Shedding Misogyny and Redefining Masculinity

Confessions of an oppressor

“The learning process is something you can incite, literally incite, like a riot.” - Audre Lorde

Walking home from an apartment party in Florence, Italy, I veered off from my friends at Piazza San Marco and headed west towards my hotel. Solitude beneath the Tuscan sky was serene and, at last, I was alone with my thoughts. The wind was crisp but it provided a breath of fresh air from the stuffiness of a room packed to the brim with drunk, carefree study abroad students. Popping in my headphones to a soundtrack of The Love Below and 3 Stacks’ rhymes, I enjoyed the smell of the morning dew and the faint fluorescent glow of a pasticceria preparing to open in a couple of hours. So now can I borrow your timid torso/More so than your soul/Honest me gotta be how I roll…

As I made my way across the square, I noticed a group of girls not far behind me coming from the left. They turned down my street. So did a young Italian guy donning a black leather jacket and scuffed up jeans. He had a quick, deliberate step and an even quicker tongue as he chatted up the girls. Ciao bella, he repeated over and over. They kept walking and ignored him. There were three of them but I don’t recall what they were wearing. It didn’t really matter.

I kept turning back to monitor the situation, hoping that’s all I would need to do. A block from my hotel, he cut them off and so I knew I needed to turn around and say something. I approached and told the guy to leave them be. Torna a San Marco, I kept repeating. He pushed me back and said everything was fine. But I kept pressing and soon enough, he conceded. Standing there, watching him walk away, I turned to wish the girls a good night and crossed the street.

Popping my headphones back in, I took one last glance back at him and approached the door to my hotel. We met today for a reason/I think I’m on the right track now…

Tired and buzzed, I collapsed on my bed. I could afford to pat myself on the back and paint myself as the good guy. To conveniently forget that an hour before I was lustfully checking out a girl’s ass and sitting idly by while my friends crassly announced which girls could “get it” tonight, my silence reverberating with every breath of laughter that escaped my mouth. I was proud of myself for what I had just done, but it was a pride that whitewashed my own shame for being complicit in helping to bring situations like this about every day. I was a bystander who felt inaction could not rightfully be equated with tacit approval.

This sense of shame was relatively new to me. For years, I helped promulgate the consistent connotation of woman as object, in how I viewed them on the streets or talked about them amongst friends. I benefitted from a skewed power dynamic without realizing my own privilege. I was a misogynist, not overtly, but undeniably, because I was a member of a society in which the status of women is pervasively belittled. And by strolling on by, I was doing nothing to curtail it.

Misogyny — hatred of or contempt for women, manifest in political and social prejudice based on their gender identity. It’s an attitude that is insidiously present in our politics, an arena where we do well to mask the othering that it demands by focusing on the advances that have been made. In politics, the progressive climb upwards has been slow and often rocky, but women stand on a more egalitarian platform in the workplace and education today than they ever have before. Several laws meant to protect women from discrimination and harassment have drawn support in recent years. Yet each advancement blazed on feminism’s trail serves primarily to create a smokescreen, preventing us from truly grappling with the cultural norms that permeate our patriarchal disposition. Legislation passes and we move on from the issue, confident that what ails us has been taken care of to the best of our abilities, unconcerned for the vestiges of misogyny that remain.

I almost didn’t write this essay. I’m speaking now (or at least I hope I am) as some sort of ally, but I have often wondered whether the authority to call myself that even rests with me. I will myself to align with the goals of the oppressed but I inhabit all too often the role of the oppressor. So maybe I’m not there yet. Maybe the most I can hope for is to keep growing and keep learning and keep loving.

It’s been a slow and often rocky climb upwards.

At the beginning of my college experience at that liberal bastion NYU, feminism seemed like a dirty word. Even women I knew rejected the philosophy, whether they were merely content with their traditional roles or fearful of coming across as misandrist (as is the common misconception). I believed in equality, sure, I mean pay everyone an equal amount for equal work. I heard talk of that Ledbetter lady on cable news and women making 77 cents for every dollar that men make yadda yadda yadda. It didn’t seem outrageous to castigate capitalism’s shortcomings, primarily because it didn’t mandate a reevaluation of my own. I had a scapegoat that didn’t require me to dismantle any of my own walls.

These walls, which had boxed me in and kept me from challenging the convention, had been built for 18 years. It was comfortable to stay firmly within their confines because I wouldn’t risk what every college newcomer feels — ostracism. And that freshman in his dorm who viewed women as little more than pieces of meat was more than content with laying down the mortar and adding more bricks with the help of new friends and new experiences.

Ah but a quick aside. Right before leaving for college, I was with the girl who would become my first (and only) love. We went to a park and I asked her to close her eyes and that’s when I leaned in to kiss her for the first time. A week before I had a chance at a concert. She was drunk and I was one of the drivers, sober as a skunk. I knew she was into me but when she stared up into my eyes, I couldn’t bring myself to steal a kiss. I wanted her to be fully aware in the moment. For it to be as special and meaningful as she was to me. And while she still berates me for that today, what she doesn’t know is that, starting with that summer, my love and care for her as a woman has helped me to shed those walls that previously barricaded me inside with privilege as companion. As I began college though, that journey hadn’t truly begun yet. I simply kissed the girl I liked and left my hometown the next day…

…and I went to New York and Welcome Week came and superficiality oozed out of my every movement and conformity seized the day. There was an onslaught of new people and I felt pressured to prove my collegiate chutzpah, Four Loko in one hand and a woman’s torso in my other. I rejected young women based on looks, due to a callous obsession with how others would perceive my taste. I pursued others for the same reason, wading in the shallow end of the masculinity pool. This dehumanization of women, viewing them solely as a fit body or a pretty face, was omnipresent in many a college male’s dorm room.

During one pregame, as one of those “soft-ass” Drake songs blared, a friend (perhaps that title is less than apt) asked me what my number was so far. I needed only a second to realize what he meant. At the risk of having a “man card” revoked, I laughed and told him three. In fact, I had slept with exactly zero girls and I wasn’t unhappy about it. But the expectation to “man up” required an image of sexual conquest. It was all part of the performance of hypermasculinity, a competition to prove one’s manhood to others. So I would lie. Or avoid answering. Nonetheless, I built up that deceptive version of myself because it was expected from my status as one of the guys.

Misogyny resided in those numbers. Misogyny was present every time my friends and I would rank a girl on a scale of 1 to 10, estimate cup sizes, or discuss the rounding of the bases. Misogyny was there when we discussed a girl’s easiness, as if she herself was a game that just needed to be mastered, the removal of her panties just the trophy at the end.

And while it made me uncomfortable, to voice this meant rejecting my own masculinity. Manhood in college requires that if you wield a dick and a conscience, you’d better cut one off. Because of those bedfellows that are so often chased, masculinity and virtue are the strangest.

I can’t pinpoint when the moment was that this mindset began to evolve, but soon I began to realize that college was an ironic place to be learning (and caring) about female empowerment. Yet here I was. I was reading more, that’s for sure — about feminist theory, patriarchal failings, rape culture. I became more enamored with female writers, artists and musicians. But above all, I grew closer to my female friends, friends whom I admired and looked up to even as so many others looked down on them. I met women who went out in public to a chorus of catcalls and had been violated in private against the force of male sexual dominance. I simply opened myself up to new friendships. And my walls began to crumble.

I had never been the kind of guy for random hookups– I was more of the relationship type — but going out to bars started to feel less and less like a prowl for attractive women. I would sit back, laugh with my friends, and head home. While there, however, my female friends would be subjected to unwanted gropes, seen as pieces of public property with a pulse. And I would watch as men routinely blurred the line between persistence and coercion. This was the college community acting as it does, misogyny at the forefront. And there I was acting as I always had, silence at the forefront.

All too often, I would see young men leading the way towards establishing the “interior colonization” that feminist activist Kate Millett describes, by which an ideology of sexual dominion pervades intimate relationships. And why not? Nobody could tell them otherwise because the status quo rested on this relationship of male-centered power. And I still wasn’t comfortable being that voice rising in objection, even to my friends.

I tried being defensive. Not all men are like this, I would say. I was fully aware that not all misogynists lurked in the shadows, that many would subvert intimacy with a woman in order to serve their interests, but come on, not all men do that. Not all men objectify women or smugly enjoy their privilege. Not all men. At the very least, well, I wasn’t like this…not me.

But this was simply my defense mechanism, a convenient get-out-of-jail-free card to shield myself from responsibility on behalf of my sisters, friends, significant others, and fellow human beings. “Not all men” and “Not me” elevated my masculinity to that of the knight saving the damsel in distress by denying my own compliance in the systemic subjugation of women.

My experiences at NYU helped to shape me as a man, now on the precipice of graduation, four years after I walked underneath that arch in Washington Square Park for the first time. They held a mirror up to the man I was to see the man I didn’t want to be. So here I am, trying my best to fight on the side of David against the oppressive sword of Goliath, a sword I have often wielded.

This seems like it should be easier on a campus in which women outnumber men 60/40. But then I remember my disbelief after a friend of mine told me that there is a fraternity on campus that has a penthouse nicknamed RD that stands for “Rape Den”. And he just shrugged and smirked. I see a “Consent is Sexy” poster on a bulletin board in the Center of University Life, and I slink back with depression that we must sexualize consent in the face of female dehumanization.

To come into contact daily with these visceral obstacles that kept me from recognizing my own acquiescence to misogyny in bars, on street corners, and on campus was jarring. Because I’ve reached that point of clarity, finally, when I know the women I encounter every day deserve better. That they, victim or not, deserve my support. This male privilege of mine may be institutional, but I can’t let it become personal. Many shrug off individual action since cultural problems are so big and daunting and permissive that only collective action will make a difference. Nobody asks: how can I, in my singular sphere of influence, be more just?

I have come to realize, therefore, that I can no longer use the language of the oppressor and expect to accomplish anything. I need to work towards redefining what masculinity means. I need to redefine myself and exude it in my actions.

We as society have collectively decided that in the big gender equation, there’s room for machismo and aggression and an unequal power dynamic but not love and compassion and accountability. To empathize is to be emasculated. To equate women with personhood is to weaken one’s own manhood. Naturally, misogyny is a byproduct of this warped understanding.

But what this redefinition of masculinity requires more than anything is an acknowledgement that we are all complicit as men. I am complicit. So while I may count myself as virtuous at times, this means nothing without trying to reverse the shame that haunts me. Feminism loves men enough to expect them to act honorably, to treat women as agents worthy of respect. For all that the women in my life have given me, do I not owe them that?

I leave campus now, channel ORANGE playing in my headphones, reminiscing about where I was when I first listened to Frank Ocean’s debut album — on my couch at midnight in the summer of 2012, the rest of my house fast asleep. My personal development was just beginning to blossom at this point. Now you’re lost/Lost in the heat of it all…

And his voice still resonates today as I dodge puddles on the street corners, dipping my head down in my hood and hiding from the world. I pass the apartment of a girl I took out a couple of times and wonder if I left her in a better place. I hope so. Just like they did to me, I know I’ve left an indelible mark on the women I’ve encountered or pursued or loved. And cyanide in my Styrofoam cup…

Ocean continues to croon and I continue to think of that cup that runneth over. A drink I’m sick of pouring the women I care for, a drink I’m sick of consuming myself. I put the cup down and continue walking, away from those I’ve hurt when my love proved absent and my masculinity sought to conform.