See What You Made Me Do

by Jess Hill

  Moments of ‘induction’ like this are what Real calls the ‘normal traumatisation of boys’.9 ‘The way we “turn boys into men” is through injury,’ he writes. ‘We pull them away from their own expressiveness, from their feelings, from sensitivity to others. The very phrase “Be a man” means suck it up and keep going. Disconnection is not fallout from traditional masculinity. Disconnection is masculinity.’ In this model of manhood, there is no society. It’s every man for himself, dog eat dog.

  When your identity and power rests on rejecting femininity, misogyny can be worn like a coat of armour. The more boys openly hold women and femininity in contempt, the less likely they’ll be pegged as a sissy or a fag. This is what the Australian novelist Tim Winton hears every day while surfing. ‘These boys in the surf. The things they say to me! The stuff I hear them saying to their mates! Some of it makes you want to hug them. Some of it makes you want to cry. Some of it makes you ashamed to be a male. Especially the stuff they feel entitled or obliged to say about girls and women.’ In their unguarded moments, Winton says, these boys are ‘lovely … dreamy … vulnerable’. But these qualities are being ‘shamed out of them’ every day. ‘There’s a constant pressure to enlist, to pull on the uniform of misogyny and join the Shithead Army that enforces and polices sexism,’ Winton said in a 2018 speech. ‘Boys and men are so routinely expected to betray their better natures, to smother their consciences, to renounce the best of themselves and submit to something low and mean. As if there’s only one way of being a bloke, one valid interpretation of the part, the role, if you like.’10

  Kimmel explains: ‘We’ve constructed an idea of masculinity that [sets] individual autonomy as the highest goal. So you hate those parts of yourself that aren’t autonomous; that aren’t individual. And then you see this living embodiment out in front of you – a woman – who embodies all the qualities you so hate in yourself … They are the ones who have these qualities, you hate those qualities, and therefore you hate them, and you get angry at them for eliciting those very qualities from you. You make me weak in the knees, you make me feel these things that I didn’t want to feel – love and tenderness and all of that stuff. I hate you for it.’

  Bruce, a Melbourne man in his forties, says he’s struggled his whole life against this straitjacket of masculinity. ‘I’ve kind of spent a lot of my life feeling disappointed that I never stepped on a grenade, or stood in front of a wall of bullets and saved somebody,’ he says. Bruce has two grown children who no longer speak to him, because of the violence he used against their mother. Slaps, mostly, but also rage – shouting down the house, smashing things. ‘I threw myself against walls, I punched walls, and I also – it’s really hard to say – I … I did attack my ex-wife. In the beginning it happened a couple of times a year. By the end, it was happening weekly.’ Since his wife left him thirteen years ago, Bruce has spent hundreds of hours in therapy rooms, trying to vanquish what he calls ‘the monster in the basement’. ‘It really, really profoundly sucks to be terrified of your own thoughts, and terrified of your own behaviour,’ he says.

  Bruce was taught to be terrified of his emotions when he was a little boy. ‘The earliest memory I have is of being in the backyard and starting to cry. I ran into the house, into my bedroom, and closed the door. I didn’t want my dad to hear me crying, because I had a pretty good idea of what was going to happen next,’ he says. ‘When he came into my bedroom and yelled at me not to cry, I remember thinking, can’t you tell that you’re making it worse? He said, “I’ll give you something to cry about,” smacked me and left. I remember deciding that I was never going to cry in front of him again.’ Bruce took his pent-up sadness to school, where he ‘spent a lot of time crying, until the teachers told me you’re not supposed to cry. This was the 1980s, and boys don’t cry. It was a very simple lesson I was supposed to learn, and I learned it.’

  Bruce’s father was an Australian diplomat, who was ‘tremendously successful at doing things to promote peace in the world’. Within the four walls of the family home, however, he was ‘terrifying’. Retreating into his teenage universe, Bruce became obsessed by computers, and was determined to be the next Steve Jobs. In this private world, he cast himself as the hero: a true believer in justice and good deeds, who would prove to the world he was better than everyone else. But as he became bigger, and his father grew older, Bruce got his first taste for the power of violence. ‘I hit him back,’ he says. ‘That was a delightful powerful feeling that I was profoundly ashamed of. My desperate need to not admit to that made it harder to manage later on, when I started being violent towards my wife.’

  When Bruce was nineteen, he fell for a woman who’d moved to the city to flee her own violent father. Before long, when Bruce felt he was being disrespected, he resorted to violence. ‘She said something that offended me. I didn’t like that, and I wanted to bring the situation under control. I don’t actually have my own memory of what happened next, but she claims I slapped her in the face, and I believe her. Back then, though, I was angry with her for some time for suggesting that I had done this horrible thing. The idea that I had done that was so profoundly offensive to me. But I believe her now.’

  When Bruce’s girlfriend announced soon afterwards that she was going to leave him, Bruce spontaneously burst into tears. He says that when she challenged him to at least get angry and ‘prove he cared’, he obliged. ‘On that occasion, I worked up to it, and ended up raising my voice. It came more naturally after that.’

  Once they had children together, Bruce says he was determined to make it work, no matter how bad it got. ‘I was trapped in the relationship because I was never going to abandon my kids. My father had got a divorce and had kids afterwards, and I was never going to repeat the things he had done.’

  Bruce doesn’t relate to the idea that underlying all domestic abuse is a basic disrespect or contempt for women. ‘Being told I hated women did not help at all.’ His major problem, he says, is that he had no idea how to properly express his emotions. ‘If I was lost and happy, then I was in awe of the mystery of woman, but if I was lost and unhappy, then my very limited vocabulary could lead me relatively quickly to taking control and using the tools that I had.’

  For a while, Bruce used this lack of emotional vocabulary as a kind of power. ‘If you’ve only got two modes of communicating with someone – one of which is a polite request, the other being violence – the polite request is the threat of violence. And so you can then maintain the self-image of a person who is unfailingly polite, while everyone responds very quickly and actively to everything you ask for.’

  When I spoke to Bruce in 2016, his second marriage was ‘on the rocks’, he was still terrified of his own violence, and was having suicidal thoughts. In the three years since, however, things have turned around. With the support of a ‘team’ of therapists (‘I’m extremely fortunate to be able to afford a team!’), Bruce has been able to return to work, and has developed the ability to lose his composure without becoming violent. ‘I might cry or raise my voice, but the days of violent and threatening behavior seem to be over, although I’ll remain on guard against them for the rest of my life,’ he says. ‘And the second marriage is getting stronger every week.’

  *

  Patriarchy trains into men a deep, shame-ridden urge to put women in their place, and to prevent them from exposing male tenderness. This power over women has always had an erotic quality, but never has it been exploited and transmitted like it is today. In pornography, capitalism has taken the erotic charge of female subordination and turned it into a multibillion-dollar industry.

  The past twenty years has seen hardcore porn – known as ‘gonzo’ – go mainstream. Extreme and inhumane sex acts like gagging, ejaculating on a woman’s face, and double penetration are now considered unremarkable, and in a lot of pornography, aggression is now the default setting. Porn actor Anthony Hardwood told Australian sex-educator Maree Crabbe that this modern porn is worlds apart from what he was mak
ing back in the mid-1990s. ‘When I started, it was like, very lovey-dovey sex, not tough like “gonzo”,’ said Hardwood. ‘After three years they wanted to get more energy, more rough. They do like one girl with, you know, like four guys and they just take over and destroy her … It’s like we want to kill the girl on set.’ Another veteran porn actor, Nina Hartley, told Crabbe, ‘In the last ten years, there’s been an increase in what I would call the aggression that we see on camera.’11

  Not all porn is degrading to women, but a great deal of it is. As federal research body the Australian Institute of Family Studies found, ‘the most dominant, popular and accessible pornography contains messages and behaviours about sex, gender, power and pleasure that are deeply problematic. Physical aggression (slapping, choking, gagging, hair pulling) and verbal aggression such as name calling, predominantly done by men to their female partners, permeate pornographic content. In addition, this aggression often accompanies sexual interaction that is non-reciprocal (e.g. oral sex) and where consent is assumed rather than negotiated.’12 Choking – which police see as a red flag for domestic homicide – is a common feature in hardcore porn. ‘Women are choked with anything from a penis to a fist to the point of gagging, and in some cases almost passing out,’ writes Gail Dines, professor emerita of sociology and women’s studies at Wheelock College in Boston. ‘The victim obviously can’t speak during these acts because she is choking, so it is typically not until the end of the scene that she says, often in a hoarse voice, how much she “loved it”. Meanwhile, she looks exhausted, upset, and – in some cases – distraught.’13 In a recent study# of the top fifty most popular pornographic videos, 88 per cent of scenes were found to include physical aggression (acts like gagging, slapping or choking), and 94 per cent of that was directed at women.14 ‘In almost every instance,’ adds Crabbe, ‘women were portrayed as though they either didn’t mind or liked the aggression.’15

  As Dines documents in her landmark book Pornland, a lot of modern porn creates a fantasy world for men in which women are turned on by their own degradation: they deserve to be abused, they want to be punished, and there’s no limit to what they’re willing to accept. This fantasy sex, she writes, ‘looks more like sexual assault than making love’. Male performers, too, are commonly reduced to patriarchal caricatures: ‘Men in porn are depicted as soulless, unfeeling, amoral life-support systems for erect penises who are entitled to use women in any way they want.’16

  This kind of porn is everywhere, for adults and children alike; the average age Australian boys start watching porn is thirteen.17 For many – especially young – people, porn is fundamentally changing the way they have sex. The Children’s Commissioner for England has reported ‘frequent accounts of both boys’ and girls’ expectations of sex being drawn from the pornography they had seen … We also found compelling evidence that too many boys believe that they have an absolute entitlement to sex at any time, in any place, in any way and with whomever they wish. Equally worryingly, we heard that too often, girls feel they have no alternative but to submit to boys’ demands, regardless of their own wishes.’18

  Research is inconclusive on whether there is a direct link between men and boys watching hardcore porn and committing sexual violence against women. But data from rape and sexual assault centres like the Gold Coast Centre Against Sexual Violence shows that in the past five years the severity of sexual violence they are dealing with has increased exponentially.19 Director Di McLeod told the Problem with Porn conference in Queensland in 2016 that sexual injuries that were once uncommon are now an everyday story involving women of varied ages and diverse backgrounds. Increasingly, these injuries are requiring treatment from emergency departments on the Gold Coast; in the previous five years, the centre had seen a 56 per cent increase in referrals from emergency departments. ‘These levels of physical and sexual violence are bordering on and including behaviour that would meet the criminal code definition of torture.’ It was common, said McLeod, for victims to report that the partner who had savagely abused them was also a regular consumer of pornography.

  If we can agree that seeing uncritical portrayals of violence, racism and sexism have an impact on our cultural norms – and should therefore be closely monitored, perhaps regulated – then surely there is something to be said about what happens to men and boys who frequently masturbate to the sight of women being aggressively fucked, sometimes to the point of tears and vomiting – when all the while those women are portrayed as liking it. If the National Plan to Reduce Violence Against Women and their Children sees increasing respect for women as a key strategy to end domestic abuse, the endless wave of misogynistic porn is a heavy tide to swim against.

  *

  We say we want men to be more compassionate, more open, more vulnerable. But do we really want that? Do heterosexual women find vulnerability sexy? And are we ready to accept men into conversations about gender that have largely, for the past fifty years, been our sanctuary away from men?

  Women have good reason to be wary of male converts. Too often, men say all the right things about rejecting patriarchy, but fail to do any work on themselves. But other men – some of whom spend whole careers dedicated to analysing their own privilege and advocating for women and children – find themselves relegated to the fringes by a small faction of feminists who are, in the words of feminist writer bell hooks, ‘anti-male’20. Often, these are women who have been seriously harmed and traumatised by men’s violence. They are victims and survivors of child abuse, rape and domestic abuse, and they have channelled their fear and revulsion of men into a vengeful fury. Their fury is legitimate and understandable, but it warps the debate. Not all men are oppressors, and not all women are victims.

  Outside the realm of gender politics, in bedrooms across Australia, we are deeply confused about how we want men to behave. The truth is, many women struggle to feel compassion for men’s vulnerability. Here’s bell hooks again, from her stunningly brave book The Will to Change: ‘Most women do not want to deal with male pain if it interferes with the satisfaction of female desire. When the feminist movement led to men’s liberation, including male exploration of “feelings”, some women mocked male emotional expression with the same disgust and contempt as sexist men. Despite all the feminist longing for men of feeling, when men worked to get in touch with feelings, no one really wanted to reward them. In feminist circles men who wanted to change were often labeled narcissistic or needy. Individual men who expressed feelings were often seen as attention seekers, patriarchal manipulators trying to steal the stage with their drama.’21

  I know I’ve struggled with this. When my husband tells me how stressed and tired he feels, or wants to talk about problems in our relationship, part of me can feel repulsed. I want to tell him to just suck it up and deal (and sometimes, to my shame, that is what I tell him). If he’s in a difficult place emotionally, I’ll happily talk about it for hours. But if it’s a chronic problem – especially one that has anything to do with a failure on my part – it can really push my buttons. Once, when he cried during an argument, I accused him of using his emotions to manipulate me. Deep down, beneath my wall of defence, I knew that wasn’t true. But part of me wants my husband to always be my rock; the one who supports me when I feel afraid or distressed, not the other way round. None of this is coherent, of course, because the traits I most love in him are his emotional tenderness, the way he is moved by art and literature, and how he can sometimes explain what I’m feeling better than I can. bell hooks gets the tension exactly right when she explains this kneejerk response as the result of women’s own patriarchal training. Men’s pain – especially in relationships – sounds to us ‘like an indictment of female failure. Since sexist norms have taught us that loving is our task whether in our role as mothers or lovers or friends, if men say they are not loved, then we are at fault; we are to blame.’22 This sense of failure for women is a major trigger point for shame – an unbearable feeling we desperately want to go away. How much
room, then, can we allow for men to be truly vulnerable?

  In her TED talk on shame, Brené Brown talks about the moment she realised that in her four years researching shame and vulnerability, she hadn’t thought to consider its impact on men. Brown said subsequent research had shown her that ‘men are often pressured to open up and talk about their feelings, and criticised for being emotionally walled-off; but if they get too real, they are met with revulsion’. When this realisation dawned on her, she exclaimed aloud, ‘Holy shit! I am the patriarchy!’23

  Patriarchy is not just a system populated by men; it’s one we’ve all been raised in. As women, we have to do our own work to reject and replace the faulty norms patriarchy has seeded in us. But acknowledging that women have their own work to do doesn’t mean for one second that it’s the job of women to fix abusive men. Only men can fix men. As the feminist author Laurie Penny tweeted, ‘Men’s healing should not have to come at the price of women’s pain, ever … I know too many women who have worn themselves out trying to understand the men who hurt, harassed and abused them, believing that love and empathy would cure their hatred. If that was all it took, we’d have a better world.’24 Nor is it enough for men simply to ‘get in touch with their feelings’ and learn to be more vulnerable. Some of the most abusive men could sit and talk about their feelings all day long – and will demand that their partners put aside their own needs and pay full attention.

  The unifying ingredient among abusers is a radioactive sense of entitlement. The animating force behind their violence is the belief that their feelings are more important than those of their partners and children. Confronted with feelings of discomfort or shame, abusive men will do whatever it takes to avoid them and move to a feeling of power. When this combines with a sense of entitlement to women’s bodies, and the patriarchal belief that women should put aside their own needs – for comfort, safety and independence – in order to meet the needs of men, the outcome can be catastrophic.