So, from the direction of the last couple of blog posts, I think eventually I am going to get into some posts that engage in some “real talk” / “Weird Beard” discussions about sex and sexuality that are going to draw on personal experience and probably embarrass myself and my family, because I think part of the impetus of this entire project is that men, and especially young men, tend to only have a pretty limited arena of places to turn to on the internet to answer their awkward and weird beard questions about sex. However, before I go there in future blog posts, I want to talk about why I think Male-identified folks that are attracted to women (including straight men, but also bi, pan, and other sexualities as well) who want to dismantle systems of patriarchal misogyny and not reinforce them often tend to shy away from publicly talking about sex from a personal perspective. I am exhausted today, so this is going to be a little list-y:
1. They know that other men who want to know about how to engage in sexual relationships with women from a position of respect, equality and a desire to develop a moment of shared vulnerability and empowerment need to be listening to, reading, and engaging with media produced by women, that was not created for the male gaze or for the purposes of participating in the capitalist exploitation of insecure men’s desire for access to women’s bodies. Putting together a list of good resources for this is an excellent project for a future blog post. The big problem with just knowing this is that it is nearly impossible to convince a man entrenched in Patriarchal Misogynistic ideas/world views to start listening to women without positioning that activity as something that should yield immediate power over their interactions with other women in the future, defeating the purpose of getting them to consider the ideas in the first place.
2. Talking to other men about having mutually empowering sexual relationships with anyone, especially people who identify as women can be exhausting and lead to bullying, social alienation, and even physical alterations. There are many, absolutely atrocious ideas about sex and sexual identity that float around spaces dedicated to patriarchal misogyny, and the easiest way for perpetrators of sexual violence, misogyny and intimate partner manipulation and abuse to avoid accountability for their behaviors is to make sure that the way men generally talk about sex protects them from observation or identification as someone doing something out of line. The past, present and future Trumps, Musks, Gates, Tates, Clintons, Cosbys, Weinsteins, Diddys, Epstiens, Ranieres, Heffners, ect., very much need a critical mass of men in society idolizing a playboy masculinity that uses power and money to gain access to women’s bodies, even beyond what legally or morally passes as acceptable behavior. This idealization makes it exceedingly difficult to bring them down individually, and when they collude together for protection, they are nearly impossible to topple within society’s existing criminal justice system. In my day, we would talk about this as rape culture, and maybe some people still do, but it seems like that is a term that has been so heavily politicized and attacked that it is difficult to use to have an authentic conversation with anyone who might feel like they are a participant or participant-adjacent to it. Calling this out for many men can feel exhausting, pointless, and even counter productive to changing the attitudes of other men. I think this is another one that will need to be expanded out into its own blog post.
3. Men don’t wait until they become men to start learning about sex, sexuality and how to behave in sexual relationships. I probably need to go back and do more research to be able to speak about this on a large scale, but certainly anecdotally, from personal and observed experience, Boys start talking to each other about this stuff and trying to gather resources about it from a very young age, like at least 9 or 10. Adults who want to talk to children about sex are people who raise massive red flags for both kids and other adults, for many very good reasons. Kids don’t really want adults to talk to them about sex like they are adults talking to children, so a lot of kids, especially boys and people wanting to grow up into a male body and social position, are actively looking to get a hold of adult content that feels like it is targeted at other adults and not children. Also, the right has found tremendous success buckling down on parents’ fear of their children being sexually preyed upon, and have turned conversations about grooming and other terms that used to be used to focus specifically on predators actively seeking people to victimize, but are now being used to just to apply to anyone that is trying to influence children’s views about sex, sexuality and themselves. I have a lot of sympathy for parents, especially as a parent myself, and one who has worked professionally and collaboratively with survivors of childhood sexual abuse and trauma…I don’t want to live in a world where children are preyed upon by sexual predators either. But, I also know that children are going to learn about sex and if you as a parent don’t think your child is already learning about it, than it probably means they are learning about it from sources you don’t know about. I am far, far more worried about my son growing up to learn about sex, sexuality and gender identity from people like Andrew Tate than from drag queens at the library, or trans folks using the same bathroom as them. At the same time, right now in particular is an incredibly difficult time to even suggest thinking about how to talk about sexual education and how children should be learning about themselves as gendered beings growing into a sexual identity. People who want to counter patriarchal misogynistic narratives can’t wait until everyone is 18 to start trying to talk about this stuff, because that won’t be the first place kids are having these conversations.
4. Most of us who have been socialized as men have to work very hard to counter patriarchal misogynistic ideas every day of our lives, not just one time until we get it. This means that we internalize a lot of ideas that are patriarchal and misogynistic, and sometimes we don’t even realize it. Talking about our ideas about sex, sexual desire, gender and identity in public means that we are going to expose some of these bad ideas and possibly even behaviors from our past that we are going to feel really guilty about, if we don’t already. Accomplishing the social badge of “Feminist” or “pro-femist” or “anti-misogynistic” male without having to do any further work on it means being able to avoid that kind of exposure from our communities and from ourselves. The reason why we have to keep calling out “silence is compliance” is because silence is also security and anonymity for people benefiting from the privileges of oppression and exploitation.
There might be other factors than these that I am missing, and if you think of one, you should share it with me! But I do think these 4 do a lot of Patriarchal Misogyny’s work for it in preventing men from being allies to anyone, including themselves, in resisting PM’s harmful grasp.