I’m sat in my therapy room thinking about a simple idea that has become dangerous: being a man should mean something.
But in 2025, that idea is so tangled in shame, slogans, and charlatans that most men wouldn’t dare say it out loud.
We’ve spent the past decade dismantling the rusted machinery of toxic masculinity. Good. It needed tearing down. The macho posturing. The emotional constipation disguised as stoicism. The belief that power comes from control. These things made us brittle. Violent. Useless to ourselves and to those we love.
But in our rush to condemn what masculinity was, we failed to ask what it could be and in that vacuum, in crawled the parasites.
Enter Andrew Tate and the rest of the self-appointed “alphas.” Not men. Marketers. Grifters with ring lights. Wankers. They sell anger as identity and cruelty as confidence. They prey on the fatherless, the unheard, the uninitiated, and sell them a performance of manhood wrapped in misogyny and muscle.
This is not masculinity. It is cosplay for the broken.
But let us not pretend the infection is only on one side of the spectrum. If Tate represents one end of the rot, rage dressed up as purpose, the other is no less sickly.
You know the type.
The man who trades his spine for social currency. Who performs constant penance for the sin of having a dick. Who thinks being a good man means being a harmless one. Soft to the point of shapeless. Fluent in all the right jargon, trauma-informed, emotionally attuned, hashtag ally but who vanishes when anything needs holding, containing, or leading.
He calls himself a feminist. But really, he’s just afraid. Afraid to take up space. Afraid to speak with weight. Afraid to be anything other than agreeable. He carries the weight of thousands of years of sexism on his back, not out of integrity, but out of performance. He is terrified that if he stops apologising for being male, someone might mistake him for a misogynist.
He’s not ethical. He’s anxious. And he thinks his anxiety is ethics.
If Tate is the cartoon alpha, this is the self-erasing beta. Both are roles. Both are lies. Neither are free.
So where does that leave the rest of us?
Those of us who refuse to go backwards but aren’t about to abandon the idea of manhood entirely.
We’re not here to dominate. And we’re not here to disappear. We want to become men who are good not just to ourselves, but for others.
The kind of men our partners can lean on, not walk on eggshells around.
The kind of fathers our kids can trust and be proud of.
The kind of sons who repair the damage, not repeat it.
The kind of brothers who tell the truth, not just nod along.
That’s the kind of masculinity worth fighting for.
We need a new archetype. One forged in fire, not foam.
A man who can cry without collapsing
Speak truth without abusing
Hold pain without infecting others with it
Stand his ground without needing to prove it every damn second
It won’t come from memes, performative vulnerability, or podcasts that confuse volume with insight.
And it won’t come from pretending we’re above it all, but let’s not romanticise it. This is not easy. It is not passive. It is not soft. It takes balls. Not bravado. The kind of work that makes your soul ache and your ego flinch.
And it cannot, under any circumstances, be done alone.
We need each other. Not to coddle. Not to compete. But to sharpen.
That’s what I’m building. Friday nights. A room full of men. No posturing. No gurus. No alpha-bullshit. Just real talk. Real effort. Real change.
So if you’re tired of pretending
If you’ve had enough of numbness, noise, and narcissism
If you feel the pull to become something more than the hollow shell of shame they handed you..
Then get in the room.
Bring your rage
Bring your shame
Bring the part of you that doesn’t know what the hell you’re doing
No one is coming to make you whole
But if you’re ready to stop performing and start becoming…
We’ll be here.
But not waiting.
No spectators.
If masculinity is to mean anything again, it won’t be found in outrage or irony.
It will be found in the slow, brutal, beautiful process of becoming
Together or not at all.
