{"id":19578,"date":"2015-02-13T18:28:33","date_gmt":"2015-02-14T02:28:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=19578"},"modified":"2015-02-14T03:07:57","modified_gmt":"2015-02-14T11:07:57","slug":"the-politics-of-being-a-man-who-survived-childhood-sexual-violence-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=19578","title":{"rendered":"The Politics of Being a Man Who Survived Childhood Sexual Violence 2"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>(You can read Part 1 here<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

I have been remiss in not telling you about a book in which two of my poems have been published,\u00a0Voice Male: The Untold Story of the Profeminist Men\u2019s Movement<\/i><\/a>. <\/i>Both poems are from my first book,\u00a0The Silence of Men<\/a>, <\/i>and I am pleased that Voice Male\u2019s<\/i> editor, Rob Okun, chose them to close each of the sections in which they appear: \u201cFathering,\u201d which ends\u00a0with my poem \u201cAfter the Funeral\u201d and \u201cMale Survivors,\u201d which ends with \u201cThe Taste of a Little Boy\u2019s Trust.” (The poem appears at the end of this post.)\u00a0The latter section is the one I want to talk about here, but first I\u2019d like to tell you a little bit about Voice Male<\/em>, which is important in its purpose and really quite remarkable in its scope.<\/p>\n

Rob Okun has been editing\u00a0Voice Male<\/i> magazine<\/a>\u00a0since 1983, when it was the newsletter of the\u00a0Men\u2019s Resource Center for Change<\/a>. Since then,\u00a0Voice Male <\/i>has chronicled what Okun calls, in the title of his introduction, “One of the Most Important Social Justice Movements You\u2019ve Never Heard Of.\u201d Starting with\u00a0The Oakland Men\u2019s Project<\/a>\u00a0in 1979, he sketches the history of profesminist men\u2019s organizations not just in the United States, but internationally as well.\u00a0Okun writes about groups like\u00a0Men\u2019s Resources International<\/a>, which has contributed to important profeminist work in countries as far flung as Nigeria, Nepal, Albania, and Ireland; like\u00a0Promundo<\/a>, which does work in Brazil and Rwanda; and like the\u00a0Sonke Gender Justice Network<\/a>\u00a0in South Africa. Indeed, reading Okun\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not surprising, then, that Okun devotes an entire section of Voice Male <\/i>to the voices of men who have survived sexual violence, for\u00a0our refusal to be silent, to allow ourselves to be silenced, calls the very foundation of traditional\u00a0manhood into question.\u00a0Richard Hoffman\u2019s brief essay,\u00a0\u201cTen Thousand Children: A Turning Point,\u201d concludes on precisely this assertion:<\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Whether or not you are comfortable with Hoffman\u2019s overtly political language\u2014defector, ideology, imprisonment\u2014<\/i>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 \u201ctrue\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

For me, embracing feminist politics was where my healing began.\u00a0The language with which the women\u2019s movement both named the male dominant culture enabling\u00a0men’s sexual violence and placed\u00a0responsibility for that violence squarely on the shoulders of the\u00a0men who perpetrated it not only helped me to name what my\u00a0abusers did to me as abuse; it also gave me a target for my\u00a0rage, 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\u00a0brings with it. I did. At least\u00a0intellectually, though, because of the feminist theory I was reading, I understood that shame not as something I deserved, but as\u00a0a 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\u00a0the intellectual work of healing\u00a0long before I was strong enough for the\u00a0emotional work.<\/p>\n

That intellectual infrastructure, if you will,\u00a0was a source of real strength at a time\u2014this was in the mid to late 1980s\u2014when 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\u00a0absolute certainty of expertise, the session leader pronounced that he was going to use\u00a0she<\/i>\u00a0as the generic pronoun for children who might choose to tell us they\u2019d been sexually abused.\u00a0While boys did\u00a0sometimes 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\u00a0us not to recognize the signs of abuse in girls, by including boys\u00a0in our training. I did not yet have the strength to out myself as a survivor in that kind of situation, but\u00a0neither was I devastated by what the\u00a0trainer said, as I might have been\u00a0without the certainty that feminism provided me.<\/p>\n

For me, in other words, healing and feminist\u00a0politics are inseparable, which is slightly different from\u00a0the connection Richard Hoffman makes between speaking out and defecting from patriarchy.\u00a0Speaking out, after all, is by definition a political act, one that positions\u00a0the 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\u00a0learn to live as a welcomed member of a community; and the only person who should be allowed to decide whether or not their\u00a0healing is political, in the sense that mine was, should be the person whose healing it is.\u00a0This is a line I have not always been successful in walking, neither in the prose I have written about being a survivor nor in\u00a0the poems I\u2019ve written about that experience since The Silence of Men<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>was published. I often lost sight of the distinction that Hoffman implicitly makes\u00a0between acknowledging\u00a0what happens when a survivor chooses<\/em> to speak out\u00a0and\u00a0suggesting that survivors are\u00a0obligated<\/em> to\u00a0do so. This is why, with a couple of exceptions, I haven\u2019t 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\u00a0\u201cThe Taste of a Little Boy\u2019s Trust:”<\/p>\n

The Taste Of A Little Boy\u2019s Trust<\/h3>\n

Snow still falling this late,
\nwhen each house framed
\nby the window above my desk<\/p>\n

is dark, and even my wife\u2019s breathing
\nhas grown indistinguishable
\nfrom the quiet, snow still falling<\/p>\n

as a truck rolls by, big-cat-svelte
\non eighteen wheels, orange
\nrunning lights spreading<\/p>\n

up and down my block
\na Halloween glow
\nin mid-December,<\/p>\n

like a space vessel landing,
\nbringing me the boy I was
\nstanding in the courtyard, searching<\/p>\n

the descending whiteness
\nfor the shapes of ships
\nI longed to fly away on,<\/p>\n

snow still falling this late
\nwhen I could be sleeping,
\nthe way I should have been<\/p>\n

the night I saw my mother nude,
\nand her friend on his back, and them both
\ntoo slow to hide what they were doing,<\/p>\n

and I told my brother and we tried it,
\nand we tried to understand
\nwhy grown-ups did it\u2014how could you let\u00a0someone
\n<\/i><\/p>\n

pee in your mouth?<\/i>\u2014snow
\nstill falling this late
\nis the whisper we tried to laugh in, breath<\/p>\n

the old man dropped, syllable\u2014
\nwhen<\/i>\u2014by syllable\u2014will I
\n<\/i>see you?<\/i>\u2014into my ear, and I<\/p>\n

couldn\u2019t move, wouldn\u2019t,\u00a0and so it wasn\u2019t me
\nwho followed him upstairs, who listened
\nto the lock click shut in the door, and it wasn\u2019t me<\/p>\n

whose belt he unbuckled, and when
\nhis pants joined mine on the floor, it wasn\u2019t
\nme he pled with, whose head he used<\/p>\n

both hands to pull towards him
\nwhen I balked, whose mind
\nat this moment always whites out<\/p>\n

until it wasn\u2019t me
\nwho unlocked the door and walked
\nto where the snow is still falling<\/p>\n

as if even now he waited
\nin the apartment above mine,
\nand no matter how many times<\/p>\n

my brother asks, I won\u2019t go out,
\nnot even to be first sled down
\na virgin hill of the season\u2019s new snow.<\/p>\n

Cross-posted<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(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,\u00a0Voice Male: The Untold Story of the Profeminist Men\u2019s Movement. Both poems are from my … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":49,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[96],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19578","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rape-intimate-violence-related-issues"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19578","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/49"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19578"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19578\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19583,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19578\/revisions\/19583"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19578"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19578"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19578"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}