Lately, I have been thinking about the sexual violence prevention outreach work I used to do in central Missouri. Specifically, I have been thinking about how somehow, the state of Missouri let me go in to juvenile “justice centers” (i.e prisons for children) and facilitate week long classes about consent, power, and the construction of a masculine identity. I really love teaching writing, and hope to do it again one day when my son is old enough not to need a stay-at-home parent, but I don’t think I have ever done any work (paid or unpaid) that was more powerful and amazing than getting to be in a room with 7 to 10 teenage boys (and some young trans folks just beginning to develop a sense of their own gender identity) and just talk about how they were developing into the human beings they wanted to be in the future.
Seriously, I don’t know how the state of Missouri let me, an anarchist coeditor of the Newsletter for the Missouri Prisoner’s Labor Union, into their facilities to have 5 90 minute unsupervised sessions with each group of kids. We would talk about the differences between “power over” and “power with” and the benefits and consequences of building a sense of self worth on each. We would talk about social expectations placed on us and the kinds of relationships we would have with others, as well as who benefited from telling us who and how we were supposed to establish intimacy with others. We would strategize tactics for making our friend groups, families and communities places that valued and respected peoples’ bodily autonomy and consent. The kids would ask a hundred weird, awkward questions about sex and their bodies and condoms and whether penises grow bigger and faster the more times they are put inside of a vagina. It was such an incredibly open, real, and vulnerable space in one of the most violent and repressive sites in our country.
Now, a lot of the kids were little shits, or to be more generous and aware, a lot of the kids were coming into the class in situations where they felt like acting up and acting out was essential for their own survival and positioning within those institutions. I never had a situation where a kid died during the week our class was in session, but I would have even 14 and 15 year-old kids that got put into solitary confinement after an altercation, or even once hospitalized. Statistics say that 1 in 3 young men experience some form of domestic abuse (verbal, emotional, physical or sexual) in their lives, either from family members, friends, mentors/authority figures, or intimate partners, but the kids in the detention center were much closer to 100% and the vast majority of them knew it.
We would usually introduce the idea of “the cycle of violence” on day one or two of the class and we would come back to it multiple times in the week as we talked about the importance of learning new, better ways to express ourselves emotionally and interact with the people that we loved and cared about, to make sure that in moments of stress and pressure, we had developed and practiced the communication skills necessary to not push our own histories with violence forward. Even the least engaged or most obnoxious kids in the class would get really serious and listen actively for these last day conversations, because, as I was often told by the kids themselves, no one else in their lives had ever talked to them about this stuff in as direct and personal a way, and many of them said that they doubted they would be able to talk about this stuff with their friends or family once they were back outside. That part of the class was tough, but it was clear (from personal testimony and written evaluations afterwards) that these classes were very well received by the participants, especially in comparison to one off lectures about sexual or domestic violence that many college and high school institutions would want to schedule with us.
To bring this all back around to addressing Patriarchal Misogyny (PM) and exposing it for the hollow shell of authoritarianism that encourages men to give up their personal power and sense of self up the chain to the ranking patriarchs for the promise that they will either get some of that power back one day when they’ve earned it…or else have some protection from social enforcers when they realize that day is never going to come (or come fast enough) and so they lash out at others with less power than them. I can say from personal experience that young men and boys are smart enough and brave enough to talk about these issues when they are given the chance to do so in environments where they are safe enough to do so. I have no delusions that kids getting one week’s opportunity to break this stuff down is going to translate into all of those kids rejecting the decades of negative reinforcement that they will get afterwards, but I think finding ways to make those conversations and spaces inviting and not attached to systems of evaluation that kids are bombarded with in their lives, might be one way that more young men can at least remember that PM isn’t the only game in town, and other worlds are possible.