Coral Herrera Gomez describes the new man and says why she loves him.
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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 to meet 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.
“I know new women exist, not frustrated because we’re not charming princes, not moving away because we’re crying, loving us as we are, understanding we’re not enemies because we enjoy life and love completely. Let’s toast to wish that they multiply, to egalitarian love!”
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.
Thanks so much Gregory. That was my whole purpose in this, to be of help to people figuring out where they might fit in this world. Actually, a two fold purpose. One, to be of help, to make sense of oneself and why one may not feel like they fit in. They of course know the basics of why they might not, based on the entirely stereotyping world we face, day in and day out, but to gain a better sense of self in where they fit and then look at themselves as being completely normal no matter where they… Read more »
Well “new man” is almost synonym for “good guy” and we all know those aren’t sexually attractive / exciting for most women, so no wonder a lot of women don’t know those men / guys are very real.
On a sidenote : that initial list comes dangerously close to the illusion of “demanding” a perfect person, where I hope we all know there is no such thing as perfect.
I am much like your dad, because my ex wife abused my daughters and I had to take them away. But I still worked full time in a demanding job. Working in a factory does not excuse your mother from being a caring involved parent too. I suspect there is more to that. Men do not by default have to “work” on our emotions. I am a loving caring empathetic person. It was not a muscle I had to develop. Women automatically assume that men who are like me had to undergo some sort of reformation. It’s just another form… Read more »
Thanks Al.
That’s probably a little to agressive to be responded to. At least by me. At least today.
Maybe not in mood for a conversation involving terms like “delusional”, “perpetual boogie man” and “false narrative” at starting point.
Especially when it follows the the “i am a empathetic person” thing.
Good article. Won’t probably be well understood yet, but I do think it is coming, the de-patriarchicalism needs to happen. It has created this simple eithor or mentality of what it means to be a man or a woman, and I love your point that women too need a movement away from their buy in. I think they’re maybe the greatest impediment to real transformation. In the vein, I’d like to share my thought on how just another way we look at gender, from binary to multphasic might move things along faster, I am a psychotherapist, specializing in gender issues,… Read more »
Thank you. That is brilliant. You worked on that, so it would not be very nice to discuss the starting point. But I would. Because I’m a bad guy 😉 I’m a MMH40. At best. But I’d like some other important points to be considered as part of my identity, compared to other humans. I know you know. But what I’d like to say is that some (not many, but some) of my values are as important as my gender-sexuality items. I’d like to put : Leftist or Rightist (in the european sense, or say : more inclined to indivual… Read more »
Excelent!! Sometimes that kinds of structures help us a lot to be part of something, to feel part of a group and not feeling alone.
I would be pleased to take part of your test.
Thank you, and sorry for my english.
Love this article. I think the future’s looking better all the time. Like the author, I had a father who was ahead of his time: he was, and still is–from above?, my hero. I like the term “new” men and women, too. I think the younger generation is much more in tune to this positive progressiveness than mine. I hope so, too, because I felt mostly alone in my gender-equal intentions growing up. So point #6 did not apply to me; I was very much suffering, even by comparison to my peers who had a more traditional acceptance of gender… Read more »
Very true, Paul.
I’ve been feeling alone too. Spending so much time hearing my friends speaking in machist terms.
Where are the other men thinking like me ?
Where are the women looking for men with equal intentions ?
Those are two very important questions we should try to answer. Now.