I used to hate men.

I reached this conclusion in my senior year of high school, eroded and weathered by the ostensible impossibility of a man seeing me as his equal and his friend. 

I grew up playing video games, a pastime in which women make up the minority of partakers. Every Christmas, my cousins would roll up with a Nintendo 3DS in one hand and a Minecraft stuffed animal in the other. They wore T-shirts, jeans, and sneakers while I sat cross-legged in my dress, Mary Janes, and barrettes, sneaking peeks at the Pokémon battles and Legend of Zelda odysseys illuminated on their tiny screens. 

I tossed aside my Barbies and begged my parents for a laptop, with which they graciously obliged me after a year or two of pleading. Unable to wait, I remember ripping the box open and trying to set up the laptop right there in the car. Finally at home with wifi, the first things I downloaded were Minecraft and Steam. 

I recall an early memory of the zombie fighting game Unturned, where I discovered that players could communicate with each other through an in-game voice chat. Excited, I pressed the button on my keyboard, leaned in toward my mic, and started talking. Immediately, I was greeted by the laughs of a hoard of prepubescent boys. 

“Bro, is there a girl in the chat?”

“I wonder if she’s on her period.”

I couldn’t have been older than 10 or 11 at the time, and only had a vague idea of what a period was. Still, my stomach twinged and my cheeks got red as I was filled with a mix of shame and confusion. I felt like I had done something wrong, but I didn’t know what. The players kept laughing, and I’m sure they said other—likely worse—things that I didn’t understand then but would soon come to know. I would learn words like “bitch,” and every allusion and sexual euphemism under the sun while I continued to play online video games as a girl, just trying to have fun like everyone else. 

At school, I had friends who were boys. We played tag on the playground and talked about the Percy Jackson books together. We traded our fruit snacks for chips and Skyped each other over the summer breaks. In sixth grade, I moved away from my hometown for a year before coming back toward the end of seventh grade. I was looking forward to seeing my old friends, but somehow everything had changed.

“He keeps asking me for nudes. He tells me he is going to hurt himself if I don’t.”

My friend was referring to one of the boys I had been close with in elementary school. I couldn’t believe or even fathom what I was hearing. We didn’t know what to do. It seemed like it was too dark to tell an adult, and who would believe us anyway? We were only 13. 

The same boy soon started DMing me with similar messages on Instagram, which I ignored. The other boys I had been friends with were now shouting slurs in the hallways while wearing their parents’ MAGA hats. They ripped a girl’s rainbow pin off her bag and sexually harassed her friends by mass-circulating a cruel picture via AirDrop.

My one male friend in high school—who I thought was different—told me he had a crush on me, and I told him I wanted to stay friends. He stopped talking to me and told me he hated me. 

When my dad left, I was 16, and I decided that men were the root of all evil. I felt a bubbling rage every day. Whenever my friends said the phrase “I hate men” as a joke, I would concur or repeat it with passion and truth. My entire friend group was female, and I lived at home with a single mom. Briefly, I was friends with a gay guy (out gay men were few and far between at my conservative high school), before being dismayed when he confidently started calling my friend a slut for sleeping with her boyfriend. It seemed to me that no man was the exception. 

Early on at Brown, I started making friends with queer men. They were kind and funny, and it was one of the first times I could tell that a man saw me as an equal and a friend. We could hang out one-on-one, and I didn’t worry about any potential subtext. I think, oftentimes, gay men think that they are excluded from misogyny, as seemed to be the case with my friend in high school, but my new friends at Brown were thoughtful and aware. I started to see a glimmer of hope and open myself up to trust again. 

Still, I would give straight men a wide berth. My friends joked with me once that it was obvious I hated men. I felt defensive, even though I might’ve accepted that assessment in the past. I didn’t hate men, right? I had made so much progress.

Finally, through a few of my female friends, I slowly began to befriend a group of guys. I had never met men like them. While many of them were straight, they never made me feel infantilized or objectified. We had tons in common and started to make inside jokes. We played video games and went to the gym together. They were comfortable in their masculinity and thought that guys who acted like the guys from my high school were losers. 

Of course, this is not to say that they were perfect, but I have learned to give grace where it is due. Together, we are always making mistakes and learning to decode the patriarchy that has permeated every aspect of our lives for so long.

I ended up rooming with one of them, along with two of my other female friends. I sometimes worried that he felt awkward rooming with three girls, but he texted us the other day:

“You guys have made this year for me.”

At the end of the day, gender doesn’t matter. We are friends and equals.

Sometimes, when I think about the men I have met at Brown, they make me want to cry out of gratitude. I used to feel so angry all of the time. I never realized how much the chip on my shoulder was weighing me down. While sometimes I worry that Brown is just a bubble—an anxiety seemingly confirmed by my shock at Donald Trump’s election at the hands of a hateful movement with a large share of incels and angry young men—I remind myself that even if it’s true and all that exists is this bubble, that does not mean all hope is lost. I have met and known good men. I have to believe that they will overcome this modern narrative. They have shown me that there is a light.