The #metoo Thing
The reportedly widespread confusion
amongst men in developed societies about how to react to the #metoo phenomenon
is understandable. Massive numbers of us seem to be fearful, trepidatious, or
defiant about the likelihood of our own behaviour coming into scrutiny and
being publicly denounced. However, maybe a closer examination of what’s
involved might help to dispel some of the ambiguity involved in our situations.
Most of us, of course, have been
sexual assholes at times. Avoiding assholery completely would be an
extraordinary achievement, considering the acculturation and socialisation we
have undergone, along with our all-too-human lack of perfection.
I myself have been an asshole in
regard to sex for what I consider to be a regrettable number of times, although
my forays into physically indefensible behaviour occurred when I was much
younger, and I have confined my sexually insensitive assholery for the past
half a century or so to misusing my inner need to come up with punchlines, or
to be humorous in general, by uttering stupid, perhaps hurtful, and definitely
unfunny things that have sprung from deep within my underlying acculturation; although
inexcusable and indefensible, these have been one-offs followed by instant
regret, and I’ve abandoned them once I’ve realised that I’ve fucked up.
Anyway, so far so good about me being
#metoo’d for any of my past indiscretions, whether I deserve the shame or not.
Perhaps there’s a reason for this,
other than just luck. Maybe several.
It seems to me, and of course I could
be wrong, that what tends to graduate – or perhaps that’s the wrong word – regrettable
but forgettable assholery into #metoo status worthy of public shaming is the
involvement of aggression, domination, power exploitation, or all of these.
Aggression, or acting on feelings of
generalised and violent hostility and destructiveness, is part of our genetic
heritage, resulting to some degree from testosterone levels, which means that
men tend to be more likely to have strong aggressive impulses than women,
although women also produce testosterone, usually in smaller amounts, and can
also experience and express terrifyingly aggressive urges. My mother was like
that.
As with many hormonal reactions, such
as fight-or-flight response, that we acquired thousands of years before the
emergence of civil society, we can channel aggression in a variety of ways. Some
of them are adaptive to our current environments, such as excelling at sport,
general competitiveness, and swearing at drivers who almost kill us, whilst
others are maladaptive, sexual aggression justifying #metoo denunciations being
one of them.
Overbearingly aggressive people strive
to be dominant and masterful and are continuously on the alert for
opportunities to confront and attack those people they identify as appropriate
targets, with the goal of harming them, dominating them, or both. For a whole
shitload of perpetrators of sexual aggression qualifying as #metoo behaviour,
but certainly not all of them, women seem to be appropriate targets.
Instead of merely being ordinary
people who occasionally slip up and act like assholes, these dedicated
aggressors become utter assholes. It’s who they are. They can hardly imagine a
life devoid of the joy they experience from engaging in sexual assaults of the
#metoo variety.
The other factors that
qualify assholery behaviour as #metoo sexual assault, dominance and power
exploitation, are of course closely linked to aggression. Political power,
whether it’s the politics of a country, an industry, an organisation, a
workplace, a family, or a relationship – and politics is an inevitable part of
these and all other areas of human interaction – refers to the ability to
influence or control the behaviour or thinking of others.
Although power
imbalances are omnipresent, they only lead to #metoo sexual aggression when
undiluted assholes exploit them for that purpose to prove their superiority to
themselves. The prevalence of this exploitation results from toxic assholes’
compulsive need to seek positions of dominant power, and ruthlessly, and to
abuse it: Weinstein, Trump, British Cabinet ministers, your sister’s boss, and
on and on.
Rape and sexual assault
therefore seem to me to be crimes of out-of-control aggression expressing the
rapists’ inner craving for dominance, albeit acted out through sexuality. Of
course, one sweeping general statement about as multi-headed a monster as
sexual assault is bound to be only partially true, but the combination of toxic
aggressiveness and the assertion and abuse of power in order to dominate
usually seems to be a major factor in the assaults we tend to consider worthy
of shaming.
My own #metoo
experience illustrates this.
It was in 1958. I was
12 years old. My brother was 14. He’d mercilessly and joyfully bullied,
tormented, belittled, taunted, humiliated, teased viciously, and otherwise dominated
and abused me on an almost daily basis for as far back as I could remember.
He somehow inveigled me
into his room in our recently built three-bedroom house. Whilst telling jokes
about how funny cocksucking is, he physically restrained me, dropped his pants,
and with one hand on the back of my neck started forcing my face down toward
his genitals, joking about it all the while. The smell wafting up from his
sweaty crotch was vile. He forced me as far as my lips barely touching the end
of his erect penis before I was able to fight my way free. I don’t know how. I
fled to my room to the sound of his mocking laughter.
To the best of my
memory, neither of us ever mentioned the incident to the other thereafter. I
certainly never mentioned it to anyone at the time. It would’ve been my word
against his. No witnesses.
Thirty-two years later
family pressure forced me to meet him again after avoiding him for several
years, even establishing residence in another country to do so. He was even
more aggressive and dominance-oriented than he’d been as a child and
adolescent, and apparently found it amusing to flaunt his love for bigotry in
all its forms in my face. At one point he criticised my adopted home of New Zealand
I knew he’d done it to
dominate and harm me, anyway, not out of homosexual attraction. Yuh reckon?
#metoo
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