I’m a man. I represent approximately 50% of the global population but am held accountable for 90% of its dysfunction. There is some fair reasoning to support this as men are more likely to be violent, warlike, abusive, sexually promiscuous, and predatory than women. This is a fact that will not be refuted in this letter. There is no shortage of both first-hand experiences and hearsay to support this that everyone be they male or female has encountered at some point.

I will not waste time with metrics and statistics, aside from one later on. If you want them, they’re widely available and you can search for them on your own time.

What I intend with this letter is to bring the conversation outside of the perception that all men are malicious. Ladies, you know this perception of males as a generalization simply isn’t true yet many of you have subconsciously accepted this as the reality of every man, or that deep down they are hiding their true self from you that will one-day present danger to your physical and emotional safety. Aside from the obvious abuses you’ve encountered in your life for which you can probably put a unique face, how many hundreds of millions of faces have been ignored or blended to fit this false narrative? Is this identity that of your father, your grandfather, your son, your brother, your cousin, your nephew, your friend, your colleague, your neighbor, your teacher, or even your current partner?

In some cases, yes. Some men close to you will have proven to be bad people. It can happen in your family or at your job or in your dating life. But was it each of these examples? Likely not. More likely it was between zero and three — a normal distribution of outliers that all men and women can say they have had some experience in having to navigate.

There are predators and heartless men in the world. I don’t deny this. I know some of them myself. This may be a shock to the narrative but once these types of behaviors enter my circle I eject myself from them immediately, as most men would.

We don’t tolerate dysfunction and abuse among ourselves either. We share a gender, not personality and values. An easy way to reframe this from a female perspective would be to ask you if you automatically love every woman you meet and want to be their friend. You won’t. Social media virtues have come to dictate you may be inclined to protest this at face value, but in practice in daily life you likely know many women whose personalities you find displeasing to be around and perhaps even damaging to your mental and social health.

Men are no different in this regard. We value healthy relations with others just as much as women.

We value meaning, connection, love, trust, family, and friends, and want a partner to share our lives with just as much as the average woman does. I personally know no exceptions to this in my male friend group.

Among cross-gender peer groups, intergender relations seem to be intuitively understood. Men who you know are welcome in your homes because they have the status of being fellow human beings not much different than you are. You see them laugh, hug their loved ones, cry when they are hurt, work hard, stand up for their beliefs, aspire to better themselves, and engage with you as a person and not an object of sexual projection. Yet, for some reason, all men have also become soulless sex hounds who don’t experience love, don’t want a strong bond with you, or wish to become devoted fathers to their children and bring meaning to their own life by sharing their deepest moments with you.

How can such extreme parallels have manifested themselves in the female mind as an established social norm to such a degree that nearly half of all men are spending their days and nights alone in their homes asking themselves why they don’t deserve to be loved?

Let me be clear — I don’t blame women for this perspective.

I blame individuals whose main lot in life is to project their pain and views from personal trauma as a loud and indivisible truth that all who have a penis are a social, emotional, and physical danger regardless if they themselves don’t in any way project such things. These pained people are made up of both men and women and have a just reason to be angry if they themselves have been abused. However, it is not the true picture of the wider world but that of their experience. Social media amplifies the problem of these kinds of public outcries because of a fundamental truth of the human survival system: what is dangerous must be seen immediately or we could die from missing it.

Animals in the wild exhibit these behaviors regularly as a means of staying alive. A call of alarm will signal a group of bonobos that a predator is near and every member of the colony panics and looks to the source of the call for direction. Humans do this too. Houses have alarms, cars have horns, protesters have megaphones, and traumatized alarmists have apps and accounts.

Empathy must be maintained for people who have suffered, men and women alike, but a jump to fanaticism and duel-mindedness among the sexes is having deadly consequences beyond what women are capable of perceiving in the men they themselves know well or may want to get closer to.

Single and by all measures normal men are the greatest victims of this sweeping trend among otherwise perfectly rational and well-meaning women. Men are up to thirty times more likely to commit suicide before the age of thirty than women. I myself have had friends and former acquaintances take their own lives within such a timeframe. The common theme? Lonelyness compounded over years of trying and failing to find a loving partner regardless of how hard they’ve worked, how much they’ve achieved, who they are as people, and what they would have to offer as both a loving partner and a loving father the children that will never be born.

Men are people just like you. We feel deeply the impact of not having someone special in our lives waiting for us to come home safely after a day of working to make our mark on the world and leave something behind of value for others to benefit from. We are just as altruistic and motivated by the idea of love and meaning as any woman yet to express such things has become a rallying cry of dishonest predatory intent that modern women brainwashed by the fear peddling of social media seemingly don’t have the capacity to accept as being the truth of who most of us are as human beings.

We’re not perfect. We make mistakes just as all people do. And like the people we are, we are motivated to do right by others and by the women whose love, we want to honor.

I have chosen to write this letter to women to give a voice to the millions of young men who have left us by their own hand as well as to the millions who remain who are in desperate need of understanding and compassion.

Men are people. We want the same thing you do and most of us won’t get it because a handful of alarmists on a narrow screen in your pocket have convinced you we’re lying.

The man you want might already be in your life, or it might be the next man you take a chance on, or he might be somewhere else. That is a free choice you can make on your own. But before you make judgments or dismiss him, look into his eyes and remind yourself that his life, his past, his inner child, and his heart are just as real as your own.

Sincerely,

A Man