Reorientation Without Contempt: A Field Guide for This Particular Moment
How to Decenter Men Without Making It Your Whole Personality
I should tell you upfront. I am not writing this from a position of detachment.
I am writing this as a woman who has, with remarkable consistency, centered men at the absolute core of her life since approximately birth. Raised by a single mom as an only child, meant the rotating cast of men she dated were the weather system of my childhood. I learned to read them fast, accommodate them faster, and disappear when necessary. Disappearing was almost always necessary. I absorbed the lesson early that men are the organizing principle of life. Everything else arranges itself around them.
One could say that I took the lesson and ran with it. I have never, and I mean this literally and not for effect, gone a single week of my adult life without being in a long-term relationship. Not one. I moved from one to the next with the efficiency of someone who finds open water terrifying. I’ve been married more than once, and never been single. My romantic history is not a timeline so much as a continuous river with different names on the shore.
Along the way I’ve worked as a dancer (that’s South-Floridian for stripper), dominatrix, and trial attorney— careers where reading and responding to men’s desires was the actual job. Where my value was measured by how well I could anticipate what they wanted before they asked for it, or ideally before they even knew what it was. I got very good at it. It nearly killed me. But that’s for another post.
When I say I understand the pull, the gravitational, structural, deeply conditioned pull toward organizing your life around male attention, approval, and presence, I am not theorizing. I’m describing my autobiography.
And then came this particular moment.
THE CURRENT MOMENT
We are living in a world where men own private islands. And governments. And humans. And baby farms.
And I don’t mean that metaphorically. Jeffrey Epstein operated a human trafficking network for decades with the full knowledge and participation of powerful men across multiple power structures—finance, politics, academia, entertainment. Women and children were treated as commodities. Photographed. Catalogued. Traded. Eaten?
And that’s just the one we know about, and only because he got caught. Again.
Gisèle Pelicot’s husband drugged her unconscious for nearly a decade and invited dozens of men—neighbors, colleagues, ordinary guys—to rape her while he filmed it. Fifty-one men participated, that we know of. They organized on forums. They traded tips on which drugs work best. Most of them had families. Jobs. Wives. Kids. They walked around as regular stand-up guys. Family men.
These aren’t isolated incidents. They’re structural features.
Abortion bans are forcing women to carry their rapists’ children. Child marriage is still legal in most of the US. States are criminalizing miscarriage. Trafficking networks operate in plain sight—women and children being farmed and sold while everyone argues about politics, pronouns and bathroom signs.
In this particular moment, rape and abuse are treated as background noise. Expected. Inevitable. Just how things are. Layer on top of that the wars spreading, markets collapsing, and the threat of World War III as an actual conversation people are having.
And in the middle of all this clarity about the madness that’s actually happening in the world, we’re also supposed to… date?
Like, get on the apps and meet strangers for drinks. Give them the benefit of the doubt. Be open. Don’t be jaded. Don’t let past experiences make you bitter. Men can sense when you’re guarded.
The cognitive dissonance is fucking staggering.
You’re supposed to maintain plausible deniability about the scope of male violence while also protecting yourself from it. You’re supposed to see the pattern without naming the pattern. Be cautious but not paranoid. Discerning but not man-hating.
And if you can’t pull off that tightrope walk? If you’re too careful, you’re damaged. If you’re not careful enough, well, what did you expect?
It’s enraging. And the rage is justified.
There’s a specific energy that shows up when you really see the scope of it. When you let yourself feel the full weight of how disposable female life has been treated across history and how little has actually changed. When it triggers a myriad of memories you’ve tried shove down, laugh off and make the best of, it can make you feel rather unhinged.
In Hindu tradition, that flavor of feminine energy has a name: Kali. The dark goddess. Creatrix and destroyer.
She’s depicted standing in cremation grounds with a garland of skulls around her neck, tongue out, wild-eyed, dancing on the chest of Shiva, the archetypal masculine. She holds a severed head in one hand and a sword in the other. She’s covered in blood. She’s terrifying.
And she’s sacred.
Kali represents the force that says: if this structure fails to respect life, while requiring my silence and compliance to stand, I’ll burn it right down to the bones. Let it fall. And then dance on the ruins.
She’s not angry for anger’s sake. She’s purifying. She destroys what needs to die so something new can be born. She’s the necessary violence that precedes transformation. And creation.
Kali energy is real. And a lot of us are feeling it right now. The pendulum is swinging back toward the feminine after decades of being told to be nice about our own degradation. With the litany of horrors being exposed on a daily basis, we are waking up. Naming what’s happening. Refusing to pretend. Decentering the male hierarchical structure as the energy we orbit around, is part of that correction.
The part that trips me up? It’s that rage, justified as it is, is not the same thing as decentering.
It’s a challenge because I also have a son. A husband I love. A father who just died. Men woven into the fabric of my actual life who are decent and real and complicated in the ways all humans are complicated. And man-hating energy simply doesn’t work in my life.
I find myself unwilling—genuinely, not performatively—to let justified anger at systems become contempt for every individual inside of them. Because contempt is still a form of centering. I’ve spent enough of my life organized around men, even when that organization looked like opposition.
Especially then.
There’s a way to hold structural reality without detonating your actual life, or becoming one of those man-hating, sad, annoying chicks that don’t get invited to girls’ night anymore because they take everything way too seriously except what matters.
On girl’s night, we just wanna have fun. And not get roofied.
THE MISREAD
There’s a predictable mistake that people make when women start talking about decentering men. They assume it means revulsion, revenge, and fury. As if the only way to stop orbiting something is to light it on fire.
The drama is aesthetically satisfying. It also completely misses the point.
Decentering isn’t a declaration of war. It’s a change of address.
The algorithm has flooded me with angry, well-spoken women since I made the mistake of looking at the Epstein files. I can’t help but think, if your “decentering” looks like seething and men are still the main character in the story you tell about yourself (they’re wearing a villain hat now), then congratulations. You haven’t decentered anyone. You redecorated the obsession. New story, same central character. Very on-brand for our generation.
bell hooks astutely wrote that feminism is “a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression—not men.” Her wisdom remains true. The systems are the problem. Men are human beings shaped by those systems, which also harm them.
This is not naivete'. It’s precision.
Because rhetoric that sounds like men are trash, all of them, categorically, is still a form of organization around men. When you hate, you are still orienting your nervous system toward the object. You wake up thinking about them. They are still the stage you’re performing on, but now the audience is your IG or group chat.
Kali’s brand of rage isn’t personal. It’s purifying. She destroys what needs to die so something else can be born. But if you’re still obsessing, still performing your anger for an audience, still needing them to witness your transformation—you’re not embodying Kali. You’re still seeking male attention. Or female attention about men. It’s the same shit with different aesthetics.
The solution, for me at least, is not to cultivate rage as identity. It’s to stop providing the priority, attention and emotional labor that drained me and created resentment in the first place.
THE ACTUAL WORK IS STRUCTURAL, NOT EMOTIONAL
Simone de Beauvoir identified the core issue in 1949: women get positioned as the Other. Humanity is male. Woman is the satellite. Not a center. A complement.
This isn’t about individual men’s intentions. It’s architectural. The structure routes women’s attention, labor, and sense of self toward men as a default. We didn’t choose it. We inherited it.
Decentering is the project of re-routing. Becoming the organizing principle of your own life instead of a supporting character in someone else’s. This is just structural work, not moral warfare. My son would say, “it’s not that deep.” But actually it is. Like so many other things I’m seeing lately, it’s about going uncomfortably, deeply inward, not focusing on what’s wrong with everything else.
Here’s the actual model I came up with—three layers of boundary architecture. Because “just be unbothered” is not a strategy, and unstructured rage just burns you out. Ask me how I know.
LAYER ONE: MATERIAL BOUNDARIES (MONEY TALKS)
The first layer is material. I hate that this is true, but it is. You can’t decenter men if you’re economically dependent on them. Full stop.
I don’t mean you have to be wealthy. I mean you have to be able to leave. To say no. To enforce boundaries without worrying about losing your job, housing, health insurance, or the ability to feed your kids.
Economic dependence isn’t a moral failing. It’s a structural trap. And it’s deliberately maintained because women who can’t leave are easier to control or ignore.
When I worked at the gentleman’s club, I had a clarity most women don’t get. The exchange was explicit: my time and attention for money. Transactional. Bounded. Everyone knew exactly what was being exchanged and what wasn’t. I loved the honesty and simplicity of that.
When I left that world for “normal” or “professional” relationships, things got a bit murky. The expectations were implicit. The true nature of the exchange was hidden or denied. And somehow, I ended up giving more emotionally, domestically, and physically while receiving less than I did as a “sex worker.” Sounds weird to call it that, but I feel like that same label could easily apply across normal male/female relations if we’re willing to see things for what they really are. It’s all sex work.
In any case, it’s also hilarious in a dark kind of way. The “respectable” relationship is in many ways, the shittier deal. Capitalism is more honest than romance. Let that sink in.
The first step in decentering is building the capacity to leave. Even if you never use it. Especially if you never use it.
Your own bank account. Your own income. Your own credit. Your own exit plan. Not because you’re planning to leave, per se. Rather, to establish that staying is a choice, not a necessity.
Without this layer, everything else is performance. You can journal about sovereignty all you want. If a man represents your only way to survival basics, he absolutely holds the center of your life.
LAYER TWO: RELATIONAL BOUNDARIES (ACCESS IS EARNED)
The second layer is relational.
Men are not entitled to access just because they exist.
This sounds obvious until you notice how much access in they form of “customer service” energy you provide to men. Mostly men who haven’t earned it.
Texting back immediately. Managing feelings. Softening needs. Being easy on the eyes. Explaining yourself repeatedly. Tolerating disrespect because you don’t want to be difficult. Giving the benefit of the doubt seventeen times in a row.
And that’s just romantic partners.
Emotional labor extends to every man you encounter. The coworker whose ego you manage so meetings run smoothly. The stranger on the street whose attention you deflect with a smile instead of telling him to fuck off because you’ve learned that’s safer. The guy at the coffee shop whose small talk you entertain because saying “I’m busy” feels rude. The male friend who vents to you for an hour but somehow never has time or interest when you’re having a bad day.
You smooth, accommodate and perform pleasantness without even realizing it. You make yourself smaller so they can feel bigger. You laugh at jokes that aren’t funny. You pretend not to notice when they talk over you. You downplay your expertise so it doesn’t threaten. You absorb their anxiety so they don’t have to regulate it themselves.
We do this so automatically that we may not even notice we’re doing it. It’s just the water we are all swimming in.
In the BDSM world, access is a privilege with clear criteria. You don’t get time, attention, emotional labor, or body just because you want it. You earn access by demonstrating respect, clear communication, and the capacity to follow the rules.
Obey. Pay Tribute. If you can’t do that? You don’t get in. Simple.
In this highly transparent dynamic, access is earned. Everywhere else, it’s assumed…if you’re a man. The irony is, I’ve had better boundaries with men who paid me than with men I engage with for free. Decentering means reversing that. Access to my time, attention and energy is a privilege for everyone. Not just the ones paying by the hour.
An interesting pattern emerges from the reversal. When a man responds badly to boundaries: gets defensive, guilt-trips, withdraws affection, or calls you harsh or difficult, he just told you everything you need to know about himself and about how it will likely be if he’s allowed in your world.
In truth, it means that man is disqualified. The word “qualify” will bother people. It implies criteria. But men apply criteria to hiring, alliances, and competitive hierarchies without anyone calling them cold. Women applying standards to intimacy, dating or even basic access, is treated as a personality defect.
In reality, it’s just coherence.
LAYER THREE: INTERNAL BOUNDARIES
The third layer is internal. This whole “inner work” thing is becoming a theme.
But even with economic independence and clear relational boundaries, I still catch myself.
I might wonder what he’s thinking, or adjust what I say or do based on how I think he’ll respond. I could interpret his mood as data about my worth or perform a version of myself I think he’ll like better. It’s all the same thing: prioritizing his comfort over my truth.
This is the deepest layer of centering. It’s about where your attention lives.
And my attention has been trained by culture, family, and every movie or TV show I’ve ever watched, to focus on men. To read, respond to, and organize myself around their presence or absence. I’ve been doing this since before I could talk. It’s automatic. Like breathing.
And I hesitate to bring this up, but we all know that one woman. Maybe you are that woman. The one who disappears into her curret relationship like it’s a black hole. Her friendships go into a holding pattern—a type of waiting room where everyone sits patiently (or not) until the relationship ends, or she surfaces for air. Or she needs something from a person that actually cares about her as a person.
When she’s in a relationship with a man, she stops showing up. Stops returning texts. Has to check everything against his schedule, his preference, his life. In a way, she becomes part of him, much like an appendage or accessory. Her entire identity becomes “we” instead of “I.” This is the woman that receives three calls from him during a coffee date about absolutely nothing. And when the relationship pauses or ends, she must try and rebuild everything she let atrophy while she was centering him.
Decentering at this level means noticing the dynamics and redirecting. When I catch myself wondering what he’s thinking, I redirect to what I’m thinking. Adjusting my words to manage his reaction? I redirect to what is actually true. The bottom line is, if I’m making his comfort more important than my boundaries, I redirect to what I actually need.
Am I good at this yet? Absolutely not. I still revert to centering men every time I’m scared or uncertain. Which is often. And sometimes, it’s for no reason at all except that it’s just the way things have always been. Turns out, decades of conditioning don’t evaporate because you read the right Substack. Change and growth take time.
What I’m starting to notice is that men who can handle me as a full subject, not a satellite, are better partners across all areas of life. More reliable, fair, and usually more interesting. And they’re infinitely more capable of actual intimacy.
The ones who can’t handle it leave my life. And honestly? They were never really in it with me anyway.
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THE OPERATING STANCE (BETWEEN NAIVETE AND MISANDRY)
I’m trying to build an operating stance that’s neither “trust men to lead” nor “men are disgusting,” although the latter is becoming harder to resist as a million planets pile up in Aries, sign of the Warrior…and the leader of the free world wakes up on Easter morning and tweets “Open the Fuckin strait or you’ll all be living in Hell. JUST WATCH!”
Riiiiiiiight.
So, not “all men are dangerous” (they’re not).
Not “not all men” (irrelevant when you can’t tell which is which until after they’ve done something retarded).
Something more like: evaluate case-by-case, trust patterns over promises, center my own agency over their comfort, and make them earn access through consistent behavior over time.
That, my friends, is not man-hating. That’s discernment in a world where the stakes are high, the odds are stacked against women, and the institutional protections are minimal at best.
Sadly, most men won’t even pass that filter. Not because they’re bad, but because they’ve been trained to expect things to continue as they always have been, and feel entitled to be the main character in any given social structure.
Even men center other men. There’s a significant body of psychological work showing that men organize their entire lives around approval from their fathers, by either proving the critical father wrong or making the supportive father proud. Watch how a man dismisses the exact same advice from his girlfriend or wife that he immediately implements after hearing it from another man. The information didn’t change. The gender of the messenger did.
And it goes much deeper than strategic authority. Men buy luxury watches to signal status to other men even more than to women. They choose partners, at least partly, to signal status to other men. Women are told they dress for each other, but that’s mostly projection. Women dress for the male gaze. Men, meanwhile, are literally structuring their entire lives around impressing other men. The car, the house, the wife, the watch; it’s all performance for a male audience.
So it’s not just women that operate this way. The whole system runs on male-as-default.
I’m burning that shit down. I’m done.
Not with men. With organizing my life around their presence.
Big difference.
The result of this architecture, structural, relational, and internal, is not isolation.
Love remains available. In fact it becomes cleaner. A partner enters a life that already has gravity. He is not asked to supply identity, security, or narrative purpose. He is assessed for alignment with an existing structure. He is a participant, not the premise.
And if he can’t handle that, or if standards feel like an attack on his manhood and wholeness reads as coldness, he’s out. That’s not misandry, it’s architecture.
I don’t have it all figured out. I still catch myself wondering what some guy I met twice is thinking about me, or performing pleasantness for some random dude at the coffee shop. I can backslide into customer service mode with alarming speed.
Some days I want to light the whole thing up like Kali in the cremation grounds. Other times, I’m right back to being my mother’s daughter, reading the weather, accommodating to suit the man at the center of the current equation.
But here’s what’s different: I notice it now. It’s not always, and not perfectly, but much more often, I redirect.
So how do we operate in a world where the Diddy tapes exist and everyone’s terrified to see what’s on them? Where people traffic children like disposable products and then walk free as if they just got a parking ticket? Where human life doesn’t seem to matter anymore?
Not by pretending it’s not happening, or trusting everyone, or letting rage at systems that protect monsters turn into contempt that burns you out.
We can take notice, and build our own system of material, relational, and internal redirects. One boundary at a time.
Organize around your own sovereignty, safety, and truth. And let everyone else adjust accordingly.
— Zanna