Men stepping up
The dismantling of patriarchy is going to have to happen from inside the system. Meet Mike, one of the men working to do that.
After I wrote Where are all the Good Men, I started looking for men who were stepping up. I came across Mike Underell’s Instagram account, @MikeinProgres, in which he documents what he’s learning about gender equality, masculinity, and a whole host of other things. Mike also has a great Substack, Mind the Gap. He very kindly agreed to talk to me about his work and his journey. I’ve edited the transcript of our conversation for length and clarity.
Let me say up front: I find what Mike is doing both moving and impressive, and I’m a huge fan.
Monique: Can you tell me a little more about what you do?
Mike: I would have called myself progressive and feminist, but a couple of years ago I realized I'm not doing anything to actually make things better. It was this idea that, especially since having a daughter, I'm doing nothing to better the world she's going to move into. And if I want to better the world that she's going to move into, I have to make the world better for women now. That was a pretty daunting thought. But I’ve come up with this mantra or motto, “just lower the stakes.” I don’t need to solve the world’s problems, but if I can make the world of the women in my immediate circle a little easier, a little better, then that would be something worth pursuing.
I'm not an expert, I'm just a guy who decided to try and live out loud while I'm trying to learn how to be a better man for the women in my life.
Monique: What do you want men to see or understand differently?
Mike: I think the best way to articulate it would be to take some of my videos. My most popular video is “How I taught myself to believe women.” There's a lot of talk about, you just need to believe women, which sounds really simple, because it is. If you say something, I need to believe it. But—and this was a long time ago—there was a point where I didn't believe everything that my wife said. If I'm not believing even the women who are closest to me, then there's something ingrained in me that I need to figure out how to overcome.
The idea that I’m trying to get across to men is that these simple things like believing women actually take work.
Monique: When you say believe women, I assume you’re talking about sexual assault. But you’re not. So men generally don’t believe women at all?
Mike: I can't speak for other men, I can only speak about my experience. For me, it wasn’t just sexual assualt. The example I use in my video is, my wife and I worked in different parts of the city. Vancouver, at least 15 years ago, was seen as generally a safe city and, for whatever reason, I took pride in that. We walked home from different parts of the city at the same time. It was dark out, or it was getting dark out. I felt safe. She didn't. This wasn't the first time that she had expressed this type of feeling, but I was like, “You're overreacting. Vancouver is a very safe city.” It was something as minimal as that. The pride in my city had more of an impact on me than listening to my wife. What was important to me, no matter how trivial, was more important than than what my wife was saying.
What flipped the script in my head was, she told me that she walked home with the keys in between her fingers and, for whatever reason, that imagery in my mind made it very real. I was like…who am I to not believe what she's feeling, to the point where she has to put keys in between her knuckles? She has to truly believe something to go that far and be that ready for the 15 minute walk home. That was sort of my aha moment. where I realized her feelings, her experience, is so different from mine.
Monique: There are so many men who are well-intentioned, who just don’t see it. There’s not a woman in the world….I walk through the world with an awareness and probably an anxiety and tension that men just don’t. I don’t think it’s out of any maliciousness. You haven’t experienced it so you can’t understand what it’s like.
Mike: There's also the mental load of trying to get the men in your life to realize this. If I’ve made the realization, it can happen. And if I can help men realize this, without women having to carry the mental load of helping their men realize this, I feel like I'm actually doing something to help change the world.
It takes work. As simple as it sounds, it takes work because we've been trained that we don't need to care about this stuff. The world revolves around us.
Monique: I think that men have a responsibility to stand up and say something, but there’s also a risk of ostracization and rejection by your peer group. How do you navigate that? Have you experienced that?
Mike: I have experienced it. Going against other men and risking feeling part of the group is hard to do. I had to mentally get myself to a point where I would actually say something.
I think it’s the idea of complicity. It’s this idea of not all men. But we also talk about how actions mean more than words. If three out of 10 men are creating bad actions but there are no good actions coming from the other men, then the only actions that we see out in the world are those bad actions. And if men aren't doing something to combat those bad actions, then that’s us being complicit.
Monique: I was in New York on election day and by the time I had landed in Paris the next morning, it was clear that Trump had won. I came home, repacked and got on a train to Avignon to attend the Pelicot trial. First thing the following morning, I was in a courtroom watching videos of men who were sitting just feet away from me raping Gisèle Pelicot’s inert body. And all I could think was, “Men hate women. They hate us.” Obviously, I was jetlagged and in an emotional place, but there’s something there. There’s an anger or a resentment, or, I don’t know what it is, but there is something. And, sure, it’s not all men—but maybe it is all men, right? What is that?
Mike: The word that jumps to my mind right now is entitlement. I feel like men feel entitled to, women, success, prestige. We’re taught that it's all or nothing. When it comes to women, I do believe it is all men, because I don't think of being a good guy as a check box. I believe it's a spectrum, and the spectrum is behaviors and whether those behaviors negatively impact women or positively impact women. And the way that I've been brought up in a partriarchial society is, a lot of my behaviors, I don't even think about women when I do it and what that impact is going to be. So, at best, I'm neutral, and at worst, I negatively impact women with my decisions. I look at it as, where am I on the spectrum? How can I figure out what behavior I have that negatively impacts women? Rectify that, and then move on to the next one.
Monique: Have you watched Adolescence yet? It does feel like there’s some kind of hidden baseline, a negative, that underscores things. I’m curious to know what you think that is.
Mike: At no point would I say that I hate women. But I think there's a lot that is self-centered, where I believe I deserve corporate success. I believe I deserve to make a lot of money and prove myself as better than a lot of people.
The more studying and reading I've done around patriarchy, it is this culture of dominance. The idea is, you have to dominate somebody, whether it's lesser women, children, or for men, weaker men, women, your children. There's just this sense of dominance.
I don't know what drives that, but I can say that's something that resonates with me, because I didn't actively hate women but I certainly wasn't going to do anything that was going to lessen my chance of succeeding, even if that meant not helping women.
I’m not an expert. I’m still doing a bunch of reading. But that’s how I see it. I don't see it as a hatred. It's more of a disregard and entitlement, women's lives be damned.
Monique: Your friends and the men around you, do they respect what you’re doing? How is it received by other men?
Mike: So far, fine. At the end of the day, I think men are trying to say the right things in social situations. That's where I sort of feel like sexism is. There's a great line in the Barbie movie where Ryan Gosling, Ken, sees some radom guy and he’s like, “Hey, I don't feel like we're doing patriarchy well.” The guy says “We are. It's just a lot quieter.”
That’s not to say that there isn't overt sexism and violence against women. Obviously there is. But but I think men are a little more savvy about what to say and not get pushback.
Monique: Right. There are a lot of words being thrown around—though I would say still not enough—but there’s not a lot of concrete action happening on the part of men, and certainly not on any kind of large scale.
Mike: The reason why, I guess, there's not any sort of large scale organization is, it's a lot of work and men won't see the personal benefit to it. Honestly, before I started any of this, the idea of taking on an initiative that would take away from making money and climbing the corporate ladder for my own personal success, it wasn't worth it.
In patriarchy, men are defined by their corporate success. Before, I valued my entire life around what I did at work, but I now value myself in different ways. Work is important to me, but I value myself as a dad, a husband, a friend.
Monique: Is there a takeaway?
Mike: There’s no easy takeaway, but the first thing that jumps to mind is that this is not a checkbox, it’s a lifelong journey. What I'd like to impress upon men is that it isn't a lot of work, it's just thinking about things differently.
You’re not solving the world's problems. I'm just trying to get you to think about women a little bit differently. Just try to catch yourself, when your wife tells you something and you think to yourself, she's overreacting, catch yourself. It's as simple as that. Start there. It doesn't have to be this big thing. It’s these small actions that eventually snowball. It's not as much work as it as we think it might be.
Monique: Do you think empathy is at the core of all of this? If you could put yourself in your wife’s shoes and think, “What does that feel like?” is that enough?
Mike: That's probably it. I don't know what it's like to hold keys in between my fingers.That was my big moment. I remember it vividly, my wife saying that. And I was just, I don't know what that's like, but that's got to be scary. I know what it's like to be scared.
Yeah, empathy. Understanding that other people have feelings, and what those feelings are like. Even if I don't know what your experience is, I've experienced fear, and now I see what you mean.
It was wonderful to meet and talk with you, Monique! Thank you so much for the discussion. Your words at the beginning are very kind 🙏 I hope our paths cross again!
The Modern Negotiation of Power: A Letter in Response
The trouble with these kinds of dialogues about patriarchy is that they are, more often than not, essays in partiality and one-sided blame. Critiques of a system without even attempting a reckoning with its roots.
It has become fashionable, it seems to me, to treat "the patriarchy" as a singular, male-authored imposition, a brutalist edifice constructed exclusively by men to serve men, and women have no culpability, and generally present as unwilling victims. And yet, even a peripheral understanding of psychology, anthropology, or human evolutionary biology knows that the story is not so neat, nor the characters so starkly drawn. Human societies are co-creations. Gender roles, however stifling, outdated, or tragic in their modern forms, have been negotiated, reinforced, and repeated by both sexes through generations, globally. What appears in the collective is never the product of one alone. It’s the unseen handshake beneath the table.
Patriarchy is not (and has never been) simply something men did to women. It’s something we built together. Systems are co-authored, and as writer bell hooks has noted, patriarchy hurts everyone, men included, by imprisoning both genders in outdated roles.
Patriarchy is something performed, co-signed, taught, and rewarded across gender lines, and built upon a granite base of generations of performance. It is less a single villain and more a communal improvisation.
There’s a simple starting point for equality. Embracing it. Desire doesn’t live in ideology; it lives in context. And sometimes, the context is this: a woman insists she wants equality, but watches silently, then thankfully, as the man pays for dinner because she’s been trained, by culture, by peers, by her own mother’s arched eyebrow, to equate generosity with affection, and power with protection. And asking, or demanding, “the patriarchy” to change while accepting this gateway behavior, immediately disqualifies all the hard work of everyone seeking equality.
Let’s talk about that role training. Much is said about “toxic masculinity,” but too little is said about the fact that men respond to the behaviors and signals of the women around them. Culture is not just built by fathers raising sons; it’s built every time women reward or punish behavior in their choices, relationships, and expectations. I’m not blaming women’s behavior for "the patriarchy," but women are most certainly complicit. Men are confused because the social scripts are changing, but the rewards often haven’t. I encounter this every single time I go out on a date, with a female friend, or in a mixed group with women. In 10 years of dating, not a single woman has ever reached for the check, even if they originated the date. Not one.
We cannot blame men for the rules, and also punish them for not knowing how to break them gracefully.
Writer bell hooks has said that patriarchy harms everyone, men included, not simply because it elevates male dominance, but because it strangles possibility. It limits who men and women are allowed to be. And yet, when men struggle toward change, many are met not with partnership, approbation, or support, but suspicion. What do you actually want from men, atonement or alignment, or a Harry Potter magic wand to somehow fix it while you watch and wait for some instant behavioral alchemy?
Equality and beating back “the patriarchy” starts with the act of behaving as an equal, when it’s comfortable, yes, but especially when it’s not.
This baseline example plays out for all women wanting the patriarchy to change. The dinner check lands. Will he offer? Will I decline? Do I ask to split? Will we both pretend we’re fine with the outcome if he always pays? In that moment, centuries of scripts write themselves through our hands, minds, and actions. And the action seals the deal. If you want to be equal, to begin to unravel the patriarchy, you have to be willing to reach out, first, and without permission. If you don’t. You’re simply not ready to have a meaningful conversation on change.
Many psychologists and feminist and controversial writers and thinkers have repeated, responsibility is where meaning lives. I am a strong believer in personal responsibility. I’ve always been taught, from the Navy through life, that courage is the willingness to be uncomfortable in the service of something larger. What if the next step in dismantling patriarchy is not public confession, or demanding men somehow break their chains, but private correction and silent and unwavering behavioral leadership?
This is especially important for young men because the roadmap has been set on fire and no one has replaced it with anything solid, but instead a moving target. They are told to do better, act better, have more empathy, think about how it feels to be in a woman’s shoes, and treat everyone as an equal, but are not shown how, or given supportive social feedback when they do. Even more so, they are asked to give up traditional roles, but are often not met with women prepared to inhabit those equal spaces with agency.
Social critics and feminists have echoed that women have always wielded immense cultural power. Though desire, through choice, through refusal, just not always the courage to use it without apology. If women are going to lead, they must act like leaders. Pick up the check. Make the first move. Assert and initiate. Not because men won’t, but because equality is not a request. It’s an action. A behavior. A stance.
This should not be about who’s to blame, which most conversations about “the patriarchy” tend to be. This is about who’s willing to act. It’s not about grand overtures of change (as noted in this piece), it’s about small moments of change that add up to larger change…over time, probably a lot more time than we all want to wait, or admit…or commit to. Not only from men, but also from women. These pieces tend to approach change as wholesale, urgent, and needed immediately, which is patently impossible without addressing the core behaviors one by one and finding an accepted and comfortable social consensus.
We don’t dismantle "the patriarchy" by demanding, endlessly, that the other person fix it first. We dismantle it by behaving differently in the places that matter most: not the conference halls, or substacks, but the dinners, the bedrooms, the social moments, the family tables.
This is not a war between men and women. It is a renegotiation, one where both parties must arrive ready to question and challenge their own comfort. To behave differently, proactively, not more aggressively.
Want to dismantle patriarchy? Then don’t wait for a man to “get it.” Or for a man to figure it out. Or other men in the periphery to be influenced by the single man making a personal change. Men don’t work like that, generally. We behave, act, and do because we respond based on the social ecosystem. Be the one who moves first.
Pick up the check. And keep going.