The Black Unicorn Press

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, from the direction of the last couple of blog posts, I think eventually I am going to get into some posts that engage in some “real talk” / “Weird Beard” discussions about sex and sexuality that are going to draw on personal experience and probably embarrass myself and my family, because I think part of the impetus of this entire project is that men, and especially young men, tend to only have a pretty limited arena of places to turn to on the internet to answer their awkward and weird beard questions about sex. However, before I go there in future blog posts, I want to talk about why I think Male-identified folks that are attracted to women (including straight men, but also bi, pan, and other sexualities as well) who want to dismantle systems of patriarchal misogyny and not reinforce them often tend to shy away from publicly talking about sex from a personal perspective. I am exhausted today, so this is going to be a little list-y:

1. They know that other men who want to know about how to engage in sexual relationships with women from a position of respect, equality and a desire to develop a moment of shared vulnerability and empowerment need to be listening to, reading, and engaging with media produced by women, that was not created for the male gaze or for the purposes of participating in the capitalist exploitation of insecure men’s desire for access to women’s bodies. Putting together a list of good resources for this is an excellent project for a future blog post. The big problem with just knowing this is that it is nearly impossible to convince a man entrenched in Patriarchal Misogynistic ideas/world views to start listening to women without positioning that activity as something that should yield immediate power over their interactions with other women in the future, defeating the purpose of getting them to consider the ideas in the first place.

2. Talking to other men about having mutually empowering sexual relationships with anyone, especially people who identify as women can be exhausting and lead to bullying, social alienation, and even physical alterations. There are many, absolutely atrocious ideas about sex and sexual identity that float around spaces dedicated to patriarchal misogyny, and the easiest way for perpetrators of sexual violence, misogyny and intimate partner manipulation and abuse to avoid accountability for their behaviors is to make sure that the way men generally talk about sex protects them from observation or identification as someone doing something out of line. The past, present and future Trumps, Musks, Gates, Tates, Clintons, Cosbys, Weinsteins, Diddys, Epstiens, Ranieres, Heffners, ect., very much need a critical mass of men in society idolizing a playboy masculinity that uses power and money to gain access to women’s bodies, even beyond what legally or morally passes as acceptable behavior.  This idealization makes it exceedingly difficult to bring them down individually, and when they collude together for protection, they are nearly impossible to topple within society’s existing criminal justice system. In my day, we would talk about this as rape culture, and maybe some people still do, but it seems like that is a term that has been so heavily politicized and attacked that it is difficult to use to have an authentic conversation with anyone who might feel like they are a participant or participant-adjacent to it. Calling this out for many men can feel exhausting, pointless, and even counter productive to changing the attitudes of other men. I think this is another one that will need to be expanded out into its own blog post.

3. Men don’t wait until they become men to start learning about sex, sexuality and how to behave in sexual relationships. I probably need to go back and do more research to be able to speak about this on a large scale, but certainly anecdotally, from personal and observed experience, Boys start talking to each other about this stuff and trying to gather resources about it from a very young age, like at least 9 or 10. Adults who want to talk to children about sex are people who raise massive red flags for both kids and other adults, for many very good reasons.  Kids don’t really want adults to talk to them about sex like they are adults talking to children, so a lot of kids, especially boys and people wanting to grow up into a male body and social position, are actively looking to get a hold of adult content that feels like it is targeted at other adults and not children. Also, the right has found tremendous success buckling down on parents’ fear of their children being sexually preyed upon, and have turned conversations about grooming and other terms that used to be used to focus specifically on predators actively seeking people to victimize, but are now being used to just to apply to anyone that is trying to influence children’s views about sex, sexuality and themselves.  I have a lot of sympathy for parents, especially as a parent myself, and one who has worked professionally and collaboratively with survivors of childhood sexual abuse and trauma…I don’t want to live in a world where children are preyed upon by sexual predators either. But, I also know that children are going to learn about sex and if you as a parent don’t think your child is already learning about it, than it probably means they are learning about it from sources you don’t know about. I am far, far more worried about my son growing up to learn about sex, sexuality and gender identity from people like Andrew Tate than from drag queens at the library, or trans folks using the same bathroom as them. At the same time, right now in particular is an incredibly difficult time to even suggest thinking about how to talk about sexual education and how children should be learning about themselves as gendered beings growing into a sexual identity. People who want to counter patriarchal misogynistic narratives can’t wait until everyone is 18 to start trying to talk about this stuff, because that won’t be the first place kids are having these conversations.

4. Most of us who have been socialized as men have to work very hard to counter patriarchal misogynistic ideas every day of our lives, not just one time until we get it. This means that we internalize a lot of ideas that are patriarchal and misogynistic, and sometimes we don’t even realize it. Talking about our ideas about sex, sexual desire, gender and identity in public means that we are going to expose some of these bad ideas and possibly even behaviors from our past that we are going to feel really guilty about, if we don’t already. Accomplishing the social badge of “Feminist” or “pro-femist” or “anti-misogynistic” male without having to do any further work on it means being able to avoid that kind of exposure from our communities and from ourselves. The reason why we have to keep calling out “silence is compliance” is because silence is also security and anonymity for people benefiting from the privileges of oppression and exploitation. 

There might be other factors than these that I am missing, and if you think of one, you should share it with me! But I do think these 4 do a lot of Patriarchal Misogyny’s work for it in preventing men from being allies to anyone, including themselves, in resisting PM’s harmful grasp.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have this ex-professor who has fallen down the patriarchal misogyny rabbit hole hard. He would disagree vehemently, at least with the misogyny part, but his last major book was a thinly veiled “satirical” allusion to the horrors of women in positions of authority in the work place, and it is transparent how much he was just really writing his true feelings about the department that he used to teach in and I was in. At least, that is what comes across in every excerpt he shares from it, and even when he thinks he is showing any kind of nuance or complex perspective, the text he points to never delivers. This book was not this teachers first foray into misogyny, and multiple Fem presenting students had stories about him tending to dismiss them as writers or encouraging them to use their “feminine guiles” to seek professional success instead of acknowledging the strength of their work.

I have tried to engage with this professor in his descent into patriarchal misogyny, transphobia, islamophobia, and white supremacy, because it felt, at first, like a descent from a position of moderate “liberal” leftism, but it is becoming more and more clear that this was less of a shift, than a position that might have been inevitable for a long time, but wasn’t necessary to express until white male complacent mediocrity was no longer going to be enough to keep him feeling secure in the work place or in his social relationships with women. 

These are really harsh words and the truth I need to commit to is that I can’t see inside this ex-professor’s head or know what made his rhetoric change so vehemently. I can only really address and respond to the things he is saying and writing now, which tend to be the parroting of hot topics in the manosphere and Steve Bannon-esque right-wing fringe media, often with poorly researched evidence. When he is called out on a particularly poorly presented argument, his response to refutation is to refer to “classical liberal” philosophers and psychologists who usually just insist that western culture is the pinnacle of human achivement, and that all society must embrace a form of competitive individualism that only really rewards competences in western cultural productions. Or, if he has jumped onto a flimsy enough right-wing conspiracy that has publicly fallen apart in the media within days of his choice to write about it, then he completely abandons the topic to move on to the next “wokest outrage.”  Occasionally, I still see the hint of the keen intellect that turned me on to authors like Louis Borges and Milan Kundera, especially in acknowledging that neoliberal, capitalist leftism was a house of cards built global exploitation, and that it requires state violence (both international and intranational) to maintain itself. But while I find that to be a fatal flaw in capitalism, my ex-professor has decided to embrace that flaw as natural fact (as has Trumpism and much of today’s far right) and encourage nationalistic protectionism and the authoritarian repression of non-governmental institutions that question the superiority of patriarchal western society.

It would be very natural for me to want to question why someone who identifies as a working class bloke is siding with people like Donald Trump and Elon Musk, who are transparently just in to turn their wealth into political power so that they can make more money…except this is the exact same turn used by the monarchs of Europe through the beginning of their colonial periods and most other expansionistic Empires throughout history. The promise that every man can be the king of his own kingdom, as long as they commit themselves fully to the glory of the Empire has been one of the most effective motivational lies in authoritarian history:

“Sure you might be degraded and dehumanized in the work that you are doing and the in the prospects of real social empowerment, but if you stick it out with us, we are going to let you get away with taking out your frustrations on your own personal family for as long as we possibly can, and as long as you don’t draw too much attention to how messed up this is.” 

Young or old, it sure does seem like a lot of men take the biggest leaps into anti-social (at least anti-pluralistic society) and patriarchal misogyny when the ghost of being the current or future patriarch of their own family is taken away from them. I don’t know if this was exactly the case with my ex-professor, but I have seen it often enough to be suspicious in most circumstances where a self-identified man has a relationship end badly. It is absolutely astonishing that so many men have managed to convince themselves that men have rational and evidence-based minds when it is so confoundingly irrational to think that anyone suppressing emotional confusion or distress is capable of rational thought. 

Last night I attended my second session of a Mutual Aid Self/social Therapy group here in Seattle, and since this blog writing project is kind of the thing occupying most of my “non-parenting” brain functions at the moment, I used my time as the narrator (or the role of the person receiving counseling) to talk about how I am feeling about this project, including my excitement and concerns about it, and why it feels like an important use of my time and brain space. I found out about this group by finding a flyer on the ground, so it really was a pretty wild shot in the dark/coincidence, but participation in the group is definitely the first time I feel like I have been taking steps to find a sense of community that isn’t rooted in a work place or family since moving to Seattle, and it feels really important and powerful to me that the group’s purpose is the creation of a collaborative mental health resource. 

So what does this have to do with Patriarchal Misogyny? I think isolation is a crucial weapon of Patriarchal Misogyny (PM). Part of Patriarchal socialization as a man is the creation of very limited and constrained spaces for men to express emotions and reflect upon how we process our emotions. Religion and Family are the two official institutions that PM allocates to men for processing emotional experiences and answering questions about the self. These are the spaces where everyone living within a patriarchal society is expected to turn to for questions about their sense of self, their desires, and their understanding of their own sexuality. 

 Less officially there have always been others, like “locker rooms,” “the workplace cooler,” and various other “fraternal” organizations, many of which present as having philanthropic purposes, but often additionally, or even primarily, serve as male-centric community spaces for the cultural exchange of values and the purpose of identity. I don’t think most men consciously identify these as “community spaces for the cultural exchange of values” but I have first hand experiencing seeing how uncomfortable it can make many cisgendered, heterosexual men to grow comfortable seeing their work and social environments as male-centric, patriarchal and misogynistic spaces, only to react very defensively when those spaces open up to women or come under the spot light of an institutional gaze that doesn’t explicitly value patriarchal authority. 

I think there are also the really covert social spaces that PM expects men to make for themselves and for the purpose of policing masculine identity, and these are where a lot of the most intense forms of misogyny are cultivated. This has traditionally been the “hanging with the boys” spaces/time, but also, as general social isolation and alienation has continued to grow (and completely balloon with the pandemic), includes semi private/autonomous digital spaces as well. These are the “what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas” spaces which are meant to be unassailable and insurveilable (to steal a French word)…except of course, by all the other men occupying those spaces. 

Lastly, within PM, there are the spaces that must be dedicated to punishing and re-indoctrinating those men who fail to tow the line of patriarchal authority (and the authority of the current and specific patriarch, which can sometimes feel at odds with some competing authorities) and this includes the obvious ones like jails and prisons, but can also include psychiatrical and social institutions focused on the “rehabilitation” of men back into patriarchal society.

What really strikes me as interesting about the potential of Mutual Aid Self/social Therapy (or MAST) is that it is building a real space community dedicated to emotional health and processing that is actively challenging authoritarian structures generally, including the structures of patriarchal misogyny. This doesn’t mean that I think that MAST is incapable of being used for or subverted into a means of identity policing with patriarchal ends, but that seeking out and building mutually beneficial resources for both self and social emotional processing is an act that will undermine patriarchal authority. I think for a lot of self-identified men in the world, just seeking out therapy generally when struggling with issues of emotional connection would be a massive blow to the overt PM of Trumpism, but that Trump is already attacking the mental health resources that would make that possible, and that communities of resistance to PM and Trumpism specifically probably need to be thinking about and investing in creating mental health resources that are not dependent on the state for support. MAST feels like A model for what that could look like.