The Black Unicorn Press

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. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What can we do about it?

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

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

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

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

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

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