In my practice of centering youth voices, I am blown away by their access to language for themselves and the freedom and power that I experience in their words. I am always reading what they have to say about themselves and their world– particularly those who identify as trans, nonbinary, gender nonconforming, and intersex. Sometimes I think my work is done, and they have cured us of the dehumanizing limits of the binary. The creations of these revolutionary youth are not the standard. For so many queer people, being in community with one another is a dream, but a large number of us experience queer spaces as a theatre, lynchpinned by the binary. We feel policed and often find ourselves trying to be queer enough. We find ourselves cast into a queer aesthetic, draped with white supremacy. We perform Shakespearean tragedies of masculinity and femininity, masking our fatphobia and classism with the avant-garde and androgynous– all of which sing lullabies of a false self-acceptance. We exhaust ourselves with scenes from this never-ending play.
I have the privilege of being a youth worker and social justice educator where group dynamics create a rich space for learning. One particular cohort experienced a sharp patriarchal disruption from one of the young men. Jumping into action to create a space for unpacking, I started to prepare a session plan about toxic masculinity. In the midst of planning, a friend questioned how we were also unpacking similar expressed behaviors from people who exist in various places along the spectrum of expression. Feeling challenged, I reflected on what this space would look like if not in response to a particular occurrence and what the goals would be. I offer some meditations from that reflection.
The Good Men Project defines toxic masculinity as “a narrow and repressive description of manhood, designating manhood as defined by violence, sex, status, and aggression. It’s the cultural ideal of manliness, where strength is everything while emotions are a weakness; where sex and brutality are yardsticks by which men are measured, while supposedly ‘feminine’ traits—which can range from emotional vulnerability to simply not being hypersexual—are the means by which your status as ‘man’ can be taken away.” In Unapologetic: A Black, Queer and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements, Charlene Carruthers speaks to our binarized relationship to harm and its limits, by naming that there is no playbook for identifying roles and power dynamics when we talk about queer communities. This affects our ability to name harm-doer and harmed. How are we to address the roots of the harm and not just the symptoms? This point reminded me of Cathy Cohen in “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?” daring us to organize around a queer identity because it is fluid and ever-changing. Doing this challenges us to stop being static while organizing and create frameworks and solutions that center the root causes of harm. This centers the most marginalized. Suppose the conversation of toxic masculinity is to uproot the experience of heterosexism, patriarchy, and violence. In that case, masculinity is only a mechanism of teaching and obscuring a culture of domination by ascribing it to men as an inalienable truth– a birthright.
Finally, landing on some new footing, we centered on patriarchy. My young people quickly identified manhood and its relationship to sex, violence, and status. Still, as we continued, young people struggled to name the other day-to-day expressions of patriarchy without it being marked by intense harm or ways explicitly expressed in the Good Men Project’s definition.
In All About Love, bell hooks mentions that as women get more social equality, there is a greater social acceptance of lying, making it a tool of domination and coercion that reinforces patriarchy. Dishonesty was named to be a young man’s earliest experience of asserting power over others. This experience rewards them for getting away with things while desensitizing them of guilt and other emotions that may drive self-accountability. Hooks continues by introducing patriarchal femininity and how, at times, it looks like pretending to experience levels of emotional vulnerability to create safety or garner power. This act of dishonesty is explicitly tied to patriarchy as one of the many tactics passed generationally between women to survive patriarchy, along with respectability and the sexual shaming of one another.
Women aren’t the only group that has been able to gain social access; men are given more space to express themselves outside of the traditional limits of masculinity. The rise of sad boys and nice guys has shown that conventional ideas of manhood allow more room for men to express emotions deemed weaker, or that it is okay not to be hyper-aggressive and dominating at all cost. At first glance, this may look like a transformation towards liberation, but as we look closer patriarchal violence hasn’t been reduced but rather has evolved to ensure its survival.
While exploring patriarchy’s evolution, my young people could quickly identify lovesick sad boy Drake as an example, leading us to do a close reading of Hotline Bling. Quickly highlighting all the ways, he shames this girl for having friends, going out, and having fun. He even asserts that she is acting differently, as if he knows her better than she knows herself, devaluing her because she no longer wants an uncommitted sexual relationship with him. Though he is expressing hurt feelings, sadness, and “softer” emotions, the fact remains that the lens through which he interprets his experience is not without the dominating paternalistic nature of patriarchy.
A nagging familiarity affirmed, for many of the girls in the group, that similar hurtful comments they’ve received are, in fact, not okay. The group wanted to go deeper, discovering more nuance: “being right at all costs; denying conversations or events took place as an act of crazymaking; shaming the expression of emotions as interruptions to decision making; playing devil’s advocate because you think it’s interesting to be oppositional; relationship to consent is one of permission rather than agency,” are things that were brought into the space, along with other forms of gaslighting and shaming used to assert power over others. The changing reality of who can access these ways of being and traditional gender roles has made the insidious and delicate nuances of new age patriarchy harder to detect.
In my community of nonbinary stewards of transformation, we all share varying patterns of relationship harm, as folx holding the weight of our partner’s trauma through emotional and sometimes physical abuse or the times when our own triggers have offered hostility and harm to our relationships. I have seen the many assumed-femme people, in partnership and within our community, do the same things we have called for an end to in toxic masculinity discourse.
In reflection, yes, conversations identifying toxic masculinity have been supportive for people looking for language. For a good deal of my young people and those who hold gender as simply—one or the other, dominant and marginalized, good and bad—toxic masculinity discourse has given space for their experiences. As a queer nonbinary person adopting this language can feel transphobic and invisibilizing at times. Too simple for the expansive ways we identify ourselves. Too simple for the complex ways we embody these systems of harm while simultaneously holding the disillusion and scars the binary leaves after years of trying to fit. I’ve been asking, is there space for people, particularly queer people, to stop projecting gendered behaviors on each other? I walk out of a world labeled men and women, and into my chosen community labeled masc and femme full of people begging to be free and struggling to see how we keep ending up here–in this binary.
I have my own work to do inside patriarchy, but I do not have to make or submit to a binary to do it. I understand patriarchy as a system of domination that holds the construct of white manhood at the center. As I see myself clearer, the moments I choose power over people are more apparent. When I feel small. When I am hurt. When I am afraid to lose. I start there.
As someone who doesn’t identify as femme but is assumed-femme, I’ve experienced lightness in engaging with the problematic ways I’ve historically discussed courtship. I used to be all about the chase, moving on when I felt bored and flirting just to flirt. This was my way of pushing against patriarchy. I felt powerful and couldn’t let it crush me because I can do it to them. Time went on, and I’ve learned that patriarchy is so insidious when used by those unaware of their privileges in wielding it. I hear my not-so-queer femme friends ready to use these systems of dominations to reclaim their power, and I worry. The culture of domination is embedded in how we experience our individual power, and we must challenge ourselves to reclaim power without hindering the agency of others.
Slews of men cry about women being the best liars and cheaters. Men are outraged by the hurt they’ve experienced at the hands of women. This rhetoric further demonizes the feminine. This in and of itself is patriarchy. With that being said, this hurt is real, and these “acts of women” are nothing more than acts of patriarchy learned from those who institutionally benefit from patriarchy. Men are experiencing the interpersonal harm of patriarchy which they often dole out to others, unconsciously. Institutionally cis-men hold the responsibility to be accountable for the institutional apparatus of patriarchy. Men cannot call for an end to interpersonal harm while wanting to maintain institutional privilege.
For those of us who have had the privilege of making enclaves of community with little cis-gender manhood to inflict interpersonal harms of patriarchy, I think it’s vital that we reconsider using toxic masculinity as the vehicle to abolish patriarchal violence in our lives. We’ve worked to create from our radical imaginations what love, beauty, and community look like, and we must get specific and hold responsibility for how we recreate the culture of patriarchy in our worlds.
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