. This impulse was revealing - I'm sure many of you reading this will be filled with skepticism.

These numbers aren't hidden. They aren't from a tiny biased study by red-pilled fanatics. They're publicly available, on the most reputable source of data in the UK. The fact that most people don't know them isn't accidental. It's the result of a story we've learned not to question, and a reluctance to look directly at evidence when it contradicts our moral beliefs.

However, when I thought about my own personal experience of abuse in relationship, and that of people closest to me, I began to shift my beliefs. Actually, in my own personal life, amongst my closest friends, more men had experienced violence and abuse in relationships than my female friends. In fact, some of my female friends were perpetrators of violence and abuse themselves.

I spoke about this with a close friend, a woman in her seventies who came of age during second-wave feminism. She realy struggled with the data. It wasn't that she consciously wanted to deny men's suffering, but it went against a framework that had helped her make sense of real injustice and real pain faced by women and herself for decades. That conversation helped me see the complexity of this dialogue.

The Power of Stories

Years earlier, a male friend had tried to talk to me about all of this, about internalised misandry and the suffering of men. I didn't really listen at the time. He was angry, speaking from pain. It was raw. And I didn't treat his views with enough credibility. Looking back, I now see that his anger made it difficult for me to hear him, because I had absorbed the idea that male anger should be treated with suspicion rather than curiosity. That made it easy to disengage without properly examining what he was actually saying. This all despite me knowing that he was a decent man who treated men and women well. He was right and I just wasn't prepared to listen.

Let me share a historical example which highlights the power of stories we hold about gender. In 1928, women ran the 800 metres at the Olympics for the first time. Newspapers reported visible exhaustion of these women athletes, which is totally normal for people sprinting 800 meters. But this fact was framed as evidence that women's bodies were not suited to the distance. Ordinary fatigue became proof of the lack of safety. That interpretation became policy. The event was removed and didn't return until 1960. Once the story was set, counterexamples didn't have the power to shift the narrative.

Something similar is happening now to men. Men are framed first as perpetrators, as dangerous, as morally suspect, and every single evidence gets filtered through that assumption. When men are victims, it doesn't get taken seriously. It gets treated as an exception , a distraction, or something that needs to be handled carefully so it doesn't undermine the more important issue of women's safety. It doesn't matter even if it happens in large numbers. Beliefs are hard to change once hard set.

Sex explains far less about violence than we often pretend. What explains more is power, stress, trauma, social isolation, and the structures people are caught inside. Reducing harm to gender is analytically lazy, even when it feels morally satisfying. But that's a longer conversation that many brave pioneers are continuing.

Where We Go From Here

None of this is an argument that women are bad, or thathistorical oppression didn’t happen. It did. The anger many women carry because of that history is understandable.

But assigning moral authority and moral suspicion along gendered lines doesn't produce justice. From where I sit, it mostly produces withdrawal. When men are consistently told they are the problem, some disengage. Others harden. A few push back in ways that cause more harm. I don't think any of those outcomes are what people who care about this actually want.

I've been progressive my whole life and I still consider myself a feminist. That hasn't changed. What has changed is my willingness to accept narratives that simplify moral responsibility at the cost of seeing the facts and seeing people clearly. I'm not sure we can build anything worth having if we can't tell the truth about harm just because it complicates the story we prefer.