by Cole Martin for The 44 North, Contributing Writer - Politics
This essay is the second in a three-part project on modern-day misogyny. You can read our introduction and the other two essays by Jeff Perera and Asante Haughton in our October-November 2026 issue, or follow our newsletter to receive them directly in your inbox.
There’s a quote from the late French philosopher Simone Weil that’s been reverberating in my head ever since reading the harrowing CNN article:
“To exclude human beings […] thrusting them down to the state of social outcasts […] this is to sever every bond of poetry and love between human beings and the universe. […] We all have a share by our complicity in an almost innumerable quantity of such crimes. If only we could understand, it should wring tears of blood from us.” (Weil, pg. 116.)
Though written almost a century ago, this quote unfortunately remains relevant. For me, it distills division, the damage that ensues when arbitrary partitions are erected, and the ways—consciously and unconsciously—that we participate in such partitions daily. It denotes the same trodden bond that Perera refers to in his piece: “When women become disposable property—possessions to toy with like a doll—we’ve crossed a line and left our humanity behind.”
Still, most of us know we’re letting one another down. Twenty-four-seven, we’re bombarded with our failures on the news, on social media, and on the street. Yet, instead of driving us to course-correct, we seem intent on siloing and perpetuating the same harmful paradigms that have plagued humanity for millennia. Why is that?
Some would invoke “human nature” to explain our shortcomings, taking it as self-evident that humans are designed to dominate one another. For others, typically “manosphere” types, domination is justified via syllogism: Humans are animals; the animal kingdom is hierarchical; therefore humans are hierarchical.
Supplementing their argument is the fact that the logic of domination and its systemic forms (patriarchy, capitalism, fascism, etc.) pervade human history. In one of her essays, the aforementioned Weil turned to Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War to provide an archaic example of this logic in action. “Athenians,” she recounted, “wanted to force the inhabitants of the little island of Melos […] to join with them. The men of Melos, faced with the ultimatum of the Athenians, invoked justice, imploring pity for the antiquity of their town.” The Athenians then “razed [Melos] to the ground, put all their men to death, and sold all their women and children as slaves.”
According to Thucydides, the Athenians justified their barbarism thusly: “We have the belief […] that always, by a necessity of nature, each one commands wherever he has the power. We did not establish this law […] we found it already established, we abide by it as something likely to endure forever.” (Weil, pg. 86.)
Weil used this analogy to argue for a dualism between what she called “natural justice” (that of the natural world and, in her example, the Athenians) and “supernatural justice” (humanity’s ability to transcend or negate nature; i.e., the appeal of the Melians). Her commitment to Christianity meant that Weil believed the latter was possible thanks to divinity; however, the duality holds even with religion removed from the picture: Humans can be competitive, cruel, and dominant, yes, but we can also be compassionate, loving, and communal. We eat, sleep, and reproduce, but we also love, grieve, make music, paint, write, etc.
In his 2021 book, Humankind: A Hopeful History, Historian Rutger Bregman presented a similar reassessment of human nature. Analyzing various anthropological and historical sources, Bregman theorized that humanity’s cooperative instinct was chiefly responsible for its early flourishing in the natural world, troubling the long-standing, cynical narrative that humans are innately egotistical and brutal (the hugely influential view espoused by seventeenth-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes). “Civilisation has become synonymous with peace and progress, and wilderness with war and decline. In reality, for most of human existence, it was the other way around.” (Bregman, pg. 112.)
The complicated truth is that human nature encompasses all of these facets, the positive and the negative, simultaneously; it’s not a monolith. We’re contradictory, incongruous, and, as Walt Whitman tokenized, “[We] are large, [We] contain multitudes.”
There is undoubtedly freedom to this fluidity, but also danger, for if there is no fixed human nature, then one is constantly subject to influence. The question is: How do we encourage the compassionate, empathetic capacity of humanity rather than the base, animalistic one?
It’s a quagmire—most people are just trying to survive late capitalism, let alone reserve time and energy for others or endeavour to educate themselves on complex politics/socio-economics. Patriarchal capitalism relies on this fatigue to propagate itself, disseminating reductive beliefs about the way the world is or ought to be to sow division and maintain exploitative power dynamics. For most, it’s comforting to believe the world adheres to the rules of the jungle, because it means they don’t need to exert much effort to understand or change it; all it takes is an appeal to history or a nod to the television to reduce all of humanity to dog-eat-dog. If unchallenged, these beliefs calcify into dogma to be passed on to younger generations.
So, how do we challenge these ideologies? I won’t purport to have all the answers, but I believe that combating an ideology—especially one as resilient and entrenched as patriarchy—necessitates paying attention to the symptoms, the ostensibly benign ways that it infiltrates everyday life. The primary inheritors and perpetrators of patriarchy—men—need to learn to identify these patterns if they are to properly challenge its programming (see Jeff’s piece!)
One of these symptoms, and one that disproportionately affects boys and men, is literacy—lack thereof, rather. While reading in general has consistently declined over the years, there is an ever-widening gender and genre disparity. The reasons for this are undoubtedly varied, but I feel confident claiming this phenomenon is deeply linked to the ongoing attacks against arts and humanities in Canada and other parts of the world.
It’s easy to understand why a system of domination wouldn’t want its subjects to be well-read: A population that doesn’t read is easier to control, as they are less likely to think critically about a government, institution, or individual’s role in society, making organizing difficult (which is why governments love to ban books!) Further, having men engage solely in the types of books that produce productive workers (e.g. self-improvement and “mindset” books) is clearly beneficial to an exploitative system.
Illiteracy is programmed in more covert ways than book bans and library closures, however. A recent example is the “performative male” trend that consumed social media a few months ago, which involved satirizing a specific archetype of “bro”—one who posts candid pictures of themselves reading Infinite Jest or Bell Hooks on a cafe terrace, typically sipping a matcha latte and languidly smoking a cigarette.
While this trend was admittedly funny (it’s always nice to get some barbs in on this mode of pretension), and I'm by no means conflating it with the daily harms experienced by women, or with the severity of the CNN article, I think the underlying patriarchal notions within this phenomenon warrant examination.
For example, the trend (explicitly or implicitly, depending on the case) derided men for reading fiction and/or feminist theory, two things already deemed emasculating and a waste of time by popular masculinity. But what’s of most concern are the knock-on effects: One can imagine the plethora of young people scrolling TikTok at the height of the trend who have now internalized the message that they should never read such books… certainly not in public, lest they be labelled “performative” or “cringe” by the social media masses.
This form of conditioning is exemplary of how patriarchal capitalism exerts control not only through overt economic and political means, but on an interpersonal, psycho-social level, such that society restricts, represses, and polices itself.
A more productive critique of masculinity, in my opinion, is to demonstrate to boys and men the breadth of masculine expression possible, to widen our collective conception of what a “man” is by challenging the prevailing myths of masculinity (while being cautious not to enforce them obliquely).
Fiction is incredibly instructive to this end (which explains its deterrence). Absorbing narrative through literature, film, TV, video games, etc. can be a fantastic way to broaden our concepts and survey our societal and individual values, as it allows us to inhabit the other in ways our day-to-day experiences don’t permit (I consider this the genesis of empathy). And the more tools in your toolkit, the better equipped you’ll be to understand yourself and your surroundings, and the sharper your image of the world becomes. “The work of writers […] They give us, in the guise of fiction, something equivalent to the actual density of the real.” (Weil, pg. 15.)
It’s clear that our collective attitude towards learning needs to change as well. Under capitalism, learning is essentially utilitarian; many people consider their learning complete when they finish school and enter the workforce. However, I’m in the camp that considers learning a lifelong project. We live in a dynamic world, and we ourselves need to be dynamic to keep up with it. One of the things that makes humans so special is our capacity for change, to absorb new information and integrate it. Our goal should be to embrace this aspect of ourselves, embrace our curiosity about the world and the possibilities it could encompass—embrace difference, and the multitudes we can hold within. “What goes too long unchanged destroys itself. The forest is forever because it dies and dies and so lives.” (Ursula K. Le Guin.)
So, as obvious as it sounds: boys and men need to read more, and be more curious!
***
Oscar Wilde once asked, “Do you really think it is weakness that yields to temptation? I tell you that there are terrible temptations which it requires strength, strength and courage to yield to.” The subtext, in Wilde’s case, was his queerness—yielding to his sexual “temptation” towards men ultimately led to his conviction, exile, and death. But his statement holds a universal truth: People are, I think (and Bregman/Weil argue), largely tempted to do good; most people have an intuitive sense of the right thing to do, and seldom do they set out with the explicit intention to harm. Yet to actually reify that desire, to act on it, sometimes requires—as Wilde said—strength and courage, especially when contemporary society so heavily incentivizes individualism.
Our way forward is to help each other do the homework. This means those who have bandwidth must step up to bridge the gap for others. Towards this goal, I think everyone would benefit from simply pausing and asking ourselves, ‘Day to day, where is my attention going? How can I better treat the people I interface with as ends in themselves, instead of means to an end?’ “The good the truly good do has no end in view.” (Lao Tzu.)
That minute, seemingly insignificant interval between thought and action can be utterly transformative. The more you navigate your life with intention, the more you will notice the myriad ways we’ve been trained to reduce the world to simple statements, and other people to single characteristics. As Weil said, “Where there is no room for reflection, there is none either for justice or prudence […] That halt, that interval of hesitation, wherein lies all our consideration for our brothers in humanity.” (Weil, The Iliad, or the Poem of Force, pg. 14-15.)
If we can work to undo the individualist, agonistic ideologies instilled in us by our institutions, media, and politics, and shift towards a sense of responsibility for one another, I think we have a real chance at dispelling the many myths espoused by patriarchal capitalism, and perhaps even oppression itself. We must resist the urge to strip the world of nuance in order to falsely simplify it. Instead, we must strive to widen our concepts so that they better reflect the whole of humanity. “We are living in times that have no precedent, and in our present situation universality […] has to be fully explicit. It has to permeate our language and the whole of our way of life.” (Weil, pg. 51.)
It is crucial that we demonstrate to boys and men that true strength stems from the courage to care for the other, not their subordination. As Leslie Fielder writes in the introduction to Weil’s Waiting for God, “The most terrible of crimes is to collaborate in the uprooting of others in an already alienated world; but the greatest of virtues is to uproot oneself for the sake of one’s neighbors.” (Weil, pg. x.)
Part of that uprooting is choosing to look. The next article in this triad, by Asante Haughton, asks directly why we—particularly at a federal law policy level—haven’t been looking. In terms of internet regulation and safety, he wonders why we’ve so long turned away, seemingly deeming women unworthy of our collective protection. To me, this is another symptom of a society lacking the depth of attention, witness, and care. I believe we can change that.
The further one’s humanity deepens, the more imperative it becomes to “people” others by recognizing and acknowledging that same depth in them. Once that intersubjective connection blossoms, seeing the mistreatment of others, whether in person, on the other side of the world, or even behind a screen, should, as Weil said, “wring tears of blood from us.”
Bibliography
Weil, Simone. Waiting for God. Translated by Emma Craufurd, HarperCollins Publishers, 2009.
Bregman, Rutger. Humankind: A Hopeful History. Back Bay Books, 2019.
Cole Martin is a writer from Atlantic Canada. He can be found on Bluesky @coleboy.bsky.social
