“The boy seeks to emulate the father because it is safer to be like the father than like the mother. He learns to threaten or hit because men can and men must. He dissociates himself from the powerlessness he did experience, the powerlessness to which females as a class are consigned. The boy becomes a man by taking on the behaviors of men — to the best of his ability.
The boy escapes, into manhood, into power. It is his option, based on the social valuation of his anatomy. This route of escape is the only one now charted.
But the boy remembers, he always remembers, that once he was a child, close to women in powerlessness, in potential or actual humiliation, in danger from male aggression. The boy must build up a male identity, a fortressed castle with an impenetrable moat, so that he is inaccessible, so that he is invulnerable to the memory of his origins, to the sorrowful or enraged calls of the women he left behind. The boy, whatever his chosen style, turns martial in his masculinity, fierce, stubborn, rigid, humorless. His fear of men turns into aggression against women. He keeps the distance between himself and women unbridgeable, transforms women into the dreaded She, or, as Simone de Beauvoir expresses it, “the Other.” He learns to be a man — poet man, gangster man, professional religious man, rapist man, any kind of man — and the first rule of masculinity is that whatever he is, women are not.
[…] Boys become men to escape being victims by definition. Girls would become men if girls could, because it would mean freedom from: freedom from rape most of the time; freedom from continuous petty insult and violent devaluation of self; freedom from debilitating economic and emotional dependence on someone else; freedom from the male aggression channeled against women in intimacy and throughout the culture.”
vaporwave
yousharknotpass
prguitarman
romaincrisis
