menby

REMINDER: CHAPTERS 6 AND 7 DISCUSSION IN 3 DAYS (12/18)

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In patriarchal culture everyone is encouraged to see the penis, even the penis of a small boy, as a potential weapon.

During these formative years, when a boy’s sexual lust is often intense, he learns that patriarchal culture expects him to covertly cultivate that lust and the will to satisfy it while engaging in overt acts of sexual repression.

The boy learns as well that females are the enemy when it comes to the satisfaction of sexual desire.

Shedding light on the negative impact of this socialization in the essay “Fuel for Fantasy: The Ideological Construction of Male Lust,” Michael S. Kimmel demonstrates that sexual repression creates the world in which males must engage constantly in sexual fantasy, eroticizing the nonsexual.

Men’s sense of sexual scarcity and an almost compulsive need for sex to confirm manhood feed each other, creating a self-perpetuating cycle of sexual deprivation and despair.

It's almost as if this western liberal patriarchal culture encourages stochastic SA.

I've written in past threads that there wasnt much "violence" from my father, outside of a "normal" level of spanking. He definitely could be emotionally abusive at times, mostly through subtle belittling.

But what he did have in full force I believe is a need for absolute control, and the ability to lash out when he couldnt get it. Usually, he searched for control of the trivial, and this is where i see myself. Things like what brand of something we buy, where we shop, the thermostats setting, where stuff goes away - things that i dont even communicate openly but find myself irked when random stuff isnt how i wouldve liked it. If I can blame my mother-in-law, im especially angry (i harbor resentment toward her, and i am trying to see how my patriarchical thinking feeds it). And especially if my wife makes decision involving finances, i am resistive and dont trust her. I dont "lash out" except for just becoming irritable and being a general dick, which usually leads to a fight (bc my wife is not stupid and knows something is up).

And i could totally keep saying that its because of my ADHD, its just how i am, and make those excuses. But i need to learn to cede control of things to my wife, she is half of our household and can make decisions without me, just as i make so many without her. I make mistakes and stupid decisions with our finances constantly, she has every right to also make financial decisions without my input or my fighting.

Regarding the sex chapter...our sex life has not been so great lately. Probably to the level of needing couples counseling. I am only recently unravelling how fucked my view of sex has been, growing up in purity culture, with my dad being a sex addict, myself retreating to the dark corners of pornhub from an early age with great frequency, its just a mess of mostly shame and fear. And its hard to open up about. Ive wished i could just snap myself into a stud, initiating sex daily and making her orgasm three times, rather than just being a fat, out of shape loser that will leave her needing a vibrator anyways.

Im sounding negative and i am venting, but this chapter did give me hope that we can return to a healthy, mutually pleasurable intimate life. I need to remember to just focus on the present and cultivate intimacy holistically, and i also need to work on being emotionally open and not afraid to discuss stuff like this with her. If i dont work at these things, i dont know how happy or long-lived our relationship can actually be.

ITS DISCUSSION TIME FRIENDS!!

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In chapter 4 hooks brings up another example of how masc views on violence are directly shaped by patriarchy, similar to the story about the survey earlier in the book:

When researchers looking at date [SA] interviewed a range of college men and found that many of them saw nothing wrong with forcing a woman sexually, they were astounded. Their findings seemed to challenge the previously accepted notion that [SA] was aberrant male behavior. While it may be unlikely that any of the men in this study were or became [sexual assaulters], it was evident that given what they conceived as the appropriate circumstance, they could see themselves being sexually violent. Unconsciously they engage in patriarchal thinking, which condones [SA] even though they may never enact it.

This is a patriarchal truism that most people in our society want to deny. Whenever women thinkers, especially advocates of feminism, speak about the widespread problem of male violence, folks are eager to stand up and make the point that most men are not violent. They refuse to acknowledge that masses of boys and men have been programmed from birth on to believe that at some point they must be violent, whether psychologically or physically, to prove that they are men.

Very interesting to read in the wake of MeToo and #NotAllMen, even 20 years ago hooks was calling out the self-centered dorks who refuse to listen to women who’ve been saying with their whole chests how bad sexual violence is. This is another of those passages that I wish all mascs would read to understand that even if you have relatively good intentions, even if you are not an SA'er or a violent misogynist, you are not immune to patriarchal brainworms, especially if you haven’t made the effort to purge them.

Her description of how patriarchal mothers shape their sons’ worldviews is particularly fascinating to me:

Many teenage boys have violent contempt and rage for a patriarchal mom because they understand that in the world outside the home, sexism renders her powerless; he is pissed that she has power over him at home. He does not see her autocratic rule in the home as legitimate power. As a consequence, he may be enraged at his mom for using the tactics of psychological terrorism to whip him into shape and yet respond with admiration toward the male peer or authority figure who deploys similar tactics. In patriarchal culture boys learn early that the authority of the mother is limited, that her power comes solely from being a caretaker of patriarchy. When she colludes with adult male abuse of her son, she (or later a symbolic mother substitute) will be the target of his violence.

Reading this made something click in my head. Women married to patriarchal men and even single mothers who haven’t excised their patriarchal brainworms play a key role in perpetuating the culture, a point which hooks has made many times already but seeing a clear example laid out like this just makes it all make so much more sense. The anecdote about young boys watching Incredible Hulk and saying they’d “smash their mommies” is pretty horrifying and illustrates the point so distinctly. And she makes it clear that it's the responsibility of both men and women to work towards ending this cycle of “normal traumatization”.

In How Can I Get Through to You? Terrence Real includes a chapter titled “A Conspiracy of Silence,” in which he emphasizes that we are not allowed in this culture to speak the truth about what relationships with men are really like. This silence represents our collective cultural collusion with patriarchy. To be true to patriarchy we are all taught that we must keep men’s secrets. Real points out that the fundamental secret we share is that we will remain silent: “When girls are inducted into womanhood, what is it exactly that they have to say that must be silenced. What is the truth women carry that cannot be spoken. The answer is simple and chilling. Girls, women—and also young boys—all share this in common. None may speak the truth about men.”

bell hooks says gossip saves lives and she’s entirely correct

In self-help books galore the notion that women choose men who will treat them badly again and again is presented as truth. These books rarely talk about patriarchy or male domination. They rarely acknowledge that relationships are not static, that people change through time, that they adjust to circumstances. Men who may have seeds of negativity and domination within them along with positive traits may find the negative burgeoning at times of crisis in their lives.

This genuinely scares me as someone who is currently single but someday desires a loving long term relationship. The people in my life describe me as a kind, gentle and loving person, but what if all the negative emotions and pain I haven’t been socially allowed to process become too much to handle and I lash out? I want to say I don’t think I would ever become a patriarchal rage monster but the fact that it’s even possible is terrifying. When men bow at the altar of their patriarchal conditioning they’re not just hurting themselves emotionally but they’re putting everyone else around them (especially femmes) at risk, even if they have “good intentions”, whatever that means.

I connect so much with hooks’ description of how even if a man is able to fully embody the patriarchal dominator role, it’s not a satisfying existence, it’s actually soul-crushing and lonely as fuck. When I was a kid and I was trying (and failing hard) to be more macho and “dominating”, I figured out very quickly that it only made me miserable, compounded by the fact that I was a nerdy little sensitive boy who just couldn’t make that facade work. I’m extremely thankful I saw through the bullshit early on in my life because I can’t imagine putting on a front like that every single day of my life just to score social points from shitheads.

I’ll share my thoughts on chapter 5 later as I found that to be quite a heavy read that I want to process more first.

I am going to talk about these two chapters separately because they are so different from each other. (Although as chapter 4 shows sex and violence go together). I think the real heart of this chapter comes from two different passage. The first is about self mutilation of their own emotions (Emphasis mine):

The first act of violence that patriarchy demands of males is not violence toward women. Instead patriarchy demands of all males that they engage in acts of psychic self-mutilation, that they kill off the emotional parts of themselves. If an individual is not successful in emotionally crippling himself, he can count on patriarchal men to enact rituals of power that will assault his self-esteem.

I find this passage rings very true from my own experience. I have never been violent in my adulthood but the killing of the emotional sense was definitely part of my life. I have found recently that I don't think I know what emotions feel like and never really knew that emotions were felt in the self. I thought they were just something people applied to situations. Like this is suppose to be sad so I feel sad. I am not surprised about this because I spent a large part of my teenage years reading pulpy Tom Clancy / war novels. It makes sense with the constant bombardment of the glory of war in my teenage head.

The second part that is the rising of violence due to the failure of the patriarchy to fulfilling its end of the bargain which ends in rage and violence. (Emphasis mine):

Male violence in general has intensified not because feminist gains offer women greater freedom but rather because men who endorse patriarchy discovered along the way that the patriarchal promise of power and dominion is not easy to fulfill, and in those rare cases where it is fulfilled, men find themselves emotionally bereft. The patriarchal manhood that was supposed to satisfy does not. And by the time this awareness emerges, most patriarchal men are isolated and alienated; they cannot go back and reclaim a past happiness or joy, nor can they go forward. To go forward they would need to repudiate the patriarchal thinking that their identity has been based on. Rage is the easy way back to a realm of feeling. It can serve as the perfect cover, masking feelings of fear and failure.>

This passage feels more true every year especially this week with the emotional reactions towards the killing of United HealthCare CEO. The general sentiment is that the current system is failing and people are angry. From the incels who believe their own hyper-patriarchy so much so that they think they deserve sex. The everyday men who are working their corporate job and falling behind the goal to provide financial stability. We were promised success in the traditional channels if we killed our own emotions and support this system but that doesn't work. We know that the only people who are benefitting are the top of the hierarchy (the billionaire class). Those of us who see it know the real enemy isn't women but those who are benefiting from our rage against them.

I feel like chapter 5 (Male Sexual Beings) did not ring as true as some of the others. There were some parts that I thought were spot on but overall I found it kind of sex and pornography negative. I feel like this might be because when the book was written (2004) there was as much kink, queer, women centric and feminist pornography as there are now. I think there have been lots of progress in this area over the last 20 years but this isn't mainstream, especially for most cis, white straight men. The kink and / or queer sexuality (they are so blurred now) is a lot more egalitarian and feminist and includes an acceptance of domination in sexuality. bell hooks doesn't talk about how this can be done safely and healthily but consenting adults for a short period during a pre-negotiated scene. The need to dominate and be dominated can be done safely sexually if people agree to it. The desires aren't bad or evil but can be used to do actions that are.

I do find her last passage enlightening:

Sex was, and is, presented as the road to real intimacy, complete closeness, as the arena in which it is okay to openly love, to be tender and vulnerable and yet remain safe, to not feel so deeply alone. Sex is the one place sensuality seems to be permissible, where we can be gentle with our own bodies and allow ourselves our overflowing passion.

This is true and I think is important to note about male sexuality. The current emphasis is not on pleasure, gentleness or closeness but rather on act of getting sex. Gentleness and sensuality is not acceptable for male sex and I think male desires are limited in the patriarchy. There are sets of bodies that we are suppose to find attractive and sex acts that are acceptable for Men.

I wish there was more talk about how male sexuality is so phallic-centric with PIV for procreation as the only "real" sex. The emphasis on ejaculation as the best and only part that is enjoyable is very prominent and hides the fact that sex can be so much more and longer than just that 1 second. The rest of the male body is ignored even though it can be a source of pleasure the same as a woman's body. It has taken me years to be gentle with the rest of myself and to understand what I actually like

The dive into sexuality as well was illuminating, from the depictions of lust out of a desire for love and the almost “taboo” nature of discussing love helps me contextualize my own desires. I’m curious to see if Hooks dives further into incels as well. The depictions of sexual assault were deeply uncomfortable, as well.

Chapter 5 stuck with me a lot because I've been trying to interrogate sexuality as much as possible, both for myself as well as in a more general sense. As a cishet guy who has been the target demographic of patriarchal continuation for my entire life I've found myself thinking:

Is this desire my own?

Do I want to do this or is this just what I'm supposed to do?

What harm may be done to myself or someone else?

hooks writes about the entitlement towards sex that is encouraged in men. It wasn't until I was in my thirties that I understood that sexual arousal was like any other emotion and didn't demand action every time it occurred. A few years on an SSRI that killed my libido was a big factor in hitting the pause button as well and gave me some room to realize that sex didn't have to claim such a large part of my waking hours. One of the reasons I stopped taking it was I was feeling sexually unfulfilled having no libido, and since then the balance feels much healthier and not alienating for either me or my partner who has undergone her own changes and journey over the years. It was having time to stop and think and having someone to speak with openly and honestly about my feelings that helped facilitate that growth. I know I likely wouldn't have reached these conclusions on my own.

It's so easy as a man to get caught up in the current of sex that permeates everything, especially during this period of extreme isolation and alienation. It's literally everywhere, provides a quick easy high to keep the darkness at bay, and requires practice to recognize it and then reject it. A problem I've encountered is people can be so protective of their sexuality that suggesting that they take some time to truly understand it is akin to asking them to dissect and ruin one of their favorite things. It's this thing where we're taught that our sexuality is our own and no one else's, so who am I to suggest there might be something unhealthy about it?

I'm stuck with the thought that sexual desire and practice are so much more complex than many people want to accept and that we're stuck in a state of arrested development that will need something akin to a Cultural Revolution to uproot the gnarly mess we've made for ourselves. I think about how things might have been different if the Nazis hadn't destroyed the German Institute for Sexual Sciences. I think about the horrible repression every time there's been a Great Awakening in the US where patriarchy reasserts itself as violently as possible. There's millennia worth of thoughts like this to fall into, but that only reminds me of the importance of putting in the work now to change it.

This was an interesting couple of chapters, but maybe less personally affecting than some of the previous ones. The home I was raised in wasn't violent or particularly patriarchal. My mother was in her own non-radical way a convinced feminist and tried her damnedest to raise me right. My father was maybe not the highest standard of male/female equality (he never really learned to cook more than a few basic dishes for instance), but he is a very gentle, artistic and somewhat introverted man, who preferred to let my mother take the lead most of the time. This is stuff I took for granted at the time, but I'm more appreciative of it in retrospect. For me, the patriarchal stuff was mostly enforced by peers and the larger culture, which hooks talked about in one of the previous chapters.

"Men of feeling often find themselves isolated from other men. This fear of isolation often acts as the mechanism to prevent males from becoming more emotionally aware."

I feel this one a lot. I feel a lot of guys have a few safe topics to relate to each other on (sports, cars, kids, if you're a bit older, etc.) and you're just kind of left out in the cold otherwise. This by the way is I will always be a sportsball hater. Every time someone asks me I saw the game last night or whatever, it feels like they're already making a lot of assumptions about me that I don't want.

The stuff on male sexuality, idk if I can really relate to much of that either. Definitely, I got the messaging as an adolescent that not having sex made you a loser and wanted to experience it, but I wanted intimacy with someone just as much. When I read this the last time, I still identified as a man, albeit a GNC man, and now I don't, and I'm thinking about where my experiences overlap with what hooks talks about and where they don't.

"Sexual pleasure is rarely the goal in a sexual encounter, something far more important than mere pleasure is on the line, our sense of ourselves as men. Men’s sense of sexual scarcity and an almost compulsive need for sex to confirm manhood feed each other, creating a self-perpetuating cycle of sexual deprivation and despair. And it makes men furious at women for doing what women are taught to do in our society: saying no."

She nailed the core of inceldom right here (not that this is exclusive to incels).

I think these two chapters do a decent job of voicing why I am uncomfortable being cishet in a way. Seeing patriarchal relationships all around I got some gender essentialism stuck in my brain. I just couldn't understand why women would ever want to be in a relationship with men, it got as far as me trying to date men instead to spare women (sorry lads, didn't work out). I was inherently bad and attraction to women was a violent dirty impulse. Like woke catholic guilt I guess. But these are my very personal brainworms, so lets look at some other stuff.

In How Can I Get Through to You? Terrence Real includes a chapter titled “A Conspiracy of Silence,” in which he emphasizes that we are not allowed in this culture to speak the truth about what relationships with men are really like. This silence represents our collective cultural collusion with patriarchy. To be true to patriarchy we are all taught that we must keep men’s secrets. Real points out that the fundamental secret we share is that we will remain silent: “When girls are inducted into womanhood, what is it exactly that they have to say that must be silenced. What is the truth women carry that cannot be spoken. The answer is simple and chilling. Girls, women—and also young boys—all share this in common. None may speak the truth about men.”

This is something that hits after my grandmother died. She was survived by her 3 children, two women and a man. My uncle was adamant that she would have wanted to be buried with her mother and her mother's husband, but both my mother and aunt vetoed that in no uncertain terms. My grandmother's father had been abusive to her while she was growing up and that was apparently kept as a secret between only the women of the family. There was a slightly similar thing when I started venting about my father to my mother (who never said a bad word about him while he was still alive) and peeling back how the break up actually went. She took all the public blame and let him constantly bad mouth her to their common friends even though it was bs (leaving her with no friends, since all their friends were in common). She argued that he needed the support more than her. She then confirmed a couple of my suspicions about how he never really cared about me or my brother, but how he kept partial custody mostly as a means of controlling her. She said she wanted us (me and my brother) to give him a fair shake, which I guess we did and both ended up disliking him. Ironically he thought that we were somehow indoctrinated against him by my mother on his deathbed.

In conversations with men whose mothers were passive as their sons were victimized by fathers or other male parental caregivers, I found that the men were far more likely than other men to idealize their moms, seeing them as victims without choice.

This got me thinking about how my mom and her partner, they got together when I was 7-8. Now, he was never really presented as or has attempted to take the role as male role model or father figure, but there is still some ways in which his behaviour, and mums behaviour in turn, conditioned me. While he has never been physically violent, he starts yelling and gets angry at the drop of a hat. The slightest provocation would set him off, which left emotional regulation of this adult ass man as my responsibility as a child. Just to have peace and quiet if nothing else.

She would bite back if he ever started yelling at me or my brother directly, but it was still a constant source of stress to live in the same house as him. I don't think he is an inherently bad person, and she does say she loves him. I've questioned her a couple of times about it, as far as I know he has never been physically abusive at least. But it is hard to be sure given her track record of ignoring her own needs.

Now that patriarchal straight men have been compelled through mass media to face the fact that homosexual males are not “chicks with dicks,” that they can and do embody patriarchal masculinity, straight male sexual dominance of biological females has intensified, for it is really the only factor that distinguishes straight from gay. Concurrently, homophobia becomes amplified among heterosexual men because its overt expression is useful as a way to identify, among apparently similar macho men, who is gay and who is straight.

This section however, I don't understand at all.

Hooks is really very good at driving the same central points home through layered, alternative angles. What this results in is lots of connections and recurring themes reinforcing each other, I expect this to be even better upon a reread.

As per this week, the further dive into rage as violent emotional outbursts maintaining patriarchy was a good way to delve into the heart of abuse, and where it stems from. Further, The encapsulation of abuse as a method to maintain patriarchy, the two-sided nature of fathers who abuse, the glorification of rage as a superpower to use against mothers, all of it is quite sad and really drives home the fact that proper parenting really needs to be in place, along with correcting societal conditions.

The dive into sexuality as well was illuminating, from the depictions of lust out of a desire for love and the almost "taboo" nature of discussing love helps me contextualize my own desires. I'm curious to see if Hooks dives further into incels as well. The depictions of sexual assault were deeply uncomfortable, as well.

Hope to hear everyone else's thoughts!

I am still catching up on reading this, so the following is more related to the first 2 chapters than 4/5.

One of the things I found hard about reflecting on the first chapter was being sympathetic to the manly men in my own life that have been assholes. I was bullied and teased for "being a wimp" in school (in other words, doing effeminate things like reading and being thin), and as an adult a female relative of mine is dealing with a nasty divorce from a real piece of work manly man who's deeply betrayed her. Intellectually I appreciate that a lot of the manly man behaviour that's negatively affected me and the people I love is a direct outgrowth of the patriarchy and patriarchal values as described by hooks. I think hooks is very insightful and does a good job describing the societal pressures on men and how that warps men's mental health, values and behaviour.

That said, while I find her very readable and even accessible for reflecting on my own thoughts and behaviour, I find it hard to read when I am thinking about these other assholes in my current and past life. I was amab, born and raised as a boy, am a cishet man - I came up with all the same social pressures and patriarchy, my parents weren't early feminists or anything, I went to church. And yet I didn't bully other kids in school and didn't manipulate and betray my wife. I think the reason that I'm struggling a bit with internalizing hooks' writing is that I view these acts of abuse, negativity, manipulation as a choice. Societal pressure notwithstanding, no one held a gun to the head of these shit bags and forced them to call me homosexual slurs, they made a choice based on what they thought would make them funny or popular. My relative's ex didn't get forced to be a narcissistic shit head that's walking out on their kids, he chose to gas light her and have an affair.

Perhaps these are my patriarchal, non-marxist brainworms talking, but while I'm willing to read and learn from this book, I am not willing to extend the same level of sympathy as hooks to the patriarchal, misogynist fucks who have wronged me and mine. I think part of what makes it difficult is that hooks is so clearly right - the patriarchy does fuck people up and does warp values. I just struggle with going from that clear and obvious systemic pressure to any form of "it's not their fault". I appreciate the irony that the dominant emotion that I, a man, have on this subject is anger over magnanimity or forgiveness.