During my usual Instagram lurk-sesh, I found an interesting video that Amanda Seales posted on March 31. Like many of her other videos, she offered honest commentary on the black woman experience. After watching, I did something many socially aware black men wouldn’t: I critiqued it. Not only did Seales respond to my critique, our interaction (and everything around it) taught me a few things.

In the first part of her video, Seales encourages men to avoid reacting negatively when they are misconstrued by women. In her words, a man’s inability to immediately correct a woman without displaying negative emotion results from ego — an observation she based on her personal experience of a man who waited four years to clearly explain himself to her. In the second part of her video, Seales’ encouraged women to only allow positive, kind men around them. She even added a shout out to “good” men who give women a chance to “replace the fuck-boy experiences they’ve had with good-guy examples that they can reference.” In its entirety, this video promoted two dangerous narratives: 

1. Men who display negative emotional reactions in response to being misconstrued are no good for you. 

2. Men who are positive and kind will not react emotionally when they are misconstrued. 

In Seales’ scenario, a man who displays a negative emotional reaction to being misunderstood is likened to a “fuckboy,” while women with histories of negative experiences is automatically expected to respond negatively by default. Her shock at the reality of men reacting negatively to being misunderstood perpetuated the belief that men have no business displaying negative emotions, not even when they are misconstrued. Yet, according to her video, when women respond to men with negative emotions, they’re going off of prior negative experiences. Are men allowed to have emotional reactions that result from negative experiences with past partners? If so, are they expected to completely bypass those emotions in situations where those negative feelings are triggered?

My response to Seales was grounded in my interpretation of her post: 

Seales' accused me of commenting rhetorically. I actually commented on the exact scenario she implied in the video: an unrealistic relationship expectation. When I imagined a relationship between a woman with a history of negative experiences, and a man with the same history, and thus reacting negatively to being misunderstood, Seales’ suggestions seemed highly implausible. Later, I found a comment from a women that echoed my thoughts on how men and women are capable of behaving out of ego in their relationships:

Seales responded to this comment with what I call a “woke-fact”: a legitimate fact on oppression that is deployed in discussion without direct application to the context that is being discussed. Society being supportive of the male ego in ways that it is not of the female is a fact, and unacceptable. Yet, Seales invoked this fact in a way that is far removed from the reality that men and women who struggle with ego will also struggle with effective communication in their romantic relationships.

My brief interaction with Seales imparted me with a few lessons:

1. I myself, may have misconstrued Seales’ post, but by telling me “no one needs me to keep going,” she failed to take her own advice. In that moment, merely correcting me was not enough.

2. Men have an incredibly long list of habits to eliminate when it comes to how we interact with women. For folks who think like Seales, not expressing negative emotions after being misunderstood is on that list. 

3. According to the great Chimamanda Adichie, the socialization of boys to not show emotions is at the root of the fragile masculinity problem. With that in mind, men are still encouraged to avoid displaying emotions — even by the same folks who complain about fragile masculinity.