Coral Herrera Gomez describes the new man and says why she loves him. The Good Men Project
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I like new men. They fascinate me. I’ve known they exist since I wrote my PhD thesis. I discovered them on their blogs and I follow them today like a groupie.
Actually my dad was a new man. My mother worked in a factory and my father, who was a writer, took care of my sister and me when we were kids. He cooked, did the dishes, changed diapers and cleaned his babies.
He loved to raise his girls and educated us so that we may become independent working girls.
My love is huge for him because dad was so beautiful, so feminist. I looked at other fathers as very patriarchal compared to mine. It might be slightly oedipal I think, but my first boyfriend was a new man as well. Thanks to them both and the life I’m living, I discovered why new men are the men I love.
1. They don’t believe they owe me
Getting to know him I fell dramatically in love. My man is one of those who has no problem with his masculinity. He does not have to show it off or prove it.
It is very comfortable for me to share my life with that kind of man, being parents, lovers or just friends. Because we can have serious conversations. Because they don’t have that inferiority complex that make them want to be my master for fear of being in my shade. They’re not jealous of me while seducing other women at the same time. They don’t make useless lies. They don’t depend on me … because they share my life.
And they are with me until they’re not any more. I mean, they are not forced to stay with me: they’re free to stay by my side.
New men have many other good points:
2. They are independent.
3. They are working on their emotions.
4. They communicate better.
5. At home, they do not consider they are “helping.” No, they simply assume their total responsibility for domestic duty and enjoy their fatherhood completely.
6. They don’t suffer as much as traditional men and are therefore more appealing.
7. They are more creative and live with more freedom and joy. I suppose they are not in such a hurry to demonstrate their virility as patriarchal men are.
New men do exist. I meet them regularly.
More often than not I suggest that my friends look for new men and move away from faux-alpha-men and those who are romantically-troubled. But they think those men are mythical or so rare they don’t even exist.
The day they called me to join the Masculinities Congress in Barcelona last year, I felt lucky. I was going tomeet some of them. I called my single friends to tell them I was going to meet a hundred ”new men.” They didn’t believe me. They thought I was going to a congress for gays. Alone in heaven.
I left that bubble in Barcelona, filled with egalitarian men and women, thinking that other ways of behaving were possible. Other ways of interacting and respecting each other.
I discovered the huge work those activists do to deconstruct patriarchal virility, to change and improve their relationships with their relatives. To claim the right to enjoy fatherhood, to fight for womens’ and childrens’ rights. The right to a new education for boys and girls, freed from stereotypes and gender-oriented lessons.
They’re few but gaining traction. They’re isolated, away from other feminist’s groups. But they’re opening a new way.
Free Women Working With Men
I am convinced, since I experienced that academic meeting with egalitarian men, that we can’t free women without working with men. We have to do it together, to end the eternal gender battle dividing humanity into two groups.
When I left them, they were talking to me about all kinds of utopias. Some told me about their desire to fall in love with women like them: depatriarchalised.
We made that toast. I was laughing, thinking about those utopias creating in congresses: the morning you deconstruct a myth, when the night comes we create another one.
Sometimes, I think we’re on a good path to depatriarchalise all together, to change the patterns on which we’re building our identities and relationships. Other days I think we’ll stay in that unfair scheme for centuries. That we’ll fail to liberate ourselves from oppression and reinvent structures of affection, of sexual and emotional links, on which we’re building our relationships.
There’s work to do and I think that egalitarian utopia has to be expressed because it comes with a joyful fight for diversity. And because it comes also with the universal right to love each other as we want it.
Coral Herrera Gomez is a Spanish writer and blogger with a PhD in audio-visual communication. She’s also a gender theory expert. Here’s her blog in spanish, El rincon de Haika. Follow her on facebook and twitter.
This post was first published in Spanish in El Pais and in French in L’homme Simple. Credits to Bob Craven for his help.
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