Ethical Masculinity Through Narrative Intelligence
Dear Substack: today is Saturday, which means I sit down and write. I’m currently sitting in the Detroit airport and am writing this on my iPhone in the Substack app! I love being able to step in today and keep my free write live!
I hope you enjoy this reflection!
Today, I’m reflecting on my work with masculinity. I’m interested in nurturing an ethical masculinity masculinity rooted in care, becoming, imagination, and love
To engage ethical masculinity is to enter a practice of unlearning and re-storying—a tender and radical undoing of the myths we were taught to believe about what makes a man.
bell hooks teaches us that love is the foundation of all justice.
In The Will to Change, she writes, “The first act of violence that patriarchy demands of males is not violence toward women. Instead, patriarchy demands of all males that they engage in acts of psychic self-mutilation.”
So we begin here:
Not with accusation, but with the invitation to healing.
Ethical masculinity, then, is about recovering the capacity to feel, to connect, to be changed by relationship. I need to be able to feel and connect with myself and others and because of my lived experience and the way my brain works, this is truly hard for me.
Narrative intelligence helps us map the terrain of that recovery. It’s the inner work to which I’m turning in my effort to become human, again, after living my entire life in academia
It is the wisdom to notice the stories we inherited, to ask who authored them, and to choose which ones we will continue to live.
Fred Moten reminds us that fugitivity is not escape, but a refusal of the scripts that would make us instruments of domination.
To be ethically masculine is to live fugitive to patriarchy—to refuse to be captured by the logics of power-over, and instead dwell in the blur:
in the trembling beauty of relation,
in the excess of love that cannot be disciplined.
This kind of masculinity doesn’t perform; it listens.
It doesn’t conquer; it co-creates.
It does not assume authority; it shares vulnerability.
Ethical masculinity, through the lens of narrative intelligence, is not about becoming better men in the eyes of empire.
It is about participating in the collective reimagining of gender as a site of liberation.
And so we write new stories.
Slowly.
Honestly.
Together.
This is my journey to turn on the wonder switch, as Harris III writes!
I’ll be back tomorrow with my reflection on Palm Sunday.
Paz, -RCE-+