A Different Man’s Response

David Lotto offered one man’s response to #MeToo. This is a different man’s response.

Dangerous, Violent Men

Incel websites are filled with hate toward women, fantasies of doing violence to women, and is associated with two males who became mass killers. My thoughts as a man? Contrary to incel’s assertions, lack of sex does not cause violence; having sex does not cure it. Lack of empathy for a woman being raped/killed at one’s own hands, relishing putting her through it, suggests an externalizing of a tortured self.

James Gilligan (Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic, 1997) and Atherson (in Richard Rhodes, Why They Kill: The Discoveries of a Maverick Criminologist, 2000) found highly violent men grew up in families laced with humiliation and/or physical violence. Resultant loathing of one’s own needs for love and contact can lead to attacking women who awaken those needs out of hatred for wanting at all. Is there a cultural element as well? Only in-depth interview research across the country and the world can find out. There remain men around the planet who are very dangerous to women, perhaps in desperate need of becoming de-traumatized themselves, no matter the fury/contempt they might feel at the suggestion. In the absence of a national or global focus on helping, women are stuck having to protect themselves. As for men: the dangerous men among us need to be stopped. That means laws against rape and murder of women, laws that are enforced, and mobilization of public support. These men need someone to care enough to get to know what’s going on in their lives/life journeys,

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someone to stop them and help them de-traumatize and achieve the decent life that eludes them, if possible. But they must be stopped. Without stopping them, the nightmares won’t end.

Sex is Everything to Men without Empathy

Harvey Weinstein has been indicted for rape, i.e. predatory physical violence. Charlie Rose was exposed for exposing himself to a woman, for groping, and for inappropriate language, which he did for years. A number of men have been exposed for treating women on dates like it’s all about sex. As far back as I can remember, I grew up in a culture that inundated us with the message: it’s all about sex. Remember Playboy magazine, The Bob Cummings Show (1955-1959), I Dream of Jeannie (1965-1970)? It was everywhere: look at women’s bodies, not their faces; getting sex is scoring and means you’re doing well at being male; don’t focus on the contexts of their lives or the life journeys they’ve been on. Wanting to know anyone’s life history, listening for its impact on their spirit or heart, recognizing the link between sex and the deepening of attachment it creates, such things weren’t modeled in the culture. If you didn’t learn this in your family, it was hard to come by.

This is said to be an era of narcissism. Volkan describes narcissism as a split in a person: an upfront part that’s highly esteemed vs. a split-off, loathed, and hungry for love part (Ferhat Atik, A Psychoanalyst on His Own Couch: A Biography of Vamık Volkan and His Psychoanalytic and Psychopolitical Concepts, 2019). So many of us, men and women, grew up with parents who had themselves grown up in cruel, unpredictable, neglectful homes and did not give us any real sense of what love is. Who told us to think a hole in our soul might be a hunger for love—or what that even meant? The message that it’s all about sex offered no pathway to discovering what the need for love and for loving would mean in real life.

Pain and Maturity

Asking which motives (sexual arousal, revenge, etc.) drive people into dominating and sexualizing is the wrong question. The right question is not what a man feels like doing; it’s what he does with those feelings. Maturity as a man is not a matter of sex; it’s a matter of character and the state of his heart. It’s a matter of where a man stands on his journey from handling inner pain through concrete action (sex, violence, etc.), emotional coercion, or submission, to being able to handle his own distress through being thoughtful and reflective.

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The question involved metaphor as the only adequate way of talking about the import of life experience on our spirits, our hearts, our courage, the delicacy and tenderness within, the sense of justice, and perceptiveness. The presumption is we men can be carrying something in us that’s gone dead, something discarded and forgotten, something to be retrieved, brought back to life. We are carriers of a life of feelings, capacities, wounds, and aliveness; the life history we’ve lived through, the life we are in now, the life we intend ahead, with all the people who were and are involved at every step and what has happened with them. Our task is to hold all of these things in mind, feeling our way into them, caring for how our hearts and spirits fare—and how they are faring in those around us. Living out impulses in the immediate moment misjudges so much. It fails to understand so much. We are more than our feelings or impulses in the moment, though they may be integral to us as well. We have to carry all of life within us, measuring the moment in that light. Walking that path makes for feeling solid enough when storms of vulnerability, regret, rejection, anger, stunning loss, or disillusionment break across our lives. There are ways to make it through the unbearable without losing the last shred of one’s humanness. This is what maturing into manhood and strength is about.

The truth is we men cannot readily grasp the vulnerability of others, including their vulnerability to us; at least, not with any measure of genuine concern, unless we have really felt and worked through the injuries we have sustained in our own lives, the toll they’ve taken, and our own vulnerability as men. Working with such injuries is a path to manhood.

Our culture has often trashed the path to real manhood, the very path by which we become men, saying instead life is about toughness or sex. “Be the guy who says ‘Bring it on.’ Do not tend to what in you has gone missing or the injuries to your heart or your spirit.” That leaves a man less able to take care with real life, either his own or that of the people he deals with. “It’s all about sex” has the same effect.

The idea that women’s sexual desirability is their central power over men means a man not only has sexual desire, he is his sexual desire. The term sexualization means being all about desire; but real life is complicated, and sex is only one part. Sexualization uses sex to disown some of the complexity of life, self, and others. There’s emotional work involved in getting to know whatever

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we’ve disowned. But re-owning the rest of ourselves makes it possible to own sexuality in good ways—and to have a feel for the vulnerability in others, a desire to not cause them hurt, a desire to see them be okay even when that means not getting something we desire, whether that’s sex or something else. That’s a central measure of crossing the developmental threshold into manhood: we can want what’s good for another even though it doesn’t do anything for us and maybe even costs us something.

Seeing men as being our desires rather than being selves who have desires is a way to get rid of pieces of our lives—the pain we lived through, our kindness, innocence, wonder, loves, and attachments. I don’t believe all men bought/buy into the sexualization messages in our culture. I think those of us who grew up in families where it hurt too much to want to matter to our parents or to let the rest of the family matter to us makes for being more at risk of thinking cultural fantasies about sex and women are a way to find something energizing and make it possible to forget the past, just like it did in Mad Men (2007-2015). Men can feel threatened by #MeToo. We can also take #MeToo as a strong reminder of the path at the heart of our life journeys as men.

Women and Solidarity

#MeToo is one part of the broader non-violent struggle by women to gain equality in a world where men hold the highest positions of power and prestige and therefore are the gatekeepers for any woman with an aspiration to move up. Gatekeepers can exact a toll for passing. It had been taken for granted the toll could be sexual without what transpired ever seeing the light of day. The #MeToo movement has succeeded in replacing that certainty with anxiety that such behavior will in fact see the light of day and mobilized strength through solidarity, strengthened by backing in the media and the courts. But, especially for those who took the first steps, coming forward to say “She’s not making this up, it happened to me too,” involved great risk and took great courage. Courageous solidarity does not always succeed in changing the world, but often does. The world may still be, blatantly and subtly, a mess. But another step has been taken.

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