Let me be upfront about something: decentering men is not a man-hating concept. It is not about cutting men out of your life, rejecting relationships, or declaring some kind of gender war. I am in relationship with men. I love men. I deeply respect them.

And still. Decentering men changed my life more profoundly than almost anything else I have done.

This article is about the invisible conditioning that most of us, women and men both, have absorbed without questioning it. It is about the ways we have all been taught to organize our lives, our worth, and our safety around a male-centered framework. And it is about what becomes possible when you consciously step out of it.

Below you can watch my video bout this topic. Prefer to read on? Just scroll down below the video! 

The World We Were Born Into

We live in a man-centered world. That is not an accusation. It is an observation. The systems we navigate daily: governments, religions, economies, family structures, beauty standards, healthcare, history books: were largely built by men, for men, and around male experience as the default human experience.

What this means in practice is that from a very young age, both women and men are conditioned to center male leadership, male stories, male desire, and male approval as the organizing forces of life. We are taught to listen to male authority, to trust male wisdom as the wiser wisdom, to see male experience as the more universal experience.

For women, this conditioning goes even deeper. We learn early that our safety, our worth, and our survival are tied to how desirable we are to men: how pleasing, how beautiful, how compliant. It is not a conspiracy. It is the residue of centuries of a system in which women literally could not own property, open a bank account, vote, or exist as autonomous legal entities without male permission.

Those restrictions have largely been lifted. But the conditioning has not gone anywhere. It lives on: in the way we dress, in who we apologize to, in how quickly we shrink when we feel too loud, in the mechanisms we use to get our needs met without asking for them directly.

What Happens to Girls

I remember, as a very young girl, knowing that something about the roles I was supposed to grow into did not fit. Not because I did not want to be a woman. I love being a woman, deeply. But because the version of womanhood on offer felt so narrow, so heavily defined by what men needed from women, that there was barely room inside it to breathe.

As girls, we absorb these lessons quickly: your body is an object. Your appearance is your currency. Your value rises and falls with how attractive you are to men. Conform to the beauty standards, whichever one is current, and you will be safe. Fail to conform, and you risk rejection, ridicule, abandonment.

The sexualization starts early. And it steals something. Innocence, yes. But more than that: it steals the connection a girl has to her own body as something that belongs to her, that exists for her own pleasure and experience, not as a surface to be evaluated by others.

Alongside this, girls learn something else: that direct expression is dangerous. Speaking up gets you called difficult. Taking up space gets you called too much. Asserting your needs gets you called needy. So you learn to get what you need covertly. You learn to please, to manage, to soften every edge, to make yourself palatable. You learn that your safety lives in someone else’s approval.

And men are not exempt from this damage. Boys are conditioned into a different kind of smallness: to be hard, to not feel, to suppress anything that looks like vulnerability, to see women primarily as objects that serve their desires. That is its own kind of deprivation, a flattening of what it means to be human.

The Shadow Side of Feminine Conditioning

This is where I want to be honest about something uncomfortable. Because if we are going to talk about decentering men, we also have to talk about the shadow side of what women have learned to do within patriarchal systems.

When direct expression is unsafe, you go underground. You use what you have. You learn to use your sexuality, your compliance, your emotional labor, your people-pleasing as tools to get your needs met. It is not malicious. It is adaptive. It is what you do when you believe you are powerless and depend on others for survival.

But these patterns, however innocent their origins, create relational damage. They keep women locked in a dynamic of covert negotiation rather than honest exchange. They maintain the fiction that we are powerless when we are not. And they prevent the kind of equal, clean, authentic relationship that becomes possible when you drop the strategies.

People pleasing, for example, is often framed as kindness. And the impulse behind it often is kind. But underneath it is usually something else: fear. Fear of rejection, fear of conflict, fear of being abandoned if you stop being useful or agreeable. When we use people pleasing to manage how others see us, we are not being generous. We are managing our own anxiety at the expense of honest relationship.

Recognizing this is not about self-blame. It is about taking back responsibility. Because the moment you see how you have been participating in your own diminishment, however understandably and however unconsciously, you gain the ability to stop.

———— read on below the ad ————

So What Does Decentering Men Actually Mean?

Decentering men means taking yourself back. It means ending the unconscious arrangement in which male approval, male desire, and male-defined systems get to be the organizing center of your life.

In practice, it looks like this:

It means letting go of external validation, not just from men but from anyone, as the measure of your worth. It means finding your own internal compass and learning to trust it, even when it contradicts what you have been told.

It means healing the relational wounds, the father wound, the mother wound, the attachment wounds, that make you keep looking to partners, bosses, and leaders to fill the gaps your parents could not. This is not blame. It is observation: we all do this until we see it.

It means dropping the covert strategies: the manipulation, the sexual bartering, the pleasing designed to make you safe rather than to genuinely connect. It means learning to ask for what you need directly, even when that feels terrifying.

It means questioning beauty standards, not to be anti-beauty, but to ask: whose gaze am I dressing for? Whose definition of beautiful am I trying to meet? And do I actually want to?

It means listening to women, seeing other women as fully realized, whole, worthy human beings rather than competition. Because the way you see other women is often a mirror for how you see yourself.

And perhaps most fundamentally: no longer looking outside yourself for permission to exist as you are.

The Codependency We Do Not Talk About

One of the deepest effects of living in a male-centered world is that it creates a collective codependency, not just between individuals but between people and the systems that were never built to serve them.

We are conditioned to be dependent on systems of authority, governments, religions, institutions, employers, in the same way we are conditioned to be dependent on the men in our personal lives. To look upward and outward for permission, for safety, for a sense of being seen and worthy. To wait for the promotion, for the approval, for the leader who will finally fix things.

Decentering men means decentering that codependency. It means recognizing that the same dynamic playing out in your relationships is playing out in your relationship to society. Both require the same medicine: taking radical responsibility, going inward, and stopping the endless cycle of looking outside yourself for what only you can provide.

This is not individualism in the shallow sense. It is sovereignty: the kind of groundedness that comes from your own centered truth instead of reacting from fear, scarcity, or the desperate need for approval.

Why Decentering Men Also Matters for Men

Men are also victims of the centering of men, and this is not a contradiction. The patriarchal model asks men to be flat. To suppress emotion, perform strength, act from hierarchy and competition, and use women and the world around them as resources for their own fulfillment.

They are also being taught to suppress everything that looks like femininity inside of them. As a result, the patriarchal world we’re living in also steals them from being in touch with half of their internal world. That is a deeply impoverished version of what it means to be human… what it means to be a man.

When men decenter men, when they let go of the conditioning that says they must dominate, must not feel, must always know more, something opens. They gain access to their own emotional world. To intuition. To vulnerability as a form of strength rather than weakness. To relationships built on genuine connection rather than power dynamics.

This is also where men have to do their own honest reckoning: where are you still benefiting from the power dynamic? Where have you been taught that you are owed more: more space, more deference, more service? Where do you still use women emotionally, sexually, or relationally in ways that serve your needs without genuine regard for theirs?

I believe there is an extraordinary co-creation possible between women and men, but only when both have done the inner work. Only when neither is using the other to fill the gaps left by their own unresolved wounds.

———— read on below the ad ————

Start Decentering Men: Shop Trauma-informed Healing Tools

What It Looked Like for Me

A few years ago, I encountered someone who became a kind of guide in my life, someone who helped me see, clearly and without softening, where I was still not my authentic self.

I saw my people pleasing, not as a personality trait but as a mechanism I had built to stay safe, to avoid rejection, to manage how others saw me. I saw how much of my energy was devoted to external validation: to being liked, being approved of, being seen as good enough. There was just so much shame inside of me. 

I saw the ways I had been using my sexuality, my softness, and my compliance to get what I needed, not from a place of authenticity or desire but from a place of fear. I saw how I had been trying to heal my mother wound through every relationship I was in, placing that weight on people who could not carry it and were never meant to.

Seeing all of this was not comfortable. But it was liberating.

I closed off my sexual energy for a while, not as punishment but to stop using it as a currency and understand what it meant to me on my own terms. I stopped dressing for the male gaze and started wearing what actually felt like mine. I stopped wearing makeup. I let my body hair grow. I watched myself move through Amsterdam with my arms uncovered, flooded with every story about what people would think, about who would find me attractive now. And I walked through it.

What was on the other side of that shame was a kind of freedom I had not felt before. Not the freedom of being approved of. The freedom of not needing to be.

Decentering Men Is Decentering Patriarchy Inside Yourself

There is a tendency in feminist and activist spaces to point at structures outside ourselves, and that pointing matters. Systems need to be named. But the deepest change does not happen at the level of the external system. It happens when you recognize that the system is also living inside you.

The patriarchal conditioning is not only out there. It is in the voice that tells you your opinion is less valid. In the instinct to shrink before you have even been asked to. In the panic when someone seems displeased with you. In the belief that you need a man, a system, a leader to legitimize what you already know.

Decentering men means dismantling that interior architecture. It means developing enough trust in your own perception that you no longer need it confirmed by external authority. It means healing the wounds that make you reach outside yourself for what only you can give yourself.

This is not a process of becoming harder, colder, or more isolated. It is a process of becoming more whole. More present. More genuinely in contact with yourself, and therefore with others, from a place of choice rather than fear.

What Becomes Possible

I feel more free than I have ever felt in my life. And I want to be careful about how I say that, because it is not a neat ending or a destination I arrived at. It is an ongoing orientation, a commitment to keep listening to the truth that lives inside me instead of the one I was handed.

What decentering men has made possible: relationships that are genuinely equal, because I am no longer bringing all my unmet childhood needs to them. Boundaries that come from self-respect rather than resentment. A relationship to my own body that belongs entirely to me. The ability to speak what is true even when it is inconvenient. Work that is aligned with what I actually believe in.

And underneath all of it: a quality of confidence that has nothing to do with being validated. Because it does not come from outside. It does not rise and fall with someone else’s approval. It is simply there: rooted, available, mine.

That is what decentering men makes possible. Not a world without men, and not a hardened independence. But a different kind of freedom, the kind that lives in you regardless of what anyone else decides about your worth.

And that, I think, is worth the discomfort of getting there.

Go Deeper

Ready for a next step? Explore our paid tools & programs.

Related Blogs