A couple of years ago, I made the transition from working predominately with women to working also with boys and young men. And, I’ve got to say, I don’t think women would stand for being treated like a teenage boy. In the past few months, I’ve become increasingly worried about the state of men in the world. I’m worried about the young boys growing up without positive male role models. I’m concerned that the young minority men in my community dream of growing up to be sports stars or drug dealers. I’m upset that real men can’t cry. I’m annoyed that in spite of my enlightened views, I, too, have a too narrow definition of masculinity.

As a feminist, I’ve talked before about trying to navigate the space between virgin and whore, and claiming my identity as both an emotional and rational creature. As a woman, I believe that I have options and choices. This complexly confident person I have become is due in large part to all the kinds of Womanspace I have found.

I worried because I don’t see a similar space for the young men in my community. As far as the women’s movement has gone to saying women can do anything men do, we have not yet reached that moment where society says men can do anything women do. Men have deeply coded behaviors for work, sex, and family, and these expectations have not drastically changed in the past thirty years. Indeed, it seems that quite the opposite has occurred: we expect even more out of them. Society expects that men bring home a big paycheck and expects them to put in quality time at home. They are expected to treat women as partners, but they still need to be gentlemen and open our doors.

I’m also tired of sitting back and watching men take it. I’m tired of seeing the same old depictions of what it means to be a man. I’m tired of masculinity being tied up with sports, sex, drugs, or being a computer playing, nose in a book, financial analyst nerd. I know that this is such an incomplete depiction of men! From my father, to the boys I used to date, to my coworkers and friends, I have seen how hard it is to grow up male and how much more there is to men than they are willing to let on. And yet, while I feel men ask for my respect, they do not ask me to change my idea of what it means to be a man.

I think it’s time for a real men’s movement. Not an ideology that is going to narrow the definition of what it means to be male, but a movement that will let men be more complicated. I want men to move past the frat boy limits of what Manspace is and find a place where a boy can decide what kind of man he will be and find men to help him on that journey. I want the young boys I work with to find a man who will show them another way to be a man and give them the tools they need to succeed at something other than drugs and violence. And I, for one, will support that kid however I can – whether that’s watching the basketball game over a beer, offering my silence so he can cry, or giving him a separate space to claim his masculinity with others far better suited to give guidance. As the new NNPCW t-shirt says, “Nobody’s free until everybody’s free.”