This poem was inspired by a recent influx of tweets from men saying, “Don’t tar us all with the same brush, only SOME men are like that” when women were discussing the prevalence of violent pornography or the rape threats feminists receive on a daily basis. These men consistently fail to see that there is a difference between saying ‘men’ and ‘all men’, and their complaints about women’s language tend to be their only contribution. As I said on Twitter earlier, the average male reaction to women discussing our violent oppression at the hands of men is to get angry about the talking and not about the violence. They have nothing to say about the harm men inflict on women every day. They would tolerate our discussing our oppression if only we could be more polite about it and promise that we love men and believe in their basic goodness with every other sentence we said — that is to say that no free discussion of the topic is tolerated at all.
Thankfully, some men don’t feel the need to make every discussion of male violence about how they themselves are innocent of said violence. So this poem is dedicated to the few men who get it and who confront their fellow men instead of harassing and guilt-tripping women.
Some Men
Some men are not all men
Not all men are like that
Not all men rape and pillage
But they are not all men
Some men are not all men
And some men are like that
Some men rape and pillage
And they weigh more than all men
Because they do it to all women
While all some men have to say is
Not all men are like that
…Men are like that
Pass the Flaming Sword 
Poor structure, lacking zest, development and poetical climax.
1.4/10 don’t quit your day job.
Oh no, my feelings! The pain! You have crushed my will to ever produce art of any kind again.
Even worse when some guy jumps in to a post about the nth woman murdered by her exhusband and says “that wasn’t a real man, just a loser/douchebag/whatever because real men wouldn’t do that! You shouldn’t say men are violent, say losers are violent instead”
This whole ‘real men don’t do XYZ’ stuff is horrible because it makes being a good person about masculinity, which is hostile to women by definition.
And ultimately they turn every discussion of the harm men cause into one about how great men are. Weird, that, eh? Classic patriarchy.
This is superb, the explanation as well as the poem, and I was pointed at it by a male friend who has never “understood” the thing where women say “men do this”, before reading what you have written here. He does now.
I shall be pointing a lot of men at this in the future. Thanks for writing it.
Thanks so much! It’s really inspiring to hear that my poem lit a light bulb somewhere out there.