Spoiler Alert: “Good Men” Don’t Exist

“Where are all the good men?” The search for the elusive “good man” is entertaining to me. It’s a trick question. “Good men” don’t exist and the sooner we all grasp that, the better we’ll all be for it.

First, who qualifies as a “good man?” Is this a man who helps his elderly neighbor with their groceries? Does he volunteer at the local animal shelter to play with abandoned puppies? Maybe he publicly proclaims his love for Black women rather than joining the chorus of ashy dusties. Or he has a secret identity as a superhero and fights the city’s bad guys in his free time. There is no consensus on what good men are good at doing. 

And perhaps there doesn’t need to be a consensus. A good man is subjective and is whatever the appraiser says a good man is. Fine. Except I’ve noticed people who subscribe to the idea of “good men” tend to hold men to lower standards of what “good” actually means. You see this when fathers receive praise for publicly doing everyday things with their children. You see this when a guy self-identifies as a good man because he has stable employment, a place to stay and no kids. 

Good by default

 More than people like to admit, being a good man only requires men to show up. I’ve talked about this before in the context of heterosexual relationships. We put so much value on men showing up at all that it overshadows being useful or competent. Like Marshawn, they’re there so they don’t get fined.

Other times, men get to claim goodness because, relatively, they are not bad. Men with few redeeming qualities get away with being not bad (good) by comparison. Fathers get kudos for doing normal aspects of childcare because they’re not deadbeats. An established man can claim he’s good because at least he’s not slanging D for a place to stay. The bar is perpetually low. 

The dichotomy

This tendency to call men good because they’re not necessarily bad reinforces a false dichotomy. We invest in this idea that people who do good cannot also do bad. Good and bad are mutually exclusive archenemies forever warring but never existing simultaneously within one person. This dichotomy obscures the potential for men to exist as not simply one or the other, but as both. Subsequently, if you are a man who does enough good in the eyes of others, then people willingly overlook the bad you do.

And as always, race complicates this whole schema of goodness and badness. In many Black communities, Black men (particularly cis-gendered and heterosexual) are seen as needing careful protection from all community members. The world weathers away at Black men so much that it takes collective effort not to further aggravate their plight. So the narrative goes. The result is a reticence to speak on Black men who cause harm. If they also have qualities of goodness, people may not only hesitate to speak on their misdeeds but may ignore them altogether. There can be more repercussions for those who choose to speak on a Black man’s wrongdoing than the man responsible. Everybody loses. 

For example…

A conspicuous example of this is R. Kelly. The grammy award winning sexual predator gave us music that inspired people, made family reunions live and bedrooms lit. For masses of people, this was enough to squarely mark him as “good.” He made people feel good so therefore he was good. And for years that eclipsed the harm he was doing.

There is added danger when the harm that men cause befalls a group of people with little protection. In R. Kelly’s case it’s Black girls and women. Many people, including myself, have said his abuse wouldn’t have been allowed to continue had the victims been non-Black. It is both his perceived status as “good” and the unprotected status of Black girls that created optimal conditions for Kelly’s abuse to thrive. 

You may claim I picked the most egregious example to demonstrate my point. Maybe I did, maybe I didn’t. R. Kelly is a man with resources and a team willing to be complicit in his abuse.  There are “good men” right now whose scope of harm is only limited by their access to resources. But that’s a separate blog post. There are a myriad of smaller scale examples of how “good” fails to capture the complexity of who men choose to be in their everyday lives.

It happens everyday

I have relationships with men that people would consider “good.” I’ve had male mentors invest time in my professional development. Male friends who supported me. Lovers who’ve been generous, and so on. These characteristics or acts do not negate that men occupy a position of privilege in relation to women.

Men don’t get (enough) encouragement to examine their privilege and how it impacts others. Culturally, there’s not much that nudges them to pay attention to the ways they can cause harm.  When it does happen, there is backlash. Exhibit A: Gillette did an ad campaign on toxic masculinity and some men were big mad.

Due to this lack of self-awareness, there are ways even “good men” can be not-so-good in their interactions with women. Some men recognize their privilege and use this to move through the world with intentionality. Arguably more do not. Some may do this in certain contexts but fall abysmally short in others. All of them are capable of having good attributes. None of them are without bad ones. 

Even in friendship

I once had a friend who said we had a soulmate connection. I don’t believe in soulmates but I felt what he felt. The connection was effortless. At times he was the first person I texted when I woke and the last I texted before I slept. Seven days a week. It’s cliché but our friendship transcended time and place. He called me while I was living in Italy and after three years of not speaking, we talked for six hours. Normally, I’d rather be back in high school AP calculus than have a phone conversation last more than five minutes. 

By most typical measures, he was a “good man.” Smart, college-educated, gainfully employed and no children. More importantly to me, he respected boundaries better than any man I’d ever met. During our eight-year friendship there were never any major transgressions between us. I felt he listened well enough to actually know me. And because I used to believed in “good men,” I thought all this made him a good man. I think he did, too.

But it can be subtle

Underneath, the subtle ways he would invalidate things I said were nagging at me. He claimed we could talk about anything (and we did) yet he had a tendency to be dismissive and gaslight me. This only happened when I talked about experiences specific to being a Black woman.

One day on his way home the police stopped him and searched his car. He told me about the ordeal immediately after. I offered sympathy and comforted him because even though I’ve never been through that, I know he was afraid for his life. On another occasion we were talking about my day and I shared a scary street harassment experience. When I told him a strange man had followed my friend and I asking for sex, his response was a joke that upset me. His response to me being upset was to tell me I needed to stop getting upset for no reason. 

I guess in his mind, he was the good guy. After all, he wasn’t the guy who followed and harassed me. In fact, he wasn’t the type of guy who street harasses women. I’d bet he’s never done it. Those dichotomies are dangerous, though. It’s easy to appear “good” and internalize goodness next to someone more objectionable. He didn’t treat women with that particular shade of disrespect so damn the rest.

It takes more than just not being bad

But benevolence does not a “good man” make. It takes work to be self-aware and intentionally cause less harm. Men settle into being “good” by arbitrary definitions while failing to do the continuous work of harm reduction in their communities and their relationships. 

“Good” is not a descriptor for men. It tells you nothing about them. The club sandwich you ate for lunch was good. Your dog is a good boy. The series you binge-watched last weekend on Netflix was good. What if we described men by the full range of qualities they’re capable of embodying? Kind. Cruel. Compassionate. Selfish. Corrupt. Intelligent. People are multifaceted. Calling men “good” is reductive and preserves a binary where good is forever in contrast with bad or evil. “Good men” don’t exist. “Good” is, essentially, useless.