"I’m trying not to hate men"

Article here. Excerpt:

'Before I could ever know anything different, this was maleness: aggression and protection, equally awful. Something cowardly and brute, something that hit you with its belt and pulled you beneath your favorite Lion King blanket and stuck its fingers into your vagina. My mind was still a dark house, waiting for positive moments—happy memories in the making—to light up each room. My father took a hammer to the circuit box, left me to wander the rooms of that dark house; and the neighbor boy who made “a secret game” of putting his hands under my dress while we sat on the couch, watching videos of Disney princesses whose happy endings came in a man’s kiss, pulled me into the basement.
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But I live in, if not a man’s world (at least, not always), a world of men. They are the co-workers who treat me with respect; the editors who’ve shepherded my essays with insight and kindness; and the men who are loyal, loving partners to my good girlfriends. And yet, there is always a part of me that is always in that dark house, always feeling my way around the walls, waiting for some unseen object to trip on or bruise against.
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These stories are remarkable because they’re not remarkable: Anticipating—and enduring—violence is part and parcel of being a woman. The batterers and rapists, terrorists and trolls may not be all men, but, by and large, they are men. As Kate Harding writes, “Of course it’s not all men. The idea that anyone might be talking about all men when talking about those who commit violence against women is ludicrous on its face … It’s not all men. But listen, you guys, it’s men.” My mistrust can become a siren of sorts: It curls its finger and sings linger in your fear. Let all men be the father who beat you with his belt, the boy who molested you, the cab driver who grabbed your one friend, and the then-boyfriend who pushed another friend against a wall.
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After the Isla Vista shootings, I told girlfriends that I’d always regarded men the way that Magneto regarded humans. Magneto, for the uninitiated, is the mastermind behind the mutant separatist movement within the X-Men universe; he plucks an asteroid from the coldest orbit and turns it into Asteroid M, a mutant-only refuge. I’d built my own Asteroid W of women friends and bosses, icons and mentors. Men became some distant planet I’d enter whenever I needed something I could only find on the black market. But an asteroid is cold and airless; it can’t sustain life.
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Recently, I left work late, after almost everyone else had already cleared out. I was alone in the parking garage elevator, until a man I’ve seen around the building (though he doesn’t work in my office), thrust his arm between the doors just before they closed. My pulsed hiccupped. I felt myself stiffen, my body ram-rod to its old message: “don’t fucking talk to me.” I took instant inventory of his features: five-foot, seven inches (give or take), portly build, and black hair with a slight curl. His hazel eyes flitted around the elevator nervously; he’d measured me up as well, sensed my anxiety. He asks me, in a neighborly voice, what my plans for the weekend are. And I realize that he gets it: He wants me to be at ease. So I tell him about a movie I hope to see, and he says that he likes the lead actress; she seems smarter than the average Hollywood type.  The ride is short, barely a minute.  But in that minute, I walk through the rooms of my dark house, lighting candles.'