Decentering Men: What It Actually Means (And Doesn't Mean)

I’m starting a new series of essays on decentering men because this seems to be the single most empowering thing you will ever do as a woman in the current cultural climate. Don’t get me wrong, there are tons of great sources of information out there about decentering men and many of them are really good. I don’t mean to rehash the same things. I’ll just add my own pieces of the puzzle that I think a lot of the discourse around decentering men misses.

The term ‘decentering men’ was originally coined by Shereze Taylor ( Charlie's Toolbox ) and exploded in popularity ever since. And for good reason.

For the past few years, ‘decentering men’ has become one of those phrases that everyone seems to have an opinion about and very few people seem to agree on. Some critics imagine it as a manifesto for female separatism, while others dismiss it as a slogan invented by bitter single women. Even within some feminist spaces, the concept is often reduced to vague self-help advice about taking yourself out for coffee or buying yourself flowers.

I think all of these interpretations miss the point. Decentering men is not about removing men from your life, it’s just about removing them from the center of your life.

That mental shift is subtle at first, but profound: from an impulse towards isolation to something more freeing: liberation.

The reason the concept provokes such strong reactions is because it challenges something so deeply embedded in patriarchal culture that we rarely notice it. Patriarchy has never depended solely on men holding more power than women; it also depends on women orienting their lives around men. Around their needs, their approval, their emotions, their careers, their comfort, their desires, and their futures.

Patriarchy is not merely a hierarchy of authority, but a hierarchy of attention.

Women are expected to spend extraordinary amounts of time thinking about men. What do men find attractive? What makes a good wife? How do I keep him interested? Is he angry? Is he cheating? Is he happy? Is he withdrawing? Did I say something wrong? Is he going to propose? Does he still love me? How can I communicate this in a way that won’t upset him?

These questions consume an astonishing amount of mental space, often without women even realizing it. And that is precisely why decentering men is such a radical idea. It asks a question that patriarchal culture discourages women from asking:

You don’t need men to disappear; you just need to allow your full self to finally appear.

The Feminist Idea Everyone Thinks They Already Understand

Although the phrase itself has gained popularity through social media, the underlying idea is much older. Feminists have been describing this dynamic for decades, even if they used different language to do so.

Simone de Beauvoir famously argued in The Second Sex that men have historically occupied the position of the universal subject, while women have been constructed as ‘the Other’. Men exist as full human beings, while women exist in relation to men: wife, mother, daughter, mistress, muse. Their identities become relational before they become individual. That’s also why patriarchal cultures insist on marrying girls before they are allowed to mature and become more mentally aware of their own individuality.

Later feminist writers expanded this observation in different directions. Black and brown feminists, in particular, emphasized that systems of domination do not merely exploit women’s labor but also shape where women’s emotional energy is directed. bell hooks repeatedly argued that patriarchy damages women by socializing them into patterns of self-sacrifice that masquerade as love. Sara Ahmed has written extensively about how women who refuse to organize themselves around others’ comfort are perceived as difficult, selfish, or even threatening.

Across different schools of feminist thought, the language changes, but the underlying observation is essentially the same: women are encouraged to become supporting characters in lives that are not their own, while men are allowed to behave like eternal sufferers of main character syndrome.

The internet and Shereze Taylor eventually condensed these decades of feminist scholarship into the much shorter expression: decenter men.

Like many ideas that escape academia, something was gained and something was lost.

The gain was accessibility: millions of women immediately recognized what the phrase was describing because they had lived it. The loss I perceive that came with this explosive popularity was nuance. Once detached from its intellectual roots, the phrase became easy to caricature. Critics interpreted it literally, as though feminists were arguing that women should never date, marry, love, or cooperate with men. (That aside, this form of decentering men, like the 4B movement, is an entirely valid choice for women who want it.)

But feminist theory has never been interested in telling women whom they are allowed to love or not. The main feminist interest lies in asking a different question entirely:

Why has women’s love so often required the disappearance of themselves?

The Problem Isn’t Loving Men. It’s Orbiting Them.

I think the easiest way to explain decentering men is to think about astronomy.

The planets orbit the sun because the sun occupies the center of their system, and every movement is determined in relation to it. Patriarchy asks women to construct their emotional lives in much the same way.

• Whether a woman chooses a dress because men or a man might like it.

• Whether she avoids speaking too confidently because she worries she will intimidate men.

• Whether she abandons friendships because her boyfriend becomes her entire social universe.

• Whether she gives up career opportunities because they would inconvenience her husband’s ambitions.

• Whether she spends hours every day trying to decode a man’s mixed signals.