yanno i really do loathe this rhetoric surrounding male violence towards women (both physical and sexual) that says “he’s a monster/animal/piece of shit/not a real man” and basically anything else to divorce them from their masculinity. it’s like no, nonononono, you do NOT get to uphold and participate in toxic masculinity that holds up physical prowess and physical strength and violence and sexual predation as the pinnacle of maleness then turn around and distance yourself from the shitty consequences of that. if it so bothers you as a cishet man to be associated with awful people like that then why don’t you reinvent masculinity as something less shitty?
It’s just another version of ‘not all men’, except reversed…and hey, no one likes to admit they’ve actually been raised to believe abusive behaviour is okay, AND that they participate in it in any way.
It’s a shitty rhetoric- it’s easy, though. So easy, makes you feel good about yourself, too. “He’s not like me, who is like men should be”. What we fail to realise at first is that what we’re actually saying is “I, too, have the power to abuse you, but as a Real Man I never would.”
One has to start questioning that power. Why do (cis) men have it? What is necessary for men to have it?
Then you realise it’s a whole system that builds this up for you. That you should not be basing your masculinity on
1. How abusive you have the power to be
2. How you benevolently refrain from using that power.
because that’s fucking disgusting, manipulative, ABUSIVE shit by definition. “I could be a jerk but I’m not.”
I hate this shit so much, I hate how hard it is to shake it off, to challenge it when it’s everywhere and upheld by everything from deodorant ads to classic literature.
You know, irt to your first paragraph, I remember reading that an ideology reaches its zenith when people no longer consider it an ideology, they just think it’s “the way things are” and I kind of feel that way about what we’re taught about masculinity. There’s this assumption that it’s inherent instead of learned, and that’s confronting if you’re looking at yourself honestly, but also a great oportunity to interrogate and change it in your own life at least.
#and this is where I say again how much I appreciate Fury Road’s Max#and the way Miller set it up so that Furiosa is absolutely a match for him#so we don’t get to assume he’s got power over her#not for a second
I’m gonna happily engage this tangent because I think it’s also the way they frame that relationship that’s reassuring in terms of depicting a different type of masculinity.
Because they could have easily had Max still be this macho warrior type and simply have her match it in terms of skill and aggression, but instead they make him physically and mentally vulnerable and don’t use that as an excuse for violence and intimidation.
I think the best example of that is when he’s stuck in the hold with Angharad: he gives her so much space and makes himself as small as he can. He’s still aware of the space he takes up and how that makes the women around him feel and mitigates it as best he can.
Oh man, I have so many thoughts on this right now; I wish I could engage. But work. Gotta get ready for it. Laame. But this is a brilliant discussion and yes yes yes. There is so much gold here. I have soo many thoughts on taught, toxic masculinity and how that shapes the violence that happens in our world. A lot of it isn’t terribly coherent and needs refining, which is why I wish I could engage. Bah! But yes. This.
Excuse you, you are very coherent and eloquent, I really enjoy your take on things.
Oh, thank you! I didn’t mean to imply that I’d be incoherent per se, just that I have a lot of thoughts that I’m not sure are justified? Like, I’m not sure how much bias shapes them versus how much of an insight I actually have and if the things that trigger my thoughts are fair.
Let’s see if I can elaborate without writing a novel. lol I just feel concerned that not writing a novel will mean something I might say might sound a lot like condoning of things I don’t. ¯_(ツ)_/¯ We’ll see.
So I overheard a story the other day about an out of control teenager who shoved her step-dad down and started striking him, and his response was to curl up in a ball, and the girl’s mother stepped in and told her she needed to back off (which worked). And like, not to say the dad shouldn’t have defended himself exactly, but I feel like toxic masculinity would dictate that his response was wrong in some way. Like, this part of the story surprised me because I’m simply so used to hearing men immediately responding in a much more active way, and I was honestly quite proud of this man for feeling the need to hurt this teenager in order to perform his masculinity.
To an out of control teen, this felt to me like an appropriate response. Instead of lashing back violently, he tried to make himself an uneasy target and let the mother intervene.
At some point in this story though, someone had to mention the fact that he didn’t have full use of his legs, and I feel like it was implied that he on some level was saying that this and this alone was the only reason he was able to be pushed over and couldn’t respond, and I was disappointed, hearing that his actions Needed this qualifier. Because without it, he somehow wasn’t performing his masculinity correctly against this teen girl.
Like, a lot of the time when I have discussions with people about feminism and I hear the ‘then guys get to slap girls thing,’ my response is easily, “No. No one should be slapping anyone.” AND I 100% BELIEVE THIS!
But I just feel that, with the way that we are raised, it honestly isn’t the same when a woman raises a hand to a man from when a man raises his hand to a woman. No, it’s not okay for a woman to be violent towards a man, but growing up, the violence we see women perpetuating toward men is not explicitly to cause pain. When a woman raises a hand to a man, it doesn’t illicit the same fear (not necessarily because it shouldn’t, but because we generally understand that a woman striking a man is not done with the primary intention of causing any lasting physical harm).
Because we’ve been raised in a society that says that women are so precious and/or frail, that in order for men to lift their arm to strike a woman, he Must intend her arm. Women are raised being told about the violence men will perpetuate against them. Women expect men to hurt them, so when a man raises a hand to her, she believes she’s going to be injured, and probably severely.
I mentioned recently on a Facebook post that no one should be hitting anyone, and one of the responses I got was, “I agree completely, but if a woman strikes me, I’m going to defend myself,” and I simply don’t trust the people who are saying this to, honestly, truly mean it, not that their actions are ‘in defense’ of themselves. Because what are the honest chances that a woman slapping you is intended and/or going to cause you any real harm? But your return slap would. When I hear this, what I hear is, ‘Any woman who thinks she has any right to do this to me is going to pay for this threat to my masculinity.’
And no, I do not think this Makes it Okay for a woman to hit a man, nor do I believe that every time a woman strikes a man it doesn’t do real harm. Of course there are cases where women perform serious and intentional violence against men.
Most often though, whenever I’ve seen/heard about a woman hitting a man (both in real life but especially in media) it’s because on some level, she’s trying to communicate to said man, and he is not listening. It’s literally a desperate act of communication and not as an intention of violence (which doesn’t make it Not violent still.) She’s either offended by something, and he’s still treating it like a joke OR she’s angry about something, and he’s not taking it seriously/listening to her. These are the primary examples of depictions of when a woman would hit a man, and just, the more I think about it, it feels like it’s a case of a woman performing toxic masculinity, because this is the Only thing men are taught to take seriously and to have any influence over them.
It’s just, a really complicated thing. I have so many thoughts. I’ll try not to even get into seeing how protective my friend’s husband was over their girl child for Standing on the Couch.
Thoughtfulfangirling 