To The Men Who Are Enraged By Articles Written By Strong Women

Relax. Take it easy. Turn off your caps lock.

Reel in your misinformed defensiveness — this article is not about you. You being a man doesn’t mean that every article written about men is about you. You being a man doesn’t mean you are allowed to be offended by all articles about men.

A woman had her heart broken, perhaps by a man, and she wrote a beautiful piece about it. The article is not about you, nor is it necessarily about a man. Most of the time, the article isn’t even about the person who did the heartbreaking; it’s about the experience of being heartbroken. It’s about the challenge of healing. It’s one woman saying to the world, “Hey, this is what I’m feeling. Are you feeling this too? Have you felt this in the past? Am I alone?”

The only person who might be offended by this article is the author’s ex, and these smart and talented writers are in all likelihood dating people who can understand that articles about love and heartbreak are not personal attacks.

They’re just an expression, an artistic expression, of the author’s experience. Sometimes, the article is an exaggeration. Part of being a writer is learning to phrase things in a way that makes them powerful, that makes them sting. Part of being a writer is the phonetics of speech, and how to makes things sound better. Part of being a writer is telling an enhanced version of the truth.

When you leave your angry comment on her article, your long paragraph about how women victimize themselves and blame men for their heartbreak, you are missing the point.

When you leave your angry comment on her article, your caps locked advice to other men to be vigilant of female manipulation, you are missing the point. She is not trying to control anyone by writing this. She is writing for herself.

When you leave your anti-feminist, ultra-jumping-to-conclusions comment that women are inferior to men in every way except the ability to bear children, you are completely missing the point. You make associations between poetry and childbirth that I simply don’t understand, and I’d have to write a whole other article about that.

So relax. Take it easy. Turn off your caps lock. Ask yourself what you’re really angry at. Ask yourself why women expressing grief, confusion or sadness makes you so uncomfortable. Ask yourself why a woman asking for recognition and support makes you so mad.

And the next time you read an article about heartbreak that hits a little too close to home, call the girl you’re thinking about and apologize.