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Post 11 of 100: Violent Pornography and its influence on large scale social behavior, especially choking.

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. 

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Post 10 of 100: Why don’t more men talk about this stuff?

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.

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Post 9 of 100: Bad assumptions about relationships often lead to men deeper into patriarchal misogyny.

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. 

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Post 8 of 100: Patriarchy at the intersection of nationalism and misogyny

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. 

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Post 7 of 100: Mental Health and Patriarchal Misogyny

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.  

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Post 6 of 100: Reflections on SV prevention work

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

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

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

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

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

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Part 5 of 100: Organizing my thoughts on how to talk to men about these issues

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

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

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

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

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

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Part 4 of 100: I guess I need to talk about rape?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Part 3 of 100: Its bigger than Political Parties

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

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

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

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

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

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

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2 of 100: Isn’t Patriarchal Misogyny redundant?

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

I mean isn’t all misogyny patriarchal?

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

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

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

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

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