Same Shit, Same Pile

At Alas, Richard Jeffrey Newman, in his series called, "My Daughter's Vagina," ends Part 7 with a pivotal comment: "...the question of how or why boys come to value manhood so highly is dwarfed by the question Miles asks, '[H]ow do they avoid it?'" I'm sorry I've been so busy at work and struggling with some relationship challenges to comment more on this series; it's rich in issues and emotionally provocative. But this one can't be missed.

A bit of context if you haven't read it - the post explores how to respond to aggressiveness, particularly the kind rewarded in and by boys and men. He talks of a damaged student delighting in the fantasy of fucking a woman to death and the one-on-one goading the student does to try to get him to admit that he actually has the same feelings. But he doesn't (none evinced in his writings here at any rate), and he refuses to satisfy the communion.

The pervasiveness of the subtle teaching that boys can't help behaving boyishly, and/or that boys must behave boyishly doesn't seem to be diminishing in the least. The expectation that all guys want to use the penis for harm, but they deny it to be politically correct, or worse, play the sensitive guy to get more chicks, may seem extreme, but I don't believe it's that uncommon. I've been told too many times by men that their behaviour must be excused because "All men humiliate strippers at clubs - or want to," or "All men would have an affair if they had the brains or balls for it." The implication here is that men who don't harm women just don't have the guts to act out their true nature. And that's pretty fucked-up if you ask me.

In a class recently, my own students were discussing whether their happiness was contingent on the happiness of others. If they had to choose, would they make another happy before themselves or do they come first. Not too unexpectedly, the guys said, "Easy - my happiness comes first." And the girls found the situation far more complicated needing myriad specifics and potential outcomes, or else immediately putting the others first. What bothers me most is that I was not at all surprised by the sex division on the issue.

My son is having serious anxiety attacks that have been keeping him home lately. Mainly he just feels the uncontrollable need to cry for extended periods, and he's terrified this will happen to him at school. I wasn't too concerned because the same thing happened to my daughter when she was in grade 6 - the hormones kick in and everything goes for a shit. Except she never missed school because of it. She wasn't worried about losing it in front of people, much less terrified of the possibility.

An article a few months back, about a girl raped by her mom's boyfriend, and the mom being most angry with her daughter, brought back some vicious memories. When I was a kid, before I got my first bra, my brother was just about finished high school, just hanging around waiting for life to happen, and he took to mauling me regularly. He was my first kiss, my first finger-fuck, my first dry hump experience. He tried more, but I was too small. I'd scream for help, but everyone was always so soundly asleep, unusually so, that nobody ever came to the rescue. One sister, in her 20s at the time, told me she heard, but didn't think she should get involved. But she told mom. So I talked to my mom directly about it. She said something that will never leave me: "Well, Jim used to steal to get attention you know."

As a child, he stole from her purse. She was so shocked, she took him to a therapist who advised her that it was his way of getting attention as the youngest of five kids in a row. Instead of punishing him, she was to spend more time with him, trying to meet his needs. Then I became the purse. And instead of concern over what was being taken, she was most concerned that she still wasn't meeting his needs adequately. This is just what guys do, and we should understand it, not attack it. She was still taking responsibility for his actions, so he didn't have to take responsibility himself, and she rewarded him with more attention. She was being the good mother, and he was being the confused son, and I didn’t really figure in the equation – so I’m understandably a little sensitive about similar scenarios.

I don't believe males and females are genetically created to be more or less concerned with others. I do believe that males, more than females, are still trained to make sure they come out ahead regardless of who they step along the way. This is not to say, of course, that I think most men are like this. But I think it takes people, male and female, with significant integrity to bypass this type of socialization. Boys are still the laughing stock if they cry, and they're still excused for their savage means of getting attention. And of all the things feminism has done for the world, I don’t see this one underlying definition of man being affected significantly.

I bristle a bit when people write about it all being a male problem or a feminist issue or a patriarchal conundrum. It is what it is. So how do we go from here? We're stuck with heroes defined by physical strength and aggressiveness. Our survivor shows are about physical challenges - man vs the environment, or about weaseling the way to the top - man vs man. We're not interested in co-operative challenges - Survivor En Masse - in which the object of the game is to keep everyone happily getting along for forty days and nights, and instead of majority-wins voting, everything has to be agreed upon unanimously, including how the money should be split, a tedious, time-consuming endeavour, not unlike some of the immunity challenges. For the camera, they can speed up the debate process highlighting only the major turns along the way. The real-house shows force people together, but the challenge there is to tolerate or bed one another, not to actually learn to respect one another. That's a key difference. En Masse, if anyone talks shit about someone else, it could threaten the entire group. In real life, it is threatening the entire group.

In place of rippling muscles, our new heroes must be well versed in authentic diplomacy with a courage of conviction, fearless in the face of emotional trauma, rather than the standard show of mastery over heights or exhaustion or wild animals or self-imposed hunger. And we need to be shown how it's done. We need to watch people figuring it all out, being coached to learn to relate on a different level for everyone's sake. Something like that. Because I also don't believe that a man really gains anything significant from the desire to harm women; it's just a way to cope with fear. I do believe men like this won’t change until they start to feel safe. But I don’t care to venture into how that can happen. Right now, I’d be pissed at the suggestion that I should help, but maybe a few decades from now I’ll postulate something.

Until we want this, until we glorify the challenges of interpersonal relationships, of warmth, of concession, forgiveness, kindness, we won't be able to begin to ignore the pull towards the aggressive and devious mindset that hungers for triumph over others, rather than with others. I can't stop being angry about it all, but to play a part in helping people avoid valuing a warped sense of manhood, I can persistently try to stop myself from reacting in a way that exalts or even tolerates the bullying path towards anyone's mock self-fulfillment.