Is it right to feel compassion for MEN?

One of the hardest questions I've ever asked myself.

I am 41 years old, and in my life, I’ve had plenty of experiences that gave me evidence of the fact that men can be real assholes.

I have been snubbed for job and investment opportunities; I was sexually harassed by one of the janitors at my theater school in my early twenties, and when I tried to speak up about it, I was accused by another man (that I considered a friend) of making a big deal out of nothing. I was complimented on my looks at conferences where I was trying to establish my expertise; I was explained by men how I was supposed to put a carry-on on the overhead compartment on a plane, but also how to cut a slice of cake, how to rinse conditioner from my body after shampoo (you can’t make this up) etc.

Heck, two months ago, a guy who had never self-published anything in his life tried to explain to me how it worked, despite knowing I had broken multiple records on Kickstarter and built not one but two companies in the industry.

The vast majority of the people that I have blocked on Instagram because they have been verbally abusive are men.

If, five years ago, you had come to me and told me we should feel compassion towards men, I would have told you to f**k off. So, if you are feeling up in arms right now, ready to defend your constitutional right to dislike men, if you are scared that I will try to drag you down a rabbit hole and justify male violence by pitying them… I understand your fear. I have felt it, and I still feel it when I read posts like the one I am writing.

If that’s any comfort, I’m not here to convince you of anything. I just want to tell you about my very unexpected journey through masculinity and how that changed my perspective on men, on compassion itself, and on gender equality.

It all started in 2022…

At the beginning of 2022, I started feeling stuck in the debate about gender and gender equality. Everyone’s positions seemed so predictable that most discussions could run on autopilot. On the one side, we the feminists, the queers, the leftists, the ones on the right side of history, the side of the oppressed. On the other side, the oppressors: religious fanatics, police, conservative politicians, and a mass of ignorant zealots.

Is this IT? I wondered if we had reached the zenith of this debate and if we (if I) would ever be able to move past these fault lines.

Bored with myself and inspired by Bell Hooks, I chose to do a little mind experiment.

I asked myself: What hurt the most when my interactions with men went awfully wrong? The answer emerged surprisingly easy: their lack of compassion. If I was telling a man in particular about a bad experience I had, I was not expecting that particular person to fix the structural causes that tilt certain portions of the world in men’s favor, but I just wanted him to sit with me for a moment in the pain of that experience, of the unjust limitations that it brought in my life. It hurt me a lot when that moment of connection didn’t happen.

The Experiment

I can’t force another person to feel compassion for me, I thought. But I can try to find within myself that compassion I am looking for and see what happens.

I wanted to see if my compassion would be enough to change the dynamic of at least some of my exchanges with men. I wanted to check how it would make me feel to open myself up a bit more than I was used to (disempowered? abused? stupid?).

Compassion is scary. It is often branded as a good word, as a feeling that good people feel. People often confuse it with pity, but pity and compassion have nothing in common.

Where pity creates a sense of separation—looking down on someone’s distress from a distance—compassion invites connection, fostering an understanding that everyone experiences struggle and deserves support.

Where pity often requires us to forget about the other person’s dignity, we are afraid that compassion could make us forget our own. We are so used to zero-sum thinking that we feel that by making space for other people’s struggles in our hearts, we lose sight of our own.

If we feel compassion for men, does it mean that we’ll forget about the pain so many women suffer at the hands of men?

Will we lose focus in the battle for the rights of women and girls everywhere?

But that is not how compassion works. Compassion creates in us spaces we didn’t know existed.

Human things are often more complex than they seem

When I started discussing feminism in public, I had to argue countless times against those who saw the lack of women in leadership positions as proof that women are biologically unequipped to be leaders. Today, we are all more aware than we were 10 years ago of gender bias, stereotypes, glass ceilings etc. We have learned that what we consider unequivocable evidence is often incredibly equivocable.

So why should I take male violence at face value as evidence of the fact that men are biologically unequipped to be empathetic, responsible, caring human beings? Isn’t it worth taking a closer look at the culture we created around masculinity and see what went wrong and how can we fix it?

Choosing compassion allowed me to spend tens of hours studying the causes of men’s difficulty expressing their emotions. For decades, we have believed that political, economic, and religious power could compensate men for the loss of human connection that is so central to our collective interpretation of masculinity.

We have taught men to hate the parts of themselves that need to be held and that seek protection; we have taught them to hate their desire to be silly, to dance, to use play as a tool to explore different parts of their identities. We surround (and keep surrounding) masculinity with shame and suspicion; we feed boys with toxic narratives about manhood and then throw away masculinity as a whole, calling it “toxic”.

But where does that leave us? Where can we possibly go from here?

Acknowledging that men are in pain does not negate the pain of women. By listening to each other, by working in good faith towards our reciprocal liberation, we can build a genuinely new world.

Here’s the thing: Compassion isn’t about absolving men—or anyone—of responsibility. It’s not about excusing the harm that’s been done. Instead, it’s about recognizing that our capacity to understand another person’s struggle can be a catalyst for genuine transformation—starting with ourselves.

We can break free from resentment

The results of my little experiment, quite simply, blew my mind. Not because all of a sudden I am untouched by men’s occasional assholery. But because I don’t feel stuck anymore in my resentment. Because I can see a way forward that doesn’t involve the elimination or the subjugation of a portion of humanity.

The more I allowed myself to see men’s stories—how they’re raised to ignore their own vulnerabilities, dismiss emotional connection, or even lash out when they feel threatened—the more I saw a cycle that hurts everyone. Does that truth negate my anger at the injustices I’ve suffered? Not at all. If anything, it reinforces my drive to ensure that nobody - of any gender - has to live in a world where empathy is stifled.

Compassion isn’t weakness; it’s an active stance. It’s a refusal to let bitterness decide our fate. It’s keeping ourselves open enough to imagine a reality where we all do better—where men learn to show up differently and women have the space to heal without having to forfeit their own dignity or safety.

I won’t pretend it’s easy. Some days, old resentments flare, and I question this path all over again. But each time I choose compassion—not pity, not a free pass for hurtful behavior, but a genuine recognition of our shared humanity—I feel a little more free. And freedom, even if it starts as an internal shift, can reverberate outward in surprising ways.

Stellar Stories for Boys of the Future

While there are plenty of books designed to reframe gender stereotypes about girls, there are not that many equivalents for boys. The books that are out there cater to the concerns of those who have learned to look at boys and men with suspicion, to “watch” boys, to catch signs of toxicity and rush to suppress them as soon as they manifest. I feel this kind of approach is unfair to boys, and counterproductive. All children deserve to be looked at with trust, and hope.

If we tell boys “we are watching you”, as if - by virtue of being male - they are suspects already… we are doing wrong by them. Because we are teaching them that we expect the worst from them, not the best.

This is why I adopted an entirely different framework in the creation of Stellar Stories for Boys of the Future, the collection of tales set on 12 imaginary planets that comes out on March 20th. This is why it took so long to create this book.

You can pre-order it here.

Let’s meet in person

I will be in NYC from March 14th through March 23rd for the NGO-CSW conference. On March 19th, at 7 p.m., I will present Stellar Stories for Boys of the Future (preorder it here) at Salotto in NYC in dialogue with Emma Kantor, Senior Editor of Children’s Books at Publishers Weekly.

I will be doing some indie media, so if you have a podcast and would like to have me on it, let me know. Send me a direct message, and I’ll try to say yes to as many things as I can.