An open letter to men

My fellow men,

There is a particular flicker that passes across some men’s faces when a woman refuses to shrink.

You’ve seen it. A woman in a meeting calmly dismantles a lazy argument. A colleague declines to “soften” her email. A woman in public life refuses to smile on cue, refuses to laugh at a joke that depends on women as the punchline. No raised voice. No insult. Just steady, unapologetic authority.

And something in the room tightens.

Suddenly she is no longer “confident”, she is “intimidating.” No longer “clear”, she is “abrasive.” The ground under her feet shifts, even though she is the one standing perfectly still. Men glance at one another, amused, irritated, vaguely affronted, as though an unwritten rule has been broken but no one wants to be the first to name it.

This letter is about that flicker. It is written by a man, to all men in this country who have felt that tightening inside themselves and brushed it off as nothing.

I am not writing as an outsider, or as a judge perched above the fray. I grew up here. I know the rhythms of our jokes, the hierarchies of the schoolyard, the unspoken rules of the footy club, the bar, the workshop, the smoko room. I have laughed along with things I should have challenged. I have been silent at moments when my silence did harm. I have felt that same jolt of discomfort when a woman refused to play the role I had quietly written for her.

Again and again, beneath all the talk of “gender wars” and “political correctness” and “feminism gone too far,” I hear a sentence that almost never makes it to print,

Some of us are afraid of strong women.

Not mildly put off. Not vaguely annoyed. Afraid.

I don’t mean fear of being physically harmed. I mean the more disorienting fear that the ground under us is no longer firm, that the rules we were promised about manhood no longer hold, that the automatic authority we grew up expecting is dissolving in front of us.

That fear is shaping our workplaces, our homes, our politics, our sons and daughters. It deserves to be named.

Most of us would never say, “I am frightened of losing power over women.” We reach for safer language. We say, “I just don’t like her attitude.” We complain about “tone.” We insist we simply prefer “more feminine women.” We call her “a bit much,” “hard work,” “not very likeable,” “crazy,” “a nightmare,” “a bitch.” We turn our discomfort into her defect.

What all these phrases have in common is that they keep the problem safely lodged in her personality, her choices, her alleged excesses. Our reaction becomes common sense. Her existence becomes the issue.

But if we are honest, many of those reactions are not about her at all. They are about what her strength exposes in us and in the culture we belong to.

Fear almost never walks in and introduces itself. It travels in disguise. It arrives as irritation, who does she think she is? It arrives as embarrassment; she’s making this awkward for everyone. It arrives as contempt, she’s hysterical, obsessed, man-hating. And it arrives as a whole vocabulary designed to push women back into the shape that keeps us comfortable.

A man who is blunt is “refreshingly direct.” A woman who is blunt is “aggressive.” A man who refuses to be walked over is “assertive.” A woman who refuses to be walked over is “difficult.” A man angry at injustice is “principled”, a woman angry at injustice is “unhinged.” We reach for these words reflexively, as if they were neutral descriptions rather than tools.

From an ethical standpoint, this matters. The language we reach for does not simply describe the world; it protects our place in it. It allows us to avoid a more troubling set of questions, what have we been taught, what have we accepted, and what has that acceptance cost the women and girls we claim to love?

Most of us were not handed a theory of gender as boys. We were handed stories.

We were handed stories where the hero is a boy or a man, and the woman is his prize, his help, his backdrop. Stories where girls wait to be chosen, rescued, validated. Stories where strength is a sword in his hand, not a fire in her voice. Even when our real lives contained formidable women, mothers holding families together, teachers running entire classrooms, nurses keeping hospital wards from collapsing, our cultural imagination kept placing women in the background. Men act; women react. Men build; women decorate. Men speak; women support.

From those stories, we learned without anyone needing to spell it out that a good woman is grateful rather than demanding, that a nice girl does not take up too much space, that women who refuse to play small are somehow suspect, and that our manhood is affirmed when women lean on us, not when they stand level with us.

By the time we are grown men, these lessons feel like reality. So, when women step forward, unapologetically capable, unwilling to defer, it does not feel like a simple change in circumstances. It feels like an uprising. We tell ourselves that they are “on a power trip,” that they are “overreacting,” that they are “ruining everything for ordinary women.” Very often, though, they are simply declining to keep performing a role that has served us at their expense. What trembles then is our unearned comfort.

Strong women are unsettling not primarily because of what they do, but because of what they reveal. If your sense of yourself as a man depends on being automatically believed, automatically deferred to, automatically respected, then a woman who challenges you is not just someone you disagree with. She is a threat to your entire self-story.

Her competence forces you to confront the fact that you are not entitled to leadership simply by being male. Her financial independence exposes the lie that love and dependence are the same thing. Her refusal to be impressed by your status reveals how much of that status was granted, not earned.

It is easier, in that moment, to declare that she is intimidating than to admit that you are insecure. Easier to call her unreasonable than to face how thoroughly the world has been calibrated to your comfort. Easier to describe her as “threatening the natural order” than to acknowledge that the old order was, for many women, profoundly unnatural.

For generations in this country, men have enjoyed advantages so entrenched they felt like moral truths. We were paid more for the same work. We were assumed competent until proven otherwise, women were assumed unproven until we decided otherwise. We moved through pubs, trains, dark streets and online spaces with less fear. We spoke in public forums with fewer threats. We failed in public life and were forgiven faster.

Over time, it becomes dangerously easy to mistake long possession of power for entitlement to it. We told ourselves men were the “head of the household” because men had occupied that role for so long. We told ourselves men were better leaders because most leaders were men. We treated male dominance in parliaments, boardrooms, media panels and sporting institutions as evidence of superior aptitude, rather than the predictable outcome of systems designed around male comfort and male networks.

Strong women disturb this confusion at its root. They force us to confront the difference between having power and deserving it. Power can be acquired through tradition, discrimination, violence, nepotism or luck. None of those, by themselves, make it legitimate. In any society that claims to value a fair go, power is legitimate only to the extent that it is accountable, shared and earned.

The fact that we have always sat at the head of the table does not mean the seat belongs to us.

From boyhood, many of us were also given another story, that our job is to protect women. In its best form, that impulse is decent, the desire to use one’s strength in the service of others. But it easily curdles into a bargain, I will keep you safe if you live within the limits I set.

When women become educated, economically independent, backed by laws that recognise their full personhood, something profound changes in that bargain. Women may still choose partnership, love, family, interdependence. But the element of necessity is gone. They are not staying because they cannot leave.

For some men, this is exhilarating. It offers the possibility of relationships based not on dependence but on mutual desire and respect. For others, it is terrifying. If you have been taught that your worth as a man lies in being needed, financially, physically, practically, then a woman who does not need you in order to eat, to pay rent, to raise children, to navigate the world can feel like a direct attack on your masculinity.

The temptation is to recreate dependence by subtler means. Undermine her confidence. Mock her ambitions. Sabotage her opportunities. Isolate her from friends and family. Control the money. Call it love, but mean, “Do not discover how strong you are without me.”

That is one of the places where fear slides into abuse. Fear may be understandable. What we do with it is not inevitable.

The ethical alternative is harder but far more honourable, to accept that being wanted is more dignifying than merely being needed. To discover that a partner who can stand alone and still chooses to stand with you is paying you the highest compliment you will ever receive.

Many of us like to imagine that our fear harms no one so long as we keep it to ourselves. That is a comforting fiction. Fear of strong women does not sit politely in men’s chests. It spills.

It spills into the way we talk about women in private, the casual slurs, the “jokes” that are really warnings in disguise, the stories we tell younger men about “crazy exes” and “ball-breakers” that are designed to keep women in line. It spills into hiring, mentoring, pay and promotion decisions, the vague sense that certain women are “not a good fit,” “too abrasive,” “hard to manage,” “just not leadership material.”

It spills into online abuse, aimed disproportionately at women in public life, intended to intimidate them back into silence. It spills into living rooms and bedrooms as coercive control, checking phones, monitoring friendships, restricting access to money, deciding what she wears, punishing any attempt to leave. It spills into politics as policies that quietly or explicitly drag women back towards dependence, by making it harder to leave violent partners, harder to control their own bodies, harder to access justice.

All of this is routinely sold as defence, defending the family, defending tradition, defending men, defending “normality.” But the pattern is unmistakable. When some men feel their grip on power tremble, they are prepared to pay almost any price to tighten it again, even when the price is other people’s safety, freedom and lives.

Here is a line that needs to be drawn with complete clarity, fear does not absolve harm. To be frightened by social change is human. To weaponise that fear against women whose only “offence” is refusing to be small is not.

I want now to speak directly to the man reading this who recognises himself, however uneasily, in what I am describing.

You may not be abusing anyone. You may love the women in your life. You may pay them fairly, vote for them, support them, be proud of them. This is not a caricature of you as a monster. Yet perhaps you notice a tightening in your chest when your partner, your daughter, your colleague, your boss steps unapologetically into her own power. You feel embarrassed when she speaks bluntly in male-dominated rooms. You catch yourself thinking that she should “pick her battles,” by which you mean fewer of them. You find it easier to complain about her tone than to engage with her point.

What then?

The first temptation is to retreat into shame and declare yourself hopeless. Shame is paralysing. It turns you inward and makes you more concerned with your own wounded pride than with any possibility of change. Guilt can be useful, but only as a signal that your actions and your values are out of alignment. The question you instead need to ask, is “what will I do?”.

Begin close to home. The next time you are about to call a woman difficult, pause long enough to ask yourself whether you would react the same way if a man said or did exactly what she has just said or done. If the honest answer is no, then the problem is not her personality but your conditioning. Notice whose comfort you instinctively protect. If you find yourself more troubled by a woman’s anger than by the injustice she is naming, more disturbed by the way she speaks than by what she is describing, then you have revealed whose pain you treat as real. Ask yourself why.

In the places where you hold influence, at work, in your social groups, in your family, use it. Tell the truth about women’s contributions instead of quietly rephrasing their ideas and collecting the praise. Question practices that reliably reward men and stall women. Refuse to let misogynistic jokes pass unchallenged and then call it harmless. Silence is endorsement, and our sons are listening to what we endorse.

Learn to sit in discomfort without reaching for control. When a woman in your life expresses anger, hurt or ambition, practise listening without trying to tidy it away. Do not tell her to calm down. Do not rush to explain why it is not that bad. Do not decide that the problem is her delivery rather than the reality she is pointing to. Your task is not to manage her emotions but to treat them as morally meaningful information about the world you share.

Ask yourself what you have been calling love. If your relationships with women depend on them staying just weak enough that you feel needed, if you cannot bear the thought of a partner or daughter who could thrive without you, then what you are protecting is not love. It is control.

None of this will feel comfortable. It involves letting go of advantages you did not design but have benefited from. It involves redefining strength away from dominance and towards something more demanding, the capacity to remain principled, attentive and open even when your automatic status is no longer guaranteed.

The alternative, though, is a small life. A life surrounded by women who have had to dim themselves to keep you comfortable. A life in which you never find out what it is like to stand alongside a woman who is fully herself, unshrunk, unafraid.

At the heart of male fear of strong women lies a lie, that strength is a limited resource and that if women gain it, we must lose it. We have been sold the idea that if women are fierce, men must be diminished, that if women stand tall, men must be pushed off the stage.

This is not true. Strength is not how much space you can take from others. Strength is how much shared space you can help to create. For men, that means learning to understand strength as steadiness rather than supremacy, as accountability rather than impunity, as partnership rather than possession, as the willingness to use whatever privilege we have to make it easier, not harder, for women to step into leadership, visibility and authority.

None of this asks us to vanish. It asks us to grow up.

We have tolerated systems in which women are expected to defer as a matter of course, to male colleagues, male bosses, male partners, male commentators for centuries. We tell our daughters they can be anything and then watch in silence as they are harassed out of industries, shouted down in public life, scrutinised for their bodies and voices in ways their male peers are not. We say we believe in merit, and then quietly translate merit as “people who look and sound like those already in charge.”

If we mean what we say about equality and fairness, then the fear some men feel in the presence of strong women cannot remain the organising principle of our workplaces, our parliaments, our sporting codes, our media, our schools. We must start from a different premise, that women’s full humanity is not negotiable.

Imagine parliaments where female MPs are as safe as their male counterparts, in the chamber and on the street. Workplaces where a woman’s ambition and authority are treated as ordinary rather than exceptional. Homes where boys and girls see men modelling care, listening, vulnerability and respect, as naturally as they model competitiveness and toughness.

To the men who fear strong women, this letter is not a verdict against you. It is a description of the world you inherited and the choice you now face.

You can cling to the old arrangements, blame the tide, insist that the real problem is uppity women and oversensitive youth and suffocating correctness. You can sneer at every woman who refuses to bow, reassure yourself that she is unnatural, ungrateful, unlovable. You can retreat into echo chambers that promise the restoration of a world where women were reliably smaller.

Or you can let the tide do its work and help build something better on firmer ground.

You can decide that your dignity as a man will no longer depend on anyone else being weak. You can stand beside women whose strength once frightened you and find that the world is larger, richer and more just when it is not built around the perimeter of your comfort.

No one is asking you to disappear. You are being asked to grow.

If you can find it within yourself to welcome, rather than fear, the women who walk with their shoulders square and fire in their eyes, you will not be left behind by history. You will be part of the best of what this country can become.

And here is the quiet truth your fear has been hiding from you,

A world in which women are free to be as strong as they truly are is a world in which men are finally free to be fully human too.

From one man, to all the others.