By : We
live in a culture where violence against men is prevalent, normalized,
excused, and celebrated by the media and in popular culture. Laugh if
you want, but the best humor is practically indistinguishable from
tragedy. The best comedians understand suffering. The best jokes are
lamentations.
We have multi-billion dollar “sports”
industries (e.g., the NFL and UFC) that glorify this violence against
men. Families gather on Sundays to celebrate this violence. Corporations
make billions on the cultural normalization of this violence against
men–making the male body the most culturally acceptable locus of violence.
All the while, folks scream that “CONSENT” is freely given by the men
being violated, failing to understand how these cultural norms influence
consent, failing to understand that freedom itself is not the
perpetuation of violence against men, failing to understand that consent
does not change the underlying fact of violence committed against men.
Freedom is not two men beating each other unconscious for entertainment
or some false idea of sportsmanship and competition. If you believe such
types of violence are freedom and sportsmanship, you have an
impoverished sense of both and you are likely perpetuating a culture
that glorifies violence against men.
We have a war machine that keeps turning
– making billions more in profits off this exploitation, destruction,
mutilation, and expendability of the male body. There is no end to it.
It never stops because our culture demands it. We defend our freedom by
consenting to violence against the male body. We are proud of our
“heroes.” We celebrate them. We love them for subjecting their bodies
and the bodies of other men to violence.
If we learn to hate this violence against men and speak out against it, we are told to “shut the fuck up.”
If we learn that all war is anti-male because all war is violence
against men, our masculinity is policed and threatened because we must
be “weak bitches” to complain about male suffering. Even feminists who
claim to be working on male issues mock such complaints about male
suffering as “man feelz.” Some of these feminists insist that male
suffering is actually male privilege. Anything else is “assholery.”
There
is real “assholery”: our prison systems. They are monstrosities of
prison guard unions, corporations, legal institutions, and law
enforcement agencies that are partially sustained by our war on drugs.
It is a war that throws men into cages and commits violence against
them for non-violent drug “crimes.” Instead of rehabilitation, we punish
these men with prison rape and other violence. Instead of recognizing
our sick culture, we blame the drug addict for wanting to escape.
As Krishnamurti said, ”It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”
While the “right” wags their finger of shame and screams for harsher
punishments and more violence against these men, the “left” wags their
finger of shame and clamors about “rehabilitating” these men to a
profoundly sick culture that demands their submission, failing to
recognize that our culture may need more rehab than do these men.
Culture may need rehabilitating because it fails to recognize that
these men are not dominating and that such violence against them is not
male privilege and neither is it a privileging of masculinity. Many are
blind to this fact, and some even make the bizarre claim that the
suffering of men somehow represents a devaluation of women.
Yes, in our sick culture of male
submission, the suffering of men is caused by a society that doesn’t
value women. In fact, it is claimed, that violence against men is
actually the oppression of women. That’s what makes sense in our sick
culture because the obvious truth is “assholery.” If a man learns to say
that men suffer violence because men are systematically devalued in our
culture—that man speaks pure misogynistic truth.
Only in a profoundly sick culture would
violence against men be interpreted primarily as the devaluation of
women, rather than the obvious–the devaluation and oppression of men.
Only in a profoundly sick culture would violence against men be seen as
the overvaluing and privileging of men and masculinity.
Fuck that and all you folks who fail to
recognize that the male body is the most culturally acceptable locus of
violence. Violence against one man is a “degradation, terror, and limitation to all”
men. Most men and boys limit their behavior because of the existence of
potential violence against them. Most men and boys box their emotions
away to create a front of stolidity, an avoidance of the crushing
reality that our culture demands their submission, obedience,
oppression, and acquiescence to a culture that doesn’t value them,
considers them cannon-fodder, expendable capital, human resources,
objects-of-utility.
My dad is 76 years old. I had the
“freedom” of watching him break into tears a few weeks ago as he
recounted some of the horrors that he saw while in the Army. This is a
man who never shed a tear or spoke a word about his suffering and the
suffering of his Army buddies until he was no longer strong enough to
“be a man.” At 76, he’s no longer strong enough to keep that shit boxed
in. It was an emotional prison for him. There is nothing heroic about
it. PTSD, survivor’s guilt,
and being used as human cannon-fodder is not and should not be
celebrated as awesome heroics of willpower. It’s a prison for men. It
isn’t male privilege and it isn’t male domination. Such things are male
submission. Such things are what my father did and experienced in
submission to a culture that demanded it of him. Such things are what
men do in submission to a culture that doesn’t value them.
This is our culture. This is violence
against men. It is prevalent, normalized, excused, celebrated,
glamorized, and glorified. If you speak out against it, you will be
subjected to further ridicule, shame, aggression, and oppression by the
masculinity and language police. You will be accused of misappropriating
words that are reserved for women because there is no such thing as
violence against men. It’s not a real thing. It’s just plain old
violence. Laugh if you want. It’s funny how that works–how tragedy
becomes comedy, how the best jokes are lamentations, how the suffering
of men makes for the best punchlines.
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