Coming Home to a World Without Rape
by Michael Biernbaum & Joseph Weinberg © 1993
“We are not even able to think adequately about the behavior that is at the annihilating edge. But what we think is less than what we know; what we know is less than what we love;
what we love is so much less than what there is.And to that precise extent we are so much less than what we are.”—R. D. Laing, The Politics of Experience
“Vision: Not intended for the general public.”
—Chrysler Car Ad
Can you imagine a world without rape?
What does it mean to have such a vision?
When we asked ourselves these questions, we discovered that, yes, we do have a “vision” of a world without rape. We imagine such a world in great detail, and it’s very real to us. It is so real, in fact, that it might more accurately be called a “reality” than a “vision,” more lived than imagined. For a total of 23 years between us we have worked to educate ourselves and other men about rape. We carry this vision with us every day, practice it to make it real in our lives, and talk about it with other men whenever and wherever we can.
In this essay we trace how we came to have and live this vision. We extend here our analysis of the sexual assault prevention program for men that we have described in two earlier essays, “Men Unlearning Rape” and “The Conversations of Consent: Sexual Intimacy Without Sexual Assault” (This program was pioneered locally by Men Stopping Rape and is presented internationally through Joseph Weinberg & Associates.) We also look at what’s to be gained by asking this question of others and by sharing our visions.
Seed and Compost
This process of vision-becoming-real was for us not unlike that of a seed germinating in composted soil. Illuminated (challenged) by feminist analysis and process, and wet by our desire to become more whole and human beings, we first sent down a root into the ground of our own histories and feelings. Turned and composted by our own digging, the thin patriarchal ground we found ourselves in—the sexual/power experiences of our rather traditionally gendered lives—became a soil fertile enough to support growth of this vision in us. Anchored and rooted, the vision then sprouted upward and outward, bursting above ground into the world with vigor and a will to survive—to grow and blossom in our own lives—and, if the winds of change were blowing right, get carried downwind and reproduce itself in other men’s gardens and hearts!
Though “vision” might suggest a view that looks out to the world, we started our search for a world without rape inside. As is true for so much of the process of unlearning rape, the visionary direction is inward. Fundamentally, we “saw” the rape culture first had to end within, if it were going to end anywhere. Stopping rape wasn’t going to be up to someone else. This is me we’re talking about, and this is mine to make happen. It starts with me.
It almost didn’t. Looking back and inward, as we reviewed our own sexual/social histories—first as two middle-class Jewish boys of Eastern European descent growing up in Philadelphia and Chicago respectively, then our dating and relationship adventures as teens living at home with our parents, as young adults on our own, followed by our marriages and the subsequent relationships of our thirties and forties—we discovered how many of the “normal” things that we believed or championed had supported rape. But we were not prepared to face our pain, confusion, anger and shame surrounding all this. (For other men these feelings can come from recognition that they are incest or sexual assault survivors, or from the grief many will feel as partners, friends, family and “significant others” of those who have been sexually assaulted.)
Like most men, we hadn’t had to look at our behaviors. When we did—and saw the “hounding,” the grabbing and the unwanted touch, all the coercive emotional and physical tools we had available to us and knew how to use—the first shock of awareness was strong and painful. We temporarily withdrew into the “safety” of denial. But keeping emotionally distant took a great deal of energy. When eventually we stopped resisting, let go of the denial and accepted our histories and ourselves, we released a cascade of energy. This self-acceptance let us come alive with the recovery and discovery that underlie the entire process of unlearning rape.
Homecomings
We think of this self-acceptance as embracing the “rapist within”—not approving, not excusing, not explaining away, but accepting our histories, “owning” our shit, being willing to take responsibility for our behavior. This was a transformative experience, one that occurred because we recognized the cost to ourselves of continuing the take-and-grab we had learned as boys and had been practicing since then every chance we got.
Honoring our pain and anger—feeling it, understanding it, using it—“radicalized” (i.e., rooted) us in a new yet familiar way. A similar process had occurred earlier when we began to read feminist analyses of women’s lives and to listen to women telling of their experiences of sexism. For awhile we “listened” but had trouble “hearing.” At some level we were able to deny feeling women’s anger and pain by “analyzing” it away. We deflected it with rationalizations that “we were different” or were “not women” so how could we be expected to understand. Rape is one measure of how poorly men listen to women. When we finally ended our denial and felt some of women’s pain and anger, that empathic experience compelled us to look at our own participation in the rape culture.
Now a second motivation to change was erupting from within: we were experiencing our own pain and were unlearning rape for ourselves. The issue became not what I should do for others, but what I want to do to recover my own selfhood. Feeling empathy for ourselves was our first “coming home!”
Some men do this kind of internal soul-searching work about rape under duress or external pressure (legal sanction, peer pressure, etc.), or in the classic liberal sense “for others” or “on behalf of women.” These external “have to’s” and “shoulds” don’t seem to generate much sustained or intense heat, compared to what follows when the motivation to change is in me and for me—what I want to do for myself.
We already understood that we didn’t want to rape again and now we believed in ourselves enough to know we could (re-)learn how to live without raping. Believing that we can do that, believing in the possibility of my world without rape, my ability to change, is one of the first and necessary steps we take towards creating that world. Not reproducing the old patterns of rape and rape-supportive behaviors was the commitment we were making to ourselves. Acceptance of, belief in and commitment to ourselves—these three internalized “homecomings” still form the basis of our vision of a world without rape.
Breaking the Contract
We didn’t know exactly what was coming next, yet some things were clear: it was up to us to find out—we had no models to follow—and we were going to have to live it. If this is the world we wanted and the world we were determined to have—then it must first start and be embodied in us and in what we do. What we do to unlearn rape in our own lives is a microcosm for the process of ending rape in the larger world.
The question that emerged was this: if masculinity is a contract with the dominant (rape) culture that we had signed as little boys, now that we had gotten to read the fine print and knew damn well that we didn’t like what we saw there, could we break the contract? (Would we get our “security” deposit back?)
We also knew that survival of the vision and our survival as changing men—meant breaking out now. What’s done is past; what we’re up to is the doing-right-now, rather than some far-off imagining of the future...a dream. Our vision need not look very far, over some distant horizon that bends far away from us. On the contrary, it is right here, right now.
To paraphrase the visionary feminist Sonia Johnson: There is no future time when there will be a world without rape. There is no magical moment when the last rape will occur and some Important Male Voice of Authority will announce officially that rape no longer exists, is finished, will never be again. Rather, to the extent that we live that world now, in every way we can make it be, then we have that world now with us. This marked another important moment of transition. We were moving from retrospection to looking ahead.
Consent
The challenge was to “incorporate” the vision—root it in our bodies and therefore our actions. This meant looking at our lives right now, at today’s intimacy, at tonight’s date, and at all our interactions with men. We didn’t have pretensions about knowing all the answers but had many questions: what is this thing called “consent;” how does not-raping feel; what are the words and actions that are not-rape; will there still be sex, or romance (whatever that is); can we feel safe with other men? The clearer we could get on the details, the sooner a world without rape would manifest in our lives. We wanted all our interactions, small and large, including sex, to be consensual. Consent—the clear, explicit, sense of safety that can be checked out, a power sharing between equals—became our new paradigm. We were entering a period of change and experimentation that continues to this day.
We began to experiment with consent—listening to partners, asking questions, hearing answers, becoming more playful, slowing the sexual pace, letting go of having to control everything, yielding with delight, letting go of hidden agendas about sex.
We look at these conversations as a way of opening up what might be called a “psychophysical safety space” between us and our partners. This is an exploratory space, an intermediate opening where action has not yet been taken, hence carrying reduced risk of physical or emotional violation. No touch has taken place yet. By opening this space we also open a new place in which to play together. It is a place where we can check things out and do so more safely and with less risk of violation. It is like an extra layer of protection.
And “romance?”
Imagine your partner surprising you with a beautifully wrapped present. Imagine opening it up, and hearing words and feelings coming from their heart—intimate and personal and real. Getting to a place where you can talk honestly and openly about anything—a genuine commitment to the process of consent—can be one of the most romantic gifts we can give and receive.
The process of consent can be an amazing and dizzying gift. Talking about desire, identifying feelings, expressing our expectations, checking in with each other, being listened to, and giving ourselves the time to play with all this—quite the romantic gift—like roses or chocolates! And like all good romance, there is mystery here, an unexplored garden in which to safely enjoy each other’s company. Consent is a shared adventure that can be as intense and intimate as we want it to be. It is a way to draw closer together. There is an appreciation that we are creating something special and new between us. When trust is created with intent and consciousness, and is testable and mutual, the adventure of intimacy can become truly romantic. What better way to demonstrate and deepen our love for each other?
“Safer Sex”
We were guided here by several principles: safety, experimentation and do-able small steps. First, feeling safe became the primary measure of how things were proceeding. Second, everything was approached as an experiment. If the outcome was movement towards greater safety and away from risk of assault and any sense of violation, then the effort could be repeated or intensified. If not, we were agreeing to stop, check in, change what we were doing, until we could restore the sense of safety. Third, we sought the smaller, do-able changes, ones we could make with reasonable hope of success. The largest changes were just too daunting to be engaged all at once. We were looking to form a solid and stable base on which to reconstruct our lives.
We began by looking at how we were expressing ourselves sexually. We wanted to find new ways of relating more safely to our sexual partners. One of us recalls what happened one month into a new dating relationship:
“Instead of making the first move as usual, I waited for her to make it. And I waited. I wanted her to make the first move so that I wouldn’t have to state what I was interested in. When I finally asked whether she would like to hold hands, I expected ‘yes’ or ‘no’ or ‘maybe’ or ‘go away.’ I wasn’t prepared for her response. ‘Asking isn’t going to stop all rape!’ I was floored. Did she think I was going to rape her? It turned out that she had never been asked this kind of question before. I learned right then that this was not something ‘all women want’ and ‘men just don’t get.’ It’s new for men and women.
I wanted a level of safety that I was comfortable with. I hoped that she, too, would be comfortable, but I definitely needed that safety. I’d rather not have sex than risk hearing later that she hadn’t wanted to make love, but was too frightened to say ‘no;’ or that she felt she ‘owed it’ to me, etc. While my intent would neither invalidate any feeling of her having been violated or hurt, nor would my denial undo a rape, I was clear that I didn’t want to rape, even if she didn’t call it rape or experience it as rape.”
On the physical level we allowed ourselves to challenge any moves that had become so much a part of our sexual repertoire that they might be described as chronic or obligatory. One thing no longer “automatically” lead to another. We became more yielding to our partners’ sexual initiatives and learned to relax into feeling the delight and tingle of unexpected but welcome body pleasuring. We learned to enjoy being touched all over instead of just the genitals, and how to spend hours kissing and caressing, allowing the erotic flow to surge and subside at its own pace, instead of hurrying it along in a few goal-driven minutes. We consciously didn’t want to rush or control things.
We also let go of pornographic/advertising images of power-over which too often, like rape imagery, conflate violence and sexual desire and which physiologically and emotionally imprint this in us. Next to overt images of rape and violence, depictions that allegedly “catch” women “unaware” are most insidious. They ostensibly “capture” them in “candid” moments, doing what they’d be doing if they weren’t aware of being watched—mainly, masturbating and waiting to be fulfilled by men. They are “blank screens” that we animate by projecting our fantasies onto them and pornographizing their “un-selfconscious” moments. The less complexity, personality, spirit and humanity that she has, the better. The “best” women are asleep, distracted, passed out, drugged, preoccupied, retarded or naive. Continuing to use this rape imagery supports rape and destroys women. It is also fundamentally an act of self-betrayal and self-victimization. While staying sex-positive, we consciously chose to align our sex fantasies more closely with our new experiences with our sexual partners—more playful, open, even silly, and definitely conscious!
We had a new sense our own and our partners’ autonomy and equality. For the first time in our lives we understood that each of us is responsible for our own sexual pleasure and fulfillment. We were not responsible for our partners’ orgasms. This did not mean that we were abandoning our sexual partners or refusing to engage in reciprocal or mutually satisfying sexual play. What we were abandoning was our long standing internalized compulsion to “perform,” to “give our partner an orgasm whether it kills them or not.” It is not our duty to “make sure” our partners are satisfied; that is their responsibility. We are with them to support, not guarantee that outcome, to cheer one another on, as it were. We learned to be open to their requests, to invite them to ask for what they wanted, to tell us what we could do to increase their pleasure. But ultimately, under conditions of consent, we are each responsible for our own sexual pleasuring and the satisfaction of our own sexual desires.
A Language of Equals
We also looked at the language we were using to express ourselves. If consent requires a dialog between power-full equals, what would such a language of power equality sound like? Some may “say” that the exact language we use is relatively unimportant, but if consent is an explicit and verbal process, the words used to fulfill that requirement are anything but trivial. Next to body feelings of safety or danger, the words we use can be a primary guide to safety. What they express or conceal, and the actions they represent can have life-or-death meaning. To prevent violation, not only is it OK to ask what that meaning is, it’s essential to understand it and act on it until our sense of safety is restored.
We had already stopped the self-deception of “reading” our partners’ body language and had begun to inactivate the objectifying sex-talk and metaphors of the men’s locker room that we’d been raised with. Now we began to notice when we were using violent metaphors in non-sexual contexts: “It strikes me that...”, “He ‘blew me away’....”, “It beats me.”, “It wiped me out.”, “We targeted this group.”, “I was going great guns.”, “Give it your best shot.”, “It really hit home.” Rape is first and foremost an act of violence, and each time we unconsciously use a violent or militaristic metaphor, we verbally reproduce an essential part of that act and reinforce the rape culture. We made a contract with our partners to help one another become aware of when we were using this kind of violent language to talk to each other.
One dramatic example of how the language of safety can be successfully internalized comes from the 1986 Midwest Men’s Festival. Sparky T. Rabbit, accompanied by his sign-carrying hand puppet, “Miss Cow,” invited participants to practice, as a public call and response, a series of direct expressions (“Miss Cow’s Maxims”) he’d developed to help reduce the risk of violation in private: “I don’t understand!”, “Please explain.”, “What are you doing?”, “What do you mean?“, “Speak for yourself!”, “Please stop!”, and the crowd’s favorite—“Please continue!” Creating this kind of profoundly personal yet publicly sanctioned language helped protect everyone there, by providing individual men, many of whom lacked communication skills, with language they could use to negotiate their interactions with other men at the Festival.
The Shadow
Having—and living—a vision can be a frightening and unnerving experience, and not something that is always easy to live with. We were leaving a system where things were clear and familiar—if costly and dangerous. It is ironic but perhaps not surprising that as we challenged ingrained patterns of thinking and experimented with new and safer ways of interacting, our feelings were often more conflicted, not less. Fear of the unfamiliar is a strong deterrent to change. Coming from a place where we thought we knew all “the moves,” not knowing what to do was daunting, to say the least. We could identify with the high school boy who said, “I may be stagnant, but at least I’m not confused.”
This was a time of contradictory feelings, too—more vulnerable yet more secure, more visible yet with a lower profile, moving too fast yet proceeding slowly, in control yet uncertain of what comes next. Both of us recall feeling more alone and on our own than ever before, and at the same time feeling connected spiritually and politically to women and to other men on similar journeys of change. It is strange to feel both isolated and part of something larger. Though our commitment to ourselves was holding firm and the new vision was growing in habit and choice, there were many times when we felt uncertain that it would all work out and ever make sense.
We turned to each other and a few trusted friends for support and encouragement. This support network was crucial. It not only helped keep us from burning out or giving up; it was a source of validation that helped keep us whole and “on track.” This was a time when we were separating from those who couldn’t give us the kind of support we needed, whose skepticism, cynicism or just plain indifference felt like sabotage. Though we needed less assurance that what we were engaging depended on what others thought or what they might (or might not be) ready to try, at the same time we found ourselves yearning for assurance that men other than us were rethinking and reforming their behaviors to free themselves from the rape juggernaut.
We recalled T.S. Eliot’s caution that “between the conception and the creation lies the shadow.” This was definitely a shadow time, almost “crazy-making” in the intensity of its highs and lows, and contradictory feelings.
Resistance
As we pass through these shadow times and bring our vision into the world, we have to face our resistance to this process, lest we sabotage our own dream and our own lives. Key to the entire visionary process of ending rape is our belief that it can even happen. Why is it so hard to accept? Part of the answer is that we don’t remember that the rape culture is a system of death. It’s easy to forget that it doesn’t create life, it takes it. Much of the damage done to people happens behind closed doors, out-of-my-sight. Its very existence is kept hidden or obscured by myth and privilege.
Even if it is a “problem,” what’s it got to do with me as a man? Ending rape, or even understanding it, has not been of much interest to most men. Until recently, rape was “only” a women’s issue—not something “important” talked about by men as our issue. Its significance, its human cost and meaning, is misrepresented as “just” one person’s (read: woman’s) personal tragedy and private pain. Further, most of us are so inured to violence in the general culture around us and in our lives that rape seems “normal.” Patriarchal taboos and fears of reprisal have threatened any serious challenging of the rigid gender and sexual binary that fuels the violence associated with masculinity. (The violence is gendered and socially constructed (masculine), not sexed or biologically determined (male).
Aren’t there are too many men, most of whom rape? Changing society one man at a time will take forever. Isn’t it a global problem? Isn’t it true that there really has never been any time or place where rape hasn’t existed? With these resistances we are clinging to the idea that rape is not “solvable”—and certainly not by me—rather than become part of a solution.
“You can’t talk to men about rape,” many men insist. What they are really saying is, “I’ll never change.” This denial of one’s “self” and one’s own ability to change is the most entrenched level of resistance. In the old paradigm, society is a vast and monolithic place outside of us that we cannot affect. We are little insignificant origami boats tossed and blown on the ocean waves. This is an illusion. The reality is that we live in a place where change is happening continuously. In fact, it can’t be stopped. Hopelessness along these lines is essentially a form of learned helplessness.
Though breaking from rape culture rules can sometimes feel like a hopeless Quixotic gesture, we knew we were not “tilting” with patriarchal windmills—neither underestimating nor misrepresenting the deadliness of the rape culture. Part of living the vision is recognizing the rape culture for what it is—a system of death, killing women and men with its lethal rules. Complicity in its cycles of death is what’s futile and illusory; breaking away is a fiercely, life-affirming act of resistance and re-creation.
Numbers Racket
One familiar resistance is the fear is that the vision will not—can not—be 100% complete: some man will surely slip out of sight, beat or rape his “girlfriend” and ruin our claim! This may be the most sabotaging of all the resistances we encounter —that it has to be “complete” before we can have it or before I have to do anything about it. We often meet this same resistance among those men we talk to who can’t (or won’t) remember a single sexist, rape-supportive thing that they’ve done. “You’ll never stop 100% of rape,” they exclaim. “OK, let’s be silly and argue numbers,” we say. “We’ll settle for 85%.” And their response? “You can do better than that!” Arguing over percentages feeds resistance to change and obscures the enormity of the violence. It also means we don’t have to do anything ourselves to end the raping. While we know that this “numbers racket” is fundamentally irrelevant, playing with it in this way is one way to confront this “resistance of statistics and decimal points” so we can move on to solutions.
There is, however, a dramatic and genuine accounting that accompanies this vision as it moves from me, where it starts, outward to other men. Each assault that does not happen translates to one man who does not assault, and someone (or more than one) who is not assaulted. How many people surround these two? Their families, their friends, their current and future lovers...there’s a world of people around them! For each rape that does not happen, the lives of many many people are improved by lessening the burden of grief, pain and anger that they and we would otherwise bear. The overall level of violence in our world is not increased, and to the extent that the event is recognized, it actually decreases.
More than that, each man, like us, has an opportunity to create something positive, something non-hurtful in that moment-that-would-have-been-rape. This can be an extraordinary act of creation, bringing something new into the world-without-rape in his life—and in the world we all share with him. Consciousness grows about our power to create new lives that are not defined solely by the potential to violate.
Another persistent resistance was our fear that the benefits of rape culture would pull us back. Even if all men had an epiphany, we still have to function in the so-called real world of MTV, war, beer ads and pornography—a place where rape behavior is taught, expected and glorified. Without women watching us, we’re sure to slip back, lured back by all the “goodies” we’ve given up. This is, indeed, a threat to be reckoned with. Here we men have to face our own complicity in keeping the privilege and power of rape alive and possible in our lives.
The reinforcements for rape behavior are continuous and real, not to be lightly discounted. Power-over is like an aphrodisiac, a reward—taught, doled out, shared by those who can retain membership in the “boys club.” There are risks and dangers as well, and men who challenge the traditional image, who step out of line, can get cast out or beaten with that same “club.”
The personal cost is high. We trade our souls for access to this power. Unquestioning obedience to patriarchy stifles us. It instructs us to distrust other men (with good reason), be frightened of and angry at women, become strangers to our children, and leads us to die ten years earlier than women on average. Sex becomes war. Fear of intimacy with men (homophobia) drives so many of us compulsively to women to satisfy our hunger for connection, suppresses much of our specialness and talents, or gets us killed or assaulted. Large numbers of men are finally beginning to recognize the limitations and dangers of the choices they’ve made. They’re beginning to understand the cost of those choices!
Safe with Other Men?
We seek out other men with whom to talk because we know we can’t stop rape in isolation. Each of us needs a network of men and women we trust around us to challenge and support us as we change, people with whom we can talk even about the most terrible of things. Without such support, the change in men’s behaviors and consciousness that is necessary to end the violence is hard to sustain. Other men can provide some of that support for us, and we can provide some of that support for them.
To live with others in a world without rape we must turn to other men and invite them to begin to accept and internalize the vision. The more any of us can withdraw from the rape-system’s rules, each time any one of us refuses to “play,” the more real the vision becomes in all our lives and in the world around us. Here we want to draw the widest, most inclusive circle of potential allies. In this process, in sharing and living this vision of a world without rape, all men are our brothers. There are people who say to us, “I don’t understand how you could talk to rapists!” How could we not?
Meeting with other men to talk, owning our pasts, we began to make real a dream of safety with men. In the past, “men’s space” was synonymous with unsafe space. In our lives it began to be possible that it be a safe space. As we deepened our understanding of consent and continued experimenting with consensual ways of being with all people, we experienced feeling safer—with ourselves first. It was an important but subsequent benefit when women and other men felt safer with us.
Now the vision of a world without rape was becoming so well-rooted that we felt ready to talk about and model this vision with men we did not know—and do so safely! We use as safety markers the same personal body sensations and physiological feelings that we each identified for ourselves and use in the process of establishing consent: those we associate with the presence of comfort, ease, trust; and the “warning signs” of potential danger and violence that occur in their absence. We also note the resistances we encounter. They can tell us where the men are at in their own journeys of recovery and discovery, and in that way help us make our rape prevention education more effective and safer.
Nurturing these body senses and monitoring the resistance, we began—and have continued to this day—to insist that we interact this way with more and more men, in as many different groups as possible, all of them our brothers. We work to create spaces where we and other men feel safe to talk. This personal experience of feeling safe with other men is a different kind of “coming home”—to a new “extended family” of brothers.
Completing the Cycle
Asking this of them or of ourselves is not an obscure exercise in fantasy; it is an essential part of our making the vision real. But how we talk with men about rape is crucial to all this. We are asking to be allowed into their hearts. We are asking to talk about our lives and hear about theirs, and honor their pain and anger. Validating men’s pain while holding them completely responsible for their behavior is the unexpected fulcrum that allows more and more men to shift from our deadly, static place to equal participation with women in creating a world without rape. We start with their beliefs, not ours. We ask about their lives, and listen carefully, with curiosity and without immediate judgment to what they can tell us about their lives, particularly their dating and relationship experiences. We strive to respond to hate, fear and denial with love.
Sonia Johnson cautions that “what you resist, persists.” Some hear this as “absolutely do not work against rape—the energy that you put into that effort will only strengthen it.” What we take from that is: when we were only angry at “those” men, only anger came back at us. (Even that effort can still be worthwhile—most men have never heard or even met men that care about them and care about stopping rape, even in this way. This may be the first time in their lives that they’ve heard other men verbally break from the traditional expectations of rape culture.) But when we can love these men, take the time to be with them, share the process of re-learning with them, learn from them, discover (remember?) together—gently, supportively, goofily, sadly and angrily—many of them are willing to look deeply inside as we did and report on what they find and feel there. This is how we started on our visionary journey home. They are no different than us. Change can and does start for them as well.
In this work our stereotypes of men are constantly being challenged. Our efforts are limited only by what we tell ourselves is possible, not by any Absolute Papal Bull such as: “Men cannot change.... Let’s not be too radical.... They will never accept us.... They couldn’t possibly like us, never mind the message.” A standoff has been all we could even imagine. Change men’s behaviors? Stop rape? Stop? We couldn’t even have imagined it.
Men expect to be accused. They expect us to scold and “bash” them. They are prepared for that, almost comfortable with it. They can be the “bad guys” and don’t have to examine their behavior. The more we can break down the “us/them” split that separates us from each other on personal issues, the more open and positive the response.
Confronting Misogyny and Homophobia
Most men aren’t used to being honest with other men; honesty means vulnerability. Gay or straight, most of us have been hurt too much by other men to let down our armor with one another easily. We know there are survivors of incest and other sexual assault present in every group of men we talk with: in the US, one out of 5 males are sexually assaulted before the age of 18. (After hundreds of workshops in such “hyper-masculine temples” as fraternities, college locker rooms, prisons and military classrooms, it is impossible to ignore the fact that there are more survivors present than in less hyper-masculine places.) What does “safety” mean for these men?
There are strong homophobic and other social sanctions against men reporting, or even identifying to themselves, that they have been sexually assaulted. To confront this we re-examine assumptions and biases about gender, sexuality and power, and we challenge the prevailing myths, such as: men don’t get raped, or are raped only by gay men; being raped by a man “makes you gay;” no female could sexually assault a man; being raped by a woman is a “good thing,” etc.
In the rush to heal our distrust of other men, our hurt and pain may require us to go slowly in making connection, though the trust feels so good and natural that many want it immediately. In general, we men understand hierarchy and expect other men to be dominant or submissive, superior or inferior. When we are honest and vulnerable with them, we are stronger and more effective. We are not attacking, and they can be honest and vulnerable in return.
Men’s fear of feminism, women, change, etc., is often enunciated very strangely. (This may not be a news flash to you.) It is very real, very touching when a high school boy plaintively asks, “Can I hold doors open for girls anymore?” They (we) are still steeped in the fantasies of our fathers and grandfathers of what a “real man” is. These teens are already nostalgic for a time that was, in fact, a disaster for women and men. Then, at least, a guy knew what he was supposed to do, right? And now? Robert Bly and other male essentialists play to this reactionary nostalgia for a time that never existed. Insisting that it did so exist, they describe a time (unlike now) when “men were men”—in touch with dad and other men—and when women were so far in the background of the picture of men’s lives that their bruises couldn’t be seen. Now, the mythopoets wail, we don’t have a sense of ourselves as men, and women are responsible, of course, for our fall from grace. The truth is that we men have not known who we are or been at peace with ourselves—or encouraged to recover a more humane relationship with women and an egalitarian basis to the sharing of power—for several thousand years, since the entrenchment of the patriarchal order.
Why should we find it surprising, then, that men respond positively to other men who will listen to them and confront them, who will accept them where they are at and challenge them to change? No one ever talked to us about rape—let alone about a world without rape—when we were boys or young adults. No one shared their histories and themselves with us. No one said to us, “We care about you, you knuckleheads, that’s why we’re here. We care about you enough to look at all the crap that we can dredge up out of our collective male experiences. We even care about you enough to be perceived as gay by you—and risk being tuned out or assaulted. We care about you because stopping rape requires each and every one of us.”
An Invitation To Vision: RSVP
Do you have a vision of a world without rape? How many people are there who might? There may be more than we think, ready to entertain this rather bizarre idea or who already do. Among them are those who share our feelings about rape as a violation of body and spirit and as an abuse of power. They abhor rape and might be able to contribute something to creating a world without rape, if we find ways to ask them and involve them. Don’t many women and men, upon hearing about a rape, share some of the victim’s grief, pain and anger, whether they are family members and friends or not? How many women—and, yes, men—are fearful, even terrorized that it might happen to them, and might be anxious enough to join in the visioning?
We might include those men who, like us, are disgusted by the notion of rape but who unlike us root their attitude in false, even rape-supportive notions of morality—i.e., a breakdown of decency, law ’n order, religiosity, chivalry and civility—rather than issues of power. Many men have it pegged as a sickness some “other men” carry, and are angry at those men for giving the rest of us men a bad rap. Even those who react with defensiveness, denial, even victim-blaming when confronted about rape, might be just a short step away from accepting the notion that we can end the raping. They’d probably be willing to ponder the question. After all, defensiveness and denial are positive indicators that the confrontation of ideas is working. Their (men’s) desperate and ineffectual bluster barely masks the recognition that they may have raped.
And doesn’t victim-blaming reflect some notion of vulnerability, that ultimately “even we” are not safe, that it could happen to us? While we aren’t suggesting that these reactions be encouraged or defended, these stances suggest a different and unexpected starting point for the process of unlearning rape. (We also encounter many girls and women who blame the victim, for example, trashing the one “out” survivor in a high school who dares break her silence. Many women who serve on rape juries exonerate the perpetrator who “looks like my son.” Women, too, have internalized an incredible amount of patriarchal poison around the construction of “femininity.”)
Generally speaking, don’t most people, women and men, ardently wish for all the violence to end? So maybe the challenge to imagine a world without rape—though not yet asked of them till now—could mean something to a very large number of people in our society, whether or not they themselves are ready or able yet to attempt an answer. Why don’t we ask them next time we have the opportunity?
Equal Time For Vision
To those who directly support those who have been victimized and injured by the criminal violation of sexual assault, or, like us, confront, hold responsible and educate those who perpetrate the violence, we pose a question: How many of us can—or dare—imagine a time when we are out of work? Not from burnout or when the agency we work at is closed for lack of funding, but for lack of people who need our intervention! How many of us who “work to end rape” can imagine a time when the chairs are empty, the lights are turned off, and the front door is closed for good? Can we see ourselves joyously “going out of business?”
If we who work so ardently to end rape and other forms of violence are ourselves stuck, unclear or unconcerned about what a world without rape means, then what are we really doing when we think we are part of the solution? Have we “defaulted” to doing what we already know how to do (and probably do well) but to what end? Maybe we are even camouflaging the solutions by patching over the problem, and giving in to our fears and resistances.
We recall our own example that illustrates some of what we are talking about here. When we started talking to groups of men about rape, we were afraid to talk about the experiences of male survivors of male perpetrators, male survivors of female perpetrators, and female survivors of female perpetrators. We didn’t want to “confuse” the issue of “men’s violence.” In order to avoid having to incorporate these “untidy” human complexities into the discussion in appropriate ways—ways we now know strengthen the entire process of unlearning rape by a fundamental acceptance of all people’s pain—we instead strengthened the rape culture. We became “unindicted co-conspirators” in these assaults. We helped keep these people invisible by denying their stories, their very real pain and their anger. By denying them we were denying a significant number of the survivors present in our audiences. (While we don’t begin discussions in college fraternities with talk of lesbian sexual assault, we recognize its existence and do not refuse to mention it. And in discussions with women, we make sure we acknowledge the existence/presence of female perpetrators as well as female survivors, and we now always discuss the sexual assault of males by males or females in any discussion about sexual assault.)
Some of us may be nearing burnout, spending all our time attempting to repair damage already done by rape and not valuing ourselves and our solutions. What if we choose to spend as much time creating a world without rape as tending to the wounds? Envisioning what we want, internalizing it and practicing it in our lives can make it real now and provide ideas and strategies for us to get from here to there that are as yet unimagined. What if we spend as much time and energy imagining and practicing that world in as much detail and with as much commitment as we already are dealing with the rape-damaged world we live and work in?
If we don’t, how much more vague, unimagined and unattainable is the vision, let alone the reality of a world without rape. Don’t we owe it to ourselves to make the future we say we want as real in our lives today as possible? Can we be too busy to find the time, too stressed by the demands on us, too tired by our efforts to end violence, to imagine this world for ourselves and for those we care about who may not yet be able to do it in their own lives? Let’s spend as much time making the new as real as we do on fixing the old? Can we afford not to?
Prick the Patriarchal Bubble!
The big secret is that there have always been men opposed to rape, individual men of vision who renounced violence and lived without raping. We can join them by making our private process of unlearning rape public and political, personal and institutional. By each of us imagining our world without rape and sharing our personal vision, we help each other break from our long-standing belief in the sheer hugeness and seeming invincibility of the “dominant” rape culture around us. Sharing our visions, we can see we are not alone; we can feel connected. We can stop fueling the rape culture out of a false sense of isolation and refuse to let it control our lives.
Instead, we can join in the de-institutionalizing of rape, de-canonizing it. We can challenge in every way imaginable the institutional support for sexualize assault and harassment and sex-based inequities, and institutional attempts to cover it up. Turn off that violent TV commercial (turn off the TV!), write that letter of protest, hold up that sign, make that phone call! We can regain valuable energy by withdrawing our support from what Wayne Ewing called the “civic advocacy” of violence—in corporate/professional sports, the advertising/pornography industry, intrusions of sexist religion into government and other secular places, etc. And we can practice interventions that stop or interrupt sexual assaults and other incidents of violence or victimization that occur in public, in ways that don’t increase the overall level of violence. We can do this in our workplaces, in our schools, in our homes—everywhere.
It is our right to feel safe and act powerfully in our new lives, particularly when the rape culture seems to loom so menacingly and full of tension all about us. The truth is, the rape culture is more fragile than we think, more like an overstretched bubble than a solid, permanent wall. When we enlarge our vision, increase its scope and scale, intensify the energy we put into living it, and refuse to settle for less, we focus irresistible pressure on the rape culture that seems to surround us. The illusion will burst. Each man who makes his own life a world without rape can prick the rape bubble that keeps him separate and hidden from other visionary men and women.
Without rape, we may be able to see each other as the people we really are. We may find that we are part of an even grander vision—all of us coming home together to a world without rape!
A version of this is originally appeared in International Journal of Protective Behaviours, Vol. 1, No. 1, May, 1993, pp. 28-39, titled Coming Home to a World Without Rape: An Inner Journey to Sexual Assault Prevention Education for Men Using the Protective Behaviors Process
Joe Weinberg is a rape-prevention educator, speaking, training and presenting workshops at universities, high schools, conferences, businesses and prisons internationally. Committed, visionary and engaging are some of the words used to describe his presentations. His combination of empathy, honesty, humor and skill in educating about rape, racism, masculinity and homophobia contribute to a non-threatening, interactive environment that “joyously empowers radical change.” He is long-time president of Men Stopping Rape-Madison, a mask maker-collector.
Michael Biernbaum (1943-1995) was Board Chair of Protective Behaviors, Inc. (USA), a co-founder of Men Stopping Rape, The Madison Men’s Center and Changing Men: Issues in Gender, Sex and Politics, an international pro-feminist journal. His great mind and gentle soul are missed.