Belated International Men's Day thought
Nov. 23rd, 2018 01:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livAs 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:
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.
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.
