I really do believe most folks with experience identifying as men don’t actually feel comfortable in spaces dedicated to the cultivation of patriarchal misogynistic values unless, and until, they have been radicalized and indoctrinated into that cause. I believe most men abhor the idea of sexual violence on both a real and theoretical level, when they are capable of thinking about the survivors of it as actual human beings. I believe that most men would much rather engage in all kinds of relationships with other people (Friends, romantic partners, colleagues, randos at the club, etc.), without having to actively compartmentalize their empathy and see every interaction as a battle, negotiation or quest for more power over the people around them. And when I say most, I don’t just mean 51%. I think it is a super majority, like over 75%, of men who would rather not live in a world dominated by patriarchal misogynistic power structures, behaviors and rhetoric. I am not a psychologist or a sociologists, so I don’t have hard data to back these claims up, but in decades of talking to men, hundreds of men about these issues and topics, I can count on one hand the number of men who really went all in on advocating for PM or sexual violence as behavior that should be tolerated or accepted by society, and this includes many people I was working with who had committed an act of sexual or domestic violence in their past. Even if there was some kind of fear-factor causing some men to lie to me (even when I held no actual power or authority over them) about how they wanted to interact with other people, it would have to be a massive conspiracy that men are keeping secret somehow, even from other men, in order to challenge my claim that most men don’t feel good or comfortable with PM.
So why do PM behaviors continue to be so prevalent in a world where people don’t like it and don’t want to it to control how they interact with other people or how other people interact with them?
I can think of a couple of things I will just list out in no particular order:
1. Not wanting to do something doesn’t make that thing not happen, and it doesn’t even prevent a person from doing the thing they don’t want to do, if they don’t know a better way of accomplishing the goal that that behavior enables. Violence begets violence and when people are not prepared themselves to handle difficult emotions under stressful circumstances, then they are likely to resort to behaviors they have seen modeled by others. Very many men have bad to terrible male role models in their lives who have given them bad to terrible advice about how to handle strong emotions in relationships, positive and negative. Even larger social institutions that are theoretically dedicated to cultivating positive behaviors have struggled mightily with hypocrisy and concentrating power and access into positions that have either attracted bad people, or corrupted good ones. This creates both a personal problem for individual young folks growing up to be men, but also problems at the community, institution and national level as well. There is probably enough to unpack in this one for it to be its own post in the future.
2. Kind of related to 1, but, at least in the US, men talking earnestly about problematic behaviors in relationships is not common, and wrapped up in competitive bravado that often can lead to more violence and antisocial behavior. Politically, even the biggest advocates of PM use rhetoric around “sexual violence is bad” to silence and control debate, and the topic itself can feel so toxic that it can be much easier for most men to ignore it than try to engage with it. Getting publicly called into a conversation about personal behaviors that crossed lines of consent can feel like such a large social trap, that many, many men will go to extreme lengths to not think about those experiences (much less talk about them) and to especially make sure that other people don’t think about them either. I have so much to say about this one that I will probably need to save it for a future post as well. Especially how the topic of sexual violence and responding to it have been pushed almost entirely into an unjust criminal justice system that sees everything in terms of “guilty or not guilty,” and why this leads men to refuse to take any accountability for problematic behaviors.
3. Every man who doesn’t violently act out PM behaviors on the people in their lives benefits from being able to call ourselves “one of the good ones,” and can fairly easily leverage that position for social admiration and attention. Then, if we ever do slip up in a way that we can’t ignore or hide, and it ends up blowing up the life we were enjoying as “being one of the good ones,” the community of people who advocate for PM values will take us in and shelter us from the accusations, instantly giving us a community again when we might otherwise feel alienated and exiled. We might revile that community, and its embrace of us might only be to push us into an act of mass violence or terrorism against women, but human beings isolated and rejected by their community become incredibly dangerous weapons to turn against those communities.
All of this can make it much, much easier for even the most well intentioned man to remain silent in the face of rising PM violence, hoping that someone else will stand up to it and suffer the consequences for having done so. What do you think? Are there more factors at play in preventing folks who identify as men from becoming more proactive in taking action?