MRAs and other antifeminists so often accuse feminist men of hating men, and hating themselves. It’s not true, of course, except perhaps in isolated cases. Mostly, we just hate an unjust system that everyone is stuck in. But it helps every once in a while for us to point out the men we like.
There’s a lot of coverage, in the run up to the Superbowl this weekend, of Saints linebacker Scott Fujita.
Fifteen years ago I followed the NFL closely, and would have known exactly who he was even if his team did not make the Superbowl. But I’ve been busy practicing law and raising children and such, so I just started reading about him today. There’s a lot about this guy I identify with.
He’s vocal in supporting LGBT rights including marriage equality and adoption, even though his teammates call him “pinko communist fag from Berkeley.” (Which reminds me of the couple of years in high school when I wore a silver fairy as a lapel pin on my denim jacket just to poke at people’s gender and orientation insecurities.) He’s vocally pro-choice. And he cites his mother as one of his biggest influences. Fujita was adopted by a Japanese-American father and a white mother, and they raised him to be the successful, smart, eloquent man that he is. My mother raised me to be the man I am, and ten years after her death she remains in many ways my feminist and progressive role model.
(I also note that Fujita proudly claims his Japanese heritage. He has no known genetic connection to Japan, but he was raised with his father’s and grandparents’ culture. That means something to me. Though I do have the same genes as my Scottish ancestors, that’s not why I’m a Scot. I’m a Scot because the culture was passed down to me, as my heritage, through my family.)
Fujita takes a stand for what he believes in, in part because he has the next generation to worry about. He’s married to a woman, and they are raising twin girls. As the father of a daughter, he and I obviously see a lot of things the same way, and probably for a lot of the same reasons.
So, all you MRAs out there, I don’t hate men. I expect a lot out of men. I expect them to be men like Scott Fujita.
Posted in Uncategorized on February 2, 2010 by Thomas
One interesting side topic that came up in response to this post concerned the role of schools and parents. I suggested that, though my kids are all in or will be in public school, my spouse and I might homeschool her for the three middleschool years because that period is so destructive. A lot of comments that followed focused on the role of public education, homeschooling and whether it should be permitted at all, the intersection of race, class and gender in homeschooling, etc. I’ve cut off discussion of that subtopic on the I Fear This thread, because I worry that it crowded out discussion of the main topic, which is the intergirl aggression dynamics. But it’s a valuable discussion, so I’m opening this thread so people can have their say on it without it being a threadjack.
“It’s humiliating. I’m a man. I was raped by four men who held me down and put a baton into my rectum. How am I supposed to feel? There is no forgiveness.”
[Emphasis supplied.]
But it seems that journalists do have a problem saying that this man was raped, or even that this man alleges that he was raped. See, e.g., here and here. It’s not that they can’t say what, in precise detail, happened to him. In fact, the articles have described it graphically:
While they held him down to the ground and kicked and punched him, he alleges, one of the officers shoved a radio antenna up his rectum.
NYPD officials said Mineo had been smoking a joint as he walked down the street and then ran when officers – who are black, Hispanic and white – approached. They insist that witness accounts do not back up Mineo’s story that he was sodomized.
But several witnesses told investigators that Mineo’s pants were pulled down, exposing his buttocks. They said he screamed “What are you doing to me? What are you – a faggot?”
Mineo told investigators that one officer yelled, “No! No! No! Don’t do that!”
Turns out the instrument was a retractable baton, that left serious injuries. Mineo bled profusely, showed officers the blood, and kept telling them that he needed to go to the hospital. He was eventually hospitalized, and treated for a torn rectum. One officer has now testified consistent with Mineo’s account.
To my way of thinking, the trial offers only one possibility for acquittal: that the jurors dislike Mineo so much for his alleged gang activity (he is, among other things, accused of taking part is a serious beating of two teenage boys) that they decide he got what he deserved. I don’t expect that, actually. I would be very surprised and very saddened by that result. I expect convictions.
The trial is unfolding just like a rape trial. The whole defense strategy is to blame the victim and encourage the jury to judge him, instead of answering the question of whether the defendants did what they are accused of. He was raped, he was injured like a rape survivor, and now he’s being tried like a rape survivor. But the major news organs won’t say the dreaded R word. This is a persistent problem.
The papers can say that “rape” is a legal term in New York, and it only involves penis-in-vagina contact — which is true as far as it goes. But not every state even uses the word “rape” in its statutes. It’s an ordinary word, in addition to its legal meaning. That’s true of a lot of words — reckless, intentional, negligent, defame, slander, fraud, murder. They can be true in the ordinary sense whether or not they are true in the technical sense, and for journalists to hide behind the legislature is disingenuous.
I want editors to be up front about their style usage when it comes to the word “rape.” What they will and won’t call rape is part of what shapes public consciousness about what is and isn’t a rape narrative. Rather than guess and wonder, they should say it up front and let it be openly debated.
There are a lot more things to say about Mineo, but I want to focus here on the issue of word usage. The man alleges a rape. I think the newspapers should say that what he’s alleged is a rape. They largely have not, but they also largely have not said why.
Maybe there’s a better writer working in the feminist blogosphere than Sady Doyle, but then again, maybe there isn’t. She’s best known for her acid wit, but some of her stuff shows that she has a reservoir of penetrating analysis to draw from, too.
Doyle just wrote something that cuts right to the heart of my fears as a parent. As a parent to a son, I feel like I know what to do. But as a parent to my daughter, I feel like there is a gauntlet of soul-destroying ugliness waiting for her that starts in middle school, and I have no idea how to prepare her for it.
Doyle set out to say, essentially, that Clay Shirkey’s piece, while poorly framed, missing the structural issue and raising hackles, puts its finger on the way women are hamstrung by the culturally mandated self-censorship and self-deprecation. I started this post by saying how good Sady is, but she can’t say it about herself, and she can’t even agree when her friends say it. She knows Shirkey well, and she summarized her conversations with him about her own abilities like this:
Taking off a condom in the middle of a sex act…it happened to me a couple of times. One of the most notable ones was one of the last of 4 sexual assaults in my early 20s which culminated in me realizng that I had survived a series of different sexual assaults between the ages of 17 and 22. This was just the last of 4 that I would allow to just roll over me like a big crashing wave that nearly drowns me and pushes me down, spitting sand and salt but told to just recover and keep surfing. I was urinating blood in the toilet. I thought it was an STD. I went to Planned Parenthood and one of their routine questions traumatized me. “Could you be at risk of being pregnant or having an STD?” The last guy I slept with that took the condom off in the middle of our sex came to mind. I had to say,”Yes.” and take the pregnancy test. It was traumatic at the time, what has become more routine for me now. Watching Jerry Springer in the clinic lobby bitterly thinking that for sure I felt violated that I had to endure pain and uncertainty because of his irresponsibility. This one was definitely his fault because he took action to violate an unspoken trust agreement between two people using a condom that that condom should stay on during the entirity of the sex act. It turned out I had kidney stones and that was why I was bleeding internally but the blood in the toilet was so traumatic that it forced me into a path of rape trauma healing of all my assaults, deal with boundary violations, go to counseling and understand PTSD. I FELT that the guy who took off the condom violated me, and I experienced it physically (through the kidney stones) and emotionally as such and so to me, it was an assault. Would the police classify it as such? Of course not. Does this guy think he sexually assaulted me? Of course not.
Fast forward eleven years, 3 of the last of those I’ve worked as an escort in LA and beyond. I have practiced boundary negotiations with hundreds of clients, customers, dates, boyfriends, and whoevers. Things still happen. Violations are part of the occupational hazards of this job. I work with the herpes virus using barriers to protect my clients and reduction of unprotected oral, when possible. Recently, the client knew that there wasn’t a condom on and continued to have sex with me. We had used a condom earlier, but the second time he put it in I didn’t realize there wasn’t a condom until about 15 minutes into it. I stopped to ask and he replied, “there isn’t one.” I was pissed. “That’s it.” I said. “We’re done.” I started packing my work bag and headed for the shower. With more body language I let him know that I was not happy. While I was in the shower, I wanted to resolve the issue so that somehow I could make it out of there on good terms. This guy had just gotten out of prison, did drugs and clearly didn’t think that not using a condom sometimes was an issue. I should be worried. I told him that. “when IS the last time you got tested?” I asked. “They test you when you go to prison.” he says. He claims that prisoner rape isn’t as common as the movies make it seem and that he never shared a needle. But you and so many too many men I’ve been with think not using a condom on every contact, every time is excusable for the sake of pleasure, or horniness. But, in this case, I believe it is also my responsibility to realize that a condom is not on, even though the penis holder is clearly in an position of power. I’ll take some responsibility for [you fucking me without a condom]. Just so I don’t have to process what you did like another sexual assault. He tipped me very well. I’m not sure if it was because he felt guilty or not. I must have made him feel bad. He gave me his phone numbers and said I could call him for anything. In the end, because I didn’t leave angry, I was able to not feel so violated. It doesn’t always resolve itself like this. Unsafe sex is an automatic ejection from the game. I think though, you should always be aware of whether or not a condom is in use. And if you are calling yourself a pro you should always be on top of that, literally.
I did feel initially violated but felt like instead of getting angry and calling him a rapist, I would try to gain an understanding about what HIS thinking, if any was.
“Do you think that what you did was wrong?”
Well, it turns out I am the forever carrier of the herpes simplex virus 1 (HSV-1) and apparently even unprotected rubbing of my vagina with other genitals can infect you with herpes sores. An ex-lover recently called me at 7am freaking out about sores all over his dick, which we guessed he contracted from rubbing himself against me without a condom 20 ? days ago in a romantic non work setting. I believe that it is possible to have safe sexual experiences with people with herpes, obviously. The condom violator definitely should have contracted herpes if the one showing signs of herpes got it. It was, as a matter of fact on the SAME DAY. (I am a hoe, afterall).
So, taking a condom off with a girl like me can get you herpes. Because I got that 7am call, I felt compelled to call the condom violator and disclose to him and tell him to get tested so he wouldn’t infect more people. Most clients don’t want to have unsafe sex. Pro sex with me is usually pretty sterile but there is that occasional guy who dreams of raw sex as the ONLY way he can get off. They don’t even ask or realize how easy it is to transmit herpes. They don’t realize that I have to worry about MORE than herpes, but other STDS AND pregnancy. To me, cold sores are not life threatening even though they don’t have a cure. This last lover seemed to have symptoms pretty bad. I sometimes feel like just taking those types of guys for suckers, snatching their money and giving them a lecture about WHY they should be more careful, but I wouldn’t fuck them first, probably just take their money, which I end up doing in the course of the type of sex work I do on a regular basis. Agency work is sometimes cruel like capitalism often is and it has nothing to do with STD disclosure.
I understand that there are MANY people who think that prostitutes are trash [women] spreading diseases even if they don’t all have diseases and even if we are not all women. I write this as part of my process to debunk the diseased whore stereotype at the same time as BE ALIVE within it. I think it is as important for me to come out and be me as it is a HIV+ gay man who also lives the stereotype but feels the need to be out about it. We can always say what we would or should do, but until you have an STD that you should or need to disclose you really don’t know what it is like to have to deal with…
I’ve never had a major multiple blister syndrome like what he described, neither did anyone else that I’d been with, including my 2 year live in boyfriend.. Too bad for my dear young 21 year old lover though, I did warn him while he was doing it, gave him the opportunity to stop. He not only didn’t stop but was extremely almost convincing me to let him in further w/o protection! Will it teach him to use a condom more because now he has to? I could be like the Trashman, aiming to unethically teach guys with indecent unsafe sex proposals a lesson about waht that could bring them in the long run. The idea of having a real life vagina dentata is somewhat enticing, however. Trashman’s character (which they have found to be a performance) is deviant and malicious. Mine is not. I simply don’t want to stop having sex. Not yet. I am also not in a position to stop doing sex work right now. So did the condom violator violate me or did I violate him by not disclosing my status, or by even working while knowing that I have an STD? Herpes is something you have forever, and I’m not showing any signs of outbreaks (and if I do, they aren’t major), so you can imagine it’s tough for me to accept a chaste and celibate future. Forget whether or not money is exchanged. I believe that he would say that he is somehow off the hook because I am the one who gave him something, that he PAID TO GET! I would say, if I didn’t already have herpes, I surely would have gotten it then, and he will surely pass it on in the same way. He didn’t really see the importance of getting tested, I did make him realize that he could spread it to all the little speed freaks that he “helps” by giving them a hotel room to stay in.
In my recent mission to make things right in different ways, I called him and told him. He, being a “full blown drug addict” (his words) didn’t really care it seemed. He wasn’t upset. He wasn’t showing any signs of herpes. But, our conversation did make him use condoms more he said. (but I’m sure he doesn’t understand that he violated me too). He appreciated my honesty. He believed he was a man of solid morals. A good tweaker. (they always believe they are good). Once the 21 yo lover told me of his outbreak, I told this guy, whom I only had the phone number of because he wanted me to buy weed from him. My conversationS with him were not too deep and definitely drug induced on his part. His intent to harm me was not there, I figured, but I realized that BOTH of us need to protect ourselves from each other’s withholding of information at the same time! I don’t feel guilty and I don’t feel violated anymore, but that could unfortunately be because I have a lot of practice dealing with this type of thing or it could be that I took so much time to process and discuss it with each of the peope involved, writing about it on blogs and to myself..?
I just finished reading Clarisse Thorn’s account of her developing relationship in South Africa with a Baha’i sex educator, who is for religious reasons abstinent. She doesn’t yet know what the parameters of that are, and Clarisse being Clarisse, she’ll probably write some interesting things about it as she finds out. (These Carnal Nation bloggers make my life easy. They have all this smart stuff to say, and I just bulk-paste it and comment on it.)
So far, she says, she’s told him: “I promise not to push you- though I confess I’m curious about the vow’s limits. ” Clarisse, as she communicates clearly in this piece and at her own blog, is a BDSMer, and a BDSM educator. For her (and for me), eliminating any one act from the palette of sexual intimacy is not really all that critical. She muses, for instance:
And maybe, just maybe, his vow allows him to practice BDSM … a girl can dream, right? But seriously, if we can do BDSM together, then I just might be his dream partner. I’d be happy to focus our sexual time on BDSM and foreplay, and to ignore “actual” sex indefinitely.
I’ll admit right up front that I don’t know what the takeaway from this is, but I feel like I have to comment on it. Sinclair Sexsmith is an excellent writer, and his thoughts on masculinity, coming from his (it’s a noun not an adjective) butch perspective, have got my attention. Sinclair’s piece When Men Wear Skirts is over at Carnal Nation, and it’s not brand new, but I’m just getting to it. He’s got other pieces on the topic, like the “Manifesto for Radical Masculinity” and “How To Make Masculinity Stop Hurting“.
Since I don’t know what to say, I’ll use some blockquotes, tell a few anecdotes, and probably conclude by pretending I have something to add. Here goes:
men still cannot wear skirts by choice. Sure, there are hakama, the Japanese wide-legged pants that samurai wore, and there are kilts (and the cultural assumptions around Scottish masculinity also say that Scotsmen are strong, capable, and prone to violence, so we dare not insult a man wearing a kilt)—but we can’t even call these garments a “skirt”, that word is too femininely gendered. Could we even entertain the idea of a man’s dress? Ha! A man in a dress—that is pretty much the (untasteful, probably) punchline to a joke, not an acceptable garment possibility for men.
There are even some particularly manly skirts out there: like Utilikilts, which are made in Seattle, where I went to college. I remember my college roommate, any time we saw a man wearing one, saying, “Awww. He needs a hug,” because it was obvious to her that his masculinity was compromised, and he now is sensitive, soft, and caring. Not manly, not studly, not just some guy in a skirt, but emasculated, because of his garment, because of his gender presentation.
Sure, perhaps not all men or masculine folks want to wear skirts—I sure don’t. I don’t really want to pursue baking, scrapbooking, or sewing as one of my hobbies, either. But feeling as though I cannot pursue any of these hobbies because of the social consequences makes me want to partake just to be a thorn in someone’s side. Everybody should have the choice to pursue whatever hobby, interest, activity, or presentation that catches their particular fancy.
[Emphasis supplied.]
The meat of the thing is that end bit about the constaints of the binary. If all this stuff that people do is coded, and our gender performance is policed for whether we’re doing it right, we’re all limited as people. That’s a losing proposition for everyone. Critically, it’s not an equally losing proposition, and some people end up relatively better even if absolutely worse, which is why we’re stuck with this shitty mess. Read more »
Yesterday I reviewed Dr. C.J. Pascoe’s book Dude, You’re A Fag. One thing I said I might do is deal at greater length with the public exhibition of symbolic heterosexuality among boys, and how it relates to rape culture. So, this post is that.
Pascoe notes a lot of distrurbing, invasive, violent sexual harassment by boys against girls in her year in a California high school. This behavior formed the material for the third chapter of the book, and she concluded with this observation:
As a feminist researcher I was saddened and quite frankly surprised to discover the extent to which this type of sexual harassment constituted an average high school day for youth at River High. Though much of the media and many cultural critics repeatedly claim that we have entered a postfeminist age, these scenes at River High indicate that this age has not yet arrived. In fact gender practices at the school – boys’ control of girls’ bodies, almost constant sexual harassment, and continual derogatory remarks about girls – show a desperate need for some sort of sexual harassment education and policy enforcement in schools.
P. 114.
Pascoe has some observations of how this culture of constant, low-level assault on girls’ autonomy relates to rape culture, though that is an aside to her book. I have been thinking about closely related issues lately so I have some thoughts of my own. In particular, I want to examine how these behaviors and norms relate to what we know about rapists in the population, particularly from the work of Lesak and McWhorter; see here and here.
The kinds of interactions she witnesses were somewhat shocking. To appreciate the flavor of it, I’ll quote several passages at length here: Read more »
Older guys, usually fathers themselves, tell the joke a lot, usually with the assumption that I either see the world the way they do, or that when I’m older I will. The joke is, “why are sons easier to raise than daughters? Because when you have a son, you only have to worry about one penis. When you have a daughter, you have to worry about all of them.”
Ha, ha. Like the jokes about meeting the boyfriend while cleaning shotguns, the stated or unstated premise of this entire family of humor is that I want to, and should take action to, prevent boys from having sex with my daughter. Read more »
Posted in Uncategorized on January 12, 2010 by Thomas
This fall, I read three books about masculinity, right in a row: Michael Kimmel’s Guyland, C.J. Pascoe’s Dude, You’re A Fag, and Norah Vincent’s Self-Made Man. Of the three, I was far and away the most impressed with Pascoe’s, so I’ll review that first, and then Vincent and Kimmel … maybe, when I get to it.
Here’s the headline: Pascoe spent a year immersed in a Northern California high school doing an ethnography, both of masculinity among boys, and among girls. The book was her dissertation; Dr. Pascoe is now on the Colorado College Sociology faculty [the book jacket said University of Puget Sound, which the author tells us is wrong, see comments]. She’s brilliant, the book is awesome, entertaining, and thought-provoking and I highly recommend it. There’s a brick wall of theory in the first twenty pages that will lose probably eighty percent of the readers who pick it up expecting something light and breezy; don’t be deterred! It’s worth working through that to get to the stuff inside.
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