Go get ‘em!

Men who are raped are a strange lot. In the larger view of the constant daily rape of women, it’s not much of an issue at all. Most feminists (I use “feminists” to identify humans with uteruses, versus Feminist Freds, who are simply friendly to the idea of feminist revolution) will snort derisively at the the very thought of wasting time considering the circumstances and particulars of men who are raped. But on this blog, it’s a useful tool for helping men to understand the depth of feelings our oppressed women friends experience.

Empathy and understanding of what constitutes rape can be gleaned from a consideration of men who are raped. Piercing the thick skin of men who live in a bubble of male privilege and who have been trained from birth to never, ever allow themselves to see anything through the eyes of women, is an almost insurmountable struggle. 

Feminists grow up in a culture that is based entirely on the viewpoint of mankind being male. This makes it hard to see how one-sided the ability to understand what the other gender experiences is for men. Women grow up almost completely within a male identity, and are acutely aware of their femininity as different from humanity. Women don’t have to try to imagine the world from a man’s viewpoint, it is shoved down their throats constantly, because male is the default state of humanity. Women see themselves as men plus femininity, because they are human, and to be human is to be a man.

This is how I started to understand one of the proofs that women are oppressed. Realizing that women are allowed, even forced, to see things as if through a man’s eyes, and that most women see most things as if they too were men and that their own oppression was to be defended and encouraged, was a big step in understanding why not all women are feminists, even though it seems paradoxical that women would fight their own liberation from oppression. What is normal in a patriarchal culture like ours is to see yourself as a male, as right, as on top, as a winner. To identify with and collaborate with the men who are the eternal winners, the default top dogs, is only natural in those who see the world as a contest where you seek to win and someone else must thereby lose. Getting as far up the pyramid as you can means you must justify your allegiance to the winners who can reward you with a place beneath them, but above many others.

Men, though, are so actively discouraged from seeing anything through women’s eyes, from any hint of empathy or understanding, that women are probably incapable of even guessing at the barriers that men erect and defend against any consideration of the female point of view.

Men feel that to open yourself to the female viewpoint, you must feminize yourself, you must consider yourself inferior to men, you must be a loser in life’s hierarchy, literally debase yourself to an extent that women would find just as difficult to consider, since it is deeply insulting to women to admit that seeing the world through women’s eyes is anything like this. Women, who prefer to see the world from a male viewpoint, but who also know where they stand and what being a woman can mean in relation to the threat of male domination without male protection, would prefer to imagine that men see themselves as they see themselves, as men with additional aspects, rather than as men see them, as unfathomable people who are less than men because they exist to be used as domestic servants or to fill sexual needs. And men see femininity as mysterious and incomprehensible mostly because they can’t allow themselves to enter into any kind of consideration of living a life as a number two human to men’s number one, a life of domestic drudgery or of being tricked, pursued and used sexually by men.

When men are raped, a window opens up into the world as women see it, since women are quite familiar with the constant threat of rape they walk around with. Men, unless considering jail time, are never in any fear of rape. Men will even joke loudly and with great joy that they would like to be raped, since for them, rape is a wonderful thing that happens when a person gets what they really want anyway: sex. 

Lately my buddy Misogynist Mike was telling me some stories about his days hanging around New Orleans, crashing at the tiny apartment of a plump little stripper named Sheila. After a few days, Sheila made some overtures to him indicating that she would be open to sex. Mike was younger than her, and young enough to see an older woman as still slightly mom-like; intimidating, asexual, threatening – especially since he had a roof over his head thanks to her graciousness, and she had the power to make him homeless if crossed. He had sex with her, even though he wasn’t at all attracted to her, even though it made him feel more vulnerable and dependent. He had a hard time understanding these feelings, except that she wasn’t that good looking. His feeling of discomfort while he was having sex with her was a powerful emotion, though.

“She raped me, man!” he finally realized, happy at the thought he was once good looking and desirable enough to be raped, since men see being raped as a good thing. “I didn’t want to, but I was afraid she’d throw me out in the rain that very night, so I did it any way. That’s rape!”

Yes, it was rape, and if he wasn’t so happy at the idea that rape wasn’t so bad when you were a man being raped by a woman, he might have been able to take it to an understanding of how constantly women feel threatened by the same kind of rape. Sex without true attraction, with someone who intimidates and threatens you with dire social problems like hunger and homelessness; we call that marriage.

My friend Twisty had a very intelligent commentator on this post say:

Women need to know men hate them… [their] refusal to accept men’s hatred [is] why patriarchy is so fearsome.

The essential confusion that analyzing gender creates doesn’t come from nature, from the physical body that can be typed as female or male, but from the cultural construction of femininity and masculinity. You can truthfully state that men hate women, but when you say men you are speaking of a cultural construction called men that includes a great many people who disagree on what masculinity is and how they need to express it. The same with women.

Under the cultural role that men take on to become what they consider manly, there is still a human being who is capable of having normal emotions about other humans. Even the manliest man will allow himself human feelings in his dealings with certain other men, like fathers and sons can have. So we become confused by the human apart from the role he plays. The human may be decent, and feel decent, and still will aspire to being manly in many ways, some more destructive than others, but all of them just as superficial as the social construction of masculinity.

So we have this deep gut feeling towards the humans we know with male parts who we love, and can still feel the unthinking hatred of the superficial acting out of masculine tropes that define us and that men use to define themselves. Therefore many men aren’t lying when they say that they don’t hate women. Under the cultural role they play, they really don’t hate women. But when you spend your life striving to be manly and think that women want you to be manly, you spend your life acting in ways that degrade and devalue women, and approve of all of it completely, thinking that your underlying feelings are more essential and true than your actions and words and assumptions.

As long as you identify yourself as a man, and define your personality on a foundation of adherence to cultural norms for masculinity, you act and think in ways that assume your superiority over women. Your assumptions about masculinity could marginalize women sexually if you are gay, for example, but you would still be thinking of yourself as a class of person who is male, and regard women as essentially feminine, and still end up in the same place: On top of all of them, as part and parcel of being in the same class with straight men.

It’s interesting to note that straight men lump gay men in with women, since both are regarded as passive recipients of aggressive male sexual attention. Both are seen as encouraging and even demanding masculinity from men as a prerequisite for relationships of any kind. Gay men can accept a manly man’s straightness if he presents himself as too straight to consider a partner, through the expression of heightened masculinity, for example. And straight men distinguish between gay men and women in terms of sexual preference that they present as masculinity. Some straight men see themselves as so masculine that they can have sex with men or women, seeing every other human as a target for sexual aggression. Within gay relationships there are often subtle variations on masculine and feminine roles that are used to recreate the status of pursuer and pursued, with varying levels of flexibility due to the freedom to identify as masculine, feminine, or opt out of it altogether and try for humans together.

It’s easy to see why feminist women are somewhat for lesbian relationships, since the possibility to transcend gender roles is higher between two people who are both physically identified as not being masculine, and masculine is the default superior sex in cultural terms. But to aspire to creating genderless roles between men and women is important for many women and men. So even though men hate women, and most of the definitions of men contain seeds of a broad assumption of superiority, especially when viewed in contrast to feminine identity, a human who rejects masculinity can aspire to transcend this hatred by removing and living without masculine traits.

The problem with doing this is that we tend to see losing masculinity as acquiring femininity, as if there were only two ways of existing as a human being. What helps men to realize that this is not right, and if this is what you’re doing, you’re doing it wrong, is to also reject femininity. All of the traits of any human that we assign to each sex belong equally to all humans. It’s just that aligning ourselves with a sex to assert a superiority over the other sex is wrong. If you want to rid yourself of the burden of masculinity, you have to give up the expectation of femininity. And embrace mutual humanity in the place of these externally-imposed cultural roles.

Large and in charge

My little girl is getting close to five now and I’ve read her hundreds of children’s books, from the bookstore and from the library. I’ve also watched hundreds of hours of children’s TV with her. I have no objective statistics to back up my general finding, but I defy anyone to disprove that sex bias is universal in children’s education and entertainment.

I can pick up five books at random and every character in them, even if they are androgynous-looking animals, will be male. In the remainder of rare books with female character, she is never the lead character, always a character observed by the main character or supporting the main character. It’s not that the girls are bad characters. It’s simply that they never have the center stage, unless it’s a girl book about princesses or something like that. 

The default character in children’s literature is definitely male. Considering how many women write children’s books, it’s almost tragic. Many men and women in our world today will look askance at this obvious truth and ask me “What’s wrong with that?” Well, it’s fundamental training to put girls in their place, for one thing. Book after book celebrates and demonstrates that only men can have the center stage, only men count, even that only men exist. 

My little girl really doesn’t like boys that much. She’s not friends with any of the boys at her school and refuses to wear boy colors, which are pathetically limited and easily-identifiable by any parent: Dark blue, brown, black, and anything with violent graphics or male superheroes. I can’t blame her a bit. When I was a kid I didn’t have to wear ultra-butch clothes to try to force me from seeming the slightest bit feminine, or insufficiently masculine, whichever the case may be.

So she has me change the gender of characters she likes to female when it makes sense to her, such as when they are genderless animals, and there is no conceivable reason why they should be one sex or the other. And this doesn’t even begin to even the score. But she likes it, so I do it happily. This is something she decided on her own, with no prompting from her mom or me. 

When you consider that boys do worse in school than girls, while being the center of attention on shows and books for kids, you have to wonder if we were to switch the bias whether the boys would start to do better than the girls.