I believe in equality, but you do yourself no favours by alienating men.
I consider myself an ally, but I refuse to support your nasty man-hating invective.
It’s people like you who give feminism a bad name.
I’m not saying these issues aren’t real, but you would win more men over to your cause if you were nicer to them.
A few months into the #MeToo movement, after I’d woken on a Saturday to read yet another piece about the ‘alleged’ repulsive, sexually abusive behaviour of a high-powered male celebrity (in this case, it was Dustin Hoffman), I fired off a couple of tweets in an attempt to express some of the frustration bubbling away inside me.
‘Dozens of women can expose the abuse of one man and other men will still insist that they must be lying or that we just can’t know,’ I wrote. ‘When that one man admits to it (like Louis C.K.), those same men are like, well he apologised, what more do you want? #silencebreakers.’
Still fuming, I followed up with: ‘And women still have to appease male egos around their belief in their inherent goodness for us to get them to even listen at all.’
For good measure, I then tweeted the succinct catchcry of the angry feminist: #cancelmen
Whoops!
Someone with as much experience as I have in the field of crushingly fragile male egos should have known that by doing this I broke accepted protocol. You’re not supposed to punctuate the rage you feel about men’s violence with sarcastic references to ridding the world of the male scourge. Your cynical attempts at joking make men feel marginalised. And isn’t that kind of the opposite of equality?
It didn’t take long for one man to reply, ‘I swear every time I start to see where Clem is coming from and even nod in agreement she dives right back into this shock value BS.’
It’s incredible that this male hypersensitivity continues to surprise me, but it does. For millennia women have been forced to live with the risk (and reality) of rape, assault, forced reproduction, imprisonment and even murder by men, yet we’re still expected to pepper every single thing we complain about with disclaimers. Even in agitating for our own liberation and freedom, we’re still forced to soothe male egos and make sure none of them walk away feeling bad, let alone feeling even remotely responsible for being part of the change that is so desperately needed in the world. If we fail to soothe, we’re subjected to a barrage of male anger and a litany of arguments explaining how it’s really our fault that most men are do-nothing fuckfaces when it comes to addressing gender inequality. They were totally planning on calling out their friend’s next rape joke, but then we did a misandry and now they just don’t fancy it.
Men: if you need women to be nice to you for you to accept the reality of our oppression, you are doing allyship wrong. No trophy for you!
If you’re a man reading this, you may be feeling defensive. It’s okay, I get it. It can be hard to hear that you’re not as great as you think you are. It doesn’t make you a terrible person to feel defensive and uncomfortable. It makes you a terrible person if you refuse to interrogate that discomfort and instead use it as a way of dismissing what it is you’re being told.
It takes a radical shift in thinking to understand that those people concerned with the problem of gender inequality, gendered violence and oppression are under no obligation to prioritise your ego. If you’ve never engaged with ideas like this before (or if you’ve only ever skimmed over the surface of them), it’s probably going to come as a big shock to you to hear that none of us care about how this makes you feel. But that doesn’t mean you can’t work on your feelings and your reaction and try to be an actually decent person as opposed to one who thinks men should be routinely praised for making it through a whole day without raping someone.
One of the things you need to fundamentally understand is that women already know all your arguments about why #notallmen are guilty of [insert any one of the multitude of things men are definitely guilty of doing to women]. The function of this kind of defence isn’t to tell us anything new, although you’d be surprised by how many guys seem to think they’re blowing our minds. In the great pantheon of crimes against women, of course Not All Men are guilty. There are nice guys out there, and by that I mean men who are actually nice and not just nice until the moment a woman questions their view of the world. But there are also guys who do nothing to constructively or substantially challenge the misogynist foundations of patriarchy that allow for this kind of behaviour to exist. They line up with their hands out for cookies and praise when it suits them, but they do nothing when it really counts. They don’t speak out against their friends when they abuse women. They don’t challenge the actions of their colleagues or their workplace superiors over sexist comments. They vote for men who work hard to introduce legislation that hurts women. They don’t call out their brothers’ misogyny. They side with their sons and say boys will be boys. They do nothing to demonstrate true allyship to women, but they’re sure as shit ready to wear that white ribbon for one day of the year if they think it’ll get them a public round of applause.
If I’m being gracious, I might say that this kind of casual arrogance is understandable. After all, the problems of toxic masculinity are cultural, not biological. Men have been assisted throughout countless generations to believe that their basic efforts and their acts of benevolent sexism are good enough, and it probably comes as a bit of a shock to suddenly (and without ceremony) be told that this isn’t the case. But if you men want to be better—if you truly want to live up to the promise that so many of you keep loudly telling women you have—your efforts to address gender inequality and patriarchal oppression have to extend much farther beyond saying a few choice words here and there and being nice to your girlfriend. Women have run out of time and energy to hold your hand through the hard parts of the class.
But one of the saddest parts of all of this is that many of us still will. It is a mark of either immense compassion or immense foolishness that women continue to throw ourselves into the act of loving men despite amassing a lifetime of experiences that tell us how dangerous this decision can be. I am increasingly disagreeing with the view that not all men are part of the problem, and it’s because I truly think most of them don’t understand that the problem is theirs to solve. I have a male partner whom I love, and I’m the mother of a son for whom I would die a million times over, but the gap between where we live in the world is treacherous and deep. Still, I and billions of women like me try to create safe passage between those two spaces every day. We are building the bridge, while they mostly just watch.
Under his eye, indeed.
In the end, this is perhaps #notallmen’s greatest insult. Women don’t need to be told to look for the goodness in men, because we try our damnedest to find it every day. We work hard to nurture it, even as we’re told to be grateful for it. For our own survival, women must believe that not all men are the enemy.
Yet we are not shown the same respect in return. We search for the humanity in men only to have them turn away from the reality of our pain. It can be pouring out of us in waves, but they’ll only consent to look at it if we promise not to hold them accountable for it or make them change anything about their lives in order to ease the suffering of ours. Brutality is not always about physical strength. As Twitter user @thetrudz once powerfully observed, ‘Not all men are actual rapists. Some are rape apologists. Some tell rape jokes. Some are victim blamers. Some are silent.’
No, Not All Men are a threat to women.
But we know that any man could be.
And that right there is the difference.
5
WE KNOW WHAT BOYS ARE LIKE
When I was twenty-one years old, I took a year off from university and moved to Japan to teach English. I was sent to Okinawa, a small island south of the Japanese mainland. Okinawa accounts for around 1 percent of Japan’s landmass, but it hosts 25 percent of the country’s US military bases. Basically, there are lots of men in uniform (which wa
s good for me, but that’s a story for another time).
My first night there, I found myself chatting to a marine outside a ramen shop. We started talking about the supposed differences between men and women, and how he thought the latter had a responsibility to act ‘respectably’ if they didn’t want to be regarded as sluts. ‘Women have to be careful,’ he explained to me. ‘They shouldn’t have sex with a lot of guys because it will make their vaginas loose.’ He went on to say that it was important for men to sleep with lots of women because then they’d know how to be good lovers. Convenient.
I think we can all agree that someone who thinks a vagina gets looser every time a woman has sex has no business being allowed near women let alone into their beds. The vagina is a muscle, not a piece of sugar taffy. A few dicks can’t upsize it from a studio apartment into a sprawling compound. If that were true, we could just keep all our loose change and keys in there, and we wouldn’t be so put out by the fact that none of our clothes are designed with pockets.
Unfortunately, a lack of basic understanding about how bodies work is part and parcel of the double standards that infect so much of society’s understanding of sex. In 2015, Victoria’s Fairhills High School ran a Christian sex education program teaching its year seven students that girls who have multiple sex partners ‘risk becoming like overused sticky tape’. The students were given a booklet titled Science & Facts, which included such well-known scientific facts as ‘girls are needier than boys’ and ‘sluts are gross’. (Okay, so it didn’t cite that second one in so many words, but I read between the lines.)
The whole ‘used vaginas are like old sticky tape’ analogy is not a new thing. It sits right up there with Old Okinawan Mate’s conviction that vaginas are stretched just a little bit further out of shape whenever they come into contact with a random schlong. Some years ago, students at an American high school made a short film for their health class which showed what happened to a piece of duct tape when it was stuck to different objects like the water cooler or a bin. Duct tape works by using an adhesive backing to stick itself to things, and it stands to reason that it becomes less effective with use. As the tape was transferred from item to item, it not only became less sticky, it also became dirtier and more laden with residue. The not so subtle suggestion was that sex diminishes the sanctity of girls’ bodies and turns them into garbage receptacles nobody wants to touch.
A similar experiment is often used to depict the ‘ugliness’ of a sexually active woman and the supposed lack of respect her behaviour evokes in others. In 2014, an article in Slate revealed that over 60 percent of schools in the Mississippi high school district were encouraging teachers to use ‘purity preservation exercises’. One such activity asks students to pass around a piece of chocolate to show how grubby and dirty it becomes the more people touch it. The chocolate is supposed to represent a girl’s body, and the unwillingness that class members have to eat it at the end of the activity is supposed to show how unattractive she becomes the more people she permits to fondle her. Other examples of this kind of not-at-all-scientific lesson compare sexually active girls’ bodies to chewed pieces of gum or dirty toothbrushes, and emphasise the disdain with which others will regard them if they allow themselves to become ‘used goods’.
It seems absurd that we’re still wrestling with institutional slut-shaming in this day and age, but I guess it’s not so surprising when you consider the fact that double standards about male and female sexuality are still uncritically presented as fact. The idea that ‘purity’ is at all related to the number of sexual partners a woman has is disgusting, as is the notion that her sexual decisions are the business of anybody else in the first place. Women’s bodies do not become dirtier and less valuable with the increase of sexual activity, and it isn’t our responsibility to shield ourselves from sex in order to ‘earn’ respect. These kinds of attitudes don’t protect women; they endanger us. And they endanger us because they send the message that sexually active women are less deserving of bodily autonomy, and therefore less capable of being sexually assaulted or violated. This is absolutely not the kind of message we should be sending to anyone, let alone children navigating adolescence and sexual desire.
But what I’m really interested in is how these retrograde beliefs about girls’ supposed ‘purity’ send a completely converse message about the sanctity of boys’ bodies and sexuality. It was the mother of a boy who first spoke out against the chocolate lesson, telling the Los Angeles Times that she believed it was designed ‘to show that a girl is no longer clean or valuable after she’s had sex—that she’s been used’. After all, who wants to touch a girl who’s gone and left herself smeared all over the hands of other men? Women . . . are . . . dirty.
Oh, but also remember that you can do whatever you like to dirty women who’ve let their sticky vaginas get tacky and unclean; they don’t respect themselves, so why should you be forced to respect them?
Slut-shaming women is a practice as old as time itself, and it hasn’t shown any signs of abating. In 2014, ACCESS Ministries were accused of distributing ‘Biblezines’ to Australian year six students that asked readers to consider ‘how far you can go before you are no longer pure’. Taking that dirty chocolate analogy even further (because why not?), the zines suggested, ‘Let’s put it this way: How much dog poop stirred into your cookie batter does it take to ruin the whole batter?’
Let’s put it this way, girls. If you have sex, you may as well be asking a boy to take a giant shit right inside you and then whenever you touch someone after that you’ll just be leaving your dirty, shit-stained hands all over them because you’re a dirty girl covered in shit.
Just as troubling were the pamphlet’s implied teachings about sexual assault. Girls were advised never to go braless or to wear low-slung jeans and tube tops, because they may be responsible for ‘putting sexual thoughts about [their bodies] into guys’ heads.’
Aside from the fact that there are few circumstances in which someone in a position of authority should be speaking to girls of any age about their nipples, the preoccupation with pubescent girls’ bodies and what they choose to do with them signifies an unhealthy obsession that ought to be questioned regularly and thoroughly. But again, what must also be critically examined is how this particular obsession with turning girls into sexual gatekeepers creates a universal excuse for those ‘insatiable’ boys who can’t help but constantly try to push past that border patrol.
Consider the phenomenon of ‘purity balls’ (which could perhaps more accurately be referred to as ‘creepy incest parades’). Your typical purity ball is basically a weird sort of daddy–daughter dance in which girls on the cusp of puberty dress up in white gowns and ‘pledge’ their virginity to Papa to look after until it can be passed along to their future husband as a ‘gift’. Although mostly popular in America’s Bible Belt, the balls are still held in forty-eight out of the fifty states.
It’s worth noting that no such equivalent exists for boys. Despite the founder of the purity ball movement arguing that it’s really more about ‘being a whole person’, there’s no doubt that the focus is on girls alone. (In fact, one of the few examples I could find of boys participating in something like this was focused less on pledging purity and more on learning how to respectfully treat the women in their lives—which is certainly a noble cause, but problematic in the context of how sex education is interpreted differently based on conservative moral standards.) The practice is deeply patriarchal and intensely disturbing. Participants are given mock wedding rings to wear on the fourth finger of their left hands while their daddies vow ‘before God’ to act as their protectors and authority until they can be passed along to another man to do the same thing.
There’s something more than vaguely disturbing in an activity that literally asks young girls to charge the protection of their vaginas to their fathers. In a Nightline report on the ceremonies, the head pastor of the Living Stones Church, Ron Johnson, is seen offering a ring to his twel
ve-year-old daughter while saying, ‘This is just a reminder that keeping yourself pure is important. So you keep this on your finger and from this point you are married to the Lord and your father is your boyfriend.’
Purity balls and chocolate Jesus analogies might be situated at the more extreme end of the spectrum here, but it all spawns from the same essential belief: that girls and boys experience sexuality differently, and that one group must protect themselves from the insatiable and wholly natural desires of the other (particularly in Australia, where men are basically thought to be powered by beer and boobs). Worse, that if girls fail to adequately guard themselves from the hot-blooded desire of boys (or when they inevitably realise as young adults that their thoughts on sex have evolved substantially from when they were twelve), then the shame and filth that evidently follows is theirs alone to bear.
She should have known better. Boys can’t control themselves when they get worked up. They get blue balls. It hurts them. They just want it so bad. That’s why girls can’t wear leggings or short shorts to school—because boys will get distracted and chew their own arms off in class.
Why are people so concerned with protecting young girls from sexual interaction, if not because it’s assumed that their sexuality is somehow different to that of boys? Girls are granted fewer rights of exploration and self-expression, and taught that their essential worth and value is tied up in how firmly in place they keep their knickers.
Boys, on the other hand, are shamed for precisely the opposite reasons. For not being sexual enough. For not wanting it all the time. For desiring intimacy and connection instead of an emotionless fuckfest. For needing to be in love in order to sleep with someone. For wanting to wait.
Boys Will Be Boys Page 12