Vivek Shraya

Women who behave “badly” are ultimately not given the same benefit of the doubt as men and are immediately cast off as bitches or sluts. Men might be written off as
“dogs,” but their reckless behaviour is more often unnoticed, forgiven, or even celebrated—hence our cultural fixation with bad boys.

I’m afraid of men because it was men who taught me to fear the extraordinary parts of myself.

When I’m on a packed bus or streetcar, I avoid making eye contact with men, so that no man will think I might be attracted to him and won’t be able to resist the urge to act upon this attraction.

The snobbish, superior attitudes of such men have prevented me from calling myself a musician for years, even though I write songs, record albums, and tour.

The only time I can make choices about how I want to look, act, communicate is when I’m inside my apartment, at the end of the day.
Often exhausted, I try my best not to think about how I will have to do it all over again tomorrow.

What would my body look and feel like if I didn’t have to mould it into both a shield and an ornament?

How do I love a body that was never fully my own?

Looking back, I regret telling Nick that he wasn’t special. I also regret all the times in our relationship that I told him he was a good man. I regret this not because he isn’t a good man but because good is a nebulous standard, and our desire for something that can’t really be measured outside of religious teachings and morality only sets us up for disappointment, and sets up every gender for failure.

Parsing and naming these specific characteristics, as opposed to clinging to “good” as a universal and aspirational qualifier, proved to be instrumental. First, it allowed me to see that one of these characteristics didn’t necessarily cancel out the others, unlike “good” that must be relinquished if one does something “bad.” Second, letting go of “good” restored Nick’s humanity, as he was no longer forced to sit upon a superhuman pedestal. Third, it returned agency to me. Some “mistakes” are unforgivable, some are not. It was up to me to decide whether to forgive this time, and to act on my decision.

taking up space is a form of misogyny because so often the space that men try to seize and dominate belongs to women and gender-nonconforming people.

When I was learning to be a man, I wish that instead of the coaching I received to take up space, I had been taught to be respectful of space.