If you are a mami of color who is raising a son: how do you teach your son about violence and masculinity? what do you teach your son about violence against women? what strategies have you (and he) come up with to confront gender based violence? what advice do you have for other mamis of color raising anti-violence sons? what do you wish you had known?
(papas of color, feel free to chime in as well)
(ETA: actually, any damn body who has any sort of influence over young boys of color–please chime in!!)
- Share
October 28th, 2009 at 11:28 am #
i don’t feel that i have been successful in this regard with my son. not that he asserts his masculinity, per se, but that i’ve not come up with any strategies that mean anything. initially, when he was young, i taught him that, as per our spiritual practice, men are the protectors of women. not that women can’t and don’t protect ourselves, but that men are required by God to be appropriately protective of us, which really means: you’re sinning if you hurt us, and you’re sinning if you let any other man hurt us. he took that quite seriously and it got him into lots of trouble on the playground, and unfortunately what he learned was that girls don’t appreciate it anyway. sorry, that’s just facts as i see them. it’s really difficult to tell boys and men that they need to intervene when what they actually witness is that so often girls and women are allowing things to happen, because they don’t know they deserve better or don’t have to put up with that ish or because they think it’s part of being a “fun” girl, so when another guy intervenes he ruins the fun and she hates him for it. we witness this all the time unfortunately, and the best i’ve yet come up with is to tell him that he knows his responsibility and that being responsible might not be popular or cool but it’s what is right no matter what anyone else thinks, including the girl. now the girls he tends to hang with are pretty tough themselves so he maybe doesn’t have to “defend” them so much, but i hope that in an event where he saw a girl in need he would know that he can’t just stand by and watch. but yeah, what exactly are they supposed to do? we know that not every boy or man can or should really jump in and go on the attack against the perpetrators, especially if he is acting alone against a number of guys. there have to be other methods of getting help, of stopping things, and there have to be systemic ways that we teach our boys to be that thwart the whole culture of hatred and violence against women.
October 28th, 2009 at 12:28 pm #
i see what you’re saying about the “gray” aspect of intervention–but what I’m talking about here, there is no gray, you know? I mean, you and me, we’ve read all the stories–the gang rape in florida of the mother and her son, the *multiple* gang rapes of teen girls by classmates that were recorded and only discovered because video wound up on youtube–the Duke Lacrosse gang rape, the gang rape of the (if i remember correctly) Latina girl by a group of black men and teen boys–and that’s not even getting into the gang rapes of women and girls in war zones of both women soldiers, contractors, and indigenous women….there is no question in every single one of those cases–there was either a drunk/otherwise incapacitated girl who was incapable of saying yes, or a girl who very clearly said no. and there were multiple men who didn’t listen to her.
I wonder if we start there…if we stop assuming the “what ifs” of rape are more urgent or more “normal” and thus most in need of understanding (or, in other words, we stop allowing men to dictate to us what an anti-rape conversation should focus on–because invariably it is men who bring up the “but but but, i believed this one woman and i went and beat up my friends and it turns out she was liar!!! what about that???” scenario)–if we point out that hey–straight up, in your face RAPE RAPE (yes, thank you ms. whoopi) happens every day–maybe that could be a place to start with intervention strategies?
October 28th, 2009 at 12:35 pm #
and on a slightly different note–i personally teach my son more about “choices” than anything else–but he’s still a young dude. so we discuss his different “choices” in terms of “what would you do if you saw somebody getting bullied?” He is not a macho hero boy and I encourage him to find his own ways that he is comfortable with in confronting shitty behavior. He actually had a trio of his and another boy and girl that worked together to confront a major bully in his class. which worked for him–he would never do something like that (confront a bully) on his own. Whenever we talk about “confronting injustices” we always talk about working together with others, because he simply is not a person that feels comfortable getting in somebody’s face–and he shouldn’t have to be. So I think that 1. showing him he has a choice in how he treats girls and eventually women is essential and 2. respecting the interventions he himself has made into masculinity is essential. he makes the choice every day to not be a bully–and I respect that shit. So i work every day to *show* him I respect that shit–which makes me think that responses to straight up violence like that gang rape have to *also* be rooted in respecting non-”normal” responses to masculinity, you know?
October 28th, 2009 at 12:53 pm #
good lord, i hate the “but it turned out she was lying” argument. have you ever known a situation where that was what really happened? i haven’t, so i don’t think it happens enough to even warrant mention. if a guy went and kicked another guy’s ass on a woman’s behalf, it doesn’t matter whether she was the rare one-time-ever woman who lied. he did the right thing by standing up for her. but the bigger problem i have is the idea that the answer is for men to become violent with each other (i don’t think that is what you are suggesting, i just think it is what most people see as the ONLY option). there has to be a way to combat violence against women and the masculinity that thrives on that violence without it being the same violent masculinity turned on men. do i think men that hurt women (esp rape) deserve to have the shit kicked out of them? hell yes. but do i think it solves anything or helps to create a different society where their behavior isn’t acceptable? no, i really don’t think it does. it addresses and individual, and it addresses him at his level. but it doesn’t address the problem. so yes, i want to teach my son that using his brute force, or being able to beat a guy up isn’t the only way to help a woman, and that maybe it isn’t even the best way. the question is: what is a better way? for my son, well, he’s the one who is bullied, even by the girls. so the idea of getting together with other like-minded kids doesn’t work, according to him (so he says anyway). he’s the one who gets defended by one friend who happens to be the most gentle guy you could ever imagine, but who also happens to be twice the size of the other kids so when he says to knock it off they don’t want to take a chance that he isn’t always gentle, LOL. but my son has to learn that he can’t always count on that friend being around, and that he does have to be able to stand up for himself and more importantly, for others. like i said, it doesn’t matter to me if no one else understands or appreciates it, you stop girls getting hurt simply because it’s the right thing to do.
October 28th, 2009 at 1:05 pm #
and here’s another thought–ok, so in the cases of “gray”–like say in the case of “girls gone wild” where obstensibly there is full consent by the woman. only to find out later that she only said yes because she thought that’s what she was supposed to do. or whatever.
why do we assume (we, as in “U.S. culture”) assume that if there is full consent by the woman/girl–that must mean that a man/boy is free to act without any morals? so–as long as the woman gives her full consent–you, as a man, are free to slide a credit card through her ass crack on international television, you are free to chain her up like a dog to look more macho, etc. you know? In essense, a girls consent becomes the moral compass of masculinity.
but what happens if we challenge that–if we decenter “woman’s consent” and focus on–say–”masculinity” or something along those lines. Like–in that Michael Jackson video where he’s dancing and grabbing himself in the middle of nowhere just because he loves to dance. Ok…so what happens if we start to figure out ways for boys to explore their sexuality and masculinity outside of the “woman’s submission makes you a real man” cultural trope?
….I’m not sure if I’m saying any of this right. but just….maybe we should be looking for ways to disconnect “the development of masculinity/maleness” with “women’s consent”?
October 28th, 2009 at 1:44 pm #
AGREED! because violence against women (and i have a broad definition of what “violence” means) isn’t about whether she consented, whether she liked it, etc. and we all know and have been in situations where we consented because we didn’t know we could not consent, or because we knew it would happen either way and it might not get as ugly if we just went along, or because we believed that it was what we “have to” do to “keep your man happy” or whatever. so consent is a good starting point, in so far as “man, did you ASK her and did she give you a clear yes” but we know there’s still lots of room in that. much better to get to the radical “man, why do you even feel compelled to get off by doing that to a woman?”. let’s address why men WANT to do certain things that are hurtful to women, regardless of whether or not women will “let” you do it. that’s not the point. the point is where does the inclination to dominate a woman come from and why is that what makes you “feel like a man”?
“I’m not sure if I’m saying any of this right”
i think you are. saying it just right.
and yes, i know that opens up a can of worms on the BDSM issue and policing what people get off on, and questionning women’s right to consent to things just because we find them abhorrant. but i think that’s NOT what we are talking about here. i’m not talking about is it okay for a woman to have rape fantasies or guilting women for whatever they do knowingly consent to because they enjoy it. i think we’re talking about a whole different matter which is men being able to be men, confident in their masculinity, sexually expressive, without it resting on degradation and pain to women (or other men for that matter).
October 30th, 2009 at 7:58 am #
This has to be the single most awesome thing I’ve read this year. Period. It combines activism, solidarity, and recognition of the power of acting as a group with a sense of justice and looking outside the “hero” idea. Damn.
You just gave me goosebumps. Seriously.