Laurie Penny - The Great Stink: It’s time for men to stop worrying about who they are, and start thinking about what they do
.... I have watched the collective inability to deal with the
fact that “good” men might not always do good things fracture communities and
friendships. I have been involved in restorative justice processes in activist
circles. Restorative justice is meant to be a way of delivering some sort of
restitution within communities without involving the legal system — and a lot
of communities have legitimate reasons not to want the police poking around in
their lives. That’s what it is meant to be in theory. In practice, what it has
often turned out to mean is a lot of women doing a lot of emotional heavy
lifting and being variously demonized for causing trouble while men promise to
change and don’t.
https://twitter.com/PennyRed
Truth is best defence, says Priya Ramani after Akbar's statement
Some months ago, I was part of a large group of women, many of them victims and survivors, wondering what to do about a repeat rapist who many of us still cared for deeply. Because I am, as mentioned, a soft touch, I was one of the people on call to make sure he wasn’t in immediate danger of hurting himself after his transgressions were finally made known. Plans were drawn up for how he could make amends; programs for his healing were suggested; timetables were proposed for when and if the press or police should be called in. Almost nobody wanted the guy’s entire life ruined, but it was hard to know what justice would look like otherwise. The issue was only resolved when one of us who had been trying to stop this man from hurting any more of her friends for over a decade stayed up late, went on Twitter, and decided, you know what, fuck it: he’d had enough chances. She wasn’t waiting any more.
Some months ago, I was part of a large group of women, many of them victims and survivors, wondering what to do about a repeat rapist who many of us still cared for deeply. Because I am, as mentioned, a soft touch, I was one of the people on call to make sure he wasn’t in immediate danger of hurting himself after his transgressions were finally made known. Plans were drawn up for how he could make amends; programs for his healing were suggested; timetables were proposed for when and if the press or police should be called in. Almost nobody wanted the guy’s entire life ruined, but it was hard to know what justice would look like otherwise. The issue was only resolved when one of us who had been trying to stop this man from hurting any more of her friends for over a decade stayed up late, went on Twitter, and decided, you know what, fuck it: he’d had enough chances. She wasn’t waiting any more.
Everyone freaked out, including me. I was among the ones
saying that we should give him more time, no, he really does want to change,
he’s trying to understand what he did wrong, and if we go hard we’re going to
lose him. I had forgiven him the demeaning, dehumanizing things he had done to
me long ago, and I had forgotten that it was not my job to decide whether
anyone else should do the same. I was terrified that this man, who I loved
deeply and still do, would end his life. I was angry at Twitter Justice Girl
for forcing the issue. I thought she had gone too far.
The real risk here is that we will let our very human
compassion for men in pain be exploited to undermine a movement for sexual
justice and liberation for everyone.
I was wrong. She did the right thing. We only found out how
much of the right thing she’d done when all the other stories started coming
out. The guy had spent 20 years hurting women on three separate continents and
— I find it hard to write this, so give me a moment — he wasn’t going to stop.
He wasn’t going to stop until the women who loved him stopped giving him
chances. He might have wanted to stop, but he didn’t have to, so he wasn’t
going to.
So when I am asked if this movement is going too far, being
too brutal, I don’t always know how to answer. I know that the climate is, for
once, less than merciful to men. I know that men are scared. I also know that
this could not have happened any other way. I don’t want to live in a world
where men don’t change until you threaten to destroy everything they love. I
wanted to believe that men would care enough about women to want to change of
their own accord. It is precisely because I’m enough of a sucker to endlessly
assume the best of men that I wanted to believe this.
The real risk here is that we will let our very human
compassion for men in pain be exploited to undermine a movement for sexual
justice and liberation for everyone. This would have been easier to avoid if we
had not made it so very normal for men to be emotionally castrated, so very
routine for them to expect women to shoulder all of the burden of emotional
work in society. The problem is not simply that so many men are unable to
cope with fear and distress — it’s also that society at large is unable to cope
with male fear and distress, whereas women’s pain is normalized, made
invisible, and accepted up to a certain degree as our lot in nature and
creation.
* * *
Part of the reason you see women reacting with anger when
men try to put their own feelings back into the discussion of consent and abuse
is that many women — most women — have spent far too long being forced to behave
as if men’s feelings were the only thing that mattered, and that hurting men’s
feelings was the worst possible thing they could do. If you’ve been made to
believe your whole life that it is your job to make men feel good, you might
not be in the best place to hear a request to moderate your tone, and that’s
okay.
You want to talk about men and their emotions? So do I,
and I hope you’re up to it.
Empathy, however, is a non zero-sum game. We are not going
to water down women’s liberation by thinking harder about how men feel about
patriarchy and their place within it — particularly not right now, when men’s
feelings are such a huge part of the picture of violence and silence and shame
that is slowly coming into terrible public focus. In short: yes, men’s feelings matter. It does not have to be
part of every feminist’s work to pay attention to them, but I consider it part
of mine. I want to understand why men do what they do and how, given that it is
not practically or economically possible to simply send half the species to a
landfill, we can get them to behave better. Understanding and condoning are not
synonymous. I am here to change the world, not to hold your hand.
But if we are to talk about men’s feelings, we have to really talk
about them, and that might hurt. It involves poking at the soft and painful
places beneath the carapace of masculine posturing. It involves talking about
the full spectrum of emotion, including vulnerability, disappointment,
loneliness, embarrassment, and fear — all of those unmanly feelings men and
boys are bullied out of acknowledging. You want to talk about men and their
emotions? So do I, and I hope you’re up to it... read more: https://longreads.com/2018/02/14/the-great-stink/
https://twitter.com/PennyRed
