I Love Men

And why you should too. My response to I Hate Men in the New York Times.

Hate is a strong word. Love is stronger. The word, the deed – an active, natural, all-consuming phenomenon. However, the two notions sit on the opposite sides of the same coin. We may call that coin our life or we may be more specific and call that coin a perception.

I saw an article in the New York Times, titled I Hate Men, and my first reaction was the title of this article. With a pinch of “WTF?” Any time I hear someone say “I hate this” or “I hate him” I try to take a step aside, take a breath, and ask, “Are you sure it’s hate? Not dislike? Or irritation? Because you see – hate is a strong word, of the unfathomable character. The Nazis hated the Jews. The Russians hated the Nazis. The victim hates the offender.” There. I think we have arrived at the answer to the title of the original article, I Hate Men. The woman who penned the article – later turned into a small book, a pamphlet really – is gay, and she was raped. I step aside, I take a breath. Of course she hates the offender. Nobody can blame her. Her body, her whole being was assaulted, which is a horrendous, unforgivable offense, the one for which I, personally, would castrate the man who perpetrated such an act. Rape is an act of hate. And she’s right to hate back, until she’s ready to work through it – which might take years – and heal from the experience and the PTSD. However, it doesn’t seem that the author has healed or even sought help. Writing is therapeutic, it’s scientifically proven. However, when your writing becomes a vehicle of hate in its own right, we must step aside and take another deep breath.

I will argue it’s the violence the author hates, the particular man who ruined her life, the society that allowed it to happen. But to hate ALL men? This is akin hating all the oceans, lakes and seas after you once almost drowned. It’s as if you’ll never light another candle or stove if you burned a part of your body before. It’s similar to never walking out of your house after someone randomly punched you on the street.

When we’re hurting, we conflate issues and notions, we take a big broom and sweep all the hurts onto one scoop, and hope it will be gone. But it doesn’t go away. It sticks around and grows. The author of the article received death threats, was harassed on social media and in real life, she had to hide and move around, and it seems has become even more afraid of men, and the hostility of the world in general.

I love men. I am a bisexual woman who was previously married to a man, and later lived in a love-union with two other women. It lasted two years, looked strange to the outsiders but was beautiful for us. My debut novel, Inga’s Zigzags, is largely based on that story. Let me tell you a secret. Even lesbians don’t hate men. One of my girlfriends at the time announced that she still “loves dick – can’t help it. Sometimes you just need a hard one inside you.” My other girlfriend promptly smacked her in response and went on to make love to her with her knowing hands and lips. 

Beyond pure physiology, men are our fathers, brothers, lovers, husbands, friends, grandfathers, nephews. It is a cliché, but they do help us in life: sometimes financially, sometimes emotionally, sometimes both. I’m lucky to have married the best father for my two daughters. He is not afraid of my passionate nature, of my strong opinions and directness. He’s a fantastic dad, who cooks, and takes them to sports practice, and attends their recitals. So, before I share my full autobiography, I’d like to suggest that the hate is not with men at large, but with those who have hurt us. And have they ever. In my own dozen of offenses and hurts that I survived, some stand out. Let me tell you.

I once flew Nick, a British-born expat in Moscow, head chef at a five-star hotel and my lover in mid 1990s – to a wedding of a friend outside of London. It was my present to him – to see his family, and to meet my friends at a fun event. Upon returning to Moscow, he told me he didn’t love me – on the way from the airport.

Another one, Colin, I met at a dance party at DUMBO, in 2000. He “picked me up” in a chill-out lounge, where I was waiting for my friends from St. Petersburg (Russia) to get their fill of dancing in a cool Brooklyn loft. He sweet-talked me, and dismissed my question about a wedding ring on his finger as a “marriage for papers”, as he was a dancer from Guyana. He called me the next day and took me shopping for ingredients to make a pizza from scratch. We made love for a week, non-stop, desperately, as he was leaving for Italy a week later, to dance with his troupe. Best sex of my life, to date. Seeing him off, in his apartment on Manhattan Avenue in Upper Manhattan, I met his mother and sister, who acknowledged me as his girlfriend. I danced a little as I saw him do earlier. He later called me from Rome, and played me songs from Michael Jackson’s new album, Invincible. “Speechless, speechless, that’s how you make me feel,” he sang along. Two days later his brother’s wife called me (I didn’t know his brother was married), and told me that Colin went to Italy to return to his actual wife. She, the wife, also called me a week later, to find out if we had a “fling”. I said we fucked 24/7 and he promised me three beautiful children, the color of coffee with milk. I shaved my head for the first time, at age 30.

There were others – men who ran from me because (pick one):

1. I was too much.

2. What we had was electricity and he couldn’t handle the voltage.

3. His old girlfriend was coming back next week.

4. He was moving to a different city for work.

5. He was moving to a different country forever.

6. He decided to reunite with his ex-wife after all.

7. He thought I was a little crazy, “too Russian”.

There were yet others, men and women, who followed me across the Atlantic to be with me, and whom I dumped; who went to St. Petersburg to meet my father, but I still broke off the relationship; who married me and whom I divorced, because “he wasn’t Russian enough. He could have tried, though he was born and raised in New Jersey,” – that’s from my first novel.

In the end – or during the intermission – I never hated men. I hated the assholes, the liars, the manipulators, the aggressors. I still loved men, those who made sweet and furious love to me, those who called me their queen and sunshine, those who looked at me as if I were the most spectacular vision they’d ever set their eyes on.

I love men, the professionals with big hearts and strong brains: my dad, Sergei Vinogradov, a retired professor of engineering and swimming fanatic back in St. Petersburg; my grandfathers, Sergei Demidov and Yefim Gordon, both military pilots, who fought for Russia in World War II and died defending it; my husband Alexei Miller (not of Gazprom) – the best partner and dad in the world; my talented nephews, Misha and Sasha Schoolov, the brainy engineers and crazy surfers; my departed mentor, in life and business, Eugene L. Scott, magazine publisher and an all-around gentleman; my dedicated cello teacher on the UWS, Eliot Bailen, and my fun-loving surfing instructor in Cabarete, DR, Elias Polanco; my girls’ swimming and tennis couches; my serious contractor, Alexander Makeikin, in charge of gut renovating my St. Petersburg apartment; my sweet doorman Ramon Santos, from the DR, in my Riverside Drive lobby in NYC; and my dog Vanya. My dear, dear friends: Sergei Ilchenko, Arkady Volk, Kirill Frolov, Peter Mugavero, Oleg Pryakhin, Sander Koyfman, Fred Solomon, Mark Rosenberg.To summarize, I hope that the author of I Hate Men actually doesn’t hate them, but rather hates the bad apples. If we hate men, what are we going to teach our daughters? That men are dangerous and not to be taken seriously or allowed too close?

How about we change the dialogue between men and women, from confrontational, with its apogee in the #metoo movement, to calm and thoughtful? To achieve that, we need to change the system, actually a lot of systems: education, where girls would be lauded for their achievements in STEM and humanities, not looks and easy access to their bodies, and boys would be taught how to do things with their hands, from carpentry to laundry, as well as how to show respect to the opposite sex, by opening a door, carrying a heavy bag, asking for permissions to borrow things – not catcalling or pulling on braids. It could grow into offering help to a woman struggling to howl a stroller on steep NYC subway steps, into letting a woman go first through a door, paying closer attention to your own wife’s or girlfriend’s emotional states, into calling out a bully in a work-place, into speaking up against bad apples when you see one about to hurt a woman, be it rape or verbal abuse.

We need to teach our boys and girls how to flirt. My God, the United States is a desert of flirting. Nobody understands it. If you flirt, they think you’re inviting them to pull off your underwear. NOT! Flirt is a kind of communication that makes the connection playful and fun, it makes one feel noticed, it elicits smiles, it causes a rush of dopamine in both participants. As a psychologist, I beg the parents and the educational institutions – please flirt yourselves and teach your kids how to flirt. People will learn how to be happy without harboring inside all of the sexual frustrations. Flirting is like letting a little steam out and leveling the horniness to a manageable level, instead of keeping it pent up – without even realizing it’s building up inside without a chance of a release – akin letting the air out of a balloon slowly vs. bursting it open.

Let us flirt! I’ll teach you how. It doesn’t mean I’m a slut or a loose woman. It means I’m a woman confident in her sexual powers, in her intellectual might – because flirting is first of all an intellectual play; it’s about quickness of mind and speed of reactions, without trying to show off or overwhelm another, in her ability to make another smile and inspire good thoughts.

Let’s not hate – men or women, straight or gays, Muslims or Jews, Blacks or Whites, not anyone who is “the other”. Let’s step aside, take a deep breath and try to see the others for what they are: human beings yearning to be noticed, to be acknowledged, to matter. Let’s start with flirting, and maybe proceed to hugs. But first of all, let’s start a conversation so that we feel connected, not alienated. Then love will overcome hate, and unity will overcome division.

I love men. And women.