The Most Dangerous Place to Lead From – How good men quietly lose their way
The Most Dangerous Place to Lead From
How good men quietly lose their way
There’s a guy on your feed right now.
Maybe you follow him. Maybe you respect him. Maybe he’s even helped you.
He sounds like an expert. The authority. He’s confident. He’s direct. He’s talking about fitness. Or money. Or women. Or feminism. Or the ex who “took him for everything.” Or modern dating. Or maybe how men are the real victims now.
He sounds sure. Legit. Sometimes funny. Fired up.
And he’s always looking out there.
I want you to sit with that for a second before you agree or disagree. Because this piece is going somewhere uncomfortable, and I need you to take the ride with me.
The harder thing
At this point, we all know about the online rape academy. (And this piece isn’t about that, so if you’ve read a lot about that, and aren’t looking for more, just stick with me.) Millions of website visits. Grown men coaching each other on how to hurt, rape, and traumatize women, children, and other human beings.
A common male reflex is, “not all men.” To file it under monsters. To picture freaks in basements and go back to our day.
But it isn’t a handful. They aren’t in basements. They’re husbands. They’re coworkers. They’re the guys in the group chat. They’re somebody’s dad. Somebody’s son.
Somebody’s friend. They are from both political parties and from cities and towns all over the globe.
And here is the part every man reading this needs to sit with, because it’s the spine of this whole piece:
Those men didn’t start there.
Nobody wakes up and decides to join an online rape academy. That isn’t the entry point. That’s the destination.
The entry point is soft. The entry point is on your feed right now, wearing a podcast mic and cool jacket, telling you women are the problem. Or maybe they are bolder, they are a guy defending grab ’em by the pussy. Saying feminism ruined the country. Saying she’s out to take what’s yours.
That’s the on-ramp. And most men don’t notice they’ve taken the exit until they’re a hundred miles down the road.
Where I’ve been
For most of my life, I viewed women mostly as sexual objects. Something to win. A game I wanted to excel at.
I wasn’t cruel about it. I probably would’ve told you, back then, that I respected women, and in some narrow sense, I did.
But the operating system underneath was: she is a prize, I am the player, and the point is to get chosen. That belief ran most of my dating life. It ran how I talked to my friends about women. It ran how I saw women, the jokes I laughed at, and the ones I let slide.
And when I look back at who I was, I was already partway down the on-ramp. Not all the way. Not close to the worst of it. But I was on it.
At the core, I wasn’t happy. I wasn’t good enough for myself. And that wound was the access point.
So as I write this, I’m not writing as someone who figured it out early and is lecturing the rest of you from the mountain. I’m writing as a guy who got off the road, sometimes slowly, painfully, embarrassingly, and one who’s still often learning from my wife and so many other wise, patient women.
Why “beware” is so seductive
I’ll say this plainly, because I know how it sounds otherwise:
I’ve noticed a trend, men online, coaches, retreat leaders, influencers who are shouting or announcing to their followers or viewers, “beware” or “watch out for,” some clickbait warning to grab guys’ attention and tell them about the danger that lies ahead. Often, that danger is a type of woman, a group, an ideology, or a belief. The “beware” is a warning, like this is how you can do better by avoiding said problem.
And look, I’m not suggesting these men are inventing the thing they point at. Some women are wounded. Dating ishard. Courts are sometimes unfair. Therapy can be misused.
All of that can be true.
And.
If the primary output of a man’s message is beware of this threat:
Who is that actually serving?
Because BEWARE is so much more comfortable and easier than BECOME.
Beware gives you an enemy. Something clean to point at. Something that explains your pain without implicating you.
Become asks you to sit in a quiet room and notice that you’ve been avoiding your wife for three years. That you haven’t called your dad in six months. That your business isn’t failing because of the woke mob, it’s failing because you never learned to finish anything. That your daughter won’t interact with you when you drink.
Beware makes you feel like a warrior.
Become makes you feel like a beginner.
Most men, given the choice, pick warrior every single time.
It’s easier to point at the dragon than to ask why you keep ending up in caves.
It’s easier to warn people about the storm than to ask why you built your house in a flood plain.
It’s easier to catalog what’s wrong with women than to quietly become a man worth being with.
What women have been saying for fifty years
Here’s the other thing I need to name.
Most of what I’m writing here, women have been saying for decades. Longer. Bell Hooks wrote The Will to Changeand told us exactly how patriarchy hollows men out and gave us a beautiful blueprint on how to be better. Countless women, named and unnamed, have been pointing at this exact on-ramp since before I was born.
We didn’t listen. We rarely do.
So if you’re reading this and nodding, good. But understand that “men are finally talking about this” is not the achievement we sometimes act like it is. The achievement, if there is one, is that we’re catching up to a conversation women have been holding the weight of by themselves.
What BECOME leadership actually looks like
So what’s the alternative?
Less dramatic. Not sexy. I’ll warn you upfront.
It’s a BECOME style of leadership.
What does BECEOME mean?
A man who leads from Become doesn’t spend much time warning you about women. He spends his time becoming someone worth being with, and trusts that the right people will notice.
He doesn’t obsess over the political enemy. He focuses on how he shows up in his own home, his own choices, his own community.
He doesn’t build his identity around what’s being done to men. He builds it around what’s being built by him and the men around him, starting with himself.
And in this specific moment, after what just got exposed, after what we now know about how many men were in those rooms, a man from Become does one more thing.
He stops defending men categorically.
He stops saying not all men like it’s a shield.
He stops worrying about how this makes him look.
He turns toward women, toward survivors, and says:
I hear you. I believe you. I’m sorry. I’m listening. And I’m going to get to work on my side of the street.
That’s not weakness.
That is the first genuinely strong thing most of us have ever done.
What this actually looks like tomorrow
A new outlook without new behavior is just a new-age breakthrough. So here’s what getting off the on-ramp looks like in real life. Pick three. Start this week.
Call it out in the group chat. The joke about his ex. The comment about the waitress. The “boys will be boys” deflection. Say something. Even awkwardly. Even badly. Silence is the endorsement that got us here.
Audit your feed. Unfollow three voices whose product is women are the problem, or something like women have no value beyond cooking, cleaning, and sex. Even if they only said it one time. You’ll know who they are. You already know.
Have the conversation with your son. Not the sex talk. The respect talk. The women are not a game talk. Then support women, lift them up, honor and cherish them as the unbelievable life-giving and wisdom keepers they are. If you don’t do it, some guy with a podcast will educate them on something.
Ask the women in your life where you’ve fallen short: and shut up and listen to the answer. Don’t defend. Don’t contextualize. Just hear it.
Stop performing allyship and start building accountability. Find one other man and give him permission to call you on your shit.
Five things. None of them requires a retreat, a book, or a coach. All of them require the one thing most men are afraid of: being uncomfortable in the presence of someone they love.
The end of the on-ramp
The men I respect most aren’t the loudest men in the room.
They’re the ones who have clearly been through something. Who’ve looked at the hard stuff inside themselves and didn’t flinch. Who’ve stopped needing an external villain to explain their pain. Who stand with women instead of against them, not because it’s trendy, but because they’ve done enough of their own work to know the enemy was never out there.
They lead from something solid.
Not from their heels.
Not from beware.
Not from they’re out to get us.
From something grounded. Honest. Loving.
The guys in those rooms are not a separate species. They’re the terminal stage of a disease that begins with a much quieter symptom, the quiet, constant belief that women are the threat and men are the prey. (Or maybe it’s some version of men are superior and women are beneath us.)
We don’t fight that at the end of the on-ramp. We fight it at the beginning.
And the beginning is in us.
In what we nod along to.
In what we let slide.
In who we follow.
In how we talk about our exes.
In what we teach our sons.
In whether, when the hard thing happens, we look out there, or in here.
“I’m a good man” is not a defense. It’s the excuse that got us here.
The life you want, the world we keep saying we want, the men we’re supposed to become, we can’t get there from beware.
And we don’t have another generation to waste figuring that out.
Alex Terranova is the co-founder of Alchemy of Men. He works with men who are ready to stop reacting and start building themselves, their lives, and the relationships worth having.
