A message from our editor for our white readers and friends. Rape culture and toxic masculinity are intricately embedded in, and dependent upon, white supremacy. Black lives matter. Ending rape culture is an abolitionist project; we must abolish the police. Donate to Movement for Black Lives https://secure.actblue.com/donate/movement-4-black-lives-1 or find a local organization or Black owned…
For how obsessed our culture is with sex, we are pretty terrible at talking about what good sex looks like, how to have it by talking with our partners about mutual and shared pleasure, how to ask for what we want, how to say what we don’t. We are especially really terrible at teaching our…
We still have far to go in our understanding and discussion of the violences of men in the United States and abroad. Domestically, there has been increasing recognition in the wake of acts of mass violence in schools that a common trait in each of the perpetrators–who are predominantly young white men–is a history of violence…
On April 20, 1999, I was barely a month into my 16th year, a sophomore in high school full of angst, unrequited love, joy, and maybe a little anger. For years one of my favorite songs was Pearl Jam’s “Jeremy,” the grunge anthem to teen angst and anger, but more so an ode to sadness…
The last several weeks have been, we can hope, only the beginning of a long awaited reckoning in the United States. Every day another man, or two or three, is publicly named as an abuser, a harasser, a rapist, a predator. In many instances, an element of justice has been swift as they are shamed and…
Toxic masculinity–the way of being a man that requires aggression, sexual domination, earning big money, being athletic, and most definitely, being heterosexual–not only feeds rape culture, but is co-dependent upon it. In fact, rape culture and toxic masculinity feed each other while destroying everything they touch. The video below from MTV News provides a quick and…
The phrase “boys will be boys” used to excuse a myriad of behaviors, from the semi-benign: aggressiveness on the playground, competitiveness on the ball field; to the truly atrocious: street harassment (formerly known as cat-calling), to sexual violence and rape. What is interesting about this statement is that it associates the behavior of grown men,…
In the United States, gender defines far more than how people dress, or the roles they must assume in their intimate relationships. Gender socialization sets the stage for how individuals think and interact with the world around them. In the United States, male gendering socializes aggression, domination, and hatred for women. This paper examines the…