The Boys at the Heart of #MeToo
We need to talk about lateral violence
“Catch it, fag. Don’t you want your shirt back?”
The locker room. Grade eight. I was just starting at a new school, so nobody really knew who I was. I didn’t have any friends yet, and I was smaller than pretty much everyone. If I didn’t realize it when I walked into a room of teenagers, I realized it when one of them pulled my shirt out of my hands and they started throwing it back and forth.
I couldn’t think of anything else to say so I told them to fuck off.
His kick was so fast I didn’t see it coming. I tried to hit him but two other guys held my arms and he punched me in the stomach. It hurt so bad I couldn’t breathe. My eyes starting watering and one of the guys holding my arms said, “Aw, we better leave the little faggot alone, he’s crying.”
They pushed me into the bench, threw my shirt in my face, and left.
— Luke, age 14
Since October, the #MeToo movement has gone from Twitter to the streets of Los Angeles to the cover of TIME, and has led to a rise in social commentary on masculinity in articles like Marianne Schnall’s call-out to men to stand up against harassment and sexual assault. Post-Weinstein media coverage is indicating a shift in attitudes on harassment, indicating that #MeToo is working.
Here’s my problem. Discussing catchword toxic masculinity among Hollywood executives, elite athletes and American politicians is about three decades too late. Men don’t learn patterns of domination, violence or sexual assault when they are men. All that begins at a much younger age.
As long as boys are calling each other fags, violence against women will continue.
When you’ve got a degree or two of separation from homophobia, it can be easy to forget that it exists. As an educator and a LGTBQ youth advocate, I can tell you that on the frontlines in schools across North America, homophobia and transphobia are alive and well. Students hear gay slurs every day. GSAs get shut down. Boys in locker rooms get punched in the stomach.
“Homophobia and misogyny run school halls.” — Ken Corbett
If you’re thinking that homophobia is solely an LGBTQ issue, take a second look at what Luke wrote. Apart from being small, he didn’t do a single thing to stand out from the other boys in the locker room. The homophobic violence he experienced, then, wasn’t about sexuality. It was about masculinity, and it was about dominance.
In 2007, C.J. Pascoe wrote a book called Dude, You’re a Fag, discussing masculinity and sexuality in a American high schools. In it, she confronts the way that the word ‘fag’ defines teenage boy culture.
“Homophobia is too facile a term with which to describe the deployment of fag as an epithet. By calling the use of the word fag homophobia—and letting the argument stop there—previous research has obscured the gendered nature of sexualized insults.[…] Becoming a fag has as much to do with failing at the masculine tasks of competence, heterosexual prowess, and strength or in any way revealing weakness or femininity as it does with a sexual identity. This fluidity of the fag identity is what makes the specter of the fag such a powerful disciplinary mechanism. It is fluid enough that boys police their behaviours out of fear of having the fag identity permanently adhere, and definitive enough that boys recognize a fag behaviour and strive to avoid it.” — C.J. Pascoe
Her point is that while boys who identify as or are perceived to be gay are indeed subject to intense harassment, homophobic language can be used against any boy. Any boy can temporarily become a fag, Pascoe says, and boys are taught to avoid being labelled a fag above anything else.
In a TED Talk last year, ex-NFL player Wade Davis described what that looked like for him growing up. “Wearing a mask of masculinity was never ending,” he said. “I knew that one of the rules was that I must verbally and with great rage name, question and call out other boys whose masculinity did not fit into the norm, and that included calling other kids a ‘faggot.’” If we think about this as an LGBTQ issue, our focus remains on those ‘other’ boys who become targets of harassment. If we acknowledge the way homophobic language polices every boy’s masculinity, however, our attention turns to ‘the norm.’
“When asked to talk about their constructions of what it means to be ‘gay,’ boys argued that being a ‘real boy’ involved being physically strong, being able to protect or defend yourself, playing or supporting football, and being able to fight. Boys who deviated from this perceived normative masculinity were seen as not ‘properly’ male and liable to be bullied and ostracised.” — Deevia Bhana and Emmanuel Mayeza
The norms of hegemonic or ‘toxic’ masculinity, are probably familiar to you—things like dominance, aggression, heterosexuality, misogyny. They are familiar because they are the roots of sexual violence.
This doesn’t mean that every boy has the capacity to be sexually violent, and it doesn’t mean that masculinity isn’t inherently toxic. It means that the traditional masculine culture upheld between boys—the culture of homophobic language and punches in the stomach—is at the heart of violence against women. Because boys don’t learn to assault girls by being with girls. Boys learn to assault girls through the lateral violence that we call homophobia, violence that becomes most prevalent and powerful while they are conceptualizing manhood in their young lives.
Michael Rohrbaugh created a short film called AMERICAN MALE through MTV’s Look Different Creator Competition that illustrates the connections in the ways that masculinity is constructed in the lives of boys and young men.
The #MeToo movement needs women reporting sexual harassment and abuse, and men standing up both in support and in recognition of their privilege. That’s been said before and it’s crucial. But if we’re going to adequately confront violence against women, we also need men acting as role models for boys. We need men helping boys foster a culture of compassion and support, a culture that celebrates both strength and gentleness and affirms boys’ masculinity without making them prove it.
If we’re going to change our culture, we need to start with the boy on the bench in the locker room, and the boy who punched him in the stomach.
