The Politics of Being a Man Who Survived Childhood Sexual Violence 2

(You can read Part 1 here.)

I have been remiss in not telling you about a book in which two of my poems have been published, Voice Male: The Untold Story of the Profeminist Men’s Movement. Both poems are from my first book, The Silence of Men, and I am pleased that Voice Male’s editor, Rob Okun, chose them to close each of the sections in which they appear: “Fathering,” which ends with my poem “After the Funeral” and “Male Survivors,” which ends with “The Taste of a Little Boy’s Trust.” (The poem appears at the end of this post.) The latter section is the one I want to talk about here, but first I’d like to tell you a little bit about Voice Male, which is important in its purpose and really quite remarkable in its scope.

Rob Okun has been editing Voice Male magazine since 1983, when it was the newsletter of the Men’s Resource Center for Change. Since then, Voice Male has chronicled what Okun calls, in the title of his introduction, “One of the Most Important Social Justice Movements You’ve Never Heard Of.” Starting with The Oakland Men’s Project in 1979, he sketches the history of profesminist men’s organizations not just in the United States, but internationally as well. Okun writes about groups like Men’s Resources International, which has contributed to important profeminist work in countries as far flung as Nigeria, Nepal, Albania, and Ireland; like Promundo, which does work in Brazil and Rwanda; and like the Sonke Gender Justice Network in South Africa. Indeed, reading Okun’s introduction, it is difficult not to recognize a movement among men intended to turn what it means to be a man into a way of living more invested in empathy, compassion, and connection with others than in the all-too-often violent pursuit of power and authority around which traditional manhood and masculinity are built.

It’s not surprising, then, that Okun devotes an entire section of Voice Male to the voices of men who have survived sexual violence, for our refusal to be silent, to allow ourselves to be silenced, calls the very foundation of traditional manhood into question. Richard Hoffman’s brief essay, “Ten Thousand Children: A Turning Point,” concludes on precisely this assertion:

When a man chooses to break his silence about boyhood sexual abuse, he becomes a kind of defector from an ideology that sees the world as an arena in which other men are all competitors and each new circumstance yields only victims and victors. It is my belief that only those men with the courage to refuse this conceptual imprisonment and instead choose wholeness can begin to lead us out of the nightmare of patriarchy.

Whether or not you are comfortable with Hoffman’s overtly political language—defector, ideology, imprisonment—Hoffman is right about this: the moment a man reveals himself as a survivor of sexual violence, the moment he insists that a full recognition of his humanity must include recognition of that violation and how it has shaped his life, he calls into question the fundamental characteristics that we associate with “true” manhood, i.e., that a man has to be strong, in control, dominant over others, and, perhaps most especially, sexually inviolate. In the same way, in other words, that there is an inescapable politics to the truth-speaking of women who have survived rape, whether or not those women are intending to speak politically, when men who have survived sexual violence tell the truth about our experience, that truth, whether we intend it or not, is political.

For me, embracing feminist politics was where my healing began. The language with which the women’s movement both named the male dominant culture enabling men’s sexual violence and placed responsibility for that violence squarely on the shoulders of the men who perpetrated it not only helped me to name what my abusers did to me as abuse; it also gave me a target for my rage, a framework for understanding that I was no more at fault for what those men had chosen to do to me than a woman is when a man chooses to rape her. It’s not that I didn’t feel the shame that sexual violation inevitably brings with it. I did. At least intellectually, though, because of the feminist theory I was reading, I understood that shame not as something I deserved, but as a tool my abusers had used quite successfully to keep me silent, even though neither of them had been a part of my life for many years. Feminism, in other words, helped me do some of the intellectual work of healing long before I was strong enough for the emotional work.

That intellectual infrastructure, if you will, was a source of real strength at a time—this was in the mid to late 1980s—when almost no one was talking about the sexual abuse of boys. I remember in particular a summer-camp training session that left me speechless. With the absolute certainty of expertise, the session leader pronounced that he was going to use she as the generic pronoun for children who might choose to tell us they’d been sexually abused. While boys did sometimes experience abuse, he said, their numbers were so very small that he didn’t want to skew our perceptions of what he was going to tell us, perhaps causing us not to recognize the signs of abuse in girls, by including boys in our training. I did not yet have the strength to out myself as a survivor in that kind of situation, but neither was I devastated by what the trainer said, as I might have been without the certainty that feminism provided me.

For me, in other words, healing and feminist politics are inseparable, which is slightly different from the connection Richard Hoffman makes between speaking out and defecting from patriarchy. Speaking out, after all, is by definition a political act, one that positions the speaker in relation to a community and that can be as much about differentiation as about affiliation. Healing, on the other hand, whatever politics may be attached to it, is much more normative, focused primarily on helping someone learn to live as a welcomed member of a community; and the only person who should be allowed to decide whether or not their healing is political, in the sense that mine was, should be the person whose healing it is. This is a line I have not always been successful in walking, neither in the prose I have written about being a survivor nor in the poems I’ve written about that experience since The Silence of Men was published. I often lost sight of the distinction that Hoffman implicitly makes between acknowledging what happens when a survivor chooses to speak out and suggesting that survivors are obligated to do so. This is why, with a couple of exceptions, I haven’t written much about this topic in quite some time. It feels good to be able to do so now, almost like a homecoming. In that spirit, I offer you “The Taste of a Little Boy’s Trust:”

The Taste Of A Little Boy’s Trust

Snow still falling this late,
when each house framed
by the window above my desk

is dark, and even my wife’s breathing
has grown indistinguishable
from the quiet, snow still falling

as a truck rolls by, big-cat-svelte
on eighteen wheels, orange
running lights spreading

up and down my block
a Halloween glow
in mid-December,

like a space vessel landing,
bringing me the boy I was
standing in the courtyard, searching

the descending whiteness
for the shapes of ships
I longed to fly away on,

snow still falling this late
when I could be sleeping,
the way I should have been

the night I saw my mother nude,
and her friend on his back, and them both
too slow to hide what they were doing,

and I told my brother and we tried it,
and we tried to understand
why grown-ups did it—how could you let someone

pee in your mouth?—snow
still falling this late
is the whisper we tried to laugh in, breath

the old man dropped, syllable—
when—by syllable—will I
see you?—into my ear, and I

couldn’t move, wouldn’t, and so it wasn’t me
who followed him upstairs, who listened
to the lock click shut in the door, and it wasn’t me

whose belt he unbuckled, and when
his pants joined mine on the floor, it wasn’t
me he pled with, whose head he used

both hands to pull towards him
when I balked, whose mind
at this moment always whites out

until it wasn’t me
who unlocked the door and walked
to where the snow is still falling

as if even now he waited
in the apartment above mine,
and no matter how many times

my brother asks, I won’t go out,
not even to be first sled down
a virgin hill of the season’s new snow.

Cross-posted.