How patriarchy fucks up all of us
My mom opened the Planned Parenthood in my hometown. Now she votes for the party that fanatically attacks the organization and all instances of women and girls trying to control their bodies.
My first girlfriend got her birth control at this same clinic. Her step father verbally and sometimes physically abused her. I think he taught her how to show love, because she eventually showed me in the same way. I took it for years, and sometimes I participated in the abuse. That was also my first poly relationship, and we stumbled over our parameters and hurt each other—I did the worst.
I had my first boyfriend when I was with her. On more than one occasion, he emotionally coerced me into having sex with him. I loved him and wanted to look past this stuff, but eventually couldn’t. I left him and then he stalked me. The part about him stalking me that scared me most was that I was afraid it would be obvious to my neighbors that I was dating a man. At the time, I would rather have a clandestine stalker than be outed to the people I lived around.
That wasn’t my first experience with sexual coercion. In middle school, a female friend tried to force sex on me at a party. There was another couple in the same room with us. I sent mixed signals at first. I struggled with whether I would appear as not enough of a man if I turned down sex when offered. I liked her, but I felt like she only wanted to have sex with me to prove to our classmates what she always projected: that she wasn’t a lesbian. (I looked her up a couple years ago, and she was married to a woman.) I knew her for years when this happened, and it made me really sad for her that she seemed compelled to force sex on a man to stop being teased and bullied for being masculine. When I eventually said “no” and struggled to get away from her—and it took a lot—she ran off with my clothes. I had to go without clothes into the living room with dozens of classmates before I could leave.
In high school, my sister had an abusive boyfriend and an eating disorder. Now she intensively genders her children to the point where her son looks like he’s having an anxiety attack if his sisters or female cousins ask him to play with them.
Seeing my nephew reminds me of growing up and appearing like a boy and feeling very differently inside. My first sexual experiences were when I was eight, with a neighbor boy. I’ve never felt like the kind of boy I was socialized to be, and was always drawn to girl culture. I was way more into my sister’s Sassy magazines than she was.
To this day, I look very different from how I feel. I look like many other men, but I wonder what I would look like today if I saw acceptance of trans and queer people around me and in the media when I was growing up. I find women’s apparel appealing, and have felt so much joy at recently seeing so many proud, confident nonbinary people.
One of my girlfriends likes to dress me up in her clothes when we’re hanging out at her house. I really like it and sometimes resent myself for not being brave enough to wear them outside.
Growing up, my gender was policed by parents and peers, the latter with occasional violence. More than once, I turned that same aggression on others. I remember making fun of a butch girl classmate in middle school and hating myself for it at that moment (and every day since). It probably didn’t save me from the additional bullying that I probably thought at the time that it would. I knew then that each one of those threats and beatings had everything to do with me not being the right kind of boy.
Teachers and other adults sometimes witnessed me being attacked. I remember a female teacher in second grade telling me not to be a sissy when I asked her to stop an older boy who was punching me. In high school, the football players would gay bash me, even when I had a girlfriend and even though they never saw me with a boyfriend. Maybe they knew more about me than I did. Once, one of them called me a “faggot” and I defended myself when he attacked me. I got suspended, he didn’t.
Patriarchy fucked me up, and it fucked up pretty much everyone else who’s been close to me.
[This is post inspired by International Women’s Day and the sometimes simplistic ways of thinking through patriarchal oppression these events inspire.]
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