‘Let This Whole Town Hear/Your Knuckles Crack’

CW/TW: This will definitely touch on SA and r*pe, but the focus is men and masculine culture, not descriptions of assault

I think I have to just dive into this one as it’s unfolded for me over the last five or six days. I don’t really know how else to approach it. It’s going to be a long road to the point I want to get to, and who knows if we’ll even arrive there.

‘Push up to the corner
Where the turbines hiss
Someday we won’t
Remember this’

So, Elon Musk and Grimes are dating, and a friend posted that absolutely, mind-blowingly cringe-inducing photo from the Met Gala and made an offhand joke about it giving her flashbacks to ’90s vampire goth LARP culture and _{<IDK, IDK, it caught me totally off guard>} my heart just stopped. The flood of fucking gross memories of being an aughts teen in the same kind of circles just swept the breath right out of me. I was completely overwhelmed at how disgusting and disturbing it was to be in those groups as a teen. Totally gripped in a wave of empathy and concern for Grimes. _{<a person I literally could not identify prior, and whose name I had never heard>} I’ve been trying to unpack it since, and subsequent events have really not fucking helped.

‘Crawl till dawn
On my hands and knees
Goddamn these vampires
For what they’ve done to me’

When I was 14, I was hanging around with a group of largely older teens. Through various channels, this group coalesced. We were unsurprisingly dressed and attituded for our time and place. I think it’s commonly termed candy goth now, but whatever. That’s not really very important, except that it sets some context. How we dressed and our brand of disaffected youth isn’t really the point. We hung around truck stops in the middle of the night. Some of us did drugs. I picked up smoking _<cloves> during that period. Of course. I consented to sex with a 19 year old that year. Completely uncoerced, conventionally speaking. I had already been r*ped by someone I trusted, and I wanted to be in charge of my sex life. Immediately. I had a sense that if I wasn’t the one in charge straight away, I would never, ever have a chance at running my own sex.

But the thing is. He was 19. Hanging around with and fucking a kid. I remember getting some pushback from women in our social group, but I recall zero approbation from the men. And none directed at him. Possibly it happened out of my sight, but I would strongly doubt any of those dudes said a peep to him that was negative. Make no mistake, I was 100% into it. _{<which is why the vilification of Bowie post-mortem made me feel suuuuuuuuper uncomfortable and unhappy and erased>} But that’s not the point. At 14, I enthusiastically boarded the social ship of being considered a score, a possession, an accessory, a prop. I signed myself up; thinking there was a way to win. I had no idea.

‘Tie these horses
To the post outside
And let these glass doors
Open wide’

So I’ve been working through all of that being dredged up for however many days now. But having that brought back up in our current context started this cascade of horror and rage. And then the Schneiderman story broke like three days ago. Dog help me, I have no idea why I read that article. But I did. And I read the whole fucking thing. And was hit with wave after wave rage about of all of the other men who insist they’re feminists for no greater reason than to protect themselves from accountability that they know they deserve. Men who publicly champion women. Who accept awards. Who your whole circle of friends think is just the greatest, most enlightened guy. Men who use their accolades to discredit the people they assault, batter and abuse. Men who use feminism as a way to make women and others protect them.

‘And in their surface
See two young
Savage things
Barely worth
Remembering’

Today someone posted an article by Musk’s first ex-wife. The things she says that she doesn’t say in that piece. They’re absolutely both completely familiar and totally unacceptable. She was made into a prop by him. Blonder, thinner, gestational, quiet, coiffed, support staff. She was reshaped and minimized and congenially dehumanized. And when she finally said something and told Musk she didn’t want to live like that and it wasn’t working for her, he basically told her to find a way to deal with it, or they’d start the divorce process. Zero interest on his part in making any changes to treat her as fully human. He moved on to the next prop with apparently little pause. _{<who, gratifyingly, threw him over in pretty short order>} Part of the promise of power for men is having women to display. She was an inconveniently opinionated display piece, so she was removed and replaced. This process can and will be repeated as desired by the man in power. Intractable trophies will be discarded with little further thought.

‘Someday we’ll try to walk upright’

What I’m saying is that men fundamentally cannot be trusted or rehabilitated within our current structure. Their apathy, dehumanization and capriciousness are built in to the society they designed and maintain. Men regularly expect everyone around them to flatter them, please them, teach them, soothe them, help them, comfort them. They are practically unaware of this, it’s such a given in their lives. Men are taught they will be catered to, and they have every right to destroy anything which doesn’t cater to them.

‘Crawl till dawn
On
my
hands
and
knees’

And now, this is the part where uncomfortable cis people inevitably pipe up with:
.                                                                                                                                                      ;except trans men! Don’t erase trans men!;

Also trans men. Trans men are men and, with few exceptions, just as toxic, entitled and violent. Trans men are not the cis trump card to pull out when men are critiqued as though they are edge cases, or fundamentally different men than cis men. They are not.

‘God
Damn
These bite marks
Deep in my arteries’
– Mountain Goats

I can’t do all of this tonight. At least, not right now. The next part is where it comes fully personal and fully contemporary.