By: Isaac Christopher Lubogo
From A philosophical reading of the line: “From a woman’s perspective, the devil is a man.”
Thesis.
Read literally, the claim is false and unfair; men are not ontologically evil. Read hermeneutically, it names a lived perception shaped by injury, fear, social scripts, and history. “Man” here is a metonym for structures—patriarchy, impunity, sanctioned entitlement—that too often reach women’s lives through male bodies. Our work is to interpret the sentence without weaponizing it, and to reform the world that makes it feel true.
1) The grammar of a wound
A wound speaks in absolutes. Trauma compresses nuance into survival rules: Don’t trust. Don’t be near. As Judith Herman observes, trauma reorganizes perception around threat. The line therefore functions as a survival axiom, not a metaphysical doctrine. The philosopher must not scold the wound for speaking urgently; he must ask, What made urgency necessary?
2) Augustine’s lamp: evil as privation
Augustine and Aquinas describe evil as a privation of the good—a theft of love, justice, and truth. On this account, “the devil is a man” means: where manhood is emptied of virtue, harm wears a male face. The target is not maleness itself but the vacuum inside badly formed power. Reform manhood by refilling it with the goods it lost: restraint, responsibility, tenderness.
3) Arendt’s caution: the banality of domination
Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” teaches that much harm is ordinary—procedure, jest, habit. In many women’s testimonies, the terror is not only monstrous men but normal men licensed by culture: jokes that belittle, policies that excuse, institutions that protect reputations over truth. When ordinary indifference scales, it feels diabolical.
4) The gaze and the script
Laura Mulvey named the “male gaze”; Fanon diagnosed the colonizing gaze. A gaze can objectify and possess. Judith Butler adds that gender is performed; boys are handed a script: dominate, do not feel, do not apologize. If the script is written by conquest, the actor who follows it will resemble a devil to those he touches.
5) bell hooks: patriarchy has no gender
bell hooks reminds us: patriarchy has no gender. Women can enforce the same script; mothers can train sons into hardness; communities can shame tenderness out of boys. The devil, then, is not the male chromosome but the culture of unaccountable power. Naming men is a way of pointing to where that power usually lives; reform must change the script, not simply the cast.
6) Levinas and the face that forbids harm
Emmanuel Levinas says the face of the Other issues the first philosophy: Thou shalt not kill. The ethical charge binds most urgently where asymmetry of power is greatest. If men often occupy the stronger position, then manhood bears a first duty to answer the face before him with protection, not possession.
7) Nietzsche’s mirror
“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that he does not become a monster.” Nietzsche’s warning applies doubly: to men resisting the pull of domination, and to societies resisting the temptation to answer injury with essentializing hate. The cure for dehumanization is never more dehumanization.
8) Ubuntu’s double edge
Ubuntu—I am because we are—can heal or harm. Properly held, it restrains the strong for the sake of the fragile. Corrupted, it becomes we protect our own, a shield for abusers. Then the community’s silence turns one man’s sin into systemic devilry. African wisdom answers: “When the drumbeat changes, the dance must also change.” Change the drumbeat of loyalty from secrecy to truth.
9) The parable in the typo: “aman”
Your second clause—“the devil is aman”—looks like a slip, yet speaks. A-man: the devil is a man (contingent, not all), and also the devil is amen—culture’s whispered so be it that blesses harm. Keep the difference: one wicked man is a man; a culture that nods along is amen.
10) Myth without misogyny
Eden has been misused to indict women; some women invert it to indict men. Both miss the Gospel’s arc: culpability is human; redemption is personal; justice is communal. Better a new myth: the devil is whatever turns a person away from being fully human. If that turning is more common in male conduct, ask which rites of initiation made it so.
11) What men must unlearn (a short catechism)
Entitlement → Stewardship. Power is a trust, not a trophy.
Secrecy → Accountability. If it must be hidden, it is likely harming.
Conquest → Care. Love measures itself by the freedom it protects, not the control it secures.
Iron skin → Honest heart. Tenderness is not treason to manhood; it is its proof.
12) What communities must guard
Due process that centers truth and safety, not reputation management.
Education that trains empathy, not only excellence.
Rituals of apology and repair, because justice without restoration breeds despair.
A new rite of passage for boys that celebrates self-control, service, and courage to refuse the herd.
13) Voices to keep on the table
De Beauvoir: one is not born but becomes—a woman, a man; we are made by norms we can also unmake.
Audre Lorde: the master’s tools will not dismantle the master’s house—end games of domination with different tools: truth, vulnerability, law.
Baldwin: not everything faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced—so face the sentence, don’t flee it.
Closing verdict: from indictment to invitation
If many women say “the devil is a man,” the wise response is not defensiveness but examination. Let men become the first critics of manhood’s failures and the first midwives of its rebirth. Let communities change the drumbeat. Then one day the sentence will change on its own—from fear’s axiom to history’s relic:
> “From a woman’s perspective, the devil was what some men were allowed to be.
From a human perspective, a man is what love, law, and truth taught him to become.”