reading respond

Fighting Toxic Masculinity Part I

(Why Teaching About Consent Is Crucial and Not Nearly Enough)

By way of beginning, imagine a well-meaning dudebro college freshman coming out of a rape prevention seminar that everyone in his school or dorm was made to go to: “Man, what a lot of BS! I mean, I obviously don’t want to rape anyone, but this whole ‘active continuous explicit consent’ stuff is so ridiculous and unrealistic! I’m really supposed to keep saying, ‘Can I still have sex with you? Can I still have sex with you?’ the whole time we’re having sex? Give me a break! No actual normal humans do that! Look around! People are touching each other all the time without asking for explicit consent! C’mon!”

And the dudebro is right about that last part. People, normal, ordinary people, are touching each other without explicitly asking for consent all the time, and lots of that touching is perfectly okay. When I come home from work, I slip my arm around my wife’s waist and give her a peck on the cheek, without asking. My 3 year old runs at me and I swoop him up in my arms, without asking. Earlier in the day I was congratulating a graduating senior, and we were shaking hands – neither of us asked first. Millions of couples will be wordlessly initiating sex tonight. When you stop to look, it’s all around. So we can understand the poor dudebro’s confusion.

So why does it seem that lots of regular folks can get away with this while dudebro is being urged to err on the side of caution with explicit asking? Answer: Because dudebro (and lots of men in general in our culture) are woefully deficient in People Reading Skills (PRS).

People with good PRS can reliably know a whole range of actions that other people do and don’t consent to without even asking them. (Punching my best friend in the face? He probably doesn’t consent. Giving him a high-five? He probably does.) In the ideal case (when you’ve got good PRS), explicit verbal consent is reserved for when you’re not sure. When in doubt, ask! And we live in a world where there’s a lot of doubt, so there needs to be a lot of asking. But the better PRS people have, the fewer consent mistakes they’re going to make. And unfortunately, most men in our culture (and in many cultures) really suck at people reading.

Our poor well-meaning dudebro – not only does he want to avoid rape, he actually wants to have GOOD sex! But the poor guy is practically INCAPABLE of having good sex, because you can’t have good sex without having PRS! He cannot tell that (although she has not explicitly revoked her consent yet) she is not having a particularly good time. He can’t reliably tell if she’s into it. Or what she might be into. He can’t read her signals. He can’t read her face. This guy has so many obstacles to having good sex: He’s bad at PRS in general. He doesn’t know this woman very well (it’s much easier to read people if you know them well). Also, he’s drunk, which is not going to suddenly make him more emotionally perceptive (to say the least.) Sorry man, but you need to resort to explicit active continuous verbal asking. Just like they said in the seminar. Sorry.

(Note that none of these considerations apply to a shitbag like Brock Turner [the guy who dragged an unconscious woman behind a dumpster to rape her], who knew perfectly well that the unconscious woman he was raping was not consenting. He just didn’t care. He didn’t see her as a person. So, you know, seeing women as people is kind of important, obviously. See “Fighting Toxic Masculinity Part II”.)

It turns out that having good PRS is a necessary condition to being an ethical human being. If you can’t tell that someone is in distress, you can’t help them. If you can’t tell that you’re scaring someone, you’ll probably keep doing it. If you can’t tell that you’re in someone’s space, or violating their boundaries, or saying something offensive, you’ll keep doing it. Without good PRS, you can’t tell that you’re dominating the conversation. You can’t tell that you’re mansplaining. You can’t tell that you’re being a douche. You can’t tell that your girlfriend isn’t in the mood for your jokes. You can’t tell that she really needs a hug right now. You can’t be empathetic if you can’t read people. People who are deficient in PRS are ethically handicapped. Men who are raised (and treated by society) in ways that stunt the development of their PRS, will be ethically handicapped. Yikes! Most men in our society are ethically handicapped!

So why are most men in our culture woefully deficient in PRS? A big part of being good at people reading is about emotion reading. You’ve got to be able to tell what people are feeling. Men tend to be bad at this partly because you can’t reliably report what other people are feeling when you can’t even reliably report what YOU are feeling. And boys are taught at an early age to squelch their emotions. A boy falls down and we immediately say, “You’re okay. You’re okay.” And on the inside the kid is going, “Oh. I thought I was feeling pretty crappy/sad/scared/etc. but I guess I’m wrong about that.” They’re not learning how to recognize and show their own emotions. So they’re going not going to be great at reading others’ emotions. And because boys aren’t showing a lot of emotion, and because kids are sex segregated a lot, boys tend to be around a lot of other boys who are also not showing emotion. So they have fewer opportunities to practice emotion reading.

(We do some of this shit to girls too, no doubt. We can ALL stand to improve our PRS.)

Without the ability to perceive emotions, the world looks black and white. It looks ethically simple. The world is made of “good guys” and “bad guys”. You just figure out a set of First Principles and apply them, universally and without exception, to every situation. Without the ability to perceive that different situations are different, that context and history matter, you can slide into a simplistic – even totalitarian – sort of thinking. You sit back in your arm chair and decide how it’s all supposed to be without really being able to see the people whose behavior you’re applying your rules to. You can’t see the differences and you can’t see the ways we’re the same.

The opposite of rape culture is nurturance culture. If you’re a parent (and especially if you’ve got a son, but really this applies to all parents): Be vulnerable. Be open. Show your emotions. Practice reading the emotions of others. Read complex literature with three dimensional characters. (One’s PRS won’t be improved by consuming simplistic literature and movies with two dimensional “good guy” and “bad guy” characters – these don’t exist in real life.) Encourage your child to feel their emotions (this is natural and important). Help them to articulate what they are feeling. Don’t squash their emotions. Don’t tell them “you’re okay.” Don’t tell them how to feel. Don’t tell them to “Man Up” or to “stop acting like a girl”. Listen to them. Listen to how they’re feeling. Then help them to look at others. Help them to see the emotions all around them. “You took that toy away from Pat. Look at Pat’s face and body. Can you tell how Pat feels about it?” Point out the emotions you see around you. Get better at reporting your own. Model vulnerability and emotional openness. Practice reporting on the emotions you see around you. Play the game where you see someone across the way and you make a story about what’s going on with them. Make the story complex. Make it include emotions. Make no one the two dimensional “bad guy”. Practice humanizing all the humans around you – especially the ones you see doing terrible things. Do this in front of your kids. Show them that you have good and bad tendencies in you too, and that we can all work to be better. Because we can. We can do better.

David Mitsuo Nixon

June 2016