Growing up, TV convinced me that rejection wasn’t only hurtful, but also inherently cruel. From baby shows whose hosts routinely tore down the fourth wall and begged for companionship to very special episodes of Disney Channel sitcoms wherein the protagonist has no choice but to befriend a marginalized character in order to save them, the insidious message was clear: “No” was almost always the wrong answer. In a typical kid’s show, a protagonist’s bedrock relationships were impossible to leave or be ousted from because of their lives’ strict adherence to “The Status Quo is God,” a trope that dictates everything in an episode reverts back to how it originally was at the beginning before the credits can roll.

I graduated to the fraught world of teen dramas and anime in middle school. When I’d finished Gilmore Girls and Fruits Basket, I became infatuated with the many iterations of Degrassi that populated the airwaves in the mid 2000s. Though the storylines and language that made my beloved fictitious worlds whole became more mature and dynamic, their misrepresentations of rejection only grew worse. In the world of adult and adult-ish media, the refusal of attention wasn’t a solvable child-friendly problem-of-the-week. It was the absolute worst thing in existence, the ultimate form of humiliation. For the hero, being turned down was an intense personal smite, a societal defect, or both.

Writers often framed permanent rejections—the ones that couldn’t be overcome—as misunderstandings by using instances of the protagonist being accepted as proof. A denial of admission from any dream school became not a matter of luck but the fault of gatekeepers who could never understand the hero’s true talent. Same for an aloof heart-throb: the hero was too good to be rejected by them, so of course there would be some better, more accepting love interest in plain view for the jilted once the jilter realized their mistake.

Both on television and in real life, there are the uncomfortable gender politics of rejection. Girls are expected to find polite, nice answers to their problems while boys destroy the boundaries that hold them back. A strong boy never turned down a challenge; he either finished it, or hid his defeat, lest he be thought of as weak. As the boys in my life became more demanding, I became shy and cloying. I forced myself to kiss family members on the cheek when I was mad at them or didn’t like the texture of their skin, fearing that if didn’t and they died, they’d die feeling alone. I always said thank you, even when I didn’t mean it, even when people didn’t deserve it.  

Only after I switched out passivity for critical introspection did I learn that “no” wasn’t a mean word. I was just as entitled to use it as anyone else. But media continues to misconstrue its fundamental purpose and, by extension, consent. Consent advocates in all media spaces need to teach people, especially men and boys pressured by the immense weight of their need be invulnerable, that rejection is not an inherent wrong but objective instrument that can be separated from situational subtext.

We’re social creatures by nature. Early humans survived harsh environments by depending on small enclaves of other humans in order to meet survival and reproductive needs. Consequently, social rejection in any form then was often a literal death sentence. Human language uses the idea of hurt to describe both physical and emotional pains.

In a 2011 report, University of Michigan psychology professor Ethan Koss found that this conflation was the result of not just culture but also biology, upon discovering that rejection and physical pain share a common somatosensory representation. Using a MRI to monitor brain activity, Koss had test subjects whose partners broke up with them perform two separate tasks: the first, stare at a picture of their former significant other and the second, receive a “noxious thermal stimulation.” In both tests, the same regions of each subject’s brain lit up on the MRI. A broken romance hurt only slightly less than an actual burn.

It’s natural that rejection hurts, but that doesn’t mean that it has to be oppressive. What makes humans humans isn’t only our ability to feel but rather our ability to process our own emotions rationally, especially in an era where being denied companionship doesn’t signify literal death.

Both on television and in real-life, there are the uncomfortable gender politics of rejection. Girls are expected to find polite, nice answers to their problems while boys destroy the boundaries that hold them back.
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Not all rejection is personal. Institutional prejudices influence who we accept and who we reject.

I first became aware of this after my introduction to sexual racism. OkCupid’s popular five year study revealed that heterosexual Black women and Asian men statistically received the least amount of attention from all men and all women respectively. I found the results disheartening, but even worse was the discourse surrounding them. People in my life both on and offline likened personal preference to the act of disregarding a whole race of people as potential romantic partners. Even those condemning the senseless vapidity behind online dating culture didn’t seem to understand that the study wasn’t about silly preferences at all, but the outright discrimination and social conditioning that weaponized rejection.

I wanted to be desired and I wanted to fight the very idea of it. I couldn’t force racists who I didn’t even like to like me. I became apathetic to the concept of attraction as a natural construct. I didn’t care if anti-Black men didn’t want to date me. I cared because many of them were in positions of power that allow them to determine the metrics of desirability, a valuable social currency. I cared because once in middle school, a white acquaintance of mine had told me they liked the hyper-realistic sketch I’d done of myself because my features looked beautiful on the white watercolor paper.

Because no one believed the victims of serial rapist Daniel Holtzclaw since they were Black women, and thus historically viewed as un-rapeable. And because Tinder dates wouldn’t stop fetishizing me for my Blackness, and when I told one of them to stop he said, “What? Did you want me to say I think you’re ugly? Is that what you want?”

For as long as I can remember, the white spaces I inhabited have operated as echo chambers for heterosexual men to routinely remind me of their God-given right to say that not liking me sexually was the same as not liking a man. It was especially ironic when the same people complained about superficial women who didn’t want to sleep with them. I felt their contempt everywhere, in articles that use pseudoscience to argue how Asians are inherently cute and Black people masculine, on websites dedicated to pretty women that completely exclude black and brown women. I felt it even in explicitly black media when black artists like Donald Glover declared their fetishistic infatuation for women of other races and existential boredom for those in their own communities.

In her recent essay “Does Anyone Have the Right to Sex?”, Amia Srinivasan, a British-Indian philosopher, argues against the racial policing of sex and romance.

[…] [w]hereas you can quite reasonably demand that a group of children share their sandwiches inclusively, you just can’t do the same with sex. What works in one case will not work in the other. Sex isn’t a sandwich, and it isn’t really like anything else either. There is nothing else so riven with politics and yet so inviolably personal. For better or worse, we must find a way to take sex on its own terms.

Srinivasan criticizes how feminist consent advocates make overly simplistic one-to-one comparison between sex, a human trait, and some personal object, creating a false discord between moral consciousness and consent that allows sexually regressive subreddits to thrive. Traditional consent politics, she argues, objectifies the people it tries to protect, reinforcing the idea of sexuality as a valuable currency rather than a non-transferable essence of being. For instance, the Rebecca Solnit essay “Men Explain Lolita to Me” compares sex to a sandwich. “Tea and Consent,” a British-produced PSA, compares sex to tea. Sex is viewed as a good that can literally be consumed.

We need to acknowledge when rejection is based in problematic beliefs. According to Srinivasan, before teaching, sex educators should first familiarize themselves with radical self-love movements, groups unified by the idea that we all have a duty to transfigure, as best we can, our problematic and often racist biases in all parts of our lives. But that doesn’t mean all rejection is based in institutionally-influenced prejudice. At a certain point, no one can be compelled to want someone.

I had to mute the television during Gossip Girl when Chuck Bass, a tragic rich boy, tries to attack Jenny Humphrey. I was afraid my mom would see and make me turn it off.

He lures Jenny away from a party and up to an abandoned rooftop, where he pins her down. The scene is visceral. She struggles against him until her brother Dan saves her, punching Chuck in the face. I assumed the attempted rape would become a central part of the narrative, reshaping the characters involved.

Chuck’s punishment is as brief as it is indirect. In a subsequent episode, he and his classmates fight for a coveted usher position with Dartmouth College. Of course, already being an established villain from his first non-rapey appearance on screen, Chuck is rejected again, this time from being an usher. His cockiness makes his comeuppance more enjoyable for audiences even though it is only a passive form of poetic justice, a simultaneous erasure and acknowledgement of the severity of his most recent crime. As the series progresses, Jenny and all the other central characters quickly, wordlessly, forget Chuck’s violent nature, absolving him from the unglamorous role of rapist and proving that the show can’t handle the permanency of rejection.

At a certain point, no one can be compelled to want someone.
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At best, rejection is portrayed as a weapon for smiting the Chucks of the world, and at worst it is the ultimate punishment. The latter is especially the case if the supposed victim is a man pursuing a woman. John Hughes’ 1986 film Pretty In Pink created an indignant subculture of fans who believed Ducky, an affable nerd, deserved the affections of his closest friend Andie instead of quintessential ’80s heartthrob Blane. In the Salon piece “The trouble with Duckie: How Pretty in Pink’s most lovable character gave a generation of teenage boys the wrong idea,” critic Jon Cyer invalidates the misplaced indignation behind “Duckiegate” by comparing Duckie to the more recent “nice guy” archetype, a man who believes the women he desires should reciprocate his male niceness with offers of romance or sex.

Duckie defenders fail to see Andie’s decision to continue her friendship with Duckie after he insults her as a valid form of acceptance—all because of the pervasive idea that in order to truly love someone, we have to accept their sexual advances. The “friendzone” has come to mean something just as bad as indifference or contempt because, to them, rejection in every form is equally bad. They misinterpret her choice as an intentional slight against her best friend, without understanding that her rejection of him as a romantic partner isn’t a rejection of his friendship or personhood.

Duckiegate is a part of an age-old paranoia that a woman’s autonomy exists to oppress vulnerable men. If you type “false rape” into Reddit, the search results are too numerous to count. On the controversial subreddit r/MensRights, two of some of the most popular discussion threads suggest false rape allegations are rampant and that extremist MRAs known as Incels are right in their belief that women are sexual gatekeepers who resent Duckie-esque “beta-males.” The group is an infamous star in the misogynistic and often racist constellation of online spaces colloquially known as the “manosphere.” What they all share in common is their obsession with how society punishes men who aren’t Blane-esque “Chad Thundercocks” by denying them sexual intimacy and, by extension, power, supposedly leaving them vulnerable to the judgmental perceptions of women.

They misinterpret her choice as an intentional slight against her best friend, without understanding that her rejection of him as a romantic partner isn’t a rejection of his friendship or personhood.
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While the manosphere loathes women, it doesn’t defend the Chads who prey on them. Some of the most popular comments and posts on r/MensRights about Brock Turner, an ex-Stanford jock who sexually assaulted a woman in 2015, condemn the wealthy alpha male (comment: “[Turner] isn’t being honest about what [the police report] said”). Same for convicted Steubenville rapists and former football stars Trent Mays and Ma’lik Richmond, the latter of whom is Black (post: “I think that as a community we should mention the Steubenville rape trials. We always talk about false rape allegations, but it’s just as important that we acknowledge real accusations”). Compare this to the site’s sympathetic view of Peter Naussenger, the middle class, white, nerdy man who fellow Columbia alum Emma Sulkowicz accused of sexual assault while the two were in college together.

Knowing that society believes punishment and rejection to be the same, MRAs view the ostracization of Chads as righteous and Duckies as offensive. To them, Chads not only deserve to not be loved by women but also hated by them. The internet Duckies believe they’re oppressed because they think their rejection/ostracization is undeserved. 4chan is famous for drawing national attention to the victim blaming that embroiled the Steubenville case, going as far as to demonstrate IRL wearing Guy Fawkes masks, and to send death and rape threats to Sulkowicz for indirectly ousting her alleged rapist through performance art.

During a workshop on dating violence in college, everyone in the classroom had to come up with a characteristic of a healthy relationship. The room was quiet. We’d already filled up more than half the whiteboard with traits of an unhealthy one (“gaslighting,” “physical violence,” “intolerance,” etc.). After a minute passed, a trickle of suggestions came, but they were all vague, and could apply to any type of relationship, good or bad. Hugs, hand holding, saying I love you—these were things even convicted wife killers had done.

It reminded me of that one cheesy ’80s song “What Is Love?” where the singer basically just repeats the title and “baby don’t hurt me.” I said nothing. If I were asked to do the exercise now, I would say rejection was the ultimate sign of a solid partnership. Regardless of who’s being problematic for what, acknowledging when a romance is or might turn sour is the definition of emotional strength.

However, going back in time won’t be enough to change societal views on rejection. Improving our communities would mean forcing people, especially men, to not only embrace the idea of consent but to also reevaluate the intrinsic violence of desirability, using their own experiences with people’s problematic preferences as an empathetic guide. Men are literally killing women for rejecting them. Until men learn it’s okay to be rejected, no one will be safe. And that’s going to take a cultural shift to turn “no” from an attack to just another word.

I had always been terrified of giving birth. I called my mother after I watched the first episode of One Born Every Minute and told her, in no uncertain terms, that I was never going to be able to have a baby. She laughed at me and said I would, and she was right. Eight years after that conversation, I was looking at the window on a piss covered litmus stick, where one pink line was darkening up beside another. I burst into tears — I was going to be a parent! — but they weren’t happy tears. Nope, no matter how much I wanted it, I wasn’t ready, because to reach motherhood, I was going to have to give birth.

I frantically Googled things like “pregnant scared to give birth” and “elective caesarean.” I floated the idea of a cheeky C-section with my consultant obstetrician. He told me to put my pants back on as if he hadn’t heard me. Back to Google then, and pretty soon afterwards, I discovered hypnobirthing, a practice that promised I could be so blissed-out during labor I wouldn’t even be aware of the pain. My fears evaporated and I began to study for labour like it was a test.

I received books about natural birth for Christmas and I’d devoured them before the turkey was on the table. I laid them out in the rapidly diminishing triangle of space between my crossed legs every night. I read them in the bath; I dropped them in the bath. I listened to hypnosis tracks that were supposed to tap into my neocortex, and send me into a serenity so deep that I would not feel my daughter leave my body. I bought a diffuser so that I could use holistic oils to transport me to the pain free labors of my past lives (and this is only a mild exaggeration).

My hypnobirthing instructor was a magnificent force who believed in the power of mind over matter, and had not used anesthesia at the dentist in five years. She explained that adrenaline would hinder my labor, and that I needed to create feelings of joy throughout the experience to heighten levels of oxytocin, the body’s “happy hormone,” which would speed everything along. She asked me what I loved more than anything in the world, and without even a passing glance at my husband I said our dog. She advised me to plaster the inside of the car with pictures of the dog, so that our ride to the hospital could be stress-free. I printed out 20 photos of him later that day. Also printed was my birth plan — a neatly bulleted list of exactly how the experience would play out. Double spaced, 12pt, Lucida Serif. On heavy cream vellum paper, like a wedding invitation.

I was doing what I thought I needed to do to bring a child into the world purely and unharmed. I had come to believe that my body was designed to give birth, so giving birth should be easy and, if I just studied hard enough, could be painless. The natural birth movement claims that childbirth used to be safe and easy before the advent of modern medicine and roots for a return to drug-free home birth. When I mentioned this to my husband he said he thought he’d prefer it if I had our baby in the hospital. To be honest, I thought he was a prick for not letting me give birth in our freshly carpeted bedroom, but telling him that didn’t really sit with the new earth mother persona I was curating, so I just smiled serenely and meditated for a while.

I had come to believe that my body was designed to give birth, so giving birth should be easy and, if I just studied hard enough, could be painless.
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When my water broke at 10am one Monday morning I made myself a cup of tea, got into the bath and read my book. Calm mothers have their babies quicker, I’d been told; so I waited, thinking about how in eight hours — or who knows, maybe six if I was really calm — I’d be holding my perfect baby in my arms.

24 hours later I was in the car on the way to the hospital, listening to my hypnobirthing tracks. “Three, two, one,” said the clinically composed female voice through my headphones, “relax, relax, relax.” Just need to get in that birthing pool. Just really. Need to. Just want to feel that nice water. Make it better. Dog pictures not really working. Three, two, one, relax. Dog. Birth pool. Relax. Three. Dogpool.

My contractions were coming every four minutes, but when the midwife took a cursory look at me, she told me I was only one centimeter dilated. “We won’t admit you until you’re 4cm,” she said. “Not enough beds.”

“But I have been in labour for 24 hours,” I argued, worrying I was already ruining my perfect birth experience, “I think it’s time for the birth pool — I think if I could just get in the-”

“You need to go home,” she said.

Four hours later, I was in the car again. I was screaming in pain. I went back into the hospital and told them, under no uncertain terms, that I wanted an epidural. They examined me again and I was only 2cm dilated. “As I mentioned, we don’t normally admit women until they’re 4cm,” the midwife said conversationally, looking from my vagina to my vitals and back again. I didn’t care. I needed relief.

Then, a change of plan. “Your baby is in distress,” said the midwife, looking again at the two heart rates on the screen. “You’ll need to be constantly monitored from here onwards. You won’t be able to have your water birth after all. And we can give you an epidural, if you like.”

Within half an hour, I’d signed a form that gave an anesthetist permission to lodge a huge, hollow needle into my back and absolved me of the right to sue if he paralyzed me. Ten minutes later, I could feel nothing at all from the waist down. “I’m terribly sorry,” I said to the midwife, “I think I swore at you downstairs. That’s not really me. I do apologize.”

“Don’t worry,” she said, “I’ve had much worse.”

My husband stood at my bedside staring at me in uneasy wonder. “The epidural,” he announced, “is modern medicine at its finest.”

Though many ancient cultures attempted to treat the pain of childbirth, for centuries in Western society a biblical misogyny infiltrated the medical care given to those in labor. Christians portrayed pain relief in childbirth as blasphemous, believing it contravened God’s punishment for Eve’s original sin (“I will make your pains in childbearing very severe; with painful labor you will give birth to children” [Genesis 3:16]). According to Steve Ainsworth at Midwives Magazine, incense and prayer (yeah, really) were an accepted analgesic, but “anything else might upset divine intent.”

It wasn’t until the mid nineteenth century that attempts at pain relief during birth began to be widely normalized — by Queen Victoria, no less. Victoria enjoyed a famously rich sexual relationship with her husband, Prince Albert, and bore nine of their children. She hated being pregnant, however, and was “repulsed” by childbirth, developing a keen interest in technological advancements in pain relief as a result. In 1853, during the birth of her eighth child, Prince Leopold, she used chloroform’s anesthetic properties to reduce her labor pains. As the head of the Church of England, her decision signified the church’s direct acceptance of pain relief. Chloroform was subsequently known as “anesthesia à la reine” and was used by doctors to lower labor pain until after the Second World War. 

At around the same time that Victoria was pregnant with Leopold, a French surgeon, Charles Gabriel Pravaz and a Scottish doctor, Alexander Wood, each independently combined a hollow hypodermic needle and a syringe. Wood discovered this could be used to manage neuralgic pain. The epidural progressed in 1885 when neurologist James Leonard Corning injected a dose of cocaine into the sacrum of a healthy man. It went through several updates before reaching its current form of local anesthetic, continually administered by a catheter inserted into the “epidural” space just shy of the spine. It was first used in childbirth in 1909 and began to be regularly employed as pain relief in labor in the 1940s. At that time, although many still believed that pain in childbirth was a necessary part of the experience, more progressive doctors saw that pain relief was vital in creating a safe and healthy birth culture. In 1949, in his presidential address to the Section of Obstetrics of the Royal Academy of Medicine in Ireland, leading obstetrician Dr. O’Donel Browne said:

It is wrong to withhold relief from pain from poor or rich, and the argument that analgesia cannot be made applicable to domiciliary midwifery must not prevent us making every effort to reach that goal. Many difficulties confront us, but I am convinced that we can overcome them with comparative ease if we are prepared to take a little trouble over the problem, and to agree that the slight additional expense is warranted.

Amongst gynecologists, Browne represented a growing movement that recognized the importance of reducing maternal pain regardless of cost. At present, NHS hospitals in the UK aim to provide epidurals free of charge to any woman who requests one. This means that British birthing people are among the luckiest in the world; in the United States in 2016, for example, the average cost of an epidural was $2,312. But British people’s choice to labor pain free, for free, has been threatened before. In 2006, the Education and Research Committee of the Royal College of Midwives recommended charging for the procedure. Maureen Treadwell of the Birth Trauma Association said:

The women least able to pay would get the rawest deal. Some professional women can just put the cost of an epidural on their plastic cards but women who can’t afford it will suffer.

She went on to describe a woman who had been persuaded by a midwife not to have an epidural and was left with post traumatic stress disorder as a result of the unrelieved pain. Indeed, recent research has shown that the administration of an epidural during childbirth can reduce the possibility of postnatal depression and conditions such as PTSD. This could be a very important factor for expectant mothers with existing depression or anxiety to take into account — but unfortunately, it is still not widely shared. More research found that amongst pregnant people who had been intending to deliver naturally but chose to receive pain relief during their labor, levels of postnatal depression were higher. Understandably, for those who have invested large amounts of time, energy and money in the natural birth movement, a feeling of failure follows the use of pain relief in childbirth.

Scratch the surface of the natural birth movement and you’ll find disturbing, decidedly anti-feminist roots. Fernand Lamaze is arguably the most famous player in the natural childbirth game, a French obstetrician who developed the psychoprophylactic, or ‘Lamaze’ method of childbirth, which puts focus on breathing and massage. Lamaze thought little of his patients, and reportedly ranked the “performance” of the laboring women on his ward from ‘excellent’ to ‘complete failure.’” Other male obstetricians such as Robert Bradley and Grantly Dick-Read (his real name, I shit you not), both sons of farmers, developed techniques for unmedicated births based their methods on delivering calves. According to obstetrician Amy Tueter MD, Dick-Read’s method centered the premise that “‘inferior’ people were having more children than their ‘betters’ portending ‘race suicide’ of the white middle and upper classes.” Meanwhile, Bradley became the key proponent of Husband-Coached Childbirth. Oh yes, you read that right; he literally trademarked mansplaining giving birth. 

More research found that amongst pregnant people who had been intending to deliver naturally but chose to receive pain relief during their labor, levels of postnatal depression were higher.
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More progressive doctors claimed that these techniques “needlessly primitivized” birth — I’d go further, and argue that these doctors entirely fictionalized new reasons for labor pains to better suit their agenda. Dick-Read’s technique, which predated Lamaze’s, was premised on the idea that contractions were a result of unnatural physical tension caused by fear. This is categorically untrue. Contractions are the result of the pituitary gland releasing oxytocin and causing the uterus to tense and relax which pushes the baby down into the birth canal. Dick-Read, Lamaze, and Bradley must have known that: it was discovered by Sir Henry Dale in 1906. It’s not fear that hurts in this situation (but if you’re scared, I don’t blame you), and yet a multi billion dollar industry has been born from that lie. In the US, C-sections are at an all time high, and many women are given them simply because they are convenient for the doctor, and often more lucrative for the hospital. It makes sense, then, that there’s a social movement in favor of natural birth among people who feel like their agency is depleted in an over-medicalized system. I gave birth in the UK, where healthcare is free and natural birth is encouraged by hospitals, as it works out cheaper for them. I took the information I was given and ended up at hypnobirthing, believing all I read about stress causing maternal pain.

It’s not fear that hurts in this situation (but if you’re scared, I don’t blame you), and yet a multi billion dollar industry has been born from that lie.
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It turns out, however, you don’t have to listen to a movement started by cisgender men in the 1940s that likens you to a laboring cow. In 2004, the American Congress of OB/GYN and The American Society of Anesthesiologists put out a joint statement to remind us that, “there is no other circumstance where it is considered acceptable for an individual to experience untreated severe pain, amenable to safe intervention, while under a physician’s care.”

My pregnancy was as far from happy as I could imagine. I was diagnosed fairly early on with Symphysis Pubis Dysfunction (SPD), a condition caused by the hormonal loosening of the pelvic ligaments, which leaves the pelvis misaligned and causes constant physical pain so intense that it’s difficult for some sufferers to walk. The only thing that relieves SPD is delivering your baby, and because I was preparing to use hypnobirthing, I was excited to do it.

In the time leading up to my daughter’s birth, I was calm, and when I reflected on it later, I was glad I’d used hypnobirthing to those ends; but that’s because, in spite of the unwitting danger I put myself and my child in, we escaped harm. We are lucky. Many people have lost babies through the dogmatic approach to natural birth that certain hospitals adopt.

Hypnobirthing is grounded in the teachings of Dick-Read, Lamaze and Bradley; the same old misogynistic doctrine that women are animals and pain is empowering. It is repackaged for the modern, middle class mother; the book I bought, with its cover image of a beautiful, serenely pregnant woman lying on a huge taupe cushion looked more like the front of an Ibiza lounge compilation CD. It’s assumed that you have enough free time to lie in bed meditating to 12 six-minute-long hypnosis tracks a day. These are mostly compiled of a woman, who I always imagined to be the pregnant Ibiza lounge woman, slowly repeating the words, “three, two, one, relax, relax, relax.” As if it were that easy.

I wasn’t frightened about giving birth because I never imagined the type of birth I was actually going to have. I readily believed everything I read about my body being expressly designed to cough out a child. Because of that, and because I thought that my body’s production of oxytocin would be halted if my natural laboring rhythm was interrupted, I wrote into my birth plan that I didn’t want to be touched during labour, and — as is very common in hypnobirthing — I included internal examinations in this.

Unfortunately, I only discovered in the middle of my labor that the natural birth movement doesn’t account for any of the problems that I encountered. It doesn’t acknowledge that, of the four different pelvis shapes, only one is deemed medically “ideal” for labor. It misses out the babies that are positioned back to back, breech, transverse or in a “brow” presentation — coming out face first, like a little sloth — like mine was, which is the cause of 6% of maternal mortalities worldwide. No amount of oxytocin was going to help me with that.

If I’d ignored my hypnobirthing rulebook and allowed an earlier internal exam, they might have picked up my daughter’s position. By the time I consented and the midwives realized she was brow, she was too far down the birth canal to be delivered by caesarean; I was given an episiotomy and she was pulled out by ventouse, at which point the doctors realized that her dropping heart rate had been caused by the umbilical cord which was wrapped around her neck, constricting her every time my body contracted.

Unfortunately, I only discovered in the middle of my labor that the natural birth movement doesn’t account for any of the problems that I encountered.
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Natural childbirth relies on a tightrope walk between oxytocin, the aforementioned “happy” or “love” hormone, and, latterly, adrenaline, which produces a “fight or flight” response in humans. Telling a woman to refuse medical exams, keep calm and look at pictures of puppies to release a flow of oxytocin will only work to speed up her birth if she and her baby are perfectly positioned for it.  My belief that I could give birth completely naturally hindered my labor.

It doesn’t fit with the hypnobirthing mission statement to condone deviation from the birth plan, so stories like mine do not make it into hypnobirthing books. One of the first things I noticed when I began to be visibly pregnant was the startling regularity with which other women would go out of their way to tell me stories about their births. Some of them were horrific, whilst others dismissed my ideas about how I wanted to give birth. Hypnobirthing discourages all but the most perfect narratives, and anyone who begins a hypnobirthing “journey” is advised to ask other women not to mention any negative birth experiences. What’s more, if you do an online search for phrases like “hypnobirthing back to back birth” or “hypnobirthing brow presentation,” there are exactly zero results that discuss hypnobirthing in these circumstances. Yet these are very real risks that accompany every single pregnancy and it is at least disingenuous, at most very dangerous, for a widely used method to erase the existence of these stories.

The fact is that every birth is different, and there is not one “journey” that is better than another. The acceptance of pain relief to avoid post traumatic stress disorder is not “failure,” and anyone making money out of telling you so does not have the best interests of you, or your baby, at heart. Whether it comes from midwives, the Old Testament or hypnobirthing instructors: the vilification of the epidural is nothing but misogyny under another name.

“I tell my kids, if you have self-control, you have everything,” says Melanie, the innkeeper at our B&B in Fairbanks, Alaska. “It applies to any situation, whether it’s with a wild animal, a school bully, me and their dad. Self-control… it will serve them well anywhere.”

A few days later, my husband and I are sitting in the Denali National Park Visitors’ Center, watching a wildlife safety video. Home to grizzly bears, moose, and caribou, among other creatures, the park is one of the few places remaining in the U.S. where humans are intruders—and need to behave accordingly.

We like to hike, but we’ve never encountered anything larger than deer in the wild, so we’ve been leaning toward exploring Denali behind the protective steel and glass of our rental car. But just in case we feel like wimps once we’re out in the forest, we decide to watch the video so we can make a last-minute call. The trails are open year-round, after all; we can always stoke our bravery later.

Four guides narrate the 30-minute video, structured as a list of do’s and don’ts. The tips for bears in particular are enlightening:

• Minimize surprises—make noise to announce your presence
• Suppress any scents so you don’t attract bears—no fragrances, all food in bear-proof packs
• Stay vigilant: When stopping, choose sites with good visibility. Have everyone in your group face a slightly different direction, so you can see anything approaching
• Bears are curious, and their behavior is contextual; you never want to provoke or set precedent (e.g., don’t keep food in or near your tent—then they’ll think tents equal food)
• Keep bear spray close—you don’t want to be fumbling for it in a crucial moment. Make sure you know how to use it before you head out
• If you do come upon a bear and it spots you, don’t run! (That could trigger the bear’s predatory chase drive.) Back away if possible, but don’t turn your back on the bear. If you can’t retreat, stand your ground and put your arms over your head to look as large as possible
• If the bear attacks, lie in the fetal position, cover your head and neck

As the video wrapped up all the different ways hikers and campers could get in trouble, one of the youthful park rangers offered a final thought: “Don’t be afraid to go out and explore!”

Despite this encouragement, we ultimately opted to stick to our original plan. We drove to Mile 30 and back on Denali’s main road on two consecutive days: the first in afternoon sunshine, the second in morning mist and light rain. On both occasions, the weather revealed different shades of the mountains and valleys, and a variety of animals came out to greet us: bald eagles, caribou, and yes—two grizzly bears. The afternoon bear sidled down the mountain and crossed the road, less than 30 feet from our car; the morning bear stayed up on the hillside, munching on the brush. We snapped a few pictures, the gargantuan beasts transformed into mere specks on our smartphone cameras. We continued on our way, enclosed and safe.

But something about the situation rattled me, and it took me a few days to understand just what exactly it was.

I acknowledged that when I go hiking at home in New England, I am seeking out silence, as well as the opportunity to clear my mind. The recommendations for Denali—being loud and constantly on high alert—seemed in direct opposition to what I’ve always pursued when I hit the trail. I hike to relax, and this type of endeavor was vigilant — maybe even tense.

In fact, I thought, if I wanted to be constantly on the lookout and poised for a potential attack, I’d just stay home and continue my usual, “commuting on public transportation” and “woman walking alone in the city,” routines.

But something about the situation rattled me, and it took me a few days to understand just what exactly it was.
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Suddenly I realized that those safety tips from the National Park Service video weren’t so different from what I learned in a self-defense class a few years back.

• Stay constantly alert! Don’t wear earbuds or talk on your phone. Know your surroundings at all times.
• When going out, look large: Practice safety in numbers
• Dress conservatively, watch how much skin you’re showing—you don’t want to trigger a prey drive
• Yell and make noise so others know you’re in trouble
• If you’re going to carry pepper spray, make sure you know how to use it. Otherwise it could be grabbed and used against you!

And it then hit me—do we regard men the same way we regard wild animals?

I thought of Mike Pence, who refuses to dine or be alone with any woman who isn’t his wife. Louis C.K.’s compulsions. School dress codes that make sure girls don’t distract boys. The string of assaults against women in my former Boston neighborhood — conducted over repeated years by the alleged same assailant — which terrorized residents so much that the local community center provided the aforementioned self-defense classes free of charge.

I thought of the flood of #MeToo stories, encompassing friends and strangers, famous men and everyday men. My own stories, my friends’ stories. In every case, the proprieties of respect and social mores fall away and the feral urges dominate the experience (and headlines). That sense of unpredictability, that succumbing to animal nature, sets the foundation for repeated indignities—and worse.

He can’t be controlled. You need to be smart. (You need to take that self-defense class!)

Boys will be boys—it’s in their nature.   

Don’t tempt him or be a tease—he can’t help it.

Do we regard men the same way we regard wild animals?
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We took a red eye home from Anchorage and promptly fell asleep. When we were somewhere over the Midwest, Dr. Christine Blasey Ford started her testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Jet-lagged and bleary-eyed, I watched a video recording of her opening statement later that evening. She was composed, with self control.

I watched Justice Kavanaugh, raging and roaring; Lindsay Graham, red-faced and sputtering; both as volatile as creatures disturbed in the wild. And I suppose they were—here was an interloper daring to call out how they roamed their habitat. In both her statement and replies, Dr. Ford refused to continue the narrative that they had no self control.

Of course, this narrative won’t go away quietly—cultural mores built over millennia don’t just course correct or even adapt immediately. Just this month, for example, the Atlantic gave Newt Gingrich a lengthy (and often bizarre) profile, opening the story with its subject stomping around in a zoo and featuring choice quotes comparing all of human nature to the animal kingdom. Photos show him grinning alongside menacing dinosaur skulls and petting giant turtles.

“It’s not viciousness, it’s natural,” he chides after the reporter pushes back. Later in the story, citing a 2016 speech Gingrich gave to the Heritage Foundation, our president is compared to (what else?) a grizzly bear—specifically, the ferocious bear in the movie The Revenant: “He will walk over, bite your face off, and sit on you.”

Here was an interloper daring to call out how they roamed their habitat.
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But for those of us who have never wielded power — who have never been regarded (or permitted to be regarded) as wild or ferocious — we know by default that there are other ways of moving through the world.

For those millions of us who have always been held to a higher standard — who have never had the privilege to unleash any “wild” tendencies — we know collectively what’s possible. That we all can do better. That the narrative of “nature dictates violence” has to stop. In short — that we all can exercise self control.  

Two days after we returned home, my husband and I drove up to Plum Island for a hike through the nature preserve. The sun was high and the salt marshes spread as far as the eye could see. It was quite a departure from Denali—mostly flat without a predator in sight.

But at a certain point, I got ahead of Andy on the boardwalk trail, and saw a solo man a few feet away. The wind rustled through the brush that flanked the narrow pathway. It was just him and me as we approached each other. He could be a bear, I thought, or he could be a crane.

And just like that, all senses were firing.

I took a deep breath. Self control, I thought, and hoped it would be enough.

I wondered if he had even an inkling of the same thought.

“Hello,” I said as we made eye contact.

“Beautiful day,” he said, and we continued our opposite ways.

As I browsed the University of Texas Press’s fall catalogue, a title jumped out at me: The Man Who Wrote the Perfect Novel (October 15). When I read the blurb, I became incensed. It was a biography of John Williams, the author of Stoner, the unlikeliest bestseller of the 2000s. Stoner was originally published in 1965 and reissued by NYRB Classics in 2006, and then re-reissued in 2015 in a lavish hardback edition. It was reviewed and lauded widely. In the New York Times Book Review, Morris Dickstein called it “a perfect novel.”

Stoner is not a perfect novel. It’s not even a particularly well-written novel. You’ve probably read a hundred books like it. It is a methodical, hagiographic piece of fiction about a college professor, a man who plods passively through his life and takes joy only in literature.

William Stoner is born on a farm. He goes to college, becomes a professor at that college, takes a wife, has a child, undergoes professional difficulties, and dies. This is a terrific way to write a novel—to do a character study of a small, mediocre life. But Williams’s mediocrity blurs with Stoner’s until they both lose the reader’s interest. And one or both of them has a frightening carelessness toward women. Stoner repeatedly indulges in marital rape, saying that when his wife shifts against him in her sleep, “he moved upon her.” His wife, in response, “turn[s] her head sideways in a familiar gesture and bur[ies] it in her pillow, enduring violation,” so there is no mistaking these encounters as consensual. Dickstein’s review didn’t mention that. But then, Stoner is aimed toward Dickstein, and not toward me.  

There’s a reason a book like Stoner was re-issued, and a biography like The Man Who Wrote the Perfect Novel was published.  The most elevated cultural conversations favor writing that is traditionally male, subjectively male, overtly male. This may be occurring almost involuntarily on the part of the editors and critics. In Stoner, a male critic might not notice that Stoner’s wife is relegated to the stereotypes of frigid bitch, and later, crazy bitch. A critic without a disability might not notice that the central villains of the book are both disabled, and that the motives for their villainy are otherwise unexplained. A white critic might not notice that there are no educated people of color in the book at all. He might perceive only that Williams’s quiet, scholarly hero does his duty and loves his literature, despite the schemers who endeavor to ruin him—never noticing the common thread among those schemers.

So, of course Stoner is not a perfect novel. There’s no such thing, but if there were, it definitely wouldn’t sympathize with marital rape or demonize characters who are not cisgendered, fully abled white men. To state the obvious, no novel can be all-inclusive. Committee art is rarely of good quality. But a novel that actively shuts out readers because of their gender or skin color? The time for celebrating a novel like that, for glorifying it to the point of biographizing its author, should be long over.

The most elevated cultural conversations favor writing that is traditionally male, subjectively male, overtly male.
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Yet it still happens. Charles J. Shields, who has also written biographies of Harper Lee and Kurt Vonnegut, has done a valorous job with Williams in The Man Who Wrote the Perfect Novel. But he cannot disguise what’s at the heart of Stoner and what seems to have been at the heart of its author: misogyny, and mediocrity. A recollection of Williams: “He was one of those who felt…that the world is closing in on them, with all these ‘women and minorities’…[taking] the place that they were raised to think is rightfully theirs.”

As a scholar, Williams’s work was backward-looking (despite writing in the fertile 1960s, he had no interest in poetry beyond the time of William Carlos Williams), derivative, and inadequate; a rejecting editor wrote to Williams, “You are overstepping your evidence by about ten thousand miles.” In 1963 Williams caused a minor scandal by plagiarizing Yvor Winters. Shields treats it as delicately as possible. “Williams’ students did know of their professor’s proclivity for borrowing…He had taken shortcuts since the beginning of his teaching career…piggybacking on Alan Swallow’s Wyatt dissertation for his own…compiling a poetry anthology incorporating Winters’ scholarship.”

In the critical segment of his writer’s life, Williams is so unimaginative that he must plagiarize. Meanwhile, as a poet and fiction author, he struggles to find an agent, to find publication, to find a job, to find funding. He often expresses frustration that he can’t seem to get ahead as a writer. Shields tiptoes around it, but the fact is, Williams’s books just aren’t that good. On his first novel, a rejection letter reads, “To us it seems a shame that a writer of Mr. William’s [sic] obvious capabilities and potentialities should have spent so much time delineating a character who is basically not worth it.” Dutton’s feedback: “Unfortunately, we think that…this manuscript is just too long and too pretentious.”

In sum, Stoner is a minor novel by a minor writer. I don’t begrudge its wide readership (people can enjoy whatever they want); I begrudge its elevation, when it is so plainly and seriously flawed, to the point that a single review by a male critic has titled Williams’s biography. The preposterous, rapturous praise, leveled unequally toward mediocre men like Williams, is the problem.

A scan of the NYRB Classics list shows that male names outstrip female names; the same editors who chose to put two editions of Stoner into print within ten years choose mostly men from the annals of out-of-print literature to reissue and promote. Yet the poet Ai, who won a National Book Award, a Guggenheim, and an NEA grant, requires a Kickstarter to come back into print. The Second Shelf, a quarterly publication and online bookstore devoted to out-of-print women’s writing, also needed a Kickstarter to fill the gap NYRB Classics perpetuates. Passing, by Nella Larsen, is obscure (ranked at 10,000 in Amazon sales at this writing), while Invisible Man flourishes (ranked at 1,000).

Twice as many male authors get translated as women; only two houses that commonly publish translated books published more women authors than men in 2017. And just one publisher, AmazonCrossing (!), accounts for 20% of the women published in translation. VIDA continues to shout across the gender gap in publishing for short stories, essays, and particularly criticism—check out the stats for the London Review of Books and, surprise!, the NYRB. As those statistics demonstrate, women writers are reviewed less, and women critics are offered fewer opportunities to review.

The preposterous, rapturous praise, leveled unequally toward mediocre men like Williams, is the problem.
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Stoner is perfect in one respect: as an example of the heights to which a mediocre white male writer can soar when given proper cheerleading. Williams has netted a biography and lasting fame because of the men in publishing and criticism clustered around him, rooting for him. Compare him to Clarice Lispector, a contemporary, who was exponentially more prolific and acclaimed during her lifetime. It took a 2009 biography to push her work into wider acknowledgment in the US, instead of the acknowledgment engendering the biography. Or compare him to Anaïs Nin, whose work is remembered as supplemental to Henry Miller’s, whose extraordinary diary has been published by smaller and smaller presses as interest in her has waned, whose objectively fascinating life has been biographized only once. Or compare him to Grace Metalious, author of Peyton Place. She wrote bestselling, salacious melodramas that tapped the repressive sexuality of her era and is barely critically studied at all.

Stoner is also excellent as a standard against which every female writer should push. Per Shields, “Williams could build his fiction around thought warring with feeling, which creates tension, and to suggest that emotions are ineffable, beyond characters’ reach.” This sense pervades Stoner, that emotions are foreign and impossible. I think this struggle was Williams’s, that he found it difficult to enter the weak and confusing realm of emotion and nurture (his own children barely appear in Shields’s biography), the realm in which women stereotypically belong. I imagine that Williams would have found a book like My Brilliant Friend as intolerable as I find Stoner, as there is no place for him in it.

Women are half (or more) of the reading public, and yet books like Stoner are what’s thrust upon us—books in which we will never find ourselves, books whose authors were rightly buried under the weight of their own mediocrity. Books and authors whose obsolescence, whose extinction, are overdue.

content warning: sexual assault

Much of my time as a teenager was spent counting down the days until my next concert. I was a five-foot, sixteen-year-old girl, and I spent all my money on floor tickets to watch my pop punk idols thrash around on stage; I maneuvered my way through the masses of sweaty men, hoping to secure a view of the band before the chaos ensued. My mom worried, and most of my friends didn’t get it, but there, with no need to impress the strangers dancing and singing along beside me, was my refuge.

I could lose control and take up space. I didn’t know how to dance and it didn’t matter. I could sweat all my makeup off and it was only proof of how much fun I had. When men pushed me, I could push back harder. I could scream until my voice went out — and I did.

That was where I felt safe — for a while.

As I grew older so did my list of unpleasant experiences and wariness of the men around me. As much as I wanted to cling to the things I loved about live music—the release, the rush, the sense of connection that breathes new life into the intimacy of listening to music—it became harder to ignore the pervasiveness of dangerous male aggression in the spaces I wanted so dearly to call home.

When men pushed me, I could push back harder.
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It was in the pit that a man looked me in the face and told me he hoped I’d get raped.

It was in the pit that a man questioned my belonging, called me “little girl,” and shoved me to the ground.

It was in the pit during a Gaslight Anthem show I’d travelled three hours to see that a man gave me one look, called me a bitch, and punched me in the face. I still remember the fear of his fist coming towards me and the hot tears that slipped out after he was ejected while I tried and failed to look unfazed. (How else would the other men know I actually deserved to be there?)

It was in the pit that I was groped. Time and time and time again.

It’s at shows and bars and DIY venues that I am harassed and interrogated by the self-appointed gatekeepers of punk who are apparently so mired in their imagined 1981 utopia that they can’t fathom a woman wearing a band t-shirt because she genuinely enjoys the music. Where men call me a bitch because I’m there for the show and not for them, or a poser because my interests or image don’t perfectly align with their expectations. Where even self-identified progressive punk bands protect their predatory friends and image rather than use their voice for the good of the community. Where popularity still outshines virtue.

In the poignant memoir Tranny, penned by the frontwoman of Against Me!, Laura Jane Grace, she breaks down the ever present dichotomies of punk politics and her experience navigating the scene as a trans woman. “Show spaces were supposed to be open to everyone regardless of age, race, class, sex, or sexual preference, but for the most part it was just white kids oblivious to the privilege they came from,” she explains. “It also became clear to me that while these were the politics heralded by the scene, often they were not actually practiced.”

For a while, I tried to avoid  these interactions by making myself smaller or dressing the part. I started watching shows from the side of the crowd for fear of getting trapped amongst men who weren’t interested in the ethics of showgoing. I followed the Guidelines of Being a Woman in the Pit: stay near a friend, definitely avoid skirts, move out of the way of men, keep to yourself, watch your drink, and accept the groping as a consequence of crowdsurfing while appearing female or queer, or being anything but a straight, while man. But unsurprisingly, none of these things made the harassment disappear.

It was in the pit that I was groped. Time and time and time again.
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I became hypervigilant and afraid; my refuge was stolen from me by the same power dynamics that threaten women on the streets, at their jobs, and even in their homes. The loss of safe spaces for uninhibited self-expression and catharsis is ultimately a loss of freedom.

One night, sitting outside our favorite dive bar after a show, my friend noted, “you know, a lot of punk dudes are really just bearded frat boys in leather jackets.” I wanted to laugh. And cry.

There’s this idea that being part of a “scene” guarantees acceptance and safety — that a community born out of guitars in basements and dive bars is somehow inherently inclusive, progressive, or just moreso than, say, a frat house. And while it’s true that punk has historically fostered community and solidarity among working class men, it’s also the genre where skinheads and known abusers run free. Even the Riot Grrrl movement failed to resonate with women that weren’t white, cisgender, and middle class.

But the (frequently ignored) reality is that people of color and queer folks have been punk all along.

Punk promises refuge from the oppressive institutions and ideologies that permeate everyday life, yet when its direction is dictated primarily by white cisgender men — as has often been the case — the same power dynamics and hierarchies that undervalue and suppress marginalized people recreate and uphold themselves. As with any subculture, the reluctance or outright refusal to acknowledge and address patterns of misogyny, racism, and transphobia only exacerbates the issue, and marginalized people are left behind, ostracized, or worse.

It's in the pit where men call me a bitch because I’m there for the show and not for them.
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But white men are not the protectors of punk — they just think they are.

Where men can voice their feelings and opinions freely, but women and queers are degraded or silenced, there is no liberation. Where concerned women are dismissed as “bitches” and “feminazis” and people of color are consistently alienated and sexualized, there is no liberation. When cis men get to choose which issues “matter,” the most vulnerable people lose.

I can’t lie and say I wasn’t or am not still attracted to the nihilistic attitude of punk; feeling lost, alone, unheard, and depressed will do that to a person. But I always thought of making music and going to shows as an outlet to express and manage those feelings of cynicism and rage—likely planted by a largely uncompassionate world — not to heighten them. I understood gigs as a space that honors solidarity — a place where I didn’t have to “prove myself.” I understood punk as community and a celebration of difference, not as an expression of self-superiority.

But it seems that I was wrong. At least, in practice. And isn’t that where it really matters?

Bad things happen in the pit. But it’s also where I found refuge as a quietly but deeply lost teenage girl harboring more rage than I knew how to manage. It was where the man who punched me in the face was almost instantly knocked to the ground by a group of men who proceeded to check in with me without commenting on my poor attempt to disguise my tears. The pit is where I desperately scanned the crowd for someone to notice I was being sexually assaulted and silently met eyes with a kind woman who stepped in and flagged down a security guard that fortunately took his job seriously enough to kick the creep out.

White men are not the protectors of punk — they just think they are.
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The pit is where most people understand that when someone falls, you help pick them up.

I don’t think many of us would willingly and repeatedly enter a situation that typically ends in bruised ribs, mysterious cuts and scratches, dehydration, and aching feet if we weren’t at least a little self-destructive, but there is a difference between the consensual physical exhaustion of the mosh pit and having your physical being threatened or assaulted. It seems that with this chosen loss of control—women love to get dirty too—the threat of real danger continues to loom.

Almost ten years later, when men challenge my music knowledge or demand a list of my favorite Dead Kennedys songs, I walk away knowing their insecurity and fragile masculinity are not my problems to manage. But when I go to shows, I’m more withdrawn. Live music is still very much a part of my life, and sometimes I still fight my way toward the stage, but sometimes it feels like I’m pushing through bodies looking for something that just isn’t there. Maybe I’ve outgrown it.

Or maybe I’m just tired.

The allegations against Brett Kavanaugh have been careful to include not only his age at the time of his alleged assault, but the fact that he was a student at Georgetown Prep. Assaults are a pandemic in our culture today, but his alleged actions speak beyond toxic masculinity and the general rape culture that holds all women hostage today. Brett Kavanaugh is a symptom of something worse. He is the fullest expression of elitism blended with misogyny that is cultivated and groomed at private, all-male institutions like Georgetown Prep.

I know because I went there.

I was proud when I was accepted as a freshman. I loved that the school dated back to 1789—  just two years after the signing of the Constitution—making our school older than modern France. Coming from a brand new public school, I marveled at the marble columns of the chapel that was built with an anonymous donation during the Great Depression.

It is a potent brew of pride that is heady stuff for a 15-year-old, and it meant the world to me to be included. I was coming from a public middle school in rural Maryland, and I loved my teachers and had an incredible education, but I had been bullied every day for my bookishness. I believed Prep’s story about itself—I was so excited to be a part of such a noble institution of scholars and athletes “committed to justice.”

As part of our orientation, we were told what an honor it is to be a “Man for Others.” I was in awe of the access to power being a Prep grad might secure for me.

I remember Justice Scalia spoke at our annual Father-Son Dinner. We sat in the gym and feasted on steak as he addressed us. He pointed out that he attended Xavier High School, which was still in our network of esteem and familiarity as a Jesuit school like ours. He laughed about his decision in determining the course of the election of George Bush over Al Gore, and said “Well, I got that right,” to thunderous applause. Brett Kavanaugh worked for George Bush during that very campaign.

I wonder at what point in his career Brett Kavanaugh felt that he would someday serve on the Supreme Court. Kavanaugh was two years ahead of Justice Gorsuch at Prep. They would have passed each other in the halls. Did they already feel confident even then that would rise to such prominence?

As a teacher now , I truly believe in the power of the growth mindset. Rather than telling a student “you are smart” or “you are good,” you should praise the effort a student invests. My education at Prep had a different tenor however. Teachers offered intermittent, lukewarm constructive feedback on our behavior, but the general message of the school was that we were already fully actualized as “Men for Others.” Largely by virtue of our parents’ being able to pay the admission ticket, we were Prep students. We were the best. We hated our rival schools and looked down on everyone else.

Kavanaugh was two years ahead of Justice Gorsuch at Prep. They would have passed each other in the halls. Did they already feel confident even then that would rise to such prominence?
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No one should walk with the certainty of their own innate goodness, least of all unformed, adolescent boys. As many lessons as we learned about how special we were, we learned even more from the lack of response to our worst behaviors.

I remember a young woman who substituted for my English class weeping as she erased “I want to fuck Ms. ________ in the ass” from the blackboard. If the boy who wrote it was disciplined, I never heard about it; his actions were never condemned. I also remember our class president getting elected on the slogan “Bleachers,” because he had “fingered” a girl beneath them. Before big games against rival schools, the “Boosters” (an elected group of cheerleaders who would get the fans going before and during games) would paper the hallways with posters with such slogans as “Beat the Pagans” when we played schools that were not religious, and “Hoya Saxa,” etc. One popular poster was a cartoon of a rabbit’s head that on closer inspection revealed a woman parting her legs. It would appear alongside other posters praising certain players or generally hyping the team. It served no other purpose and had no other meaning.

When you believe you are superior and untouchable, the least moral commit heinous crimes. The same lack of accountability that led to the rampant abuse finally being called out by the #MeToo movement, the rape of children in the Catholic Church by priests, rapes in the military and abuses by the police force—these all stem from the same corrupting sense of superiority.

I don’t think a day went by that I didn’t see a penis scrawled on a chalkboard or a desk. Everyday in the hall I would regularly see guys punch each other in the groin. I would often find myself doubled over in pain having just been punched out of nowhere. On two separate occasions I was choked until I almost blacked out. This was normal, everyday behavior. That is the culture enabled by the dangerous and passive permissiveness of “boys will be boys.” I have never been a fighter and in truth, I’m not particularly quick with words. I had very little defense. The idea of telling a teacher never crossed my mind. I’m not even certain who I would have told.  

When I was a sophomore, I was taught math by a very old priest. He was a big fan of the football team, and he would let football players sleep in class because they needed rest. He hated me, presumably for my lack of athleticism and my preference for extra-curricular activities which he deemed unmanly. He made a point of telling me that, “we get men ready for college, not art.” A student chimed in in agreement that “if I didn’t like it, I should just leave.”

No one should walk with the certainty of their own innate goodness, least of all unformed, adolescent boys.
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On another occasion, when I took exception to his taking additional points he’d taken off of one of my tests, he called me a “pussy” and punched me in the head.

I wonder how Kavanaugh, a star athlete at the school, would have been treated. I wonder what he would have said if he had been in that class with me. The image of his yearbook page that is now circulating indicate that he was inculcated in and upholding of this same cruel and misogynistic culture.

We did not have a comprehensive sexual health education at Prep. Freshmen were required to take physical education, and we had a rigorous program of units on weightlifting and other sports. One day out of every class cycle, we met with a coach who styled himself as “Doctor.” There was no textbook or curriculum. He simply shared amusing anecdotes and gave us words of wisdom such as:

“Boys, the first time you have sex, you’re not going to last long. So you should probably be drunk so you’ll last a little longer.”

There were high fives around the room. Everyone laughed. There was no discussion of how to use contraception and there was certainly no attempt to discuss what consent was.

During freshman orientation at college, I remember we were having a water balloon fight. I had gotten to know a student named Charles, and I picked him up and went to throw him in the kiddie pool of water and balloons. He cried out for me to stop, and he looked so upset and scared, I realized that I had crossed a line and I needed to rethink how to interact with other men. I felt awful—I saw in Charles a brief glimpse of the hurt and humiliation I’d felt throughout all of high school.

As an educator now, I am horrified at my memories of high school. It took me years to learn about healthy sexual relationships and healthy relationships in general. I worry about how our failures of education are perpetuating rape culture. The  statistics for sexual assaults are staggering. One in five women will be raped in their lives and more than 90% of sexual assault victims on college campuses do not report the assault. We spend more time articulating the honor code and investigating claims of plagiarism and cheating than we do the health and safety of our students, especially that of the girls and young women attending our schools.

At all-boys’ schools, when students stand shoulder to shoulder with their classmates and hear that they are called to greatness, they also internalize the absence of women from their position of privilege and power. Women are not part of the club. They are separate. They are for conquest; they are for dating; they are for marriage. Women are not peers. Some boys graduate and go on to unpack and unlearn these lessons. Others find new clubs with guarded access. They join fraternities. They go on to business schools and law firms and seek out institutions with disproportionately more men than women. Look at the gender breakdown of boardrooms everywhere. Look at the Supreme Court.

The question of the quality of sex education is vital for our schools now, and also in considering what education our current leaders have had. Has Brett Kavanaugh ever attended a course on sexual health? When would he have learned about consent? I don’t believe he learned about it at Prep. I wonder what curriculum he might have had at Yale. The world is different now than it was in ‘70s and ‘80s yet we are letting men with largely unchanged attitudes from those decades literally pass judgement on cases that define our lives and our society.

We've internalized the absence of women from their position of privilege and power. Women are not part of the club. They are separate. They are for conquest; they are for dating; they are for marriage. Women are not peers.
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Court cases demand that crimes be proven beyond a shadow of a doubt, and institutions like Georgetown Prep have honed their ability to cast shadows for almost three centuries. I will never know exactly what happened to some of the victims at my school, and we will similarly never have conclusive evidence proving guilt. That is no accident. We learned implicitly which victims were not valued by the community and therefore expendable.

The new teacher here only temporarily? Graffiti desks in her room with threats of sexual assault. The librarian who just wanted to create a quiet space for study? Mock him every day and make his life miserable. Attack the isolated and the vulnerable, but be sure to do it when there are no witnesses. It’s safe to do anything in front of your classmates and your Prep brother, of course—they will always have your back and laugh about it later.  All the while we were confident that we were “Men for Others,” confident in our goodness and the promise of great futures.

The burden of proof should not be on the victim, but sadly it is. While the legal system remains imperfect and we cannot hope for immediate change, surely we could stop rewarding alleged predators and abusers. We don’t need to know whether or not Kavanaugh is definitively guilty of any one of the many allegations being leveled against him now.

He is not a man for others; he’s a man for other men, and the women of our nation deserve better.

“But a bird that stalks
down his narrow cage
can seldom see through
his bars of rage
his wings are clipped and
his feet are tied
so he opens his throat to sing.”
― Caged Bird by Maya Angelou

It’s rare, but sometimes a film will touch my heart so deeply that I’ll spend days living with the characters in my head.

When I watched A Suitable Girl, a women-of-color-made documentary we’ve covered this week on The Establishment, my heart wept. I spent that night curled up in bed, covered with goosebumps, a mountain of balled up tissues by my bedside.

I was reminded of Aditi, my college friend who got engaged right before our final exams, getting accepted into one of the hardest degree programs in the country, but who had exchanged any career aspirations for an engagement ring.

I was reminded of myself, the raging feminist, who cried each time I was rejected by prospective suitors for being too tall, too fat, too modern.

And then, I went to the place I always try to block out for my sanity. I thought of my mother. The woman who had her wings clipped when she married a stranger at 21.

But it’s not just women in South Asia. And it’s not just in the context of relationships. Here, in my work on gender equity advocacy in America, the same themes of judgment, shame, and oppression keep showing up. Just this week, I’ve had two requests to coach modern, professional American women on how to be “likable.” I attended an all-day conference in Seattle which urged women to ask for more money because… the wage gap. I’ve said the words “impostor syndrome” until I was blue in the face.

But what if? What if we stopped judging all womxn by their ability to snag a man and be liked?

What if we told more womxn that we are more than enough, with our large hips, and melanin-filled skin, and our loud, bossy, opinionated, dominating, angry voices?

Would the world fall apart? Or—dare I hope—would it rise up to meet us and the space we demand to take up?

With love + solidarity,
Ruchika Tulshyan
Founding Editor

The Problem With ‘Cancer Miracles’

By Sascha Cohen

Early stage patients have a very good shot at curative interventions, remission, and long life spans, but for many of us — those with cancer that hides out for years before making itself known, or is repeatedly misdiagnosed, or mutates into a treatment-resistant subtype, or simply spreads very quickly — it’s too late for a miracle.

By definition, the cancer will win, and not the long-suffering patient, unless they get hit by a bus first.

Fantasies that tell us otherwise are dangerous and insulting, and they don’t only come from Hollywood.

The idea of the “miracle cure” represents a conglomeration of media mythmaking, mainstream religious tropes, New Age spirituality, pseudoscientific quackery, and good old-fashioned commercialism.

Meet The Filmmakers Highlighting The Complexity Of Modern Marriage For Women In India

By Madhvi Ramani

Being able to tell a story of marriage in India through the lens of women directors has immense consequences on the storyline.

Oscar-winning ‘The Big Sick’ and ‘Meet the Patels’ are two recent documentaries showcasing arranged marriages in South Asian communities; both, and others like it, have been criticized for presenting women of color as caricatures.

In multiple films on the topic, women of color are an afterthought to be pitied — far from being the protagonists.

Want to learn how to build a powerful brand while embracing intersectional feminism AND conscientiously monetizing? Sign up for Everyday Feminism’s “How to Build Your Online Feminist Hustle” workshop.

Building A Better Breast Pump Should Be Everyone’s Hackathon Challenge
By Marya Errin Jones

On April 27–29, MIT Media Lab will host its second Make the Breast Pump Not Suck Hackathon.

The aim of the hackathon, the first iteration of which took place in 2014, is to bring technological equity to the table, to develop improved lactation devices, to fight the stigma of breastfeeding, and to brainstorm services that better support women who want to breastfeed their babies in a society that often shuns the practice.

Centered on collaboration over competition, the hackathon brings together top CEOs of women’s health companies, teams of doulas, mothers of color, and LGBTQ parents and families to help generate better solutions for the breast pump.

Why does this matter? For far too long, we’ve seen that when engineering teams aren’t diverse, only certain people’s problems get solved.

For 17 Years, Vanessa Potkin Has Been Exonerating The Wrongly Imprisoned

By Erica Commisso

The Innocence Project attorney Vanessa Potkin planned to stay at the organization to help exonerate the wrongly accused for just one year. She’s been doing it for 17 years and counting.

In addition to fighting for individuals, the Innocence Project seeks to reform the justice system through education, in order to prevent future injustices and wrongful convictions.

Lead image: Unsplash/ Warren Wong

In northwest England in 1292, Alexander le Wood cheated on his wife, Almaria, with another woman named Almaria (apparently he had a type). His wife discovered this and, according to legal records, “was enraged.” But instead of lashing out at her husband, she hired two women and a man to kill Almaria #2 in exchange for a gift. The team of killers — colorfully named Ellis of Skelton, Lettice Greathand, and Goda Hurlepot — carried out Almaria #1’s wishes and killed Almaria #2. They put her body in a sack and took her on horseback to a moor, where they buried her. Almaria #1 was arrested, paid a fine, and went free on bail. The legal record does not say what happens to her.

What strikes me about this case — in addition to the love triangle, the fact that both women involved with the same man have identical names, and one woman’s hiring of two female killers to kill another woman — is its emphasis on female jealousy and women’s rage. Almaria #1’s actions are clearly named in the legal record as motivated by fury — “commota” in Latin, related to the English word “commotion” — against Almaria #2.

The case illustrates women’s anger expressed as violence against another woman, showing how women have long directed their fury at one another instead of the men who have wronged them.

I was reminded of the two Almarias when I served as an alternate juror in a criminal trial in Philadelphia. Two defendants, a man and a woman in their twenties whom I’ll call Ellis and Almaria, were on trial for allegedly attacking the woman’s ex-boyfriend Alexander — the father of her two young children — and his new girlfriend, Alice.

On the first day of the trial, the District Attorney for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania drew a diagram of the complicated relationships among everyone involved. He was tanned and handsome and douchey in his well-tailored suit, wearing a Fitbit on one wrist and an expensive watch on the other, a gleaming tie clip holding his pink silk tie in place. He told us that Almaria had two children with Alexander. After they split, he started dating Alice, although he continued to hook up periodically with Almaria. She became pregnant with a third child and told Alexander that he was the father, only to confess that it was actually her co-defendant Ellis’s when the baby was two months old, invoking the stereotype of the sexually transgressive woman who deceives men about her baby’s paternity. In addition to having similar first names that start with the same letter, the two women shared the same last name, although they were not kin. The lawyers mixed up their names repeatedly throughout the trial, reinforcing the connections between them.

The trial centered on a violent incident involving both couples. As Alexander and Alice stood outside one summer evening, a white van with its headlights off circled the block twice. The third time, it stopped, and Almaria and Ellis emerged. Another car pulled up, carrying Almaria’s sister and her two best friends. A group of men also appeared. The four women began to beat Alice, while the men attacked Alexander. Someone allegedly said, “Fuck it, get the gat,” and bullets began to fly. A parked car was shot full of holes. Almaria, Ellis, and their friends fled the scene.

A police officer testified that he stopped them shortly thereafter, Ellis sweating and shirtless, Almaria’s three small children in the backseat. We were shown photos of Alice’s scratched and swollen face, mascara dripping beneath her eyes, a large bruise darkening on her temple. I thought back to the medieval Almarias — women with similar names fighting over the same man, sexual jealousy and infidelity, and an angry woman marshaling other women to attack her sexual rival with violence.

Throughout the trial, both sets of lawyers drew repeatedly upon the trope of the angry, competitive woman whose jealous fury against her sexual rival incites her to violence. This narrative goes back to Medea in Greek mythology, sending a deadly poisoned robe to her husband Jason’s new wife after he abandons her. Each side invoked it for their own purposes: The D.A. wanted us to believe that Almaria’s anger at Alice was so great that she attacked her with brass knuckles and was willing to kill her, while the defense lawyers sought to convince us that Alice’s anger at Almaria prompted her to file false charges after a mutual fight. They repeatedly emphasized the fact that Almaria had two children with Alexander, while Alice had none.

Millennials Are Embracing Anger — And That’s A Good Thing
theestablishment.co

“Do you have any children with Alexander?” asked Ellis’s lawyer when Alice took the stand.

“I lost two babies,” she said.

“I’m very sorry to hear that,” he said, although he did not sound sorry at all.

“And were you angry when Alexander told you he was having another baby with Almaria while you were with him?” he asked.

“I was angry with Almaria for messing with him,” Alice replied, as though Alexander had no role whatsoever in impregnating his ex girlfriend, as though he was utterly helpless when faced by a calculating woman who wanted to sleep with him. The two women glared at each other across the courtroom.

This toxic narrative is pervasive in our language — for example, there is no male equivalent term for “homewrecker” — and in popular culture: After Jennifer Garner and Ben Affleck, as well as Gwen Stefani and Gavin Rossdale, announced their separations within several weeks of each other, both couples quickly became the focus of a flurry of tabloid stories about Affleck’s and Rossdale’s respective infidelity with their children’s nannies. But rather than focusing on the husbands’ transgressions, the coverage blamed the nannies and focused on the conflict between wife and nanny. Meanwhile, the philandering men were painted as hapless victims, even though data shows that nannies, who are often low-income women and women of color, are disproportionately vulnerable to sexual harassment and assault by their male employers.

Ask Ijeoma: Is The ‘Other Woman’ Free To Do As She Pleases?
theestablishment.co

“Ben Affleck’s Nannygate Scandal — Is He a Villain or Victim?” asked one headline, accompanied by a photograph of an unshaven, anguished-looking Affleck tenderly cradling a golden retriever puppy in his arms. Similarly, coverage of the Stefani-Rossdale divorce blamed the nanny and created narratives of jealousy and competition between the two women: “Nanny Who Allegedly Broke Up Gwen Stefani and Gavin Rossdale’s Marriage Gives Birth,” proclaimed one headline several months later; another asked, “Gwen Stefani Jealous? Hot Family Nanny Linked to Ex Gavin Rossdale Has Baby, Engagement Ring.”

The cases of the two Almarias, separated by over seven centuries, illustrate how easy it is for women to hate one another in a woman-hating society, where the misogyny is ancient and toxic and pervasive like lead covering our pipes, our walls, our windowsills. We ingest it day by day until it slowly poisons us, until we are so sick that we cannot even identify who or what is responsible for our harm. It coats the quotidian spaces we inhabit, affecting how we think, shaping our behavior, afflicting every system and organ in our bodies, storing itself in our bones.

These cultural fictions of masculine haplessness and feminine culpability, which we absorb like poisonous water and dust left behind by long-dead builders, have tangible results in cases featuring women’s real-life anger and violence directed against other women instead of the men responsible for their harm.

Alexander, the man involved with both women, finally testified, sauntering insolently to the front of the courtroom. The jurors craned our necks in anticipation, eager to see this prize of a man worth fighting over. He had wispy sideburns and a bright red lipstick kiss tattooed on the right side of his neck.

Several grim-faced women of various ages sat in the back row of the courtroom with their arms crossed throughout the trail. Many had tattoos on their chests, and one had very elaborate bangs. All of them swiveled their heads to glare as one, like a many-headed Fury, at Alexander as he took the stand. This group of women challenged the lawyers’ narrative about female antagonism, as they banded together to support Almaria and directed the full force of their wrath at Alexander.

“So were you seeing Alice at the same time you were seeing Almaria?” Almaria’s lawyer asked in a raspy voice.

“I wasn’t seeing anyone. I was talking to Almaria, and I was talking to Alice,” he said defensively. The grim-faced crowd of Furies looked as though they would rend him limb from limb.

After closing arguments ended, the judge dismissed the alternate jurors. We went to the Chili’s next door to drink margaritas from blue plastic tumblers and gossip about the case, our lips flecked with salt. A large group of the courtroom Furies, now smiling and jolly, entered the Chili’s and sat down together, but they did not see us.

For centuries, women have been encouraged to turn on each other, rather than the men who wronged them.

flickr/Sergio y Adeline

I n northwest England in 1292, Alexander le Wood cheated on his wife, Almaria, with another woman named Almaria (apparently he had a type). His wife discovered this and, according to legal records, “was enraged.” But instead of lashing out at her husband, she hired two women and a man to kill Almaria #2 in exchange for a gift. The team of killers — colorfully named Ellis of Skelton, Lettice Greathand, and Goda Hurlepot — carried out Almaria #1’s wishes and killed Almaria #2. They put her body in a sack and took her on horseback to a moor, where they buried her. Almaria #1 was arrested, paid a fine, and went free on bail. The legal record does not say what happens to her.

What strikes me about this case — in addition to the love triangle, the fact that both women involved with the same man have identical names, and one woman’s hiring of two female killers to kill another woman — is its emphasis on female jealousy and women’s rage. Almaria #1’s actions are clearly named in the legal record as motivated by fury — “commota” in Latin, related to the English word “commotion” — against Almaria #2.

The case illustrates women’s anger expressed as violence against another woman, showing how women have long directed their fury at one another instead of the men who have wronged them.

I was reminded of the two Almarias when I served as an alternate juror in a criminal trial in Philadelphia. Two defendants, a man and a woman in their twenties whom I’ll call Ellis and Almaria, were on trial for allegedly attacking the woman’s ex-boyfriend Alexander — the father of her two young children — and his new girlfriend, Alice.

On the first day of the trial, the District Attorney for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania drew a diagram of the complicated relationships among everyone involved. He was tanned and handsome and douchey in his well-tailored suit, wearing a Fitbit on one wrist and an expensive watch on the other, a gleaming tie clip holding his pink silk tie in place. He told us that Almaria had two children with Alexander. After they split, he started dating Alice, although he continued to hook up periodically with Almaria. She became pregnant with a third child and told Alexander that he was the father, only to confess that it was actually her co-defendant Ellis’s when the baby was two months old, invoking the stereotype of the sexually transgressive woman who deceives men about her baby’s paternity. In addition to having similar first names that start with the same letter, the two women shared the same last name, although they were not kin. The lawyers mixed up their names repeatedly throughout the trial, reinforcing the connections between them.

The trial centered on a violent incident involving both couples. As Alexander and Alice stood outside one summer evening, a white van with its headlights off circled the block twice. The third time, it stopped, and Almaria and Ellis emerged. Another car pulled up, carrying Almaria’s sister and her two best friends. A group of men also appeared. The four women began to beat Alice, while the men attacked Alexander. Someone allegedly said, “Fuck it, get the gat,” and bullets began to fly. A parked car was shot full of holes. Almaria, Ellis, and their friends fled the scene.

A police officer testified that he stopped them shortly thereafter, Ellis sweating and shirtless, Almaria’s three small children in the backseat. We were shown photos of Alice’s scratched and swollen face, mascara dripping beneath her eyes, a large bruise darkening on her temple. I thought back to the medieval Almarias — women with similar names fighting over the same man, sexual jealousy and infidelity, and an angry woman marshaling other women to attack her sexual rival with violence.

Throughout the trial, both sets of lawyers drew repeatedly upon the trope of the angry, competitive woman whose jealous fury against her sexual rival incites her to violence. This narrative goes back to Medea in Greek mythology, sending a deadly poisoned robe to her husband Jason’s new wife after he abandons her. Each side invoked it for their own purposes: The D.A. wanted us to believe that Almaria’s anger at Alice was so great that she attacked her with brass knuckles and was willing to kill her, while the defense lawyers sought to convince us that Alice’s anger at Almaria prompted her to file false charges after a mutual fight. They repeatedly emphasized the fact that Almaria had two children with Alexander, while Alice had none.

Millennials Are Embracing Anger – And That’s A Good Thing

“Do you have any children with Alexander?” asked Ellis’s lawyer when Alice took the stand.

“I lost two babies,” she said.

“I’m very sorry to hear that,” he said, although he did not sound sorry at all.

“And were you angry when Alexander told you he was having another baby with Almaria while you were with him?” he asked.

“I was angry with Almaria for messing with him,” Alice replied, as though Alexander had no role whatsoever in impregnating his ex girlfriend, as though he was utterly helpless when faced by a calculating woman who wanted to sleep with him. The two women glared at each other across the courtroom.

This toxic narrative is pervasive in our language — for example, there is no male equivalent term for “homewrecker” — and in popular culture: After Jennifer Garner and Ben Affleck, as well as Gwen Stefani and Gavin Rossdale, announced their separations within several weeks of each other, both couples quickly became the focus of a flurry of tabloid stories about Affleck’s and Rossdale’s respective infidelity with their children’s nannies. But rather than focusing on the husbands’ transgressions, the coverage blamed the nannies and focused on the conflict between wife and nanny. Meanwhile, the philandering men were painted as hapless victims, even though data shows that nannies, who are often low-income women and women of color, are disproportionately vulnerable to sexual harassment and assault by their male employers.

Ask Ijeoma: Is The “Other Woman” Free To Do As She Pleases?

“Ben Affleck’s Nannygate Scandal — Is He a Villain or Victim?” asked one headline, accompanied by a photograph of an unshaven, anguished-looking Affleck tenderly cradling a golden retriever puppy in his arms. Similarly, coverage of the Stefani-Rossdale divorce blamed the nanny and created narratives of jealousy and competition between the two women: “Nanny Who Allegedly Broke Up Gwen Stefani and Gavin Rossdale’s Marriage Gives Birth,” proclaimed one headline several months later; another asked, “Gwen Stefani Jealous? Hot Family Nanny Linked to Ex Gavin Rossdale Has Baby, Engagement Ring.”

The cases of the two Almarias, separated by over seven centuries, illustrate how easy it is for women to hate one another in a woman-hating society, where the misogyny is ancient and toxic and pervasive like lead covering our pipes, our walls, our windowsills. We ingest it day by day until it slowly poisons us, until we are so sick that we cannot even identify who or what is responsible for our harm. It coats the quotidian spaces we inhabit, affecting how we think, shaping our behavior, afflicting every system and organ in our bodies, storing itself in our bones.

These cultural fictions of masculine haplessness and feminine culpability, which we absorb like poisonous water and dust left behind by long-dead builders, have tangible results in cases featuring women’s real-life anger and violence directed against other women instead of the men responsible for their harm.

Alexander, the man involved with both women, finally testified, sauntering insolently to the front of the courtroom. The jurors craned our necks in anticipation, eager to see this prize of a man worth fighting over. He had wispy sideburns and a bright red lipstick kiss tattooed on the right side of his neck.

Several grim-faced women of various ages sat in the back row of the courtroom with their arms crossed throughout the trail. Many had tattoos on their chests, and one had very elaborate bangs. All of them swiveled their heads to glare as one, like a many-headed Fury, at Alexander as he took the stand. This group of women challenged the lawyers’ narrative about female antagonism, as they banded together to support Almaria and directed the full force of their wrath at Alexander.

“So were you seeing Alice at the same time you were seeing Almaria?” Almaria’s lawyer asked in a raspy voice.

“I wasn’t seeing anyone. I was talking to Almaria, and I was talking to Alice,” he said defensively. The grim-faced crowd of Furies looked as though they would rend him limb from limb.

After closing arguments ended, the judge dismissed the alternate jurors. We went to the Chili’s next door to drink margaritas from blue plastic tumblers and gossip about the case, our lips flecked with salt. A large group of the courtroom Furies, now smiling and jolly, entered the Chili’s and sat down together, but they did not see us.

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]]> https://theestablishment.co/this-therapist-is-trying-to-cure-nice-guys-412290928428/ Wed, 14 Mar 2018 16:49:11 +0000 https://theestablishment.co/?p=1510 Read more]]> No more Mr. Nice Guy — but what does that mean for women?

In May 2017, a Reddit user by the name “HelpMePlease” posted a request for advice. He met a 19-year-old woman while working together at their university’s rec center. They had gotten lunch together, and he had given her tours of campus. “We hit it off immediately, and I knew I was in love instantly,” he wrote in the forum. When he asked her out, she said no. But he continued to give the woman gifts, call her, text her, and even follow her to another town, to “show her how much I love her.” She sent him a cease and desist letter.

“What do I do now that she thinks I am a total creep?” HelpMePlease wrote. “I know I have made some mistakes, but I promise I am a nice guy.”

Within a week, the story had been reposted in the subreddit /r/NiceGuys. The forum takes its name from a phenomenon that began to gain prominence in the early 2000s, when feminist websites like Heartless Bitches International published pieces arguing that self-proclaimed “nice guys” aren’t actually nice. Instead, Nice Guys think treating women with a basic level of respect is a bargaining chip that can be exchanged for attention, sex, or a relationship. When Nice Guys don’t get the exchange rate they expect, their behavior can become cruel and even violent.

Fortunately, HelpMePlease’s story didn’t go down that path. In September, he posted again to say that the comments on his post had convinced him to seek therapy, and he now realized he had been “stalking and victimizing that poor girl.”

The update received 33,000 votes and over 2,000 comments expressing surprise and curiosity. Could it actually be possible to treat Nice Guys through therapy?

According to Robert Glover, a therapist with about 25 years of experience, the answer is yes. Glover first identified the symptoms of a disorder he would come to call Nice Guy syndrome in himself.

When Nice Guys don’t get the exchange rate they expect, their behavior can become cruel and even violent.
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In the 1990s, Glover was working as a marriage counselor when he realized that his own marriage was at the breaking point. His second wife told him he needed to work on his passive-aggressive behavior.

“I thought, ‘Wait a minute, I’m a nice guy. I treat you well…yet you’re never happy, and you never want to have sex,’” Glover explained in a phone call. Glover went to therapy to get better at communicating with his wife. He started to notice his patients expressing the same things he’d felt: I’m a nice guy, so why doesn’t my partner want to have sex with me?

Glover had discovered the pattern of behavior that would soon gain attention in feminist media outlets: men who think that because they act nice, they should get something in exchange. He then set out to help the men he worked with understand and overcome Nice Guy syndrome, work he continues today from his home in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, where he is not a licensed therapist.

Glover determined that Nice Guys believe in three “covert contracts” that define their interpersonal relationships: if they’re nice, people should love them (and want to have sex with them); if they meet others’ needs, others should meet their needs; and if they do the right thing, their life should be easy.

“When other people don’t read our minds and meet our needs, or when they don’t like us or want to have sex with us just because we treated them well, what tends to happen for Nice Guys is that builds up a lot of resentment,” Glover explains. Nice Guys try to control the behavior of others with their own. When this doesn’t work, they either become passive-aggressive or hold their anger in until it explodes.

Glover helps Nice Guys manage their own emotions so they don’t feel as much need to manage their partner’s behavior. He teaches men to ask for what they want openly, rather than trying to manipulate someone else into giving it to them through covert contracts.

Where Glover’s therapy gets complicated is in looking at the causes of Nice Guy syndrome, which Glover believes stems from childhood experiences, primarily with women, that made these Nice Guys feel defective in some way. In his own case, Glover says he was negatively influenced by “angry feminism, where women were just lashing out at men, [saying] that basically all men were evil.”

To avoid being called “evil” by women, Glover pivoted in the opposite direction, and, in his words, “tried to be the kind of guy that I thought women would like.” But Glover says Nice Guys, who “tend to seek validation from women,” may need to learn how to “embrace their own masculinity.”

A Letter To My Abuser
theestablishment.co

“The main reason that seeking approval from a woman doesn’t accomplish what you want is that your needy traits are ‘feminine’ in nature,” Glover writes on his blog. “The ‘masculine’ is self-validating by through [sic] action.” In Glover’s view, men should be assertive about their emotional and sexual desires to “stay out of the friend zone,” and should avoid feeling fear and anxiety so that women can look to them as a “security system” rather than a “girlfriend with a penis.”

Peter Navratil, a licensed social worker with over 20 years of experience treating domestic violence offenders, says that by fostering these types of stereotypical male behaviors, Glover may be encouraging beliefs that Navratil commonly sees in domestic violence perpetrators. “It’s about the need to win, the need to be right, the need to always be looking good, and the need to be in control,” Navratil says. “What I try to teach in relationships is just the opposite of that.”

Jack Brennick, a licensed mental health counselor who teaches court-mandated classes to men charged with domestic violence offenses, also notes that abusive behavior can be caused by “male entitlement, misogynistic attitudes, and beliefs.”

“Artificial distinctions of what’s ‘man-like’ and what’s ‘woman-like’ are part of what makes abusive behavior more common in men,” Navratil says. “Boys are told to be a man, and that automatically cuts you off to a whole level of learning how to feel and express and communicate and relate.”

Brennick says that conversations intended to address Nice Guy behavior should include these broader discussions of gender power dynamics. He adds that work with abusers “needs to be connected to the women” who are impacted by the abuse.

“In a sense, the men who attend the class are not even the clients,” Brennick says.

That’s quite different from Glover’s self-help model, which positions men as the beneficiaries of their changed thinking patterns. Glover tends to emphasize not how the Nice Guy mindset can harm women, but how it’s ineffective at getting Nice Guys what they want.

‘Artificial distinctions of what’s man-like and what’s woman-like are part of what makes abusive behavior more common in men.’
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For example, Glover says he teaches men to stop objectifying women, “not [because] it makes them bad people,” but because “it doesn’t serve them very well” in creating relationships they’ll actually be happy with.

“Beauty is only skin deep, but moody, mean, and bitchy last,” Glover says.

Glover takes pride in the fact that his work seems to make a difference in people’s lives, and he’s trained other licensed mental health professionals about Nice Guy syndrome. His website lists nine other therapists who use his method, which he calls “No More Mr. Nice Guy.” He recently had surgery, and he told me that he’s received hundreds of emails from men thanking him for his work and telling him, “You need to stay alive to keep helping people.”

The popularity of Glover’s work is another way it differs from that of other therapists who work on abusive behavior. Brennick says that almost half of men drop out of the court-mandated program he runs.

Still, Navratil says, the men Glover works with might really need therapy, and as long as Nice Guys work with a therapist who uses evidence-based treatment models, counseling could be effective at addressing their issues. “Treatment is very effective for people who want it,” Navratil says. But he adds, “There’s just a vast number of men who you can see as needing it, and only a very small percentage of men want it.”

Navratil says there isn’t much evidence that involuntary programs create long-term changes in men’s behavior. And for a man who struggles with managing his emotions but won’t voluntarily seek therapy, the other option can be waiting until he’s charged with a crime and sent to a court-mandated program. “It sometimes surprises me that we’re even in business with our pathetic outcomes,” says Brennick.

Navratil believes that going to therapy at all is a big step for some men. He says the idea that “real men’ don’t talk about stuff” can prevent men from seeking therapy. “Sometimes I give men a lot of credit just for walking through my door,” Navratil says. “It takes a lot of courage to come in and talk to a therapist.”

But is walking through the door nearly enough if, as with Glover’s treatment, what they’re taught fails to challenge gendered assumptions about male behavior?