Author: Benjamin

Since it has come up twice in previous posts, I think it is time I write about why I think loyalty, as a value in relationships, is a misplaced attempt to establish security instead of empathy or a shared sense of empowerment in a relationship. 

Now, I know I have pretty negative things to say about loyalty as a value, but before I do, I really want to emphasize that I have nothing negative to say about people who value it. Loyalty as a value is not even in the same ball park of terrible as something like Andrew Tate valuing misogyny. There are legitimately good people with good reasons for valuing loyalty. 

My issue with loyalty as a value is that it is deceptive in what it really expressed and how it creates harmful, unrealistic expectations (things I get into later). Maybe I’ll win you over with my argument, or maybe I won’t, but I am not on a quest to destroy loyalty as as a value in the same way that I definitely am to destroy patriarchal misogyny. If you disagree with me about loyalty as a value, I can totally respect that and would be happy to have a conversation with you about that, in a way that I do not want to have a conversation with anyone about how men should value misogyny. 

Ok, so with that out of the way, let’s talk about Loyalty.

There is a whole boat load of anti-authoritarian, feminist, and post modern theory that underwrites the way I look at relationships, power and identity that I don’t have the mental bandwidth to write out like an academic cultural criticism essay right now. If you want me to break some of this stuff down in the future, please let me know what specifically interests you, but here are 2 kind of important, “big” ideas, that a lot of what I have to say about loyalty rests on:

1. Power exists in all interactions and relationships between people. Not just the power people bring to that relationship or interaction, but the social and political forces that have shaped the experiences and identities of each of the people in the relationship. You could maybe look to Michel Foucault for a more eloquent break down of this, maybe his book Discipline and Punishment? What is really important to point out from this is that when people enter into relationships with other people, they are doing it for some kind of benefit, usually related to power, in some fashion, even if that power is something like, “the power to be myself around another person,” or “the power to receive financial stability in exchange for some kind of emotional, sexual, or domestic labor.” 

2. There are different ways to create and use power. From Physics, to Psychology, to Philosophy, Sociology and Political Science, power can mean many different things but is generally considered the ability to do or be or have done an intended thing. Many people consider power, especially social power, to be the second definition of Power, as found here in the Merriam-Webster dictionary , “possession of control, authority or influence over others,” but that is pretty much only one very shallow kind of social power which a theorist Starhawk calls “power-over.” Starhawk also talks about “power-with” and “power-within.” She develops her theories about these different kinds of power in an excellent book titled Truth or Dare. I am not going to talk to much about power-within for this discussion about loyalty, I don’t think, as I am going to focus on power-over and power-with. Power-with is pretty much exactly what it sounds like, but I will be using it in contrast to the Merriam-Webster’s 2nd definition of power, to be the ability to do or be or have done an intended thing  without the need for control, authority or influence over others. In other words, power-with is when the desired thing gets done because the people doing it are doing it together because they want to, not because they are being forced. 

Back to loyalty as a value. I would like to believe that most people want to believe that their romantic relationships are relationships of equals. People who advocate for Patriarchal Misogyny (PM) are people who don’t want to believe that their partner is truly their equal in terms of power and authority within their relationships, but most people are not PM losers and realize that romantic relationships where power is shared, or created and used collaboratively with the other people in the relationship, are stronger and more rewarding relationships (I am only talking about romantic relationships here and not sexual ones, for reasons that might best be discussed in a future post. Romantic relationship can include sexual relationships, but don’t have to). So, people generally want their romantic relationships to be relationships of equals, because it makes for better relationships, and that is a good thing to want and to work to accomplish in romantic relationships…but relationships between people do not happen on desert islands in which there is no outside society or world exerting pressure on them. This means that the people involved in the romantic relationship are both bringing their entire lives (and all of their experiences) prior to the relationship into the relationship, and those experiences are shaping how each person in the relationship is able to participate in, contribute to, and benefit from the relationship.

When the people in the romantic relationship come from different places in their lives and experiences (which everyone does, many so in very different ways) it can be nearly impossible for everyone involved in the relationship to understand what kinds of things enable and empower the other person (or persons) in the relationship, and what kinds of behaviors, words and actions end up extracting energy and power for that person, not build them up. All of this is to say something pretty obvious really, but something easy to over look when getting wrapped up in the “magic” of forming a romantic relationship: You can’t really know what another person has been through, or how it affects their ability to be in a romantic relationship without doing a lot of talking, listening, and giving each other time to process how those past experiences are affecting this new one. 

Instead of doing this work, which pretty inevitably lasts as long as the relationship itself does, because people grow and change, it is really easy to look for short cuts that can stand in for doing that work over and over again. For the vast majority of people, cultural values and ideas (usually stored and shared in popular media)  provide a multitude of these short cuts past having to do difficult communication work within the relationship. Words like “dating,” “boyfriend,” “partner,” “fuckboi,”  “wife,” are all words that people use because they do the definitional work of establishing personal, interpersonal and social expectations for relationships. In addition to the words that we use to define ourselves and the others in our relationships, the other big category of words we use as short cuts in doing relationship communication work, even when trying to do that work, are the “value words” we use to try to define behaviors and beliefs that we are looking to encourage in the relationship. This is (finally) where loyalty comes back in.

Many people think of loyalty as a shared value that establishes trust and equality in a romantic relationship. If the people in the relationship are acting loyally to each other, then power must be shared, right? But loyalty is a hollow and meaningless word outside of the circumstances in which it is being tested. It is easy to be loyal to your king when you feel like you are getting everything you could reasonably expect from giving your allegiance to him. It is much more difficult to be loyal to a king that is giving you nothing at all for your allegiance, and when you think of loyalty in this ruler/ruled context (where the concept of loyalty comes from in the first place)…well it becomes pretty messed up for rulers to expect unswerving allegiance from subjects that are getting nothing (or worse than nothing) in return. That is just an abuse of authority and power.

“But, romantic relationships are supposed to be relationships of equals right? So the ruler/ruled context shouldn’t be relevant!”

This is where placing the expectation for loyalty becomes so problematic to me.

1. I personally want my romantic partners to feel more empowered and more free to be and to become the self they most want to be in the world, as a result of building a romantic relationship with me. I hope that empowerment and freedom leads them to value me, and what I contribute to the relationship, just as I hope to be a good enough listener and communicator to make the relationship a place where vulnerable and difficult ideas, feeling and dreams can be shared, but I also realize that a lot of the people I have had romantic relationships with in the past have a history of relationships (some romantic, but also familial, social and economic) not valuing their empowerment, freedom or ability to become the self that they most want to be in the world. As someone who identifies as a man, I have to acknowledge that a lot of the cultural ideas that surround loyalty as a value exist and are reinforced to my benefit in social relationships, especially in romantic relationships with people who identify as women. I don’t really want to waste my time right now trying to explain this one. If that doesn’t immediately make sense to you, may just look at the history of patriarchal family relationships and how much political struggle it took for women to get the right exist as more than just the property of their fathers, husbands and sons.

2. I can talk a pretty game with my telling my romantic partners that I want them to be empowered and free to become and continue to grow as the person that they most want to be in the world…but can I walk the walk that proves that I really value my romantic partner(s) in this way? That doesn’t take promises and words, it takes time and the work from me to turn conversations into actions. Sometimes, in the past (and maybe, hopefully, the present) I have succeed in doing this well enough for my partners to want to be able to talk to me about changes that are occurring in their lives, their feelings, and the world around them enough to keep including me all of those things as a romantic partner…and sometimes I have failed. Big desires and goals can create a lot of ambition but also a lot of pressure in relationships and both of those things can lead people to be more afraid of letting someone else down than of questioning whether those desires and goals are even shared anymore. Fear can lead to insecurity, which can lead to saying things people don’t mean in the hopes that it can either make the words themselves true, or at least keep others from questioning them. It is the people who insist that you trust them that always seem to be the least trust worth and the most likely to exploit whatever trust we are about to give them. 

Leading to 3. Most of the time people start talking about loyalty in romantic relationships, it is coming either from a place of vulnerability and hurt, and trying to avoid the mistakes of the past (instead of looking to the present and building up what is and could become)…or it is coming from a boatload of preconceived ideas about romantic relationships developed from bad media examples and little experiencing processing difficult emotions, or at least, little positive experience processing those emotions. In both cases it should serve as a warning flag that deeper and more vulnerable conversations are needed, about where our relationship expectations are coming from, and how we intend to grow past the insecurities and heartbreaks that have made us establish those walls. 

Ok, all of that probably sounds a little wish-washy and hypothetical. But I promise I am speaking from a lot of personal experience. I have been the kind of “cheated on” that shattered my life and left me reeling as I tried to pick up the pieces, but the problem was never actually “my romantic partner is just an unfaithful person, incapable of loyalty.” The problem was almost always something more like, “I am constructing a fantasy world for myself and an imagined version of my romantic partner that might not actually be that person at all, because I am not creating the space and time to talk about these growing desires I have for the relationship in the kind of way that lets them be an equal partner in our relationship and its future…” even when I really thought I was putting in the time and work to make that happen. I can understand where some people might think it would be awesome to just have a series of magical words to say or oaths that can taken that make doing that hard and very often fruitless-feeling  work of developing a strong romantic relationship unnecessary (its only truly fruitless work when you give up on trying to do it in the future).  However, magical fantasy relationships that take no time or effort on our part to maintain tend to be pretty worthless relationships in the long run for everyone involved. That isn’t to make a “romantic relationships need to be painful” argument. Not all work/labor has to be unfun or painful.  In fact, experiencing pain in a romantic relationship is a very good warning flag to reevaluate whether this specific relationship is a relationship empowering you as much as you are putting in the effort to make it something that can empower others. But all of our relationships are defined by the time we put in them and the number one way to show someone that your relationship with them is meaningful (romantic or not) is to make sure that the other person feels like the work of building and growing the relationship is shared and mutually enjoyed. This isn’t accomplished by trying to control the behaviors of another person with words like loyalty, but by being present with and aware of the other person and the person they are becoming. 

Loyalty is, at best, a horizontal move towards a static, unchanging relationship-state. It is almost always an expectation, even when it is leveled at oneself, that leads towards disappointment and shame or anger. Instead of loyalty, I want to offer sincerity as a personal goal in romantic relationships, not to be used as a threat: “you must be sincere in your actions and words towards me, or else I will leave you;” but as a tool of self-awareness: “I want this relationship to be a place where everyone involved can do the work of becoming more sincere with ourselves about who we want to be and what world we want to create with each other.” 

Ever since I started writing these posts, my Social media feed has been serving me up some real gems of stuff that must fall into the “talks about sex and relationships” content. Here is one that really jumped out at me as bizarre when I first saw it, and got even weirder/started to make a lot more sense once I started reading the comments.

First of all, I know almost nothing about the poster of this content, much less where the original creator of the meme shared. From an incredibly surface level analysis, it appears that BoozyBetch presents as a woman with a snarky sense of humor who likes drinking and is trying to build up a (rather impressive) network of followers with content that sparks engagement and debate. This is relevant to posting a survey meme like this one, because, while her posts tend to appear directed at women, this post has more than 100 times the engagement of her typical posts, largely because it is full of comments from men insisting that they know how the “ladies” really rank these 5 categories, with almost all of the men claiming that women put money, and looks at the top of this list, with some disagreement about where penis size and personality rank, although almost all of the men commenting insist that women actually put loyalty at the bottom.  This is the second time the idea of “loyalty” has come up in my blog posts, so I am going to have to write my big thoughts on it in a post sooner than later, but for now I am going to ignore why men think women don’t value loyalty, and instead focus on the absolute absurdity of “personality” as one category, and why so many of these commenting men think women value money more than that.

What does it mean to have personality? I think generally, within the context of this kind of meme-survey, “personality” is supposed to be read as “fun to be around,” maybe “good sense of humor,” and possibly also “is kind.” This is already too many things to be one category but since they aren’t listed out anywhere else in the list, “Personality” also has to be a stand in for “self-awareness,” “emotional maturity,” “ability to make friends and sustain those relationships for any length of time” but also even little stuff like “shared interests” or at least “stuff to talk about and connect over that isn’t about how I make money, how good I am in the sack, or how I maintain looking this good” (since those three kind of do get covered by other things in the list). In that regard, it is kind of absurd, sad, and telling that anyone looks at this list and doesn’t put personality at the top of the list. Think about it. Someone with a bad personality isn’t going listen to you or your desires. They are not going to share their wealth with you in any way that isn’t directly transactional and unbalanced in their own favor. They certainly are not going to be loyal to you in a way that is meaningful to you, and not just representational of their own moral code, which will almost certainly be used against you at some point in the future if you haven’t submitted yourself fully to them/that code.  And this is where I think misogynistic ideas about heterosexual relationships, and what men are supposed to want from them, and what women are supposed to want from them gets exposed in the way different people think about personality.

If you are defining personality as just maybe the first 3 things I mentioned: fun to be around, sense of humor, kindness; that kind of exactly fits the misogynistic stereotype of “the nice guy,” that is destined for “the friend zone” (ooh, that is definitely a topic for a future post). Of course men who’s identity is tied up in patriarchal, misogynistic ideas about sexual virility and dominance are going to undervalue “personality,” not even realizing that they have probably tied their own personality to things like making money, looking good to women, and dominating sexual relationships with a massive penis. Thus, in their own eyes, women valuing money or eggplants are really just valuing what real men present to the world as having a personality. It is also why it is inconceivable to these men that some women might see right through that facade they are presenting and say they value personality over these other attributes when talking them, not realizing that it might also be a personal warning that they (the women) think these men’s personality based on those other attributes…just sucks. 

So, “hey, Dudes!” If you think that women are lying when they say personality is the most import thing off this list, there is a very strong probability that the reason why you are leaving comments like this in the first place on a post of a person you definitely don’t know…your personality probably is the reason why no one you are interested in wants to date you. You are the one essential yelling at random women on the internet and calling them liars. If you don’t understand how that kind of misogyny makes you a 0, you need to do a lot of reading and rethinking of your life. 

I 100% believe there are behaviors attributed to masculinity that are toxic for the person embodying them, for the people around that person and for society as a whole. I have used the phrase “toxic masculinity” myself when doing violence prevention work in the past, and I don’t think it is any kind of problematic phrase in and of itself. At the same time, I have seen the proponents and media spokespeople for authoritarian, patriarchal misogyny (PM), relentlessly attack people for using “Toxic Masculinity” with some success at bringing that phrase into the collection of terms that the left has become afraid to talk about or be identified with, and I think there are some weaknesses to the term that made it so easy to attack.

1. PM has been successful in convincing the larger public that people who use the phrase “toxic masculinity” are using it to suggest that all masculinity is toxic. That is not how anyone I have ever listened to use it when talking sincerely about harmful behaviors connected to masculinity, but it is how I have heard a lot of people try to deride it and make it seem, and I think they have been fairly successful at it.

2. “Toxic masculinity” as a phrase doesn’t actually convey what is happening or why. It doesn’t speak to power or intention. It just kind of establishes that there are these unhealthy behaviors associated with some people’s ideas about masculinity, but it kind of just leaves the conversation there. Cleaning up toxic messes is difficult and usually people just ignore them or put up fences around them and say “never go here.” Also masculinity in this context just becomes this state of being, rather than a tangible set of definable behaviors that can be addressed or changed. 

Patriarchal misogyny on the other hand describes a set of behaviors that reflect and foster a hatred of, aversion to, or prejudice against women for the sake of establishing a patriarchal power structure. For someone to embody patriarchal misogyny, they don’t just exhibit some attitudes that harmful to themselves and others, they are doing it for a purpose that is authoritarian and anti-women. This makes it a lot easier to talk about and counter without necessarily implying that people who might still be struggling with problematic behaviors are exclusively part of the problem, or something to fence off or ignore, but rather engaged with around a sincere dedication to counter Patriarchal misogyny, even if that means having to own up to and take accountability for potentially harmful actions we have done in the past. PM absolutely fosters ideas about masculinity that are harmful enough to everyone to call toxic, but it also fosters really bad ideas about femininity too, and even worse ideas about existing outside of either masculinity or femininity—ideas that fundamentally exist to create an unequal distribution of power around gender that has to be reinforced with a hatred and loathing for that which is denied access to power, because to do otherwise is to create space for empathy and understanding.

This is going to be a short one, because life, but I think I have covered the basics of why I generally try to avoid talking about toxic masculinity when I am talking about patriarchal misogyny, even though both ideas are closely linked.  

Post 15 of 100: Is talking about Patriarchal Misogyny a sign of Trump Derangement Syndrome?

The title of this post is tongue in cheek click bait, as the answer, up front, is clearly, “NO,” but the irony of one the sponsors of a bill defining Trump Derangement Syndrome getting arrested for trying to solicit sex from a minor, is just too much of a moment to let pass. I think there is a justifiable urge to “whataboutism” any single story about a politician soliciting sex from a minor, as abusing the position of political authority for access to “sexual taboos” is certainly something that is not limited to just republicans, but Trumpism’s embrace of defending sexual predators from the consequences of their actions was inevitably going to draw more predators into its tent, as well as serve as a wink and a nod to the republican rank and file that “her body my choice” is going to be acceptable behavior moving forward. 

For now, the Minneapolis Republican Party seems intent on pushing this predator out of the party and encourage him to resign, but I am going to try to keep an eye on the story, because I would not be surprised at all to see him double down, call the whole thing a witch hunt and try to draw Trump’s attention as true loyalist being persecuted by the media. I am hopeful that this guy is so far down the rung that none of that BS sticks and his career is crushed if not his personal life as well, but we were dangerously close to letting a much bigger predator serve as the Attorney General, so I would not count any chickens or eggs just yet. This isn’t the first case like this we have seen in the last half a year, and it isn’t going to be the last, because the thing serial predators look for even more than potential victims is for groups and positions of power that will protect them from discovery or consequence. Like this was seriously a thing I used to talk about all the time when doing my outreach for sexual violence prevention. Back in the early 2000s when I was paying very close attention to these statistics, the average sexual predator victimized 12 people before getting caught. This is because they seek target the most vulnerable people they can (including, as we have seen, children) and they congregate in patriarchal misogynistic environments where people tend question survivor narratives and victim blame them as well. This is exactly what Trumpism has made of the Republican Party.

So while calling out Trumpism as cesspit of patriarchal misogyny might one day qualify me as someone to attack as being misled by Trump Derangement Syndrome, I hope all the other republicans sitting in that Trumpism tent with Justin Eichorn, Matt Gaetz, Elon Musk, Donald Trump, Linda McMahon, Pete Hegseth and who knows how many more predators or their direct enablers, are still comfortable with the company they are keeping. That was a bitterly barbed comment, because I find the idea of protecting abusers abhorrent, but in reality, we do know that there are some folks in the Republican Party that were uncomfortable with how much of a predatory sleaze Matt Gaetz was that it stopped them from supporting his nomination for AG, so maybe, hopefully, some of those same people will see how many of these predators are dropping into the ranks around them and realize how close they are to unmistakably becoming the party of sexual predation.  Maybe it is too late for that, but the Minnesota state party clearly doesn’t want that association to stick, so there has to be some folks there that see where this road leads.    

Post 14 of 100: You don’t need to buy anything to believe that better examples of masculinity are possible and preferable.

I am willing to bet, even amongst my close friends, the only ones likely to read these posts, that not everyone buys into my claim that patriarchal misogyny is a deliberate political tactic being employed in authoritarian movements around the world (Trumpism just being the pervasive one here in the US). In fact, I bet there are some folks who have pretty much tuned out after the first couple of these posts, because something like “Patriarchal Misogyny” sounds too complicated and systemic to even do anything about. I think, assuming I complete this 100 blog posts project, one of my greatest challenges moving into “what next?” Is going to be trying to figure out who my specific audience is and how do I tailor my message to that audience.  Do I scale back on interweaving my own theoretical framework into my efforts to reach groups who might be capable of changing and challenging many of the most pervasive “bad ideas” that are shaping masculinity in the world today? Or do I just stay authentic to who I am, how I think, and let my more radical beliefs about government, capitalism and the shaping of society be an open part of explaining why, even given everything else I believe and think needs to be done, that staying focused on what (and who) defines masculinity is the key to undermining authoritarianism around the globe?

But those are questions I don’t actually have to worry about right now. What I am much more interested in is trying to sort through my own beliefs about masculinity, why it exists as a thing, and who benefits from certain ideas I have about it. For that, I don’t really need to worry about whether I am losing people if I want to talk about PM as a strategy of manipulation and control over men as well as women, or about how I think the underlying structure of property and economic value in the United States was built upon a Patriarchal misogynistic framework of racial supremacy. I am not going to self-censor my ideas as they are taking shape and I am trying to understand them because someone later might dismiss my ideas because they see them as “too woke.” One of the dangers of public blogging, which actually includes posting ideas to various forms of social media, is that the divide between public, open commons space and private, safe space becomes difficult to separate. 

I am actually a professional writer and educator with years of experience researching, writing and talking about these topics, so I am aware of the risks (and fairly well protected from the consequences of them) I am personally taking writing about this topic and publicly calling people like Trump and Musk pathetic losers who are beholden to some of the most garbage ideas about masculinity because they were born into situations where those ideas protected wealth and social power that were already available to them. Like, yes, one day in the future, AI being used for authoritarian surveillance and social pacification might see these words on the internet and decide to take some kind of action against me/terminate me, but I don’t have family members that hold immense power over me judging me for what I write about on the internet, nor do I have a precarious work position that is in jeopardy just because I believe that US citizens should understand how the concept of property in this country was developed to include owning people (both in the form of chattel slavery and in the patriarchal ownership over women and children) and to strip land away from the people currently using it so that it could be used to make already wealthy people even more wealthy.  It is important for me to point that out in a conversation about meeting people where they are at, because assuming that what is safe enough and comfortable enough for me to talk about and to advocate for should be shared by everyone I am talking to is one of the biggest reasons why “man in the feminist organizing group” or “white ally to antiracism work” is such a cliche meme. Non-masculine identified folks really don’t need any man telling them what patriarchy is or how it affects their life. But the problem there is not men trying to do the work of confronting patriarchal misogyny, the problem is men thinking they are trying to do the work of confronting patriarchal misogyny by focusing all of their time and attention doing that “work,” by taking up the time and attention of non-masculine folks and their organizations. It took me a long time to figure this out and I still probably don’t get it right all the time, but realizing that I am not actually advancing the cause of dismantling patriarchal misogyny when I am mansplaining some radical feminist/anarchist theory to a moderate liberal women to justify why I don’t feel comfortable donating money to a democratic presidential candidate, was an important step in my growth into someone prepared to do better. 

All of this is to say that what I am trying to sell with these blog posts is not a unified strategy for dismantling PM, that just requires your monthly donation of $19.95, your sycophant devotion to my brilliance or authority, or for you to defend my every action or word, past or present, from any questioning or skepticism. Even where I have ideas of actions and strategies that I want to be more involved in, I am not promising that I will do them well, or that everyone doing them well is going to fix everything. You don’t have to agree with everything anyone says to try to understand what issue or issues are inspiring them to speak up or take action and decide for yourself if those are issues worth your time and energy to try to address or not. I see young men (especially white men) lining up behind Trupism’s new version of authoritarianism that is promising that it is going to “make comedy legal” and protect them from accusations of sexually inappropriate behavior, and the clearest path I see forward to not having to fight all of these young men in the streets after they have been fully indoctrinated, is to at least make sure that they realize how little the people in the positions of authority actually give two shits about them. This can be a tough job, because Trump has done some stuff, like pardoning the Jan 6th rightwing insurrectionists, that sells a very heavy dose of “Daddy Trump will be there for me,” but as many of the working class and Latino voters who voted for him have been learning the hard way,  the group of men he will actually protect, and how far he will go to protect them is pretty thin and incredibly transactional. There is still room to counter the indoctrination of PM within authoritarian political movements, but I think the US left has repeatedly demonstrated a tendency to either punch down with their satirical judgements and media production (oh the deplorable) or to pick targets so far out of reach above them that the efforts fall flat and are subject to easy ridicule. Like, for example calling Trump a pathetic loser, representative of the worst of what masculinity can be, is a pretty easy charge to levy from down here where the words have almost no weight to them, but telling your boss (your father, your uncle, the president of your fraternity, your friend) the same thing, because he acts the same way, has done some of the same horrible things to women, is a lot harder to do, and might not be the best strategic approach in the first place. 

The right has gotten really good at their selective targeting of the people who are really standing in the way of their political and social goals. Trumpism 2.0 is being used like a wrecking ball (or perhaps a better metaphor would be a carpet bomb) instead of a surgical laser to cut out all resistance not just from the federal government but every institution that can be influenced by the federal government, but it is not missing its targets. I have seen some small groups of grassroots leftists trying their bests to be more creative and selective with what they are trying to target with their actions and organizing, but you definitely don’t see that happening at larger state or national levels in the US, and especially not by the Democratic Party.   There will not be much time left (if there is in fact any) for people in the US wanting to resist PM authoritarianism in the form of Trumpism to address the people in their lives buying into this awful ideology as friends and family members and not enemy combatants. I think the fear of that impending reality is maybe one of the most disabling factors in the left’s general/large scale response to Trumpism, but if we can think about our sphere’s of influence, and act swiftly within them, it is is still possible to engage with some of the people getting sold PM the heaviest before they go all in with it. 

Even if you don’t buy into any what I am saying about Patriarchal Misogyny and how it is being used to turn young men into soldiers of authoritarianism, you can look around at the people in your life and talk to them about what masculinity is, what it can be, and why people’s ideas about masculinity seem to be so intimately and personally tied to their political identity as well.

In post 12 0f 100, I made the suggestion that to confront the pervasive influence that Patriarchal Misogyny (PM) is exerting on the youth, especially young men, through pornography, the best approach is a decentralized attempt to “flood the box” and change the conversations that kids are seeing society have about sex. How do we do that?

I do think it is important for parents to try our best to keep open lines of communication with our children and not shy away from awkward or difficult conversations, and to be real with them about behaviors that we might feel hypocritical about, or even shame over…I also think that our kids should be expected to try to “do their own research,” get outside perspectives on these topics, and to talk to their peers about it too. Kids are going to push back against our attempts to control their access to different kinds of media, and they should, because we want them to be capable of critical thinking. But just as important as the conversations that we have directly with our children, and the freedom we eventually give them to explore difficult and confusing ideas on their own, is the conversations that our children see us have with other adults about these topics, and how we respond to various depictions of masculinity and sexuality in the world around us. 

Kids are sharp. Whether they consciously identify it or not, they watch how the adults in their lives experience and portray their gender and sexuality. They notice when it is only women at family gatherings clean up after meals or do all the cooking. They notice when the men have conversations that veer into politics and issues of social justice and exclude, ignore or belittle the contributions of women to these conversations. They notice when papa storms out of the house angry and really struggle to process that, especially when the resolution to that conflict might happen outside of their ability to overhear or observe it. And as they reach puberty, they have been paying attention for years about what topics their fathers and mothers and care givers seem confident and competent at talking about, and which ones they should avoid bringing up around the adults in their lives at all costs. If we want youth generally, and young men especially, to have better frames of reference to learning about healthy sexual behaviors than the misogynist “free” pornography that pops up with their first internet searches on these topics, we have to make sure that they are used to seeing adults talk about these issues in healthy and constructive ways, even when they aren’t sure they know how to do that…as long as the adults also display healthy and constructive ways of admitting where their knowledge is lacking, or wrong, and a have a willingness to learn from their mistakes. 

This is much easier to say than to do, especially for adults who might have very little experience existing in communities and spaces where having healthy conversations about sex and sexuality is common or even valued. That is ok. It is ok to admit that there are topics we don’t really know that much about or are difficult for us to talk about. It is especially ok to help our/“the” kids understand why these conversations are difficult for us, and share with them the horror stories from our own attempts to learn about and explore our gender and sexual identities. Simultaneously though, we can’t just let “I am not good at talking about this stuff” stand as the final word adults have with the youth that come to them with these questions. We have to demonstrate a willingness to do the work to get better at these conversations too. When we say “I am not sure I know an answer to that question,” we need to follow that up with “but I can try to find out,” or “would you like help finding someone with better answers than me with whom to continue this conversation?” I think masculine-identifying folks need to be very careful about redirecting these difficult conversations about developing emotions on to feminine-identifying folks in the child’s lives, especially for children socialized as males, as that has a heavy risk of teaching them that men can and should expect women to provide the men in their lives free labor of emotional support, and I think the best way to do that is make sure that us male-identified adults in the lives of children have networks of care and emotional support that include more than just our own family members and romantic partners.

We need to participate in these kinds of vulnerable and sometimes awkward conversations about gender identity and sexuality with each other more often, until we start to feel comfortable enough to keep having these conversation in front of and with the children/kids/youth in our lives.  Because in 2025 USA, conversations about gender and sexual identity are taking place all around us and the youth in our lives, both in person and all over the internet, and judging by how badly the left was caught off-guard by how effective Trumpism’s use of misogynistic medial platforms to mobilize voters and create an army of dangerous loyalists, I don’t think that we can expect kids to miraculously demonstrate better media literacy and awareness than we have demonstrated ourselves when it comes to sorting out what ideas about sex and sexuality are healthy, and which are going to place them and their potential sexual partners in harms way.   

In post 11 of 100, I looked at an article in the BBC about their investigation into the prevalence of choking (or Non-Fatal Strangulation, NFS) in pornography and how it has effect it has had on the general attitude and ideas that people, especially young men, have about what constitutes “normal” sexual behavior. It seems, at least in England, that one of the more common ideas about how to challenge and change this situation is to make the depiction of NFS illegal. I was a little dismissive of that idea in post 11, and I am still skeptical about whether making it illegal will really stop it, or necessarily change the behaviors of young men who might really be struggling a larger influence about how they are supposed to depict themselves as dominant alpha males. 

But the dilemma sat with me over the last few days and made me think about the attempt back in 2012 to require condoms to be used in all vaginal and anal pornographic productions filmed in LA, and the back lash that law met. On its surface, it seems like a very reasonable idea for a law, as Sexually Transmitted Infections are a common health risk in the industry and it is probably very difficult as an individual actor or actress to advocate for yourself effectively in the work place without risking your job. It received a lot of support from people within the industry and from the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, and it passed in LA county with almost 57% of the vote (this is all information you can find about 2012 Los Angeles Measure B on Wikipedia). Apparently the primary effect of the legislation is that most of the industry moved from LA to Las Vegas and that there has been a 95% reduction in permits for pornographic productions to be filed in LA. Attempts to pass similar laws at the state and federal level have all failed to materialize or be voted down at the polls. So practically, the idea of passing this kind of law appears to be about impossible, because the US is generally very squeamish about talking about sex, and as long as laws pass piecemeal around the country, then the industry will just keep moving, especially as the nature of pornographic media production has changed so radically over the last decade since these laws were even being considered. 

Then, additionally, there were opponents to the bill within the industry because the bill was created without consultation with performers in the industry and that using condoms for the kind of sexual encounters being filmed in pornography (that can go on for hours) can actually make the the shoots longer and increase the risk of immediate injury to the performers from chafing and abrasions that can increase the risk of infection for performers. It makes a lot of sense to me that politicians do a really bad job of consulting with actual sex workers and performers before drafting up laws like this or thinking through how they are going to be implemented. 

At the same time, it is pretty clear that people all over the world are turning to pornographic media as a primary source of sexual education, and that the World Health Organization is reporting that condom use among sexually active adolescents has declined significantly since 2014 around the world. So yeah, yikes! Like it is true that HIV/AIDs is not the death sentence it was for generations before me, and that the stigmatization of people with STIs that happened when I was a kid (because of people’s absolute terror about AIDs, even as the government was doing nothing to stop its spread or research it) was incredibly problematic, but we are kind of reentering a time period in the US where there will be no federal organizations doing any kind of sexual education research or promotion, and access to birth control and abortion is not looking good in the US ( worse in many ways than in my youth, better in some of the technological developments since then).

So kids have better access to an almost infinite supply of pornographic media (including the rapid spreading of AI generated content, a subject for a different post); that content is nearly impossible to regulate as much of it has been decentralized through social media type platforms like Only Fans; and it is clearly shaping attitudes and ideas about sexuality around the planet.   The marketability of the content and its ability to use that content not just to sell itself, but to sell a whole host of insecurities that can generate sales for things like diet pills, sexual performance enhancing products and medications, Beauty products, clothes, etc…and it is pretty obvious to me that it was only a matter of time before the culture this has created in the minds of young men was going to spill over into the political sphere, like it has in the form of Trumpism today. 

What can we do about it?

Regulation doesn’t really seem practically feasible to me, although I am sure a lot of folks are going to try to go that route, even ones I like and respect. I have already talked about it enough above, unless I someone points out something that has really been working on the state or national regulation level and then I will have to come back to this topic in a future post. Attempts to ban pornography have almost always ended up hurting poor and marginalized communities the most, while the barely-underground sex work industry being created for the wealthiest of people in society is left to create its Jeffery Epstein’s and P. Diddy’s regardless of its legality. Trying to regulate the specific behaviors of sex work industries like pornographic media production works a little bit around specific social norms that are incredibly dominant throughout society (like child pornography and depictions of hyper violent acts are bad) but also tend to push those parts of the industry into dark networks of power brokers who tend to be exceptionally good at exploiting chaotic political environments like the whole world is experiencing right now. As words like “grooming” become political battle grounds, and states consider having adults examine the genitalia of children participating in sports or even just trying to use the bathroom, these social norms are going to fall apart and regulation is going to be much less capable of protection and be used much more heavily as a political and social weapon.

Counter industries/“responsible” sexual media production already exist and are probably responsible for creating pockets of young people with much healthier ideas about themselves, their sexualities, and the how to be respectful and caring partners than in the general public. This has probably been a good thing for people with access to these media sources, but I don’t see it being the thing that is going to address the problem at a larger social level. Almost all the examples of this kind of media that I have ever heard about or seen tend to be fairly expensive in a world where (bad) pornographic media is essentially free, and much better about self-regulating in ways that conform to laws about age restrictions than the bad stuff, and thus will not become media sources that inform the general public about sex in the same way that the rest of the pornographic media industry has. It will just create “liberal bubbles” of alternative forms of gender and sexual expression that will generally be dismissed and blatantly attacked by the Manosphere and the enforcing branch of Patriarchal Misogyny. This isn’t to say that grown ass adults that want to view or engage with pornographic media shouldn’t try to be responsible with what they view (because attention is data, money and power in this post-information era we are living in), but expecting this kind of solution to address the issue of patriarchal misogyny and its spread through the porn industry is like expecting companies like Tesla to fix climate change. 

I think the only real hope to counter the wide spread power that Patriarchal Misogyny has exerted through pornography is to de-stigmatize talking about sex and the depictions of sex that people see in their lives around them. I don’t think we can count on schools to do this for our children, not any more, at least in the US, although Europe is failing this really badly as well. I don’t think expecting it to happen through religious institutions is likely to work either, although religious institutions might be the best hope we have to be capable of protecting the kind of speech and knowledge that is necessary to have these kinds of conversations, even if most of them will not. It will be much harder for the right to attack religious institutions than nonprofits, and publicly funded educators on these topics. I think decentralized people just “flooding the box” and forcing the PM authoritarian weirdos like Vance and Trump and Musk and the Manosphere onto the back foot might be the only real practical strategy for most of us, we need to make them defend their terrible and pathetic ideas about sex in public discourse instead of the underground, “locker” room discourse where their sycophants  just eat it up and  make sure it is accessible to most of the kids that are looking for it.

Although the trolling and doxing and nastiness of these PM networks should not be underestimated. They are incredibly happy to attack women and LGBTQIAA2S+ folks and that is a big part of why I think male identified folk need to be stepping up and doing our part to make sure the box is being flooded. We need to keep making media like memes and videos that is accessible to youth (as opposed to stupid internet blogs on websites that get 20 views a week when they are busy, cough, cough) about how bad these losers are at being in meaningful and empowering relationships: sexual, romantic, familial, and even just at forming real friendships that are not about exploit each other and treating every interaction between two people as a power play or a financial transaction.   

I don’t want my son to grow up in a world where anyone would look at a serial cheater and sexual predator and say “this is the shining beacon on a hill of masculinity that all men should emulate.” PM’s vision of masculinity is garbage. Not sexy hot mess trash, but shit-filled, toxic sludge garbage that is poisoning the world. Grown men in positions of authority who will quietly try to exploit PMs potential for personal power and privilege instead of stand up to it and call it out for what it is need to have the spot light turned into their faces, while the young men and boys that are trying to navigate a sense of self that is currently being lost to PM need to see positive examples of men doing the work to counter PM ideas in themselves and their communities. 

I think I got too comfortable trusting that the work of confronting PM ideas was being done by the grown ups in the room at institutional levels like governments, Universities, and Departments of Education, but clearly the grown ups in those rooms were living in little bubbles and getting their information from sources that were not in touch with the real underworkings of how masculinity has been shaped by the changing cultural influencers.  It is time to get back to work.

Just after making post 10 of 11, I saw an article in the BBC about how “choking during sex now normal for many,”  that talks about how, in the UK, it is becoming more and more common for men to engage in “Non-fatal strangulation” (NFS) while having sex, often without asking permission or talking about it in advance. This article goes on to talk about how dangerous this can be, and how it appears to be a behavior that has been heavily influenced/encouraged through pornographic media.  

I think this is a really strong example of what I was talking about in Post 4 of 100 and post 5 of 100, about how little understanding or influence the left, and especially the moderate liberal centrists in the United States has over how the internet media environment works or how people gather information for the purposes of forming identity and social behaviors around. The fact that so many parents and educators and people in positions of mainstream authority are so uncomfortable talking honestly about healthy and unhealthy sexual behaviors is exactly why kinds are turning to internet pornography for this information. The more that industry exists as this illicit, underground market that is actually super easily accessible to almost everyone, everywhere, with very little realistic means of control or limit, the easier it is for the controlling forces of the production of that media to be driven purely by the profit motive of exploiting insecurities and creating impossible power fantasies that require spending money to even hint at replicating.

With the example of choking, as brought up in this BBC article, the very first narrative the story examines is the case of a man placing his forearm down across a woman’s throat and pressing with his full weight without warning or consent. This makes it an act of sexual violence, which the article maybe hints at later, but doesn’t explicitly state. The same woman has it happen to her again 2 weeks later, again without warning, and it led to the woman disassociating through the entire experience, and choosing not to engage in sex again for a year afterward. It is abundantly clear that both of her partners clearly thought that consent to begin the sexual encounter, and never hearing an explicit “NO” meant that these encounters were fully consensual encounters in their own minds, and if they were to be called out for having committed sexual violence or rape, they would probably vehemently deny those charges and insist that they had no idea their partner was unwilling during this activity.  In England and Wales, NFS is specifically a crime whether it is consensual or not with a potential prison sentence of 5 years. In the US, it is not blankly a crime, instead crimes related to domestic violence and sexual violence are defined state by state.  I doubt many people know the explicit laws around it in their own state, I know I didn’t before digging into this topic. And I am pretty sure that the Washington law still requires the strangulation to be proven to be against the will of the person strangled, although honestly, I find it pretty difficult to dig through the different statutes that could apply. 

And the thing is, I personally find breathing play to be something that can be a very positive part of a sexual encounter. Even as a child, I was pretty into masturbating in the shower and basically water boarding myself with the shower head. I am almost certain I didn’t get this idea from any media source, just from realizing that holding my breath affected my sexual pleasure, but it was super dangerous behavior to do in isolation, I very easily could have drowned myself, but I don’t even think I realized the fire I was playing with until I learned that there was a football player at my undergraduate college who died from auto-erotic asphyxiation. With the hindsight of survival, I know that I have been pretty luckily that I never accidentally killed myself, and I am pretty thankful that I was self-absorbed enough through my awkward early sexual encounters, before I learned to be comfortable talking to my partners about everything we were doing, through the full experience, that I never tried choking a partner, thinking I was heightening their pleasure.   

And I also now know that there are much safer ways to play with breath control, and simulating the experience of being choked without placing any pressure on the front of the throat or windpipe, which I have personally learned from reading queer kink erotica and other sexual health resources. I once put together a zine of my own on this topic called “Doing it Together” and it is probably worth revisiting that project at some point in the future. I know that one thing a lot of folks who watch porn forget is that there is almost always multiple people in the room when scenes are being filmed and that good, responsible producers of pornographic or erotic media place the safety of their performers above everything else about the production, but that highlighting that is not something that a lot of these companies do, and that a lot of what is getting produced and distributed is not being made by people that care about being a good, responsible adult media production company. (None of this is discussed in the BBC article, which is much more just concerned with legal actions being taken to ban NFS from adult media in the UK). I can see the logic of trying to ban degrading and violent online pornography, especially that which provides little to no context for the process of consent that needs to go into the reproduction of this kind of role-playing fantasy. It is certainly not the kind of material that I want my son to discover on his own, to learn from, or to try to emulate. But I have yet to see how any nation is going to federally regulate this kind of thing that doesn’t just result in a much darker and more dangerous underground market that can become even more predatory. If anything, I think that the most successful approach to changing the culture around what people think about this kind of pornography is to ruthlessly and relentlessly belittle and mock it for being the hight of edge lord power tripping patriarchal misogyny that is selling visions of pleasure and sex that are pathetic in their insincerity. 

But this is just my immediate gut-check feeling after reading this BBC article and thinking about this topic over the course of writing this blog post. This is a topic that I think a lot more people need to be thinking about and talking about because clearly, without doing something and talking about these subjects more publicly, these atrocious and pathetic examples of sexual behavior quickly become normalized in the minds of youth who either see no other alternatives, or alternatives that appear sterile and boring. 

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.

NOTE: As a stay-at-home parent, my time to write is jambed literally into the dark crevices  of my day. It is difficult for me to find consecutive blocks of time to write my ideas down, much less re-read them with fresh eyes or carefully edit them. I don't really care about small errors of grammar. In fact, I often make them with intention, much to my own detriment as a writer, just because I find them colorful, or I dislike the rules they break. However, if something is unclear or seems to be saying something contradictory to the flow of the writing,  I do appreciate having that pointed out to me so that I can know specifically what writing I have done that really, actually needs me to sacrifice my sleep time or reading time or future writing time or even just a rare moment of time to relax, to go back and re-read with fresh eyes, and edit and change...vs what I might just be better letting exist as a confusing mess or write about again in a more organized or clear manner.  In other words, don't hesitate to reach out to me if something I wrote seems off! It probably is. 

After re-reading post 8 of 100, and getting to the last paragraph, I realized that I was transitioning into kind of a new topic/idea, “what is the deal with male-identifying folks getting their heart broken and falling Into pits of patriarchal misogyny?” And that that kind of weakened the thread of what I was focusing on in the rest of that post. Instead of trying to fix it/edit that part, and instead of trying to just continue addressing that question in another, more hypothetical and poorly researched psychological diatribe, I thought it might be a good time in these blog posts to go back and start talking a bit about my own personal rejections/heart breaks, especially since I am a male-identifying folk.

First of all, this is a topic that I have been writing about for something like 20 years. Seriously, in many ways, the first book I ever published, I Fucked Up, is pretty much a semi-fictional account of many of my many failing/failed romantic and intimate relationships and the life I have been inspired to live as a result of these wonderful and painful heartbreaks. I did digitize that book and turn it into a website that includes a lot of other stuff, but the original anthology can be read here.

I don’t want to basically repeat myself here, and I don’t want you to think that you need to go back and read an entire book to understand this blog post, so I will instead focus on one specific heart break that is only partially covered in this text, and how a lot of people expected me to react to it vs how I did react to it.

I think one of the classic “the world (in the form of this one specific romantic partner) has done me wrong” tale of heart break and woe, the kind that is supposed to leave people shattered wrecks is the tale of being cheated on by the love of your life. Personally, I think there are multiple tales of heartbreak that are much more tragic and dark, but few of them capture the fear of “ultimate betrayal” that get represented in the “cheated on” trope.  Before I go into a super long mega post talking about why I think relationship ideals like “Loyalty” and “Honesty” are bogus patriarchal constructs (something I will probably save for a later blog post), I will just say that I probably don’t share the same ideas about intimacy and sexual relationships as many folks that might think people that look like me might think. 

This can make it pretty difficult and awkward to talk about ex-partners in locations and situations where normal people talk about these things as form of bonding with other normal people. Like, you have to do a lot of explaining why the reason you were hiding, crywacking on a sunporch outside the bedroom of a long-term romantic partner you were wildly in love with while they had sex with some random person who you really don’t like and don’t trust…isn’t just because you are some kind of pathetic, pervy, beta cuck, but because you realize that your partner knew they had double booked their time with you, after you had hitchhiked 90 miles to see them, and they hadn’t told you that before you got there, so you were really just trying to multitask dealing with the emotions of feeling disrespected within a place of vulnerability while also trying to exhaust yourself enough to just go to sleep, so you could be in a better head space to talk about the issue in the morning, than you would be if you spent all night stressing out about something you had no control over.

This incident was neither the first nor the last, more even the most intense instance of emotional immaturity and failure to respect each other that would occur in my relationship with this person, from either of us.

I am not going to go into too many details about the “ending incident” here, because it doesn’t feel necessary to the purpose of talking about how it left me in the kind of position where my heart was fully shattered, not just because of what had happened, but because the “this is over”-ness of our now ex-romantic relationship left me in a position of extreme economy insecurity—essentially homeless in a city where I had no one I could stay with, and removed from a community of support that had shrunk down to include no one that was not directly connected to that relationship…except the boss at my job, who was underpaying me for the work I was doing, and thus offered to let me sleep in my office, because he knew the alternative was certainly me leaving town at a time he found me irreplaceable.  

There are many men that I have tried to talk to about this story, usually trying to explain about how much I learned and grew as a person, and a romantic partner, from having had these experiences and how I don’t regret the choices I made that put me in that situation, even if they embarrassed and shamed me. Those conversations never go the way I want them to. Far too often, they have instead gone down the “That F’ing B!@(^ ! You are just too nice a guy”  response, which has left me pretty hesitant to talk to men about it in the future. This “F’ing B—!” response always seems rooted in some imagined and imagined-to-be-shared patriarchal cultural knowledge that a man in a relationship with a woman, should be able to expected to receive assurances of emotional and physical security from “their women,” and when women fail to provide that security to their men, they have failed not only their men, but society as a whole. 

But the thing is, I have never seen any man positively reflect upon their growth as a person from a relationship that they identify as having ended because their partner cheated on them (for the sake of simplicity, when I am talking about infidelity or cheating in this post, I mean specifically engaging in an act of physical intimacy with someone outside the relationship, without the knowledge or consent of the partner). Like it is a fairly common story, and I have a lot of great friends who identify as men and have had relationships end after an incident of infidelity came to light, but many of them still have difficulty talking about those relationships or being friends with their ex or their exes friends. Now, WARNING: It is ok, fuck it, it is even a sign of emotional growth and maturity, for anyone to establish boundaries for themselves about who they can and cannot be around. If you are reading this and feeling like this is you, GOOD JOB! You are doing the right thing. I would much rather see every man in the world walk away from and never look back at exes for whom they feel like they can never trust again or have any kind of rational or platonic relationship again, than have any men push themselves into interactions that they cannot handle emotionally, because that is how really terrible things happen to real women all the time. 

At the same time, I think a lot of growth as a person can happen when you can look back at the relationship and realize that any act or acts of infidelity were not actually what went wrong with that relationship, but that there were issues buried much deeper in the relationship and that both the act of infidelity and its coming to light are probably really important signs that the relationship was probably only going to get a lot worse down the road if they didn’t happen or the feelings leading to them didn’t get resolved. If you were at a place in your own emotional journey where you are expecting your partner not to engage in certain behaviors, or to even just to not engage in those behaviors without talking to you about it first, and your partner is not ready to be in a relationship with those expectations, that is not a healthy relationship for either person. If even talking about what kinds of expectations you are going to put on your relationship with another person is too awkward an idea to even consider it, then you are not ready to be in a healthy relationship with that person, and if you just assume that patriarchal assumptions about loyalty and security in relationships should be enough to make those kinds of conversations about expectations unnecessary, then you are in great danger of slipping deeply into patriarchal misogynistic thinking when one of your relationships inevitably explodes because it was a relationship you were not really ready to be in as a healthy and mature partner.