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June 17 - June 22, 2024
Rape and sexual assault are about entitlement because men can—and typically do—get away with it. Of every 1,000 sexual assaults that even make it to the criminal justice system, approximately 975 perpetrators walk free.
As prosecutor Deborah Tuerkheimer explained to me, the reputation of a powerful man is enough to make the survivor’s pain just…disappear. There’s the assumption that she’ll get over it, so why derail some man with plans. This idea is entrenched in patriarchy, and it is wildly disturbing: Women are always deemed less essential, less important than men, even when these men are abusers.
When we establish girls as the more responsible party, the babysitters of this rapacious male appetite, we set them up to be blamed. We turn their bodies into the vehicles for their own destruction. We also deny the presence of their own desire, making it inherently deviant.
There’s never been an upside in reporting. There’s no catharsis. Every outcome is terrible. It’s retraumatizing, humiliating, as everyone’s “part” is litigated. Was it the “R” word? Was your “no” stated with enough vehemence? How hard did you fight? Were you drinking? What were you wearing? How many sexual partners have you had? Was it enough of a struggle? Did you fear for your life?
According to the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN), 80 percent of sexually violent crimes against women are perpetrated by people we know and sometimes love.
By supervising our reproductive powers, men can hold the line. There is no greater lever for keeping women in poverty, in subservience, than to deny them the ability to determine their procreative future.
The irony, of course, is that while the power resides with men, the burden of birth control—particularly abortions—rests on the shoulders of women.
The reality, I think, is that straight women don’t know what they want because they’ve been told they shouldn’t have any sexual wants at all. Our desire is off the charts simply because we haven’t been taught to map it.
Bader’s work is empowering because it suggests fantasy is a map to feeling safe within our sexuality, a path to reclaim our lust and sexual agency, to short-circuit our inhibitions—many of which are cultural—in order to get aroused. It may well be the means to regain our lustful birthright and enjoy sex rather than just endure it.
I reside in the land of incessant impatience, irritation, resentment, the slow and soft boil that captures so many frogs unaware.
Even our language condemns such women as ‘shrews,’ ‘witches,’ ‘bitches,’ ‘hags,’ ‘nags,’ ‘man-haters,’ and ‘castrators.’ They are unloving and unlovable. They are devoid of femininity…. It is an interesting sidelight that our language—created and codified by men—does not have one unflattering term to describe men who vent their anger at women. Even such epithets as ‘bastard’ and ‘son of a bitch’ do not condemn the man but place the blame on a woman—his mother!”
she paused to stress how perverse this language is—that it paints men as victims of women’s wrath, helpless against our anger. Yet how many men do you know who palm pepper spray as they walk to their cars at night, fearful of being attacked by a woman?
Instead, when our voices reach the crescendo of rage, we’re seen as being mad, in...
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As Rebecca Traister, author of Good and Mad, writes, “We are primed to hear the anger of men as stirring, downright American, as our national lullaby, and primed to hear the sound of women demanding freedom as the screech of nails on our national chalkboard.
Where Christianity came to reign, the church transformed many goddess constructs into terrifying witches, a warning to women everywhere about the monstrousness of our power.
In all this caretaking, we backburner our own needs, never lending them any heat, hoping, perhaps, that someone will notice our selflessness and reciprocate by taking care of us.
Fighting is shameful—particularly for women, where there are no cultural accolades for expression, just easy deprecations of us as scolds, nags, old ladies, and bitches.
While we recognize aggression in its physical and verbal forms, there’s a third type, social aggression, otherwise known as gossip, alliance building, silent treatment, and exclusion. We socialize boys to the first two types—“Boys will be boys.” We socialize girls to the third, the least confrontational.
Instead of “I am angry because they…,” he urges us to flip the script and say: “I am angry because I am needing….” This is not easy. As women, we have been trained to not overtly need anything—it is one thing to acknowledge needs exist and another to assert them confidently.
It’s scary as hell when things get heated, when you feel eyes turn to assess your moral character, when you feel compelled to respond immediately and to defend yourself. It’s terrible to feel judged.
We must prioritize the needs of those who are most marginalized, as a bottom-up movement and not top down. This can’t be about white women protecting their status—and then reaching out a hand.
It seems to me that sadness is the “sin” that’s most destructive to men precisely because it’s perceived as womanly, as weak. Because it slipped from the rules about morality, women are better at recognizing and then allowing it. Men, on the other hand, reject this emotion, or they repress it and let it cripple and destroy them.
Yes, women are capable of oppressive despair—it just doesn’t come for us with the double-barrel of shame.
Sadness is also typically followed by a cattle prod from a world that wishes you would just get over it already.
We live in a culture that exhorts us to be happy and suggests that consistent and constant happiness is attainable and natural through optimistic thinking and positivity.
I love the philosopher Alan Watts’s definition of the two. He writes: We must here make a clear distinction between belief and faith, because, in general practice, belief has come to mean a state of mind which is almost the opposite of faith. Belief, as I use the word here, is the insistence that the truth is what one would “lief” or wish it to be. The believer will open his mind to the truth on condition that it fits in with his preconceived ideas and wishes. Faith, on the other hand, is an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be. Faith has no
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I wonder if a desire for control, the belief that control is possible, is why so many of us—men in particular—do not permit our own sadness to emerge.
In past decades, women have frequently been encouraged to behave more like men: to grab and wield power, to rule. The suggestion is that we can take power and sanitize it with our gender, make it softer and more gentle, somehow less patriarchal.
To abide in business, women are behaving like men—choosing power and control over humanness and fallibility and the full expression of feeling.
This is the ‘masculinity’ that our society breeds—the male who feels at home in the world of things and abstract ideas but who has little empathetic connection to others, little attunement to his own internal world, and little willingness or capacity to ‘hang in’ when a relationship becomes conflicted and stressful.” The muscles of connection and intimacy atrophy—or fail to develop in the first place.
The science suggests that atrophy and underdevelopment are the right words, as boys are more sensitive, needy, attached than their sisters, not less.
As therapist Terry Real explains, “Little boys and little girls start off with similar psychological profiles. They are equally emotional, expressive, and dependent, equally desirous of physical affection. At the youngest ages, both boys and girls are more like a stereotypical girl. If any differ...
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As professor bell hooks explains in The Will to Change, “By supporting patriarchal culture that socializes men to deny feelings, we doom them to live in states of emotional numbness. We construct a culture where male pain can have no voice, where male hurt cannot be named or healed….
Studies indicate that both boys and girls have a clear sense of which sex they are from about the age of two.” The belief that maleness must be “achieved” persists, though, and I have to wonder if it’s because masculinity as our society perceives it is a mask anyway, a coerced act of disconnection, as if to be a man requires playing one on TV.
Our lack of equity, particularly the dominance of powerful white men, continues to be embedded shrapnel that keeps us in cycles of pain.
