Author: Benjamin

Lately, I have been thinking about the sexual violence prevention outreach work I used to do in central Missouri. Specifically, I have been thinking about how somehow, the state of Missouri let me go in to juvenile “justice centers” (i.e prisons for children) and facilitate week long classes about consent, power, and the construction of a masculine identity. I really love teaching writing, and hope to do it again one day when my son is old enough not to need a stay-at-home parent, but I don’t think I have ever done any work (paid or unpaid) that was more powerful and amazing than getting to be in a room with 7 to 10 teenage boys (and some young trans folks just beginning to develop a sense of their own gender identity) and just talk about how they were developing into the human beings they wanted to be in the future. 

Seriously, I don’t know how the state of Missouri let me, an anarchist coeditor of the Newsletter for the Missouri Prisoner’s Labor Union, into their facilities to have 5 90 minute unsupervised sessions with each group of kids. We would talk about the differences between “power over” and “power with” and the benefits and consequences of building a sense of self worth on each. We would talk about social expectations placed on us and the kinds of relationships we would have with others, as well as who benefited from telling us who and how we were supposed to establish intimacy with others. We would strategize tactics for making our friend groups, families and communities places that valued and respected peoples’ bodily autonomy and consent. The kids would ask a hundred weird, awkward questions about sex and their bodies and condoms and whether penises grow bigger and faster the more times they are put inside of a vagina. It was such an incredibly open, real, and vulnerable space in one of the most violent and repressive sites in our country.

Now, a lot of the kids were little shits, or to be more generous and aware, a lot of the kids were coming into the class in situations where they felt like acting up and acting out was essential for their own survival and positioning within those institutions. I never had a situation where a kid died during the week our class was in session, but I would have even 14 and 15 year-old kids that got put into solitary confinement after an altercation, or even once hospitalized. Statistics say that 1 in 3 young men experience some form of domestic abuse (verbal, emotional, physical or sexual) in their lives, either from family members, friends, mentors/authority figures, or intimate partners, but the kids in the detention center were much closer to 100% and the vast majority of them knew it. 

We would usually introduce the idea of “the cycle of violence” on day one or two of the class and we would come back to it multiple times in the week as we talked about the importance of learning new, better ways to express ourselves emotionally and interact with the people that we loved and cared about, to make sure that in moments of stress and pressure, we had developed and practiced the communication skills necessary to not push our own histories with violence forward.  Even the least engaged or most obnoxious kids in the class would get really serious and listen actively for these last day conversations, because, as I was often told by the kids themselves, no one else in their lives had ever talked to them about this stuff in as direct and personal a way, and many of them said that they doubted they would be able to talk about this stuff with their friends or family once they were back outside. That part of the class was tough, but it was clear (from personal testimony and written evaluations afterwards) that these classes were very well received by the participants, especially in comparison to one off lectures about sexual or domestic violence that many college and high school institutions would want to schedule with us. 

To bring this all back around to addressing Patriarchal Misogyny (PM) and exposing it for the hollow shell of authoritarianism that encourages men to give up their personal power and sense of self up the chain to the ranking patriarchs for the promise that they will either get some of that power back one day when they’ve earned it…or else have some protection from social enforcers when they realize that day is never going to come (or come fast enough) and so they lash out at others with less power than them. I can say from personal experience that young men and boys are smart enough and brave enough to talk about these issues when they are given the chance to do so in environments where they are safe enough to do so. I have no delusions that kids getting one week’s opportunity to break this stuff down is going to translate into all of those kids rejecting the decades of negative reinforcement that they will get afterwards, but I think finding ways to make those conversations and spaces inviting and not attached to systems of evaluation that kids are bombarded with in their lives, might be one way that more young men can at least remember that PM isn’t the only game in town, and other worlds are possible.

Part 4 got pretty raw and stream of conscious-y there, especially at the end. These are all ideas I am still trying to work through and understand better myself, and the purpose of trying to write 100 blog posts, instead of like, just a handful of essays, is to keep the ideas coming out of my head and into a space where others can read them, talk about them and eventually maybe refine them and present them more coherently. I rarely get 20 separate viewers on this website in a month, so I know this is less about outreach then developing a message in the first place, and I want you to know that too, so that you can also think about organizing against patriarchal misogyny (or PM as I will start calling it here to avoid typing it out 100 times) and the people using it as a political weapon.

One important thing I brought up in part 4, that I need to keep working on, is talking about how Trumpism and Manosphere media personalities are having so much success making misogyny into a fun game or sport, even through the intense and large scale movements to confront sexual violence and harassment that have happened over the last decade. In part 4 I question whether a large part of that appeal is just that it is a space where young folks who are still trying to figure out things about themselves and what it means for them to be men can be safe and protected, even when they do weird, gross, and sometimes abusive things. PM says that, at worst, boys trying to look up women and girls skirts is behavior that deserves a slap on the wrist when a man/boy is caught doing it by a women, and wink if caught by another man. It makes as much light out of sexual violence as it can…as long as that sexual violence isn’t being committed by a group that the current patriarchy is trying to target as horrible monsters. I think that hypocrisy is a waiting avenue of attack against the ideology of PM. 

PM requires men to believe that they are inherently monsters, especially in the ways they think about and act towards women, and that it is only their own society’s laws, norms and enforcers that really keep the monster under control. Instead of encouraging men to question how their ideas about sex, sexuality, and their own masculine identities  are formed, it tends to just assume all “normal boys” experience the same kinds of pressures, media, and ideas about men as sexual beings, and that all men just want as much unfettered sexual access to the most idealized constructs of the female body, as they can possibly get. Publicly, as in, in the presence of women, PM tends to advance strict, religiously enforced morals about what should guide and limit men’s otherwise inexhaustible desire for access and control of women’s bodies…but in practice, in patriarchal safe spaces, there is a pretty thinly veiled mockery of those religiously enforced morals. That tends to be more overt, the more money and power the inner circle of the group is able to wield, and that is why at the highest levels of wealth and privilege it is not uncommon for “sex is power/power is sex” to spill over beyond rigid gender boundaries (see P. Diddy “freak outs” and RNC city Grindr activity). Within a PM world view, wealth and power is how men get freedom to explore sexual liberation and escape the codes and laws that prevent other people, including most other men, from being truly free to be their own sexual beings. 

Which of course is bullshit. People are capable of creating relationships and communities where anyone can explore themselves and each other as sexual beings freely without any money or political power. People have been doing exactly that for a long time, and will continue to do so no matter how authoritarian and draconic the moral police become. So the “special thing” that PM has to offer men who tow the line is basically “here is a really shitty version of sexual liberation that will make you feel guilty for participating in, because it violates the moral standards that we try to teach everyone, and just excuse ourselves from when we have enough power, when we could just not do the moralization around rigid gender and sexual identities.” It is a hollow reward that only makes sense within the frame work that patriarchy is inevitable, even though it requires brutal levels of violent misogyny to maintain. 

So why are so many men falling for this BS, and how do we counter it?   

Content warning: this entire post is going to talk about rape, and while I will strive to avoid being graphic or exceedingly descriptive: rape is terrible; people have intense personal experiences with this topic; and society as a whole has an absolutely awful track record supporting and believing survivors. Take care of yourselves.

I don’t really like writing about rape. White men writing about rape should be, and is, a giant red flag of sus.

Anytime any man starts writing about this topic, you should be asking yourself and the author “why does this guy think he knows anything about this topic, much less have something useful to say about it when it is a topic that white men absolutely love to tell stories about, concoct fantasies around and seem to want to remind everyone that ‘hey, this really horrible thing exists, but don’t worry, I know it is horrible and that is why you know I am a part of the solution and not the problem.’” We should especially interrogate men that are writing about rape as a narrative device, whether that is for political, cultural or social purposes. I tread on dangerous ground writing this post and I can’t promise I won’t mistakes, but I really do believe it is necessary for men to critically examine some of the ideas they might have about the topic of rape, which is going to mean men having some really awkward and uncomfortable conversations of which not everyone needs to be forced into being an active audience. 

Also, before I dive deeper into this topic, I want to express that I have some pretty radical ideas about social and criminal justice (and the problematic ways that our society and legal system responds to accusations and convictions of sexual predators) that I will not try to hide or avoid…but with the topic of rape, and surviving violence of such an intimate and personal nature, you should always do whatever you have to make yourself safe from sexual violence, and you should never, ever, let some internet rando make you feel bad for doing what you got to do. For example, even if I desperately want to live in a world without cops and prisons, I would never ever judge anyone for calling the police if that is what they needed to do to protect themselves from a violent perpetrator.

Ok so those two things out of the way, let’s talk about why it is impossible to talk about patriarchal misogyny without talking explicitly about rape.  It feels like it is really important for people to have a shared and well understood definition of the word “Rape.” In 2016 the FBI set the definition of “Rape” as “penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim.” But this is only the definition of the word used within the Federal Department of Justice, and each state has its own slightly different definition as well that will be more likely to be applied to a specific legal case. Meanwhile, the UN defines  Rape as “any sexual penetration without consent or as a result of intimidation, force, fraud, coercion, threat, deception, use of drugs or alcohol, abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability, or the giving or receiving of benefits. This can be by any person known or unknown to the survivor, within marriage and relations, and during armed conflict.” I personally like the UN definition a lot better than the US one, but the key to looking at both definitions is to understand how this is a word that requires precise and specific definition because of its use within legal contexts at every level of society.

Thus, even though it is a word used to describe an act that has perhaps been around as long as the human species (or possibly even longer),  and it is only a word that has taken on explicitly moral value judgements within a relatively short period of time in human evolution, it is a word that almost everyone knows that “if you commit rape, you are the worst sort of criminal.” And honestly, it is kind of awesome that Feminists and advocates of sexual autonomy and freedom have largely succeeded in making the identity of “rapist” something that is to be avoided at all costs, and not a secret badge of honor, or even a public badge of power and privilege, as it has been at various times in humanity’s and even the United State’s history. One of the reasons I am personally so specifically focused on fighting back against patriarchal misogyny is my fear that it is going to attempt to undermine this dominant cultural meme that “rape is bad.”

At the same time, as we can already see in how the US federal legal definition of rape is so much less inclusive of behaviors I would personally include as sexual violence than in the UN definition. Some might argue that the FBI definition is more direct, simple, and easier to memorize; the nuances of “consent” can be defined else where, or interpreted as necessary to include everything about intimidation, fraud, deception, etc. However, I think having an ambiguous legal definition is not only problematic for the sake of providing judgement in legal cases, but in establishing social norms about what kinds of behaviors are acceptable and will prevent a person from facing even the accusation in the first place.

This is specifically where I think Trumpism has been successful in convincing (I’d say manipulating, but I’ll try to avoid my bias) young men that they belong in that movement. That Trumpism will protect them from a left that is out to define male sexual desire towards women as inherently violent and coercive. The Manosphere is absolutely full of language that talks about “tricks” to getting women to sleep with you, including exploiting positions of vulnerability and exchanging sex for economic, social or political benefit. Any young man who is turning to these kind of media sources to learn about themselves as sexual beings, and is attracted to women and feminine standards of beauty is going to have a very difficult time reconciling their own desires and behaviors outside of a definition of rape like the one presented by the UN. This leaves many of those men in either a position to accept that they might actually be rapists, or at least have their sexual identity defined by behaviors that cross lines of consent…or pretty aggressively attack groups and ideologies that present definitions of rape that include a broader definition of coercive and consent violating behaviors. And the kind of fucked up thing about it all, that I will really have to come back to in a later post (because it is getting late and this is getting long) is that I think having only legal definitions of words like ‘rape’ to look to and use to describe people’s problematic behaviors is what protects so many sexual predators and rapists in the United States. Because the US criminal justice system absolutely has to proceed with the expectations that a person is innocent until proven guilty, or else it becomes a political weapon and system of injustice. At the same time, we cannot let that legal shield from state punishment be used to prevent communities from protecting themselves from predators, this is how someone like Donald Trump, who admitted on tape to being able to use power to gain access to women sexually, publicly started his first run for president by stating that he is going to stop foreign countries from sending their rapists to the United States, and later insist that he is the president who will protect US women better than his opponent, who is actually a woman. Any way, addressing that dilemma will be for a later post. 

In the mean time, maybe I need to think more, and maybe everyone needs to think more about how we prevent the word ‘rape’ from being so effectively weaponized by the Manosphere and proponents of patriarchal misogyny as something that they can throw around to demonize immigrant communities and so fear in their political base, but be so well shielded from being accused of themselves, even when repeated and public accusations of sexual violence and harassment are so rife within their organizations. It seems like they have gotten so good at deflecting these claims that they have created a safe space for rapists and sexual predators that becomes very welcoming for anyone who ever ends up accused of sexually violent or coercive behavior, or whoever worries that one day they could be.  I do know that in my 25+ years of organizing, I have seen male-identifying leftists, socialist, and anarchists take massive reactionary turns to the right when they get called out for behaviors that crossed lines of consent and coercion, even if they were not criminally or civilly being charged with rape (and many of them probably could have been). That hasn’t always been the case, but it has happened upon many occasions, and while almost all of these folks (the ones who jump to the right as soon as they sense they are going to get called out) are not people that I would want to ever organize with again, it feels like a problem that it is so easy for leftist men to jump ship into a political movement that is hungry to welcome them and promise them that they will never face consequences for their problematic behavior as long as they tow the patriarchal misogynist line. 

I will definitely come back to the specific topic of generating community responses to sexual violence later, as I have a lot of organizational experience with that topic and concerns that I want to talk about. However, to end  this blog I want to keep thinking about and publicly questioning how and why Trumpism has been so successful in tapping into patriarchal misogynistic safe spaces, and how we have let them become so good at controlling the narrative of what constitutes the sexual violence that only they are standing up against, and what constitutes the “false accusations of sexual violence” that the snowflake left is using to wage war against ‘real masculinity.’ 

In part 2 of 100 I defined patriarchal misogyny as something different than just patriarchy or misogyny because it is an intentional political and social strategy used to advance an authoritarian agenda, and I am directly calling it out as a fundamental tenant of Trumpism. I believe this is true, but seeing that Andrew Cuomo is running a campaign for mayor of NYC that is likely to get a lot of traction in the process of the primary, I want to be clear that I do not think Trumpism is (nor Republicans are) alone to blame for the rise of weaponizing patriarchal misogyny. I think many Democrats will vehemently deny that their party utilizes patriarchal misogyny for political ends, and I think there are folks in the Democratic Party much more willing to stand up to it and its politicization than there are in the Republican Party, but there is no doubt that individual Democratic politicians, including too many rather popular ones, over many decades have at least embraced the privileges afforded by patriarchal misogyny, if they have not directly used it for political ends.

Andrew Cuomo is an example of one of these kind of Democrats, as he was eating up being called the “Sexy Governor” during the first year of the Covid pandemic, putting himself forward as this confident, tough guy, who could stand up to Trump 1.0 for what was right, while simultaneously sexually harassing at least 11 women. Cuomo is largely considered to be a front runner in this campaign for mayor and will heavily lean into the image of a “tough guy from New York” who has stood up to Trump in the past, and use that to contrast himself against current NYC mayor Eric Adams. I find this grotesque, but also pretty ironic, because I am fairly confident that had/if any sexual harassment accusations against Cuomo proceed to point of facing criminal conviction, I think Cuomo would be quick to accept a pardon from Trump/capitulate with Trump’s Department of Justice to make sure that none of those accusations even get prosecuted. The fact that Trump is so readily willing to “save” men accused of sexual violence and manipulation, as well as general corruption and fraud accusations, regardless of past political affiliations is one of the things that makes Trumpism so particularly frightening and dangerous.

Trump’s weaponization of patriarchal misogyny is very much about establishing, or maybe just expanding the class of men in power who are above the law and who will be able to “reap the benefits” of power in disturbing and disgusting ways. This is not actually a new thing, and there are probably even more presidents than we know of who abused the power of their office to gain access to and control over women’s bodies and lives, but Trump’s efforts to return the US to that kind of protection for the President and his cronies is an intensely reactionary move against decades of feminist action. There is a very real danger of Trump succeeding in re-entrenching patriarchal misogyny in US political and social thought that will spill over well beyond Trumpism, rebuilding walls that protect terrible and abusive men, that had only just begun to crack.   

The fact that Trump was probably drawn to the idea of running for president based upon his insider perspective of the ways in which Bill Clinton abused the power of his office should not be lost on anyone, nor should the fact that so many men with a history of abusing power have been similarly drawn into the Trumpist camp.

It is going to take more than traditional US leftist politics and campaigning to undo the damage that Trumpism is causing, even as the success of Trumpism is largely a result of the failure of Leftist campaigning and politics. The massive turnover of federal employees and a desire to hire new, loyal Trumpists into every federal office is going to make sure that it is harder than ever for anyone to whistle blow. It might not even take official laws or executive orders to accomplish things like running women and LGBTQIAA+ folks out of the military or federal law enforcement as abuse and harassment will be largely ignored as long as they appear in service of the political vision. Even if Trump leaves office at the end of his second term, and a Kamala Harris wins the presidency back with a full house and senate majority, there is almost 0 percent chance that any Democratic president is going to commit to clearing house in the same way, and it will take decades of organizational restructuring around principles of inclusivity and justice to uproot the ground work of patriarchal misogyny that Trumpism is doing everything he can to embed into the Federal government. Attacking this problem from the top down, and waiting for leaders who we trust to be able to enact these changes to navigate a system that will be incredibly hostile to change is delusional fantasy at this point, but there is great potential for youth movements to rise up in resistance and revolt as the futility of traditional political means becomes more apparent.  But only if we can make sure to counter the vision of “every (white/rich) man a king of his own kingdom” that Trump is employing patriarchal misogyny to sell to young men, especially young white men. 

Brainstorming and envisioning a masculine identity not rooted in “the ability to control and rule the people around me as property” is our path  forward away from both Trumpism and the overt weaponization of patriarchal misogyny that Trumpism is force feeding back into US politics. Hopefully, it will also be something I can continue to contribute to and focus on with the rest of these blog posts.

In thinking about what to talk about next, the phrase “Patriarchal Misogyny” leapt out at me as something that I think I use very intentionally to mean something specific, but that many readers might see as just “woke buzzwords” or an attempt to make myself sound more like a fancy academic cultural critic when I could have just said something like “a hatred for women,” if I was trying to communicate more direct.

I mean isn’t all misogyny patriarchal?

Well, for the sake of my critique of Donald Trump, I think it is important to talk about a type of misogyny that is deliberately performed socially/politically for the sake of reinforcing some of the most authoritarian patriarchal structures, and the kind of misogyny that stems internally from a hatred of women, even if both types eventually serve patriarchal ends.

For example, when a young male mass shooter targets women indiscriminately, based largely on personal rejections and a sense of lost personal authority rooted exclusively in his masculinity, that kind of violence does inevitably serve patriarchal social, political and domestic structures (which I will get to in a second). However, even when the intention of the shooter is to become some kind of hero for incels and men’s right advocates everywhere, the reality is that these kinds of hyper violent misogynistic acts only really serve to create a literal bogeyman of “why woman should be thankful that the good men in their lives will protect them from these kind of monsters.” This kind of violence absolutely is providing a service to patriarchies everywhere, but it is coming from either a position of zealous devotion to a patriarchal value system, or even a sense of despair at feeling rejected from the promises of one of those value systems.

Patriarchal Misogyny is different in that its perpetrators are not the rank and file followers of patriarchal or misogynistic systems, they are the ones intentionally designing and shaping those systems, even if their reasons for doing so are more personal than actually political commitment to those systems. This is why Donald Trump in particular needs to be called out for his patriarchal misogyny, even if he is often capable of deflecting general accusations of misogyny by pointing out that he is neither the most overtly patriarchal politician, nor misogynistic. Like, Mike Pence is pretty clearly a politician more dedicated to rigid patriarchal domestic and political systems than Trump ever was, but he was also far more cautious and afraid to adopt the kind of overtly misogynistic rhetoric that Trump was in service of those patriarchal systems. Pence would have been an awful president who worked tirelessly to assert his own vision of patriarchy deeper into US politics, but he was never going to be willing to risk completely upending the US political system to assert control over a movement of men willing to weaponize patriarchal misogyny for his own political purposes. 

This is why I am directing these blog posts specifically at patriarchal misogyny, and especially the radicalized and weaponized version of it that Trump has fully embraced as both a political tool and as one of the centralized underpinnings of Trumpism 2.0.  Because even if it is largely self-serving, and a way for him to deflect legal accountability for acts of sexual violence in his past, his efforts to give it such a powerful and explicit platform (including surrounding himself with other men who have committed similar acts of violence) are either going to be a weak point in his overall drive towards authoritarianism that we must attack…or his platforming of patriarchal misogyny is going to be radical root of his most dedicated and zealous foot soldiers, who will put no persons or legal systems ahead of their messianic patriarch. 

Maybe I am way off on this, and you have your own ideas about patriarchy and misogyny you want to share back with me? In future blog posts I intend to dig deeper into how we resist patriarchal misogyny as a weapon of authoritarianism as well as why it is actually a really terrible and unhealthy ideology for anyone to internalize, and how helping young men overcome its appeals will be essential for everyone’s future, but that will all be for next time. 

Ok, so I am going to “start somewhere,” and try to start a blog where I make 100 posts in the year 2025 about sex, consent, and self worth as a pro-feminist, anti-capitalist, anti-authoritarian, cisgendered dude who has had fulfilling sexual relationships with women-identifying folks in a political and social environment that feels like it is giving itself over entirely to patriarchal misogyny. This very first one is just going to be pretty stream of conscious brain storming about topics I want to cover in these 100 blog posts, and why I am doing this, but probably in reverse order, and with no promises of covering every thing.

The elevator pitch for “why am I doing this?” is that I think the one place Donald Trump has really managed to succeed beyond what conservatives previously thought possible for themselves was to make blatantly self-serving, amoral, patriarchal misogyny a personal brand and unapologetically sell it to a generation of young men that were possibly on the cusp of questioning whether patriarchy still had anything to offer them at all anymore. I personally want to live in a world without patriarchy or misogyny, so I think it sucks to see so many young men repeating ideas that I thought we had maybe crushed by the early 2010s, but clearly I was wrong, and the reactionary surge of “Men’s Rights” bullshit and sexual predators knowingly being welcome back everywhere into positions of power and prestige in society is starting to feel like a giant, personal “fuck you” to the decades of work I did trying to address gender-based violence professionally and as a community organizer…as well, of course, as being really bad for the world as a whole. I think I will have to get into a lot more of that personal history in later blogs, but it is becoming abundantly clear that there has been a safe space of misogynistic ideas about gender and sexuality that has been cultivated on parts of the internet and social media that a lot of folks on the left wrote off as fringe and out of touch, and it has cost us dearly.

I think there are a lot of male-identified folks out there who wanted to discuss and explore sexual desire, especially their own developing sexual desire for women, and the only place where they were able to find those conversations happening in ways that felt authentic to their own experiences (and freely accessible) were in places on the internet dedicated to the manipulation and economic exploitation of insecure men craving access to what they identify as desirable female bodies. I am talking about the entire world of mainstream pornography (a massive, opaque economy built explicitly for the purpose of this kind of economic exploitation), but also a lot of “Men’s health industrial complex” type internet and social media stuff too, some of the worst of “gamergate” gamer culture, as well as grotesquely hypocritical patriarchal religious organizations and men’s social organizations as well. That is a big net, and it isn’t comprehensive. This also isn’t an attempt to cast blame on any one person or small group of people who participate in any one of these groups, or to pretend like the internet originated these places or even made them any worse than they were before the internet, but to acknowledge that Trumpist right-wing politics have massively benefited from targeting men through these internet platforms, and the left’s efforts to counter them or offer alternatives failed miserably, and without the left realizing how devastating this failure was going to be.

Like, I think a lot of leftists were like, “look! We are winning (changing ideas about what male identity and sexuality can be) in certain institutions like college campuses and some mainstream entertainment industries, so maybe we are winning with the youth overall?!” But the reality was that young men with questions about their own developing heterosexuality were not turning to college classrooms or mainstream entertainment industry giants like Disney to answer these questions. They were turning to free porn on the internet and community spaces where they felt like could talk to other people in similar situations about the kinds of sex (and the development of identities built upon that kind of sex) that were happening in that porn. And this isn’t even a trend unique to male centric conversations about heterosexual sex. The whole “what media appears free to the end user, and what media seems price prohibitive to the end user (especially when the end user is a minor with limited economic freedom)?” is problematic in everything from news media to even academic research media literacy. Ivory Towers of knowledge and wisdom are getting torn down across the world because there is easy money and power in doing it, and “Anti-Woke” misogynistic gender ideology is only one of these easy paths to money and control over a population of people with a lot of political power and capacity for extremist violence.

But it is the one that I think I have spent a lot of time learning about and trying to respond to in the past, and so I want to write a ton of blogs (like 100 in 1 year) that adress the kinds of questions that patriarchal misogyny has created a monopoly on answering for many young men. Maybe in the process of sharing these writings with you all as an audience, and possibly inspiring some of y’all to respond back or start conversations about these topics within communities you are more comfortable communicating within, we can start building a more effective response than we’ve done in the past.

So why am I doing this? Because I think the left (and specifically folks who identify as men on the left, because this isn’t another job we need to push off on women or nonbinary folks, expecting them to do this labor for free) needs to talk about how we talk about sex and with whom we have been including and excluding from those conversations. This is an ambitious project, and I have struggled to do any writing of any significance in the year and a half since my son was born, but by putting the goal out here in cyber space, maybe it will push me to be more accountable to myself, and to this project. Feel free to reach out with questions, suggestions, or encouragements to keep going on this project!