Fatherless.
I grew up without a father.
For years, I thought that absence had carved out a void — a lack to be filled with male figures, with approvals to win, with gazes to deserve.
At first, I confused absence with rejection. I mistook silence for indifference. Only later did I understand that not being shaped by a father meant being shaped by no one — and that this, paradoxically, was what allowed me to become someone.
At thirty, I realize it wasn’t a lack at all: it was an education in freedom.
Adult men disgust me.
Not in a superficial, visceral way — but in a systemic one.
Those old enough to be my father are, in most cases, the most saturated representation of the world I reject: egocentric, ignorant, convinced they are the rightful owners of the reality that raised them.
Some are more intelligent, even sensitive, but their sensitivity is often just arrogance in disguise.
They would all need a process of unlearning — from patriarchy, from colonialism, from capitalism.
Not to become “better,” but simply to learn how to exist without taking up all the space.
My generation has grown up watching these men build systems that no longer work — political, economic, emotional.
We inherited their ruins and their arrogance.
And now we’re asked to admire them for the very structures that are collapsing on us.
The myth of the “great man” persists, even as his empire of certainties turns to dust.
The best of the fifty-year-old men think like the average twenty-year-old woman: with that fragile clarity of someone who’s beginning to question things but still hasn’t learned how to listen.
And this isn’t a moral judgment — it’s an anthropological observation.
For centuries, women have had to develop critical consciousness as a survival tool; men, instead, have been allowed the luxury of remaining unaware.
Perhaps growing up fatherless was a privilege: it spared me the imprint of domination, it taught me to read absence not as a wound, but as an open space.
At thirty, I’m not looking for a father, nor a teacher.
I’m looking for men capable of unlearning — men who can meet the world without claiming to own it.
