> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.humanacre.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # FUCK THE GENDER WARS - URL: https://www.humanacre.com/fuck-the-gender-wars/ - Published: 2026-10-23T09:03:55.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-23T09:03:55.000Z - Author: Niall Maxwell # *Stand by your man. Stand by your woman.* Fuck the gender wars. Don't buy it. Don't believe it. Don't swallow the fucking story. We have been cooperating for millions of years. Badly. Very fucking badly. And yet here we are. Men and women, still trying to make something of each other, still trying to understand what the fuck is going on in the other person's head, heart, pants, ancestral baggage, whatever. And now we're being told to take sides. Men are this. Women are that. Masculinity is toxic. Femininity is manipulative. Everyone is a narcissist. Everyone is traumatised. Everyone is recovering from somebody else. Fuck off. Stand by your man. Stand by your woman. Even if they're an insufferable bollocks. Even if they're an insufferable cunt. Especially when they're a mess. Because they are a mess. And you're a fucking mess too. I have someone in my life who has spent the best part of eighteen months telling a story about me that I don't recognise. A story that has travelled further than either of us might ever have imagined. At times it has infuriated me. I've wanted to fight it, dismantle it, expose every contradiction, every distortion, every last fucking syllable. And I have done my own share of damage in that rage. But here's the thing. I still stand by that person. Not necessarily beside them. Not in agreement with them. Not in the firing line. But I refuse to make them my enemy. Because I suspect there is something trying to get out of them. Something that predates me. Something deep-rooted, archaic, ancestral perhaps. Or something much more ordinary. Something from childhood. Something from yesterday. Something from a culture that has convinced us that the only way to recover ourselves is to prosecute everyone who ever hurt us. I don't know. And neither, I suspect, do they. I'm not going to pretend that every accusation is some sacred expression of buried pain. People lie. People misremember. People hurt each other deliberately. And sometimes the things we don't want to hear about ourselves are true. All of this requires discernment. But what I will not do is take one person's conduct and make it a verdict on half the human race. And I won't buy the notion that every broken relationship is evidence of a war between men and women. It isn't. It's evidence that human beings are extraordinarily fucking difficult. I am an unequivocal mess. There. I've said it. The whole world can know. The whole world probably does know. Who gives a fuck? I'm not healed. I'm not a messiah. I'm not floating six inches above the ground dispensing wisdom from some celestial arsehole. I have a temper. I have contradictions. I have behaved badly. I have caused hurt. I have missed the mark so spectacularly on occasions that the fucking target wasn't even in the same county. And I am still here. Trying. As are most of us. We have been sold a peculiar idea of liberation. That to be free of somebody we must first make them monstrous. That we must establish ourselves as entirely innocent, entirely injured, entirely right. And that the other person must become the repository of everything we cannot bear to recognise in ourselves. What a fucking miserable arrangement. What if the other person is neither monster nor saviour? What if they're simply another bewildered human being, stumbling around in the dark, occasionally finding the light switch and occasionally setting fire to the furniture? What if you are too? Stand by them. But let's be clear what that means. It doesn't mean enduring violence. It doesn't mean allowing someone to destroy your reputation without a right of reply. It doesn't mean accepting cruelty, intimidation, manipulation or abuse. And it certainly doesn't mean that someone's trauma grants them diplomatic immunity from responsibility. Fuck that too. Sometimes standing by somebody means leaving them alone. Sometimes it means closing the door and keeping it closed. Sometimes it means holding them accountable. Sometimes it means recognising that you cannot love someone into recognising what they refuse to see. And sometimes it means allowing them to tell their story without spending the rest of your life trying to correct it. Let them tell it. Let them exhaust themselves if that's what they need to do. But let them carry responsibility for what they say. And carry your own. I have been angry enough to call people every name under the sun. Angry enough to say ridiculous, ugly, profoundly stupid things. Angry enough to want to piss on somebody's lawn. There's a fucking spiritual practice for you. But none of that makes me right. And none of it makes me beyond love. That's the bit I don't want to surrender. The possibility that we can be furious with somebody, utterly opposed to what they are doing, unwilling to tolerate another moment of their behaviour, and still refuse to abandon their humanity. The possibility that we don't have to make enemies of each other to become ourselves. Because whatever else is going on here, men and women are not opposing armies. We are the descendants of an extraordinary, dysfunctional, bewildering cooperation that has somehow managed to keep the species alive. We have loved each other badly for a very long time. We might even learn to do it better. But not by declaring war. So fuck the gender wars. Stand by your man. Stand by your woman. And if you cannot stand beside them, stand by the possibility that they are more than the worst thing they have ever done. As are you. Even if you are an insufferable bollocks. Even if you are an insufferable cunt. Especially then.