Belated International Men's Day thought

[liv]

As far as I can work out, International Men's Day started as a sarcastic joke because lots of people were whining about how it's not fair that there's an international day for women but not men. This year I was heartened to see a lot of sincere pro-men stuff on social media, including some corporate PR about inspirational male role-models. Admittedly they were inspirational because they do what the large majority of women in the workforce do: succeed in their jobs while taking an active parenting role, but still.

I didn't get round to posting this on the day, but I saw several conversations talking about gendered violence. I was reminded of this Conversation about male victims of sexual assault by David Perry. I think Perry is wrong to engage with the #HimToo hashtag at all; it's pure astroturfing, and strategically I think it should be ignored rather than trying to wrench it back to talking about male victims of sexual violence. But the second part of the essay, where Perry describes coming to the realization that he, a cis man, has been a victim of sexual violence, is important. Perry reports:

Bullying was always part of my life as a child. I was picked on as a target, and, in turn, I picked on smaller kids as a reaction to being a target [...] So much of it was sexual in nature, laden with homophobic slurs, comments on my body and especially my genitals, standing too close in locker rooms before and after gym class, the usual feints at molestation.

For a long while I've had the building suspicion that part of the reason too many men are prone to disregarding women's sexual boundaries is that sexualized violence against boys is absolutely endemic. Only we don't count it as sexualized because women are the sex class; young men being molested and humiliated isn't regarded as a sexual attack, it's "just" bullying or "just" hazing. Or indeed it's some kind of proxy attack on women, because it's punishing people for being perceived as gay or feminine. But the people whose gender is being policed with this kind of sexual violence are mostly male people, or at least male-assigned people.

There's the derailing conversation that goes, why are feminists obsessed with female victims, don't you know that men get raped too? And there's the actual useful awareness raising which can unfortunately look quite similar, reminding people that despite the stereotypes, some rapists target men, and that rape of male victims is likely to be very under-reported. But I think there's another dimension to this. #MeToo has brought to a lot of people's notice the concept that a sexual assault doesn't have to be forced penetration to be violating and traumatizing; I'm a bit sad that the media only noticed this in 2018, feminists have been talking about it for ages. But given that, it makes sense that a lot of disregarded "bullying" and "gender policing" and "humiliation" of boys is in fact a form of sexual violence.

There's a story about rape culture that says men reach adulthood with a sense of entitlement to sexual attention from women. And I don't doubt that's true, but I wonder if it's only part of the story. I wonder how many men reach adulthood having gone through repeated experiences of their own sexual and bodily autonomy being completely disregarded, and that contributes to not understanding consent, and possibly also to finding it difficult to form strong emotional bonds or deal with non-sexual intimacy. Not that it's an excuse; there are plenty of people who are sexually hurt in adolescence and don't go on to violate others, indeed it's practically expected of women.

I do know some men who have disclosed to me that they've been raped or assaulted. And I certainly don't want to be like those men who say, surely violence against women can't be that bad or I'd know about it. But there's a bunch of stuff that is (rightly) seen as violating when it happens to women but not worth mentioning when it happens to boys or young men: unwanted exposure to other people's genitals and masturbation, intrusive prying into one's own masturbation habits, inappropriately sexual comments on one's body and clothes, disrespecting personal space and unwanted touch, being pressured into dressing in parodically sexual outfits for other people's gratification.

I'm broadly pro-porn, I think it's part of human creative and sexual expression, and I don't want to ban it. I don't know how much it matters that a lot of quite young boys are being shown porn by older boys or age peers who happen to be more sexually mature, though. I can imagine that some enjoy it, but I don't know how often that exposure to sexually explicit images is fully consensual, especially with children who may not understand what they're consenting to. The usual story is that boys watch porn, and then when they have real sexual partners they have unreasonable and misogynistic expectations of how sex should work. I don't know how much it's also true that boys watch violent and misogynistic porn and are straight up traumatized by it, though.

Some of the conversations which I can't now find again included men saying that it's absolutely forbidden to talk about any of these kinds of experiences, because talking about being hurt that puts you outside the "man box" and subject to even more violence, including sexual violence, to make you behave according to masculine gender expectations. Quite a few trans women lending their voices to the discussion saying this definitely matched their experience of being incorrectly perceived as boys, repeated violence and a horrifically enforced prohibition on expressing any feelings about the experience of victimization. I'm a bit suspicious of the idea that trans women have a special insight into what it's like to be a boy, but being women they're able to talk about it more openly than men are, but if it's actually true that men are terrified of talking about sexual bullying then I possibly don't have much other way to learn about this situation.

We generally assume that as adults, women put a lot of effort into avoiding sexual assualt, whereas men feel generally safe from this kind of attack (if they're not otherwise vulnerable, for example incarcerated, in war zones etc). I postulate that at least some of toxic masculinity is men trying to protect themselves against the sexual violence they may have already experienced in adolescence. It's not called that, being afraid to show emotions other than anger, or objectifying women, or subscribing to homophobia, look like being entitled and failing to care about other people, but it feels like in some cases it could be an attempt at self-protection.

I don't really have a conclusion here. I don't want to waste energy looking for ways to be sympathetic to people who use their privilege to hurt others. But I do want a world free of sexual assault for people of all genders, and I don't know how important this stuff is, or if it's even real rather than me piecing stuff together from glimpses of a gendered experience I don't understand.

Comments

[skibbley]

Thank you for these thoughts

[kaberett]

(A thing I find consistently uncomfortable, that I think is An Example of some of this, is the way that left-leaning! feminist-ish! people talk about David Cameron & the Bullingdon Club, as though it's a hilarious example of what an awful person he is, not some kid in their early twenties who was sexually harassed and assaulted by their peers. The utter disconnect about recognising what was going on there is pretty horrifying, to me.)

[davidgillon]

Oh, that's a particularly good point. And we can bring it together with Liv's point on the sexualized nature of much male-on-male bullying to note that it seems to be particularly true of select group hazing rituals.

[cesy]

Ooh, good point. Despite everything, there's a part of me that has still been classing the Adonians as a funny story as well as horrifying, not really realising what it actually means.

[kaberett]

<3

[angelofthenorth]

I've put a comment about the Adonians below...

The dynamics there are *incredibly* complicated, and go back to the number of students at college who are ex-English Public School...

[davidgillon]

A lot of good points as usual. #HimToo and the like are, as you say, astroturfing the debate with a conscious intent of obscuring violence against women, but in doing that also tend to obscure the reality of male-on-male sexual harrassment and bullying. I can give you an example from when I was at school, there was a kid in my year who would be having a pleasant conversation in a group in the playground, and then without warning or provocation knee someone in the crotch, which he thought was hilarious. I've always thought there was something particularly odd about that as he wasn't a bully in other ways, but thinking about it as sexual violence makes it even more disturbing.

[silveradept]

When there's serious commentary about violence by and against men going on, it tends to center these kinds of experiences, and the ways in which greater society tends to think of it as a phase that boys go through on their way to becoming men. Because "locker room talk" isn't just about men and women, it's about men and men. And that gets bundled up in what qualifies as manly strength (often related to cis-het sex) and an idea that strong men should be given latitude to do what they want to weak men in the interests of getting them to become stronger. Or at least give the impression they're stronger so that they won't be targeted.

[flippac]

One thing that can follow from that is associating sex and fear while not being "afraid of sex" or at least wanting to have sex.
.
I suspect bad things can happen when someone is subconsciously expecting fear in people who want to have sex, because it stops being a "this is not consent" signal.

[siderea]

(CW: hate speech examples)

ABSOLUTELY. Only worse than that.

One of the things I had my eyes opened to working as a therapist in a blue-collar community with men, some of whom were sexual assault survivors, (and with women talking about their male partners and family members), was the fact – nakely obvious when you think about it for half a second – that traditionalist norms of masculinity say that men don't have a right to say no to sex. Any man (or, especially horrifically, boy) who tells a woman that they don't want to have sex with her has opened himself up to abusive, even violent, gender policing. "What are you, a pussy? A faggot?" It's part of what drives the market for viagra etc: being able to "perform" when one doesn't actually want to, to demonstrate one is still a "real man".

I will never forget gently explaining to a man of fifty-eight that he had every right not to have sex with his scarily violent-when-drunk alcoholic girl friend, and how dubious he was, clearly wondering if I was an idiot who didn't understand that no, he didn't.

It was world-rocking for me to finally see things through their eyes, how literally they had no concept that they got to refuse to have sex or participate in sexual activities. Literally never had anybody say to them, "You don't have to." Or as I put it to that fifty-eight year old, "All that 'no means no' stuff applies to you, too. You also get to say 'no'."

When men describe feminists' demands as wanting "special treatment" for women (something more common hereabouts in the 90s as I recall)... wow, suddenly there's a context in which it makes perfect sense. I found myself dealing with a population – and I doubt it is at all rare – in which any man (or boy) of honor would never dream of "putting my hands on a woman" against her will, but never though he had the same right to refuse sex, sexual touching, sexual innuendo, sexual harrassment, sexual violence, etc.

ETA: And I want to clarify something. The issue isn't just that a woman can demand a man have sex with her, and if he doesn't she might call him some mean words. It's:

1) Male children being shamed into comply with adult rapists, both female and male.

2) Vindictive female partners who extort sex from men (or tolerance of sexualized aggressive behaviors) with the threat (or action) of talking around town about him being a "pansy" or a "pussy" or a "punk", thus both diminishing his reputation among men, and also potentially marking him out as a target for male-on-male violence, including sexual violence. (In a way very parallel to slut-shaming, only the inverse.)

3) Young men being shamed or threatened into compliance with other young men's sexual aggression against women, e.g. being pressured to participate in everything from "locker room talk" to "wolfwhistling" to gang-rape.

4) Men (and boys) internalizing the idea that if they ever decline sex, if they're not ready to "get on it" with absolutely every available partner in any moment, if they ever feel not like having it or not with a particular partner or not in a particular circumstance, then there's something wrong with them, they're weak, they're defective, they're not "real men". And that, in turn, leading them to any a number of terrible places, including toxic compensatory over-performance of (what they think of as) masculinity.

ETA2: I have long harbored the suspicion that the best way to reduce sexual violence against women (and misogyny broadly) in traditionalist communities in the US is to engage in a very public PR campaign, "Men, your no means no, too" and "Ladies, it's just as wrong for you to pressure him for sex as it is for him to pressure you."

[flippac]

I have more than one ex-gf who'd clearly never done the work re respecting others' right to consent or not.

Often coming from crappy places, but still - I ended a friendship over the response I got when I said (on twitter, fresh thread) that we need to be teaching girls and women about consent as well as men and boys. Guess it's slightly more subtle than that, in that we need to make sure everyone is being taught all the same things and knows it - which was definitely something I'd had in mind, from a different angle.

[cesy]

As usual, you bring wise words and insight. Thanks.

[kaberett]

Huh. Thank you; this has made several things click into place for me.

[angelofthenorth]

Just processing this a bit, so the comment may not entirely make sense.

how much of the 'not being able to say no to women' isn't directly fear of women but fear of other men's judgment should it get out?

There is also the fear of mockery, and being reduced to nothing but one's sexual organs.

And then there is the direct fear of violence that you mention, that again has a lot to do with other men finding out, as well as the fear of harm.

I think therefore the PR campaign you mention in your ETA2 needs to look at gossip as a wider thing - toxic femininity as much as toxic masculinity.

In one of the comments above there's a mention of the Adonian's - an all male drinking&dining society based at my Cambridge college where older men preyed upon younger men - all over 18, but seldom over 21 while the older men were in their 50s and 60s in some cases. To the younger men involved it was a badge of honour - it was about patronage as the old men had Connections. We were disturbed by it at the time, but male sexual culture shrugged it off. In a college that was 80% male and with a significant number of bi and gay men among that, it would be very difficult to show how wrong this was, and to get across the disservice they were doing.

To the younger men, most of whom had gone through English public school and enjoyeddured things like the biscuit game, and similar, they saw it as their birthright to have this patronage, that they older men should be interested in them.

I went to a Minor English public school - it had gone co-ed about a year before I joined, and they weren't able to cope with me very well - they wanted the girls to be nice femme types, and I wasn't - I learnt the confidence and the assertiveness from them, and gave as good as I got. There were very toxic ideas about what feminism was and wasn't, but the teacher who did the most for dispelling the toxic masculinity was an English teacher named Mr Heaven. He challenged people on consent culture, and what it meant to be truly feminist. (that he constantly had affairs with female teachers was the one blot on his copybook)

In other words, I was at a school where the grooming culture was being undone, and Mr Heaven and others were trying to move the school to being a lot less toxic, and by all reports they seem to have succeeded. getting a new head who created his own senior team also helped.

College was the second to last to go co-ed, but because of its location remained far more male dominated than the last to go co-ed who were at parity by the time I was an undergrad, and had stripped out the more egregrious anti-women sentiments which my college hadn't. My college was a hotbed of Conservatism - it produced Portillo and Michael Howard among other leading lights of the Tory party as well as some American & Australian Neocons - but there was a lot of homophobia that needed unpicking, because the model of relationships that organisations like the Adonians offered was about power and not about love.

[lilacsigil]

I remember all of this happening to my younger brother (who was very thin, smart and not physically aggressive, hence a target) and him getting very frustrated that other boys would grab him by the balls and hurt him and then *he* would be called gay, as a pejorative. He wasn't grabbing anyone's balls!

When the story about Asia Argento, who is prominent in the #MeToo movement, sexually assaulting a teenage boy came out, it was very disheartening to see all the male commenters going on about how this just shows that women are dirty hypocrites and everyone does sexual violence to everyone, without a trace of concern or sympathy for the boy in question - in fact, comments about how he should consider himself lucky it was Argento and not Weinstein assaulting him!

[jesse_the_k]

Fascinating thoughts--I'm rethinking conversations I've had over the decades.