Author: Benjamin

I tend to say that I was raised by a single mom. My father wasn’t entirely out of the picture especially not in my youth, and my mother remarried and I had a stepdad from the age of eight into my twenties, but I have issues with both that I have written about extensively in my autobiographical anthology I Fucked Up. I don’t have harsh feelings for either my father or my stepfather, even though they have both caused me traumatic pain at various times in my life, but I tend to look at both of them as examples of masculinity that really made me question the value of masculinity as an identity, and the things that “men are supposed to do.” 

One aspect of this that I have thought about for a long time, and have struggled to write down effectively in words before is why I get so upset and uncomfortable with the very common meme that “fathers make sacrifices for their families.” I don’t know if I am going to be able to do better with this blog post than I have with my attempts at story telling and poem writing in the past, but I am going to try, because I think some aspects of this have come up in watching Adolescence, but also, I see the “Father must do anything for the family” to be an absolute root lie of patriarchal misogyny and Trumpism both. Like my aversion to the value of Loyalty, I will acknowledge up front that “A father will do anything  his family” is probably one of the first things people think of when they say “family values” and that there are centuries of media, from around the world that reinforce this idea as one of noble character and high moral value. As a whole, I think my complaint is really more directed at the reality that this value almost never actually means the “I would take a bullet for my child” extreme that a lot of people think of when making a statement about a father sacrificing for their family, but instead that fathers actually very rarely even act in the actual interest of their families, and instead can get wrapped up in a whole lot of bullshit trying to convince themselves and their families that fathers are the ones who best know and speak for the interests of their families. 

This is the situation that I feel like drives so many men who have relationships fall apart into the arms of patriarchal misogyny. I think a very central pillar of socialization as a man is the belief that, as a man, your highest purpose in life is the creation of some kind of family that will come to define your identity, but which also represents your identity into the world. I think this is why so many men are attached to having their partners and children adopt their last name, and where that tradition came from. I think it also underwrites a lot of the laws (both from religious law and secular) that have established property rights into the hands of a father, not only of properties like possessions, land, and titles, but also wives and children. I am arguing that the idea that a man is supposed to see his family as the ultimate representation of himself and his legacy is pretty much the root concept of patriarchy, and it has a deep stranglehold on the construction of a masculine identity.

It is not a difficult value to romanticize, especially if you ever end up a parent, or have dreams or aspirations to become one. In its noblest aspirations it can be a model for many people on how to unselfishly love beyond the boundaries of yourself, or at least it gets spun that way over and over again. But I just don’t believe that learning to see yourself represented in your family, in your partner and your children, is really experiencing a love bigger than yourself, it is just projecting your sense of self beyond the confines of your own body and mind. I especially don’t believe that there is any altruistic selflessness in the projection of valuing family that I see in the most public proponents of patriarchal misogyny, like Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Vladimir Putin, etc.

Even I the nobler projections and fantasies of this story “the father sacrificing some aspect of themselves for their children or family,” these stories of sacrifice almost never include the family collectively coming together to discuss what is best for everyone individually and for that to be what drives the father into action. It is almost always a father acting unilaterally to do what he alone really understands what needs to be done, because it will end up being the best for everyone. This is the fiction and the fantasy that I have personally seen drive many a man into a horrific spiral of feeling exploited and undervalued by their families, their children and especially their romantic partners. Because sharing the labor of figuring out what the family needs is seen as an act of  burdening the family with the often messy and ugly realities not just of survival, but of prosperity. And this is where I really think the idea of “a father must do anything for their family” really gets harmful and dangerous for society, for the family, and every single person in it. Especially because the needs of most families in the United States almost never come down the moments where anyone must do some thing terrible for the family’s safety or survival. Instead, the absolute atrocities that the United States continues to engage in, and that men wanting to be model father who will do anything to support their family continue to condone and support, are almost always about misplaced expectations of sharing wealth and prosperity. When the dirty deeds of “doing anything to support the family” are no longer really justifiable, that is exactly when not revealing them to the family isn’t really about protecting the family from the horrors of the world, but about protecting the acting father/man from potential value judgment from their families. This is the situation that the United States keeps putting itself into, at home and around the world, and is a big part of why I think patriarchal misogyny is such an attractive ideology to people on the right who think they are pushing family values. 

Nothing is actually lost when people value and wish to protect their communities, not just their immediate families. There may be extreme times of hardship where everyone in a community cannot be supported, fed, protected and cared for, where really difficult and ugly choices may have to be made, and where people might decide “my family, not yours.” But those times are so much more rare than the fear mongering rhetoric that the right pushes relentlessly would have us all believe. It only becomes possible when there are a sizeable base of people fully buy into the idea that any attack on their own right to have everything they want is a violent attack upon their own person. And when each man can count their entire family, and prosperity of their entire family into that same self-serving dominion, that is when you have the zealous foot soldiers that will condition themselves to see everyone else as an enemy out to destroy their very sense of identity.

Family values in the hands of patriarchal misogynist are identity politics. They are used to create a sense of self, with specific, coded radicalized and gendered ideologies that justify violence and dehumanization of anyone that isn’t willing to step in line and give themselves, their bodies and their labor, to the cause of supporting the next biggest patriarch up the chain.  

In Post 23 of 100, I talked about the pain of sitting through a Carl Benjamin (Sargon of Akkad) video to make sure I was responding directly to his criticisms of the TV show Adolescence, and not my own imaginings of his argument, or how he might have been represented by someone else.  One idea that he mentioned that I have been wrestling with since watching that video is trying to answer the question that titles this post. How can anyone, especially a grown man living in Suburban England, really believe that there is some kind of matriarchal authority that is currently controlling western society/culture?

After only a small amount of internet research, I realized that this question is at the heart of the entire Manosphere/Men’s Rights Movement (MRM)/Incel identity and is going to take some time to research and write about, over the course of several posts, so I will step back from trying to look at that question in its entirety for this post, and instead look at the one thing Carl Benjamin said in that video that has some truth behind it…but only really one small aspect of it.

The vast majority of school teachers in the US and in the UK are women. Benjamin is UK-based and looking at those figures, but I am in the US, so I will point to this Pew Research Center report, and acknowledge that 77% of K-12 public school teachers in the US are women, and that the ratio of women to men in the profession skews even more heavily the younger the student grade level. Carl Benjamin uses this statistical reality to make the claim that this is the root of young boys growing resentful of the authority of women, because they are having their social behaviors monitored and evaluated by feminized standards that don’t understand what it means to be a boy. 

I think there are a lot of people who probably find this argument to be moderately compelling when based on this evidence. I know for me, as college professor and as a male outreach facilitator for a domestic and sexual violence shelter, I absolutely have had an easier time getting male students to listen to me and respect my ideas than many of my colleagues who are women. Male teachers who were adequately trained to address misogynistic violence (like what happens in the show Adolescence, at the extreme end) and the rhetoric that leads to it probably would have an easier time engaging with the boys and young men most likely to need guidance away from misogynistic ideas and behaviors. There is violence prevention research that backs up the claim that young men, especially young men already headed down the road of embracing misogynistic and abusive ideas about gender relationships, will be more likely to listen to men than women. Troubled boys will tend to listen to and respect the opinions of male authority figures over women. However, as Carl Benjamin makes clear in almost all the rest of his video, if young men struggling with patriarchal, misogynistic ideology are turned over to the kinds of men he advocates should be disciplining these boys, then their misogynistic and patriarchal ideas are not only going to be reinforced, they are going to become almost unshakable, especially in an environment like a public school, where most of the student’s future teachers are going to be women that the boy has been doubly socialized to disrespect as an authority figure. Patriarchal and misogynistic male teachers are capable of having a massively oversized reach and effect on the boys and future young men they are teaching, making the “just get more men into teaching/mentoring roles and positions of authority to be a potentially dangerous approach to reducing gender-based/misogynistic violence. For example, just imagine putting Carl Benjamin into a high school classroom…and then stop imagining that right away, because you don’t deserve to have that occupy space in your brain.

But all of that is getting a little off topic to this post. I think one place where the manosphere has been successful in recruiting young men into patriarchal misogynistic (PM) movements has been in framing educational institutions as centers of feminist/matriarchal dominance, and then attributing any fault in a student’s educational experience as being a product of that matriarchal authority. The school is underfunded and lacks resources that would benefit the student or engage with their interests or learning styles…blame female leadership. The school is beholden to meeting specific state/federal standards that require teachers teach specific and required material in such a breakneck pace that nuance and context are impossible, so overgeneralized, “correct” answers to the tests become all teachers can afford to teach…blame female leadership. The school’s physical infrastructure, built decades ago and underfunded at every opportunity, feel structured like a prison, sniffle creative thinking, and limit especially physical forms of emotional expression…blame female leadership.

Another aspect of this situation that patriarchal misogynists manage to avoid addressing when they talk about how terrible it is for boys and young men to be surrounded by female teachers is why this unbalanced ratio became normalized in the first place. While there are many factors that have played a role in women becoming an oversized sample in the field of education, it has never been the case that more women were encouraged into the field of education after that field has experienced increased growth or economic support by society. Women generally are paid less than men in every field, and this remains true for teachers. Hiring women as teachers has been an intentional strategy in past decades for bringing down the cost of schools and reduced educational budgets tend to push men out of jobs faster than women when they see a limit to future pay increases or professional growth. Society devalues education, and, surprise surprise, the field of education becomes more and more feminized. This makes it even easier for PM advocates to point at schools as locations failing to meet the needs of boys and young men for either educational or emotional development. 

I think I will need to write a future blog post about more personal experience I have had with women gaining access to positions of authority within organizations and institutions, and how frequently that leads to immediate and harsh critiques of these places as “no longer supporting the value and potential they once had,” as I have seen that in political movements, worksites, and school clubs and organizations many times. Men, even politically conscious ones,  grow uncomfortable lending their political, social and economic power to places where they feel limited or controlled in what they can say or how they act. 

My last thought that I want to tag onto this blog post, about why some boys and young men see school as a place dominated by matriarchal authority, and limited by that authority from developing into the people they want to be, is that they are not just navigating this space on their own, they are being influenced by familial and social role models in their lives. Fathers/uncles/gaurdians who struggle to listen to, respect or value the work of women in their lives are going to act just like Carl Benjamin when they see their male children learning to listen to, respect and value the work of their female teachers, and every teacher knows that the energy parents and guardians put into their children’s development is going to be massively more persuasive than that put forth by the teachers. For patriarchal and misogynistic parents and guardians, a “feminized” educational system becomes an exceptionally easy breeding ground for instilling hatred for women in positions of authority, especially when schools and adolescence are already naturally going to be sites of rebellion and a growth of independence.    

So, no, I don’t think it is really fair to even pretend like having more women teachers than male ones means that schools are sites of matriarchal or feminist authority. But I think it is very easy to feel that way if you are man with a predisposition to misogynistic thinking and are in a location where misogynistic thinking might actually be called out as such instead of laughed off or implicitly agreed with. There are already ample studies that indicate than men tend to think women speak more often then they actually do, it really isn’t all that surprising that many men seem to react the exact same way to seeing a women exert any authority at all in a setting that the man does not expect them to.  

In the second episode of Adolescence, a kind of tricky thing happens that is really easy to miss. The episode is about the police coming to the school attended by both the perpetrator and victim of the stabbing to ask questions of some of the students and try to gather information about building a case against the boy, Jamie. The police are looking for the murder weapon, and think it might have been passed on to a friend. The episode is mostly about the perspective of the officers and the difficulty of getting kids to talk to them at all about what happened or why, even though all of the kids already seem to know more than the police officers do, largely because they have been communicating about it in emoji code on social media. Eventually the male detective’’s son, who is also a student at the school, gets a private moment to let his father in on the code, mostly because the son is getting embarrassed by how incompetent his father is looking in front of the whole school. I might do a later post about the necessity of having coded “kids only” language/means of communicating and how I think adults today might be blowing that aspect of social media out of perspective, but I think the more interesting thing to talk about in that episode, is the clear collusion that occurred and continues to occur with Jamie’s friends. 

Because the show never does any voice over narration, and everything is presented from the perspective of the characters in front of the camera at that moment, there is a lot that goes unsaid in the show, or only gets hinted at or briefly mentioned. One of these is understanding the extent to which Jamie planned to murder this girl and that he did not do it alone. To make sure I am not making assumptions about things that other people don’t see, I will lay out, chronologically, what I saw presented as what happened leading to Jamie murdering his classmate Katie.

– Katie shares revealing pictures of herself and a friend with a boy in her school.

– The boy shares these pictures with enough other people that they go viral within the class.

– Jamie either becomes interested in Katie as a result of seeing the pictures, or already was interested in her, and decides to try to win her over romantically by appearing to be sympathetic and understanding of how unfair it is that the pictures were publicly shared. 

– Katie sees through this trick and identifies Jamie as a creep, leading her to mock him, by calling him an incel.

– Jamie is very hurt by this, talks to his friends, and plots some kind of revenge. Some aspects of both Katie’s rejection and Jamie’s reaction is posted on social media and observed by most of their classmates.

– Exactly how much his friends know at this point is not really revealed, except that one of his friends, the one Jamie identifies as stupid, gives him a knife to use for his revenge plot. Maybe the friend thought he was just going to scare the girl, maybe he knew more, it is left very vague in the show.

– Jamie stalks the girl down and murders her very quickly, with almost no conversation before hand, as shown in the CCTV recording in the first episode. He stabs her multiple times and then flees, clearly not realizing that the parking lot had a camera on it. 

– Some how Jamie gets home, in new clothes that are not covered in blood and without the murder weapon. The audience is not told how this happens although the police suspect that he went to a friend’s house and received help getting rid of evidence. 

– The next morning Jamie is arrested.

I think one of the reasons why Keir Starmer, the British Prime Minister, has expressed interest in this show being watched in schools and discussed by youth and educators is because there are many points where other people could have intervened to stop this fictional murder from happening, and this kind of proactive thinking is at the heart of well-researched violence prevention programs. Like getting people to talk about the crime itself and the emotions around it is one important part of helping people be prepared not to participate in such actions, but talking about the situation from a broader social perspective also helps people see that this kind of violence isn’t just about the emotional state of the perpetrator, or showing young women what to look out for or how to protect themselves, but that an entire community enabled this violence to happen and could have done a lot more to prevent it.

This is why I think the second episode is about much more than just the police trying to find more evidence to convict Jaime of the crime, even though, from their perspective (which is the one the camera stays on for most of the episode), that is what their trip to the school is about. 

Interestingly, and probably true in most real incidents of gender/sex-based violence amongst youth, the adults in this story were all pretty clueless and not in much of a position to identify the risk factors before it happened. Not the parents of either child (we think, we never see Katie or Katie’s parents to know how much of the situation she was bringing home) nor the teachers were going to be aware enough to figure this out. Even if Jaime’s parents had been more observant of Jamie’s social media presence, he was communicating in code that would have completely stumped them if they had seen the posts. Obviously they feel incredibly guilty when they realize that their boy had been the one to do it, and many of the other adults in the community around them are probably placing blame on them, because parents are supposed to be accountable for the actions of their children and take responsibility for teaching them not to be terrible people in the first place, but that kind of rhetoric is almost always just applied after something terrible has happened as a way to find someone to blame. Occasionally there are very specific, tale-tell signs that grown ups should be educating themselves to look out for and be prepared to get involved when we see them, but, I feel, an uncomfortable truth for many adults in the room is that part of raising kids, or being a part of their education and growth is preparing them to be active members of the various communities to which they will one day belong.

***when I say gender/sex-based violence, I am talking about sexual violence, domestic violence, and all violence that originates from one person feeling like another person has an obligation to treat them a specific way because of their genders, sexes, or sexualities. So it also includes misogynistic violence, homophobia, and violence against transpeople. It is maybe a little awkward of a thing to write out/say, but it is more specific than just saying violence as a whole.*** 

Definitely in the case presented on the show adolescence, it is the youth community around Jamie and Katie that were most powerfully situated to do something to change the outcome, but also were clearly not being prepared by their families or the social institutions around them to do so. Jamie’s friends were active participants in enabling the violence that occurred, and clearly knew it afterwards, as they react by pulling a fire alarm when the police do arrive at the school to learn more, and don’t provide any useful information until cornered and essentially tortured to reveal it (there is no Television better than the righteous police office crossing the boundaries of legality to get information that might not even be necessary for their case, but that we know the interrogated person has). The rest of the school was overly comfortable sitting in the “innocent bystander” role, eating their pop corn and gossip about the entire situation as it unfolded, through Katie’s murder. 

Bystander intervention training was pretty much my area of focus in violence prevention work, and is still the direct action and preparation for action that I think can have the most positive effect on ending and minimizing the threat of gender/sex-based violence. There are a lot of reasons why kids don’t feel comfortable stepping into an active bystander role, and why a lot of adults feel uncomfortable letting them, but I think that is a deep enough topic for its own future post. So all I will say is that a more active bystander intervention model could have had the potential to empower one or more of the youth witnessing this situation into taking positive action that could have stopped it from escalating. I will also go over personal experiences with that kind of thing from my youth in a future post as well. I will say that I agree with Starmer that the show Adolescence could be used as a conversation starter that could lead youth to the development of bystander intervention strategies as well as a stronger understanding of what kinds of behaviors can escalate to unthinkable violence when no one does anything to stop it. Maybe in England, there is a better institutional structure to facilitate that happening, but it feels like in the US, any attempt to get that conversation started at institutional levels is going to be met with extreme patriarchal, misogynistic responses masquerading as protectionism for children. “How DARE you think MY CHILD needs to be exposed to such horrific ideas, or be prepared to respond to them! If anyone is going to teach my kids about sexual and domestic violence (or even worse, gender-violence)! If they are going to learn about it, it is going to be from sneaking off to consume media behind my back, or worse, experience it first hand and have no idea how to talk about it or to whom!”

As I mentioned in my post 21 of 100, I had many reasons for knowing that I wanted to watch the show Adolescence, but one of them is that I have been seeing “hot takes” pop up about how the show is garbage because the inciting incident for the show involved a black boy murdering a girl over a stuffed animal (absolutely untrue that the show was written in response to this incident), and by doing so, the real purpose of this show, and the support that has been shown to it by the British liberal/labor establishment, is to demonize white masculinity and scapegoat white boys for the rise in “what is being”so-called” misogynist violence. In responding to one of these “hot takes” written by my old ex-professor (the one I wrote about in  post 18 of 100), pointing out the factual inaccuracy of claiming that the show’s creators intentionally race swapped the murderer in their story, I was pointed to a Sargon of Akkad video  (Sargon Akkad is Carl Benjamin’s Youtube persona) , titled “The Perpetual Inmates of a Social Prison” as why it doesn’t actually matter what the show creators thought they were doing. Their real purpose (and why the show has been so promoted), whether they know it or not, is reinforcing this pervasive narrative that white men are the root of all evil, perpetuated by a feminism that is currently dominating the current world order. These guys really and fully do believe that women hold all the social and institutional power in society and I am going to write a lot more about that in the future, but for this post I want to talk about how badly Carl Benjamin misses the boat when analyzing episode three of Adolescence.

***I am sorely tempted to mock Carl Benjamin by calling him his YouTube name, Sargon of Akkad, just to avoid having to keep using my own name over and over again when talking about a guy who was one of the central instigators of the Gamergate harassment campaign, but I will avoid that temptation because it is a good exercise in humility to not take pride in my own name.***     

I really cannot negatively review this video badly enough, nor discourage you from watching it unless you are a glutton for idiotic, misplaced, misogynistic anger, but as an academic, I don’t like writing about people’s perspectives without having taken the time to read/listen to those perspectives myself. I have read Mein Kampf, I have read The Protocols of Zion. I try to understand bad ideas at their sources, not how they are portrayed to me. So I decided to watch this 2 hour monstrosity of video in its full (even though you can get everything you need out of it to understand where Benjamin goes so wrong in the first 20 minutes) just to make sure I didn’t miss any hidden gems that would really help me understand why all my ideas about misogyny are wrong, social-programing instilled by the secret feminist order that is out to feminize all boys and men to ensure that we can never take back the political power that us white men have somehow, supposedly, lost. The kicker for me about this video, is that from within the first 5 minutes of watching it, that it is abundantly clear that the reason why the manosphere and the right are so mad that the show cast a white boy to play the role of the murderer, is because they cannot help but immediately empathize with, and see themselves in the role of this character. For Carl Benjamin, certainly, and probably many more men with patriarchal misogynistic beliefs, the character of Jamie, the boy murderer, represents white masculinity, and every time he is being interrogated or evaluated by official representatives of the state, they are experiencing (or they would probably claim re-experiencing) all of the trauma of having become heavily repressed/oppressed second-class citizens in a civilization that was founded  to empower and protect them. 

Seriously, in his video, Carl Benjamin, flies off into a rage, cussing, his face flush, because, in his mind, every white boy in England knows exactly what it feels like to be sat down in a chair and interrogated for hours by a “menopausal, HR Harridan” ( Benjamin’s words, even though none of the women in the show that ever interact with the Jamie character in this way are of Menopausal age) that is trying to tell “us” (the white boys) that our naturally spirited, “boys will be boys” behavior is mortally evil and the cause of all of societies problems. Remember, that this scene is actually of a court appointed psychologist trying to determine whether Jamie is of mature and sound enough mind to realize that what he did was murder someone. Anytime Carl Benjamin does remember to talk about how Jamie might be different than a typical white boy, he does the same kind of mitigating, apologist behavior that you see in a conspiratorial misogynistic character in the fourth episode of the show that tries to convince Jamie’s father to call the arrest of his son a government plot to oppress the white man…even down to referring to Jamie as an “alleged murderer,” as if he was an actual person in a real trial case, and not a fictional character in a TV show that really makes no effort at disguising his guilt.  

While I think it speaks highly of the shows ability to humanize Jamie as a character, it is also just jarring and wild to me to see a guy who has absolutely no sympathy or empathy for the real life Hassan Sentamu, basically just immediately see himself in the shoes of Jamie, and repeated talk about how boys like Jamie are just “boys being boys” who need real men in their lives to help steer them…as if murdering a girl who might have been a bit of an internet bully falls into this “spirited boy behavior.” Doubly jarring and wild to me is that Carl Benjamin’s big argument about why the matriarchal power structure he believes currently controls England is so bad, is because it shows no grace or mercy for this kind of “spirited boy behavior”…again remembering that in this fictional case, the behavior is blatant misogynist murder, who then attempts to cast the “you can’t actually believe I would actually do something like this” charm offensive to hide his guilt. Carl Benjamin insists that this experience, of being the white boy oppressed by a system that views whiteness and masculinity as markers of social evil, is so well represented by the way this psychologist woman “interrogates” Jamie, by calling into question everything about himself that he identifies as himself, that it captures everything wrong with contemporary British society. Again, never actually recognizing that what the Jamie character really did was conspire with others to acquire a knife, stalk, and then murder someone for rejecting his attempt to manipulate her into liking him by being nice to her when he sensed she might be weak. The psychologist in the scene’s goal is not to make Jamie feel bad for being a boy attracted to a girl who rejected him, her goal is to get him talking about what happened enough to figure out whether he was aware enough of his actions and their consequences to face trial for them. 

Carl Benjamin is unquestionably one pillar of manosphere rhetoric and thought. He presents himself as different from a character like Andrew Tate, even though he talks about Tate a lot in this video, because he is civilized, married, a father, (who also, you know, generates lies and misinformation to get others to harass and dox women), but he makes it very clear that he believes that women’s jobs are to be merciful and kind to men, even ones who are violent misogynists, and that women who refuse to take that path and dare to think themselves capable of talking to boys or men about why their violent behaviors are unacceptable are “HR Harridans” who should just ceed all of that power over to a man who will just know how to handle this kind of behavior on account of being a man and having gone through adolescence as a boy. Never mind that that experience of going through adolescence as a boy has likely been full of traumatic violence and abuse (something that Benjamin himself points out without realizing he is doing so, repeatedly in the video),  or that many of the men in the show itself that try to act in that role for Jamie, end up creating trauma for him by infantilizing him or failing to process their own trauma without projecting it on to him (something you learn about especially with the father in the fourth episode, but also in the first two episodes with the arresting police officer). 

In my mind, that call for “get the professionally trained women out of the room and just let these incompetent men handle the emotional growth of boys into men” is a pretty compelling metaphor for what the manosphere is setting out to do, and why I think men who realize that it is crap need to step up and risk having a bunch of misogynistic hate mongers call us names like “gelded beta cucks,” in public without crumpling behind the traumas that these kind of guys have been using against us since we were children to convince us that it is wrong to see women as human beings worth of friendship and respect, even if they are not fucking us or acting as our mothers. They are all-to-happy to debate and harass women who will call out the idiocy of blaming all the political and social issues of our day on the feminization of men, because they fundamentally don’t believe that any real men will actually listen to or respect women, and so they see themselves as having already won any debate against such women before it has began.  You can really see this playing out in the way that they talk about the show Adolescence,  and the way they look at female authority figures in the show as standing in for their imagined “matriarchal, anti-white, misandry” power structure that is preventing the white man from enjoying the spoils of western civilization by having empathy for the conquered, colonized, and exploited. While I think there might be some merit to a critique of the authoritarian structure of schools, criminal justice systems, and family structures, the patriarchal misogynists are only interested in critiquing the people at the top of those hierarchies if they are feminists, and think the solution is to just put more white men back into those positions of authority, especially white men who understand and are sympathetic to “boys being boys” and, you know, murdering girls who don’t show them the mercy and compassion that white men deserve.  

Note: This is a post about a show about a boy who pretty brutally murdered a girl and the investigation and fall out from the murder. The show is not graphic in its depiction of violence (the inciting incident is only shown very briefly, as the characters watch a small lap top that captured the crime on a CCTV recording, and it is grainy and not even the focus of the scene), but the show is all about that violence and how various people react to it. It is not really a show that I think needs any kind of spoiler tags because it is not a mystery and probably something to be fairly informed about before deciding to watch it. I am not going to try to censor myself when talking about it, so reading this may spoil some narrative elements if that kind of thing is important to you.  

I can already tell that I am going to be writing a lot about this show, and breaking down specific elements it brings up for me, and in regards to patriarchal misogyny in much greater detail, but I figured I would start with one “my reaction post” about it first, and then see where that goes.

Firstly, I knew I was going to have to watch this show and talk about it in these blogs as soon as I heard about it, because it seems so invested in this conversation, especially about not figuring out how to talk to young men about patriarchal misogyny. Secondly, I have been seeing some other folks “hot takes” about the show, generated without watching it, and I knew I wasn’t going to be that guy who talked about what I think the show was saying or why it made the choices it did without actually seeing it form myself. I have some craft and form reactions to it that I will probably touch on in this post, and then a whole lot of content reactions that I may bring up, but will probably deep dive into in future posts. I think the show is an important enough conversation starter about these topics that I will probably watch some of the episodes multiple times to try to give more detailed analysis. But for now first reactions:

I was told to be prepared for the show to be intense. I may have over-prepared myself, and perhaps been a little more prepared than most to take in this kind of media to begin with, but it didn’t really hit me hard until the 4th episode. There are topics and portrayals of those topics that are intense in each episode and if I had still processing traumatic experience with things like: being arrested for a really serious crime that I had definitely committed, having a classmate or close friend violently murdered by someone I knew, or working closely as a psychologist with someone I knew to be an unrepentant murderer, the first  3 episodes might have been a lot more intense for me. Instead, the only episode that really hit me hard emotionally was the 4th episode, which is set about a year after the incident and focuses on the parents of the murderer processing what happened. I have daddy issues that I will probably have to talk about in a future blog at some point, but know that movies/shows that intensely deal with parents, especially fathers, either failing their children, or making choices that hurt themselves to protect their child just absolutely destroy me, and make me ugly cry. I may have never rage-cried as hard at anything in my life as watching Billy Elliot’s father break a picket line to pay for his son’s dance lessons. 

One of the reasons why I think people are having intense emotional reactions to the show though is because it is filmed in these long, long, long single take shots with a camera that will pan around the characters and move through the set in what must have been absolutely grueling scenes to direct, film and act through. There is almost no outside narration in the show, but the camera does a good job of giving you a view inside as many as 3 or 4 different characters’ heads at a time by being focused on their faces as they are reacting to the immediate story beat. At times I found the cinematic approach exhausting to watch, and I don’t think I would generally say I think filming that way is a good idea, but I think it did work for this show, and for this topic. Although, I did sometimes find myself focusing on that camera work instead of the plot  because it is impossible to film that way and not have some scenes play out much longer than needed because you have to follow characters walking down flights of stairs and through halls for much longer than you are used to seeing as an audience member. Relatedly, and to help pass some of the time in those scrolling shots, the ambient sounds and noises, on top of the thematic music that would be playing definitely toys with your emotions as well and probably compounds some viewers’ anxieties and emotional reactions to the show. 

One “hot take” that I see coming out of rightwing reactions to the show is anger that the show is trying to demonize an angry, hurt white boy as some kind of zealot in the army of men’s right groups, incels and patriarchal misogynists, and that the show’s purpose is to make white straight men out to be “the enemy.” Now most of the people repeating this take are going to dismiss everything I have to say, because I am openly talking about resisting and challenging patriarchal misogyny in this blog, but I think if they actually watched the show, they would probably realize that the show is really tame on the theme of large scale social or political theories driving this kind of violence. I don’t think any character in the show even uses the word misogyny to talk about the crime that has been committed, even though it is a crime driven by a young male character’s anger at women. Almost every character in the show is incredibly sympathetic to the murder, even the arresting cops, and if the character was not a sweet and innocent looking white boy, I don’t think audiences would have found any of that sympathy believable. I think what these very flimsy and shallow analyses miss the most is that the show itself is very much less about the boy or the social factors that might have influenced him, than it is about being parents/adults and trying to understand how things like this happen and maybe be more proactive identifying signs that lead up to it. Honestly, some of the trolling takes I have seen about the show almost just seem mad that there is a default assumption by all the adult characters in the show (and most of the kids) that a boy murdering a girl (who might have been bullying the boy by calling him an incel) is morally bad. Otherwise, the show is far more politically neutral and sympathetic towards the character who commits the murder than many people who have experience with this kind of violence happening in their lives might be comfortable watching. The girl and her family’s grief and pain is never even shown on screen. One of her friends gets a brief amount of time in front of the camera, struggling to process her pain and sense of loss, but that is really it. This show is about the boy, his family, and helping the audience see all of them as real, complex people, perhaps to the show’s detriment.    

In future posts about this show, I want to talk about: episode 3 where the boy/murderer converses with the psychologist, who maybe the first person to get him to start processing what he had done, even while exposing herself to what can only be called abuse from someone who is still trying to convince himself and the world that he did nothing wrong…specifically because what he did was not really wrong; episode 2 and whether social media really is something entirely new in how it enables kids to create unsupervised social worlds for themselves; Episode 1, and how handling violence like this through the criminal justice system is so problematic as far as really understanding what is going on or figuring out how to change it; and then, of course, I think I have to talk about being a parent of a child that will have to deal with being socially identified as a boy (unless/until she/they doesn’t/don’t identify as a boy and then we, the parents will do everything we can to support her/them be correctly socially identified) and how that relates to my own experiences and fears around growing a boy surrounded by the violence of enforced masculinity and patriarchal misogyny. In other words, I will be coming back to this show, but future posts will not only focus more specifically on particular topics, they will also fold in a lot more personal experience around those topics and issues. 

Until next time, be kind when you can, to yourself, and all those who will use your kindness to build a better world for us all…including you. 

Benjamin C. Roy Corry Garrett

In post 18 of 100, I talked about why I think loyalty, as a value, is a misplaced effort to create security in a relationship, because it is something that can only be shown to someone who is in a position of authority over another person: to test or expect loyalty from another person is to exert some amount of power over another person (This is what I talk about in that post and why I don’t think it is bad for people to value loyalty, but that in a society where people have different levels of power over each other, loyalty is not a value that can be fairly expected of all people equally). 

Advocates of patriarchal misogyny want loyalty from followers/subjects/subordinates, because truly loyal subjects require nothing in exchange for their faith and dedication to the cause. As long as they feel like they are trying to prove their loyalty to their patriarch, there is almost no act of fealty that they will not do. Eventually, with no return on the investment their loyalty has cost them, some followers will grow bitter and jaded, but to the rest, that will just be read as a sign of disloyalty. This is a very old pattern that infuses hierarchies much older than patriarchal misogyny. 

One of the strangest things about the kind of patriarchal misogynistic value system we have seen established under Trumpism, at least to my eyes, is that Loyalty is incredibly heavily sought after and tested, but from the top to the bottom, it doesn’t seem like accountability is valued at all. In many hierarchal social structures, it is very common to teach that anyone with authority over other people has certain obligations to those people that they are expected to carry out and that leaders are expected to be accountable not just for their own mistakes, but the mistakes of their subordinates. Now I am not saying that this valuing of accountability was always put into practice by other hierarchal systems, but it was often preached and reinforced with storytelling and myth-making within that system. This is just 100%, transparently not the case with Trumpism. From the top down, it is very clear that the patriarchal misogynistic hierarchy being established places no value what-so-ever on leaders taking accountability for their own actions or the actions of those beneath them. It is a system firmly rooted in pointing the finger at anyone else when something goes wrong and refusing to ever admit any wrong doing, under any circumstances. You see this kind of thing in the flimsy fascist caricatures of empire presented in media, such as with the Empire in Starwars, or many of the different portrayals of Prince John from the Robinhood myth, but it doesn’t seem like you see it for very long in real world hierarchal regimes…except maybe I am wrong about that. The thing about both of the two fictional examples that leapt to my mind, is that these were relatively short lived examples of empire. Like the starwars empire might feel long, lasting at 24 years, but the Republic it replaced lasted thousands of years before it, and Prince John’s rule barely ever gets off the ground in the Robinhood myth, even if it seems like he later returns to power, uncontested, after King Richard’s death, but that is rarely a well-told part of the myth.

So maybe we do tend to see authoritarian systems abandon the longer-term value of accountability on behalf of their leaders, but most frequently towards a paranoid collapse of those systems? Maybe this is something that can give us a little bit of hope as we see no leaders within Trumpism demonstrate leadership traits that inspire the kind of loyalty that is necessary to keep extremely authoritarian systems  running for more than a brief period, often punctuated by violent unrest? It seems like it will be incredibly ineffective to try to build a lasting patriarchal system of power on a model of masculinity that completely refuses to take accountability for anything.  I guess I did nothing to answer the question I pose in this blog post’s title, but it does seem like the consequences of it are already starting to undermine the authority of Trumpism.

In post 19 of 100, I mentioned that “sexual violence” as an idea is something that most men find revolting on a conceptual level, and that only the most extremist advocates of Patriarchal Misogyny will say things like “rape is good.” At the same time, sexual violence is still pervasive in the United States and, while the “why” of that is definitely several of its own posts to make in the future, in this post I want to talk about how much of a failure it has been to look to the criminal justice system and incarceration specifically as the primary social tools to combat sexual violence.

Before I go into that though, I will publicly state, again, that survivors of sexual or domestic violence should use whatever tools and resources they need, and are available to them, to feel as safe as they can in the world they live in. The United States does very little to support survivors of sexual violence in healthy or affirming ways and very few communities are prepared to offer support or resources that will do more good than harm. From a very young age, people in the US are taught to trust the criminal justice system to handle all aspects of personal and public safety, and that leaves very many people with no one else to turn to in response to harm or the threat of harm. It is not any survivor’s fault that getting support after an assault is so difficult or that the institutions that are supposed to be trusted to handle these situations are so bad at it, nor should they every be blamed for doing what they believed they had to to survive. 

There are a lot of things that I want to talk about here and I don’t know how to organize them in advance, so I am just going to do another numbered list who’s numbers don’t actually matter and then see where that goes. Why can’t the criminal justice system stop sexual violence?

1. It was never meant to. I have talked previously (in post 4 of 100, where I talk about rape) about how legal definitions of rape vary from state to state in the US, and that the federal definition is overly vague compared to international standards of definitions, like that established by the UN. Looking back even farther in western legal history, “rape” becomes even less useful as a legal term, because, where laws have been recorded about it, they tended to be defined more by legal definitions of property (that established women and children as the property of husbands and fathers) than by anyone’s right to bodily autonomy. If this is an interesting topic to you or new information, one easy to digest source that talks about it is this Mother Jones article. An important point from that article is that in the US, a man in the state of North Carolina could still legally rape his wife until 1993, because of the way the crime of rape was defined. Additionally, laws about sexual violence have almost always been very selectively applied and almost never to legally marginalized groups like slaves, indigenous peoples and nations as they were being colonized or waged war against, and undocumented/recognized immigrants, and incarcerated people. Laws about sexual violence in the US have almost never been about trying to prevent sexual violence, but to define when violent sexual behavior is deemed to be dangerous to social order, and when it is to be ignored/expected. 

2. It maybe feels a little ironic (but in a really predictable way), but it is a very prevalent part of popular US culture to assume that sexual violence is a common practice within jails and prisons. The actual statistics about sexual violence in prison is nearly impossible to estimate because it is so rarely reported/confirmable, with the range of estimates as far apart as 1% and 41% of incarcerated people experiencing sexual violence. Very many of the media portrayals of incarceration feature threats and acts of sexual violence within them, and it seems very common for some kind of retaliatory sexual violence to be expected when talking about the most violent and scariest perpetrators of sexual violence who are sent to prison. I think these cultural stereotypes and assumptions are very important when thinking about why sexual violence is still so prevalent in the United States: People will conceptually say “sexual violence is bad,” and I think that most will really mean it when they say it, but they are making that statement about specific types of sexual violence, being perpetrated against specific groups of people in their heads who deserve to be viewed or imagined within the category of “human beings that deserve to be treated with equal rights.” And, for a large block of the US, that is a pretty narrow category when it comes  to “willing to take necessary and expensive action to protect those people and their rights.”  Another very common trope when talking about the topic of sexual violence with men, in a way that will make it meaningful to them, is talk about how the survivors of this violence could be their sisters/mothers/daughters/etc. This also overlaps back into the historical compartmentalizing women and children as the property of men. I think I am going to have to talk more about that history and its relationship to patriarchal misogyny in a future post, because it is going to keep coming back up over and over again.

3. When sexual violence is defined as a criminal justice issue, and dealt with primarily in the criminal justice system, then it becomes an issue of individual bad actors who perpetrate the majority of this crime, and the only ones of these individual bad actors that we can do anything about at all are those we put through the criminal justice system and find guilty. So even if you think that the US criminal justice system is a fair system dedicated to equal protection under the law for all people, you have to acknowledge that in officially  reported cases of rape/sexual assault, that only 28% of people who experience an assault report it, of that 28% only about half will result in an arrest being made, only about 60 percent of those arrests will result in a felony conviction, and that only about 70% of those convictions result in someone being sent to prison for committing the act. This means that only about 1 out of every 20 rapists will ever spend a day in prison. And this assumes you believe that the US criminal justice system is fair, and that none of these conviction or sentencing numbers are impacted by factors like race, gender, class, or sexuality, or else it becomes pretty clear that people with access to power and authority within our society are very, very unlikely to ever face actual criminal conviction for their crimes. This might seem counter intuitive to some folks given the very brief period of time where people like Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein were getting convicted for these crimes, but these were serial offenders targeting people with a whole lot more power to speak up and be listened to than most survivors will ever experience. Celebrities and politicians accused of only a few acts of sexual violence might face some social and economic blow back in the US, but almost never face criminal conviction. And yet, the way the issue is talked about in the media, it is pretty easy to believe that every man has to walk around on eggshells when it comes to expressing sexual desire, engaging in “locker room talk,” or “just letting boys be boys.” Somehow, a lot of men are finding themselves identifying with largely mythical fantasy persona of the “man falsely accused of sexual violence,” who’s life is about to be destroyed by social ostracism and probable jail time. This too is a topic I will come back to again again in these blogs I think.

Which kind of leads to 4. Because the US legal system is “guilty or not guilty,” anyone found not guilty is expected to be treated as free from any obligation or consideration that they might have made a lot of terrible mistakes that hurt another person. You see this in the way that all the Trumps, Musks, Gaetzes, McMahons, act as soon as their cases are dropped from criminal or civil prosecution, even if those cases are dropped for reasons like “settled out of court.” On the one hand, it is really important that the overwhelming majority of people found not guilty of a crime are not ostracized by their communities or countries. But this becomes a problem when money and power are so effective as means of escaping the “guilty” verdict that defines whether any attention or acknowledgement of the violence occurred at all. This isn’t me saying specifically that any political candidate or person of authority who is ever accused once of sexually in appropriate behavior experience a complete and utter removal from society or branding with a scarlet letter, but it is me saying that people in positions of authority should be kept under more watchful eyes than the general public, and when they gain reputations for repeated inappropriate behavior, especially from multiple different stories from different people making accusations, this speaks badly of their ability to be an effective leader without placing themselves in compromising situations…even if they truly never did any of the things they are accused of. 

5. You don’t prevent crime only by focusing on the punishment a person can receive for getting caught. Overly repressive attempts at increasing law enforcement to stop crime (crime generally, not just sex crimes) almost never results in a reduction of crime by itself. It might move where those crimes take place, and shift who the perpetrators of that crime target in planing those crimes, but it doesn’t actually stop the crimes from taking place. Especially under a repressive and authoritarian government, you can be fairly confident that any enforcement about sexual violence that does occur within those systems is going to be targeted at specific groups and that none of those groups are going to include the power brokers and leadership of those systems. 

6. When criminal justice enforcement becomes the only tool used to stop sexual violence, you make it a lot more difficult to talk to young people about potentially problematic behavior, without essentially accusing those people of being criminals who deserve to be incarcerated if they have ever even gotten close to the line. This leads to a whole new generation of young folks who are afraid to talk about these issues with their friends or family members, and leads these people into being unprepared to handle situations that arise around them with any tools other than “call the cops,” which can be really difficult and ugly to deal with when it involves your friends or family or people you don’t want to put into potentially harmful, even lethal situations.

I don’t know if I am really done talking about this specific part of the problem yet or not, but this is all of the “why the criminal justice system is not solving the problem of sexual violence” stuff that I can think of this late at night, for now. If you think I have missed something specific that you want me to write more about , or think I  missing the big picture entirely, be sure to let me know.     

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?

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.