I wanted so badly to be convinced that Zach’s brother—along with innumerable commercials, TV shows, movies, pop songs, church sermons, and strong opinions from adults and peers—had given me the final clue I would need to reveal the secret of how to get some. I wanted to be comforted that this whole romance-with-girls thing wasn’t as staggeringly mysterious as I had initially feared. A host of anxieties were stirring in my hormonal tween psyche around this time. Adolescence was upon me, and with it a host of powerful new pressures and rules that made no sense—especially the stuff about gender and sexuality. My parents at least had the insight to have several “talks” with me, and they even sent me to “sex-ed camp” for a weekend, so I was certainly more knowledgeable about the basics than many of my peers. But none of that information could help me negotiate the demands of manhood and emerge as a well-adjusted man with a positive and organically formed view of sexuality. Back in 1988, like now, there were very few places in America where young people could receive the knowledge, skills, and opportunities to gradually develop their own unique feelings about gender, sexuality, and intimate relationships, Thus, we all looked—and continue to look—for oversimplified answers like those provided by men’s magazines, church-based abstinence-only programs, and Zach’s brother.
As it turned out, Zach’s brother’s “insights” were timely, because we had already planned to meet up with three girls from our class later that very night. We couldn’t get any pot, so we’d have to use beer. Zach assured us he knew how to break into the neighbor’s garage (a.k.a. beer lending library), and since it was on the way to the construction site where we were meeting the girls, everything seemed to be coming together. The only thing left to do was figure out which girl each of us was going to attempt to “seduce.” I don’t remember how, but I actually got my first pick: Janice. Once we were sure Zach’s parents were asleep, we snuck out into the night. We stopped at the neighbor’s house, and I kept lookout while Jon and Zach broke into the garage. A few minutes later they returned with beaming smiles and a cold case of Nasty-Brau.
We arrived at the construction site, and after sitting there for about fifteen minutes, we cracked open some beers. We started to think we might just be getting drunk by ourselves—though I didn’t even know what getting drunk felt like, as this was the first time I’d ever attempted to drink alcohol. Nevertheless, I resolved to act natural so no one would sense my rampant inexperience. When the girls finally showed, Jon, Zach, and I enacted the pièce de résistance of our plan. We’d each stowed unopened beers next to us, and when the girls walked up, we each nonchalantly (at least,
we thought
we were being nonchalant) called “our” girl’s name and offered her a beer in order to get her next to us. When I said, “Hey, Janice, you want a beer?” she at least humored me and replied, “Sure,” sitting down next to me, just as I had hoped.
After my first beer, I decided I really didn’t want to drink much more because, like most cheap beer, it tasted like cat piss smells. Janice, however, seemed to not have this aversion to cat piss, and put away three beers in the time it took me to force down half of my second can. I think I might have been aware that I was supposed to feel like less of a man for being outchugged by a girl, but before I could castigate myself, a new masculine archetype popped into my head. He looked a lot like Zach’s older brother—complete with a detached confidence and a vibe of unfathomable sexual prowess. Without even removing the cigarette from his imaginary lips, he breezed,
Hey, man, it’s cool if she gets drunk quicker than you. After all, you already know you want to get some, but she needs the alcohol to realize that she wants to help you out with that.
It seemed like good advice at the time, so I put my arm around her waist to see what would happen. Amazingly, she didn’t recoil. In fact, she actually seemed to relax and lean into me a bit. At this point, all of the three couples had started talking between themselves more than with the entire group. It was really dark, so I couldn’t see what was going on with everyone else, but I naturally assumed that, given my inexperience, I was probably not as “far along.”
In my anxious, overly literal, and self-centered thirteen-year-old mind, all I had to do was give the beer a few more minutes to work and then bust my move. In no time Janice would happily come with me behind one of the parked bulldozers to engage in all sorts of naked pawing. I don’t think I even wanted to have sexual intercourse. I just wanted to see and touch a naked girl, and experience a naked girl touching me (and my penis). When she opened her fourth beer, I busted said move, which first consisted of trying to stroke one of her breasts. She sat up straight as soon as I did it, but she kept talking with me as if everything was okay, and so I, in all of my single-minded self-absorption, interpreted that to mean,
Go for it!
I began to slip my hand under the waistband of her pants and underwear.
Fortunately for all involved, Janice knew what she was and was not comfortable with, despite having pounded four beers. She promptly removed my hand from under the waistband of her underwear. Confused, but still foolishly hoping that Zach’s brother’s advice was
the key,
I tried once more. Again, Janice removed my hand, stopped midsentence, and quietly but assertively said, “Stop it.” I mumbled, “Sorry . . . I . . . I don’t know why I . . . ” but no words would come. Then I realized: I had been acting like a dick. I set down my unfinished beer, put my hands in my lap, and tried not to make Janice more ill at ease than she already was. Janice didn’t move away from me, probably because she didn’t want to make a scene, or maybe because she realized I meant her no harm and was just deluded and clueless. Maybe both. In any case, I was responsible for the awkward silence between us. We sat there a while longer and listened to the others whisper to each other several yards away. Eventually it got late, and everyone just kind of went home.
I, like most people in our sexually myopic culture, wanted one quick and easy answer to a host of profound questions that are best considered over the course of many years. It is this drive to oversimplify and distort the intricacies of gender and sexuality that enables us to minimize the existence of sexual violence, while simultaneously blocking healthy affirmations of human sexuality and oppressing people with nontraditional sexual and gender identities. It is crucial that young people be empowered to explore their own experiences of gender and sexuality with the help of their schools and families, yet such developmental opportunities are rarely present in the form or amount needed. For example, in our educational systems, language and math skills are taught at every achievement level, every school day. But navigating the gender /sexuality pressures of adolescence is equally complex as, if not more complex than, understanding transitive property or the use of animal imagery in
Madame Bovary.
Most educational systems in the United States devote a minimal amount of hours per year (and for only a few years) to gender and sexuality. Likewise, the relatively small amount of quality education that does exist has been artificially divided into two camps: sexual violence prevention and sexual health promotion. If we can bridge these disciplines and saturate our culture with their messages and methods, then we might have a shot at realizing a grand vision: a culture where people experience sexuality in a state of well-being—a culture incompatible with sexual violence because of a deeply shared belief that sexuality is a precious part of everyone’s humanity.
If there’s one conclusion I’ve drawn in more than twelve years of doing sexual violence-prevention work, it is this: Rapists are created, not born. While female sexual empowerment is an important factor in the struggle to end rape, it will not succeed without corresponding shifts in how boys are taught to experience sexuality and gender. My insights are, admittedly, limited by my relatively narrow experience of the world as a straight, white, middle-class, male U.S. citizen, though I strive to offer ideas that are as generally applicable as I can muster. I’m hoping my experiences as an “insider” of the demographic most responsible for perpetrating rape and fucking up sexuality (pun intended) will coalesce with my background as a sexual violence-prevention specialist to provide one more helpful piece in this huge jigsaw puzzle of a problem.
Boy Meets Rape Culture
Janice didn’t seem to hold my uninvited touching against me—she and I continued to be friendly for the next five years, until we graduated high school and went our separate ways. I always felt guilty about that night, though, because there was no getting around the fact that I had acted disrespectfully. Then, when a close friend of mine was raped by her boyfriend and tried to kill herself, I started connecting the proverbial dots. The pressure tactics employed by her boyfriend seemed an awful lot like a different twist on the same plan I had tried with Janice. I took no for an answer, while my friend’s boyfriend had not—other than that, there was a lot of overlap. A host of unrelenting questions laid siege to my mind around that time, and while they’ve become more nuanced with years and knowledge, I’m still trying to find some answers. Those questions all boil down to this one: Why aren’t we all socialized to expect and proactively ensure that every sexual interaction is marked by mutual enjoyment and respect? My experiences growing up male in America helped me start formulating some answers to that question.
Thankfully, I learned my lesson from Janice and abandoned the notion that sexuality should be reduced to a boys-versus-girls, winner-takes-all game, but I still struggled with the day-to-day boys-will-be-boys stuff. While I like to think I avoided the overtly harmful extremes of that mindset, I was also a chronically horny young man, and compounding my permaboner was the fact that other dudes were playing the get-some game as intensely as they knew how. It wouldn’t have been a big deal, except that most of the girls I knew were hot for the guys rocking some type of badboy/meathead/ dickbag persona. I’ll never forget hearing this from a girl I really liked: “You’re sweet . . . you’re like the kind of guy I might marry, but you’re not the kind of guy I want to have sex with.” I suppose I just wanted an “I can be respectful
and
make you come” option that simply didn’t exist in this stud/husband dichotomy. Of course, had my senses been less clogged with an omnipresent cloud of teenage angst, I might have realized that girls are pressured to play their side of this craptastic get-some game, too. It was in trying to make sense of these frustrations that I started seeing the bigger picture of what drives this madness. Understanding how boys are socialized to view sexuality can show us where to blend the approaches of sexual violence prevention and sexual health promotion, and how to enhance the effectiveness of programs rooted in these fields. But first we have to pull back the curtain on our unhealthy sexual status quo.
At the heart of countless American neuroses is the nonsensical, pervasive belief that sexuality is derived from a weakness in humanity. This idea likely came from the paranoid Christian extremists who exerted a powerful early influence on this nation. They would no doubt be gratified to learn that four hundred years later, sexuality has become quite detached from personhood. In other words, we’ve been taught to objectify sexuality itself, and see it only as a “thing” to act upon, or that acts upon us. We don’t recognize it as integral to our own humanity, nor as a beautiful and important link among all humanity. This detachment shames us out of embracing our sexuality as a positive part of ourselves, and constrains sexual expression to certain “permissible”
physical
acts.
Consider how this objectification of sexuality plays out with the socialization of boys in the United States. My friends and I learned quickly that our sexuality was to be characterized by action, control, and achievement—certainly, familiar themes to us by the time we hit puberty. We ascertained that sexuality is tied to a boy’s ability to play and win the get-some game. Sexual violence is one of many inevitable negative outcomes in this adversarial climate, which also gives rise to unwanted pregnancies, STIs, and an abundance of shitty sexual encounters that can unfavorably impact the way any of us experience sexuality in general.
This game places special emphasis on boys’ learning to control every possible variable surrounding sexual interactions, and thereby sends the clear message that sexuality should be expressed and enjoyed only in the context of a power dynamic. (Note: This is not a new idea, and has been the topic of numerous feminist-authored books and articles over the past forty years.
1
2
) My account of the night with Janice is replete with examples of this push to control. We had a plan accounting for every detail our thirteen-year-old brains could conjure. Our attention to detail in trying to dictate the progression of the sexual interaction—and our assumption that there was going to be sexual interaction in the first place—was not uncommon. During adolescence it became as clear as a bottle of cheap vodka that a lot of guys seemed to have an angle on how they could control the situation and get some.
Boys’ control strategies seem to become only more elaborate as we pass through adolescence and into our twenties. Domination over the sexual autonomy of others can almost become fetishized, and operates from a societal level (e.g., restrictions on reproductive freedoms, forced sterilization policies, inadequate laws against rape, etc.) down through the interpersonal (e.g., a greater concern for the number of bedpost notches than for the people involved in the experiences, or the experiences themselves). Feminist activists realized this a long time ago, which is why they created the concept of rape culture(s), and pointed out that rape is as much about power as it is about sex. Some fascinating research by Dr. David Lisak
3
supports this observation.