A few days before his final confirmation hearings, during a nationally televised interview with FOX News, soon-to-be Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh was asked about Julie Swetnick’s allegation that he attended parties in high school where he touched girls “without their consent” and played a role in facilitating gang rape. Kavanaugh dismissed Swetnick’s memory by describing it as “ridiculous and like something from The Twilight Zone,” Rod Sterling’s classic science fiction series which, according to its opening sequence, took place in a “fifth dimension, beyond that which is known to man.”

Kavanaugh’s comparison was unfortunately apt for how he and other men in power reacted to the recollections of Swetnick, Deborah Ramirez, and Dr. Christine Blasey Ford over the past few weeks. This was especially the case during those final hearings, when Senators on all sides of the political spectrum joined the then-nominee in suggesting that Dr. Ford’s sexual assault did not take place in the realm of normal American life—the wholesome world they all apparently live in—but rather an alternate dimension of the United States in which men violently dominate women with regularity.

This sort of illogical thinking was common on The Twilight Zone, which despite its surreal set-up was very much about the human condition. It depicted extreme scenarios like alien invasions and dystopian futures to illuminate the terror lurking in our cookie-cutter American neighborhoods; the propensity of people to bury their insecurities beneath the desire for power—with little regard for its impact on others. Or what Serling himself once described as “man’s seemingly palpable need to dislike someone other than himself.”

On the Republican side, this self-righteous perspective was maintained by bolstering Kavanaugh’s claim to being an all-American Christian kid at 16; a boy living universes away from the kind of parties where drunken teens force themselves onto classmates. In his testimony Kavanaugh painted his drinking and partying as completely normal for a young man, and Republican Senators were eager to accept and celebrate this (very) limited picture of normative white masculinity in 1982.

Meanwhile, the Democrats created their own image of Kavanaugh as an abnormally aggressive man. Men like Richard Blumenthal asked him about excessive partying, lewd yearbook quotes, and how often he drank to the point of forgetting parts of the night before, but each time Kavanaugh simply denied he did anything excessively at all. He angrily maintained that he did not live in that other dimension, but only the one where top-of-their-class young men occasionally have some beers with their bros. Kavanaugh went to great lengths to emphasize this American manliness, making sure to mention details like “Roger Clemens was pitching for the Red Sox” when asked about a booze-filled baseball trip he organized in law school.

The Senators failed to name then—even as they commended Dr. Ford’s bravery and spoke at length about what her message might mean for other survivors nationwide—the reality that “normal” American men not only like beer and baseball, but also regularly hurt women.

Senators suggested Dr. Ford’s sexual assault did not take place in the realm of normal American life, but rather an alternate dimension of the United States in which men violently dominate women with regularity.
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In fact, only 10% of American men list baseball as their favorite sport today, but a 2017 study found that 32% of college-aged men would have “intentions to force a woman to sexual intercourse” if they could get away with it. And though beer is the drink of choice for 41% of Americans, a staggering 81% of women in this country report being sexually harassed. 1 in 6 American women have survived an attempted or completed rape, the perpetrators of which are overwhelmingly men (and mostly white). All of which is to say, misogyny is at the very least as American as beer and baseball.

Yet, as Kavanaugh performed his exasperation at being linked to sexual violence, the men in the room never admitted that the scene Ford described was very familiar to them as well.

When Kavanaugh posed a threatening question back to Amy Klobuchar about her drinking habits, none of the other men chimed in to affirm that yes, they too have silently listened to, witnessed, or participated in the dehumanization of women. Men like Sen. Dick Durbin never countered the narrative that the multiple accusations against someone like Kavanaugh were “absurd,” but rather set out to prove that this straight white man, who attended elite schools and has remained in positions of power his entire life, would be unique in his behavior if he once used that power to hurt a person of another gender.

Misogyny is at the very least as American as beer and baseball.
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That is the lie—the binary of “good” and “bad” masculinity— that men so often hide behind. The same illusion, compounded and mirrored by the lie of white innocence, which carried a racist misogynist to the presidency two years ago even after he admitted to sexual assault. It’s no surprise then that President Trump himself has openly attacked the credibility of the Democratic men since the hearing, saying “I watch those senators on the Democrat side and I thought it was a disgrace. Partially because I know them…They are not angels.”

The fear men have to speak the truth about power in this country, who has it and how they got it, ultimately bolstered Kavanaugh’s “twilight zone” case for the Supreme Court. He knew it and Trump knew it. Kavanaugh’s faux-shock at being among the accused worked in the same way as Trump’s claim to “locker room talk” before it, because the other men in the room insisted on maintaining their own facade of innocence—afraid that if they spoke about patriarchy, they too might get kicked out of the club.

That is the lie—the binary of good and bad masculinity— that men so often hide behind.
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In one of the more famous episodes of The Twilight Zone, “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street,” a seemingly perfect community is whipped into frenzied paranoia by a series of strange occurrences—beginning with a power outage and a little boy’s story about shape-shifting creatures—which ultimately leads them to turn on each other in search of the monster amongst them. The episode ends with a bloody brawl on Maple Street that exposes who these people really are.

Though many powerful men have reacted to the #MeToo movement by expressing fears of a “witch hunt,” the reality is that they themselves maintain the perception that some men are monsters worth stoning, while the rest are innocent bystanders. For instance, Matt Damon—who played Kavanaugh in a Saturday Night Live skit recently—once publicly worried about the “culture of outrage” targeting his friends in power, saying “there’s a difference between, you know, patting someone on the butt and rape or child molestation.” Which, just like Trump’s worrying for “young men in America,” expresses a desire for a hierarchy of masculinity rather than a willingness to look in the mirror.

Like those on Maple Street, the men in power in Hollywood and D.C. choose to ignore the systemic issue at hand, and instead focus on preserving their own position—regardless of how it might harm their neighbors. The Democratic men of the Senate, glad to use their five minutes during the hearing to perform their “decent” masculinity, were playing the same game as Kavanaugh: a game of avoidance and imagination. It’s not that many didn’t declare that they believed Dr. Ford, but that nearly all of them were unwilling to state that they have contributed to the culture which allows such violent acts to persist.

What patriarchy promises these men in exchange for this deflection, especially the white men, is the chance to play the hero on TV again (just like “good” Will Hunting). Meanwhile, Trump and his friends can confidently call survivors liars, knowing that the men around them will never expose the actual lie of masculinity.

But what might change if we weren’t afraid to connect sexual assault to that celebrated culture of drinking “brewskis” and playing football? What if we admitted on the largest stages that Brett Kavanaugh’s allegiance to American manhood is precisely why we should be terrified of giving him more power?

Among the most harrowing moments of Dr. Ford’s testimony was when she described Mark Judge’s actions—and inaction—while Kavanaugh was assaulting her in 1982. According to her account, Judge alternatively stood by laughing, encouraging his friend, and half-heartedly asking him to stop while Kavanaugh attempted to rip off her clothes. Dr. Ford even spoke of making eye contact with Judge at one point, hoping he might intervene. Yet he did nothing.

What if we admitted on the largest stages that Brett Kavanaugh’s allegiance to American manhood is precisely why we should be terrified of giving him more power?
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As long as men are unwilling to risk being as vulnerable in front of men as Ford and Anita Hill have been, the Kavanaughs and Trumps of the world cannot truly be challenged. They can yell and demand respect, because they know that we will adhere to the rules of the game.

To look on as someone is sexually assaulted, or to remain quiet as people are dismissed for sharing their stories of assault, is a dehumanizing way of being. Yet the illusion of normalcy, and the burying of empathy, is precisely how men have long cemented their power in this country. As the narrator says at the end of that episode on Maple Street, “the tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions.” Men are well-practiced and well-rewarded in maintaining our illusions.

W hen I was in graduate school, I worked part-time in retail. One of my co-workers — let’s call him Jake — was a white gay man who liked to tell stories about his various dating exploits each time we had a shift together. These conversations quickly went from amusing to problematic. Jake’s tales frequently centered on his conservative rural upbringing, his “love” of black men, in part because of how “masculine” he thought they were, and how he didn’t like guys who were too “femme.” “How would your family react if you were dating someone who wasn’t white?” I asked, trying to make small talk during a lull between customers. “That would never happen,” Jake said. “Black men are for fucking; white men are for bringing home to your family.”

I shouldn’t have been surprised, but the frankness of his words stunned me into silence for the remainder of my shift. I later tried to make Jake aware of his racism, but he said that had nothing to do with him. He couldn’t possibly be racist because he was attracted to black men. Not long after, I quit in order to have more time to focus on my dissertation. Jake tried to reach out to me via social media. When I saw that his Instagram feed was comprised primarily of images of muscular black men, I declined to follow him back.

Jake’s attitudes are a microcosm of many of the toxic behaviors enacted by white gay cisgender men: the adulation of conventional masculinity and muscularity, the rejection of femininity as undesirable, and the sexual objectification of black and Latino men due to their supposed exoticism and hypermasculinity.

In light of the #MeToo movement and the exposure of sexual violence and misconduct in Hollywood, the federal government, and society at large, much attention has been directed towards the toxic behaviors exhibited by heterosexual men that contribute to a culture in which sexual violence and misconduct thrive. There has been little mainstream discussion of the ways white gay male culture, in particular, is rife with its own brand of toxic masculinity.

Here’s How Toxic Masculinity Is Killing Us In So Many Ways

Still, the conversation is beginning to move in positive ways. Jacob Tobia, in a recent New York Times op-ed, critiqued the film Love, Simon for portraying its lead character as “the right kind of gay” (typically masculine, not flamboyant) in contrast to the character of Ethan, a queer black gender nonconforming teen. Ethan’s story is underexplored and, as Tobia argues, his racial and gender nonconformity are presented as a foil to Simon’s average white masculinity, telling gay teens it’s okay to be gay as long as you are gay in a “respectable” way.

But I disagree with Tobia that Netflix’s reboot of Queer Eye follows this same formula. In my opinion, Jonathan Van Ness, Queer Eye’s “grooming expert” and an unabashedly femme gay man, carries the show. In contrast to Van Ness’ dynamic personality, his more masculine counterparts, such as Antoni Porowski and Karamo Brown, recede into the background. Van Ness’ expression of gayness is depicted as equally valid, not as a trope to highlight normative masculinity. Queer Eye has its problems, but foregrounding a gay man like Van Ness is a welcome change to the mainstream media’s typical representations of respectably masculine gay men. However, Van Ness’ popularity is the exception that proves the rule.

Gay male toxicity contributes both to the oppression of queer men and to the pervasive culture of violence against women (particularly any who are feminine, people of color, and/or trans) and anyone outside of the gender binary. If we are serious about eradicating sexual violence in all its forms, then we must move beyond discussions of toxic masculinity that center heterosexuality and work to name and uproot the toxic behaviors of both dominant and marginalized men alike.

The phrase “toxic masculinity,” oft-cited in social justice circles, originates from the work of psychiatrist Terry A. Kupers. Though Kupers focuses on how so-called “toxic” expressions of masculinity impact men’s mental health outcomes in prison settings, scholars and activists have found his concept more broadly applicable, particularly as a way to describe how masculinity fosters a culture rife with sexual violence.

All expressions of masculinity are not inherently toxic. Kupers differentiates between what we might refer to as “typical” masculinity — the dominant or “normal” notion of masculinity within a particular context that stipulates what it means to be a “real man” — and certain aspects of masculinity that have socially harmful, or toxic, effects. “Toxic masculinity,” he explains, “is the constellation of socially regressive male traits that serve to foster domination, the devaluation of women, homophobia, and wanton violence.” In other words, “toxic masculinity” embodies a constellation of the worst aspects of masculinity as a whole.

Because toxic masculinity is defined, in part, by expressions of homophobia, we may falsely assume that regressive male traits are the property of straight men alone. Gay, bi, or queer masculinity, because they differ from the ideal, are often positioned as inherently transgressive.

Sexual minority men, however, are still exposed to the same expectations of masculinity as all men, and can also exhibit socially regressive traits, though they may not look exactly like those expressed by their heterosexual counterparts. If toxic masculinity as a whole is based primarily on the domination of women, then gay toxic masculinity is based on stigmatizing and subjugating femmes, queer men of color, and trans men via body norms, racism, and transphobia.

Sexual minority men, however, are still exposed to the same expectations of masculinity as all men.
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Gay culture, like the dominant culture, creates a hierarchy based on norms of masculinity. At the top are those who occupy the position of what we might call the “normate gay”: those who are thin, toned, muscular, white, cis, able-bodied, and express their gender in conventionally masculine ways. Despite pervasive stereotypes that gay men are improperly feminine in comparison to straight men, gay male culture often dictates that conventional masculinity is the most desirable. This hierarchy of gay masculinity also contributes to our inescapable culture of sexual violence. Part of masculinity is domination over those deemed feminine (not solely those who possess “female” bodies), so sexual violence functions as one way to reinforce what it means to be “masculine.”

A conventionally masculine appearance is prized within mainstream gay male culture. Indeed, it is not uncommon for gay men to post images of their toned bodies and exercise routines on social media, or to express their preference for men who are “straight acting” on dating apps. Preferences for masculinity indirectly shame those whose bodies are “soft,” “curvaceous,” or “fat” — qualities associated with femininity — and position femininity as shameful and undesirable. Body shaming and policing, therefore, support the invalidation of femininity as a legitimate way of occupying the world. As someone who often inhabits gay male spaces — though I identify as queer — I witness such behaviors on a near-daily basis.

The Remarkable Intersection Of Anal Sex And Toxic Masculinity

Gay men who care about physical fitness or their appearance are not automatically toxic. It is understandable, to a certain extent, that gay men would seek to challenge the stereotype that they are feminine or “sissies” by masculinizing their bodies through diet and exercise. This challenge, however, ultimately has toxic effects by reinforcing gender norms as opposed to subverting them.

Gay men can choose to care about their appearance, or express preferences for hypothetical partners, while also working to undo the systems that oppress those who do not conform to normative standards of masculinity. Too often, gay men seek to alleviate body shame and feelings of unworthiness by disciplining their bodies and policing the bodies of others who do not conform to masculine standards of appearance. While adhering to masculine norms may temporarily mitigate the effects of oppression, conformity does little to dismantle the systems which cause it.

Gay toxic masculinity also manifests in the form of racism and transphobia. Jake, for example, fetishized black men both for their racial difference and due to the fact he saw them as hypermasculine and therefore more desirable. Racial stereotypes intersect with those of gender and sexuality to exacerbate toxic masculinity in gay male culture, primarily through sexual objectification.

Mainstream white gay male culture objectifies queer men of color who, because of racial stereotypes, are seen as desirably masculine (such as black and Latino men) and shames queer men of color who are seen as undesirably feminine (such as Asian men). Furthermore, gay toxic masculinity is often transphobic, as it invalidates the identities of transgender men who may be seen as unable to fulfill the criteria of what it means to be a “real man” because their sex assigned at birth is emphasized over their gender identity and expression.

How Can The Queerest Generation (Ever) Still Believe In Gender Roles?

The #MeToo movement, particularly through the case of Aziz Ansari, has brought to light the difference between behaviors that are illegal versus those that are socially detrimental. While some expressions of toxic masculinity may not be criminal, they are, nevertheless, harmful and speak to the necessity of a broad shift to address our current culture of pervasive sexual violence. To this end, we cannot leave white gay men’s toxic behaviors and the general toxicity of mainstream gay male culture untouched.

Some of this can be done by calling on others to change their behavior, whether by pointing out instances of gay toxic masculinity when you see them, asking both mainstream and LGBTQ media to present diverse representations of masculinity, or amplifying the voices of those who don’t conform to masculine stereotypes.

But the hardest work is internal, especially when it comes to expressing “preferences.” We often mistakenly feel that our attractions are just what they are, rather than influenced by social context. As social justice educator Beverly Daniel Tatum explains, “racism is like smog in the air.” In other words, even though we may not see ourselves as racist, if we live and are socialized in a racist society, we invariably absorb its prejudices. Jake didn’t get the idea that all black men were “hypermasculine” out of nowhere.

We cannot help but breathe in whatever toxic particles are in the air. Just as we cannot simply choose to stop breathing, we cannot exempt ourselves from exposure to racist, sexist, and queerphobic images and messaging. You can’t force yourself to be attracted to anyone, but you can interrogate the societal influences on your preferences.

We often mistakenly feel that our attractions are just what they are, rather than influenced by social context.
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Privilege and oppression do not cancel each other out. Because they are on the receiving end of homophobia, white cisgender gay men, in particular, may perceive themselves as incapable of oppressing more marginal members of the LGBTQ community. Intersectionality forces us to consider the ways we are simultaneously privileged and oppressed and to broaden the lens through which we view the world beyond our subjective experiences.

White gay men can no longer profit from the toil and labor of their queer ancestors — many of whom were trans, femmes, and people of color — without also holding themselves accountable and working to dismantle the systems that oppress those who fall outside masculine, white, cis, and able-bodied ideals. The implications of gay toxic masculinity extend beyond gay male culture and contribute to our general culture of misogyny in which women, femmes, genderqueer people, and others who don’t or can’t perform mainstream masculinity are consistently devalued and undermined, often in violent and dehumanizing ways.

If white gay men are committed to the work of our collective liberation, then they must take a hard look at their own behaviors, because their time, too, is up.

As a woman who makes a living putting pen to paper, my second worst fear is that I will communicate so poorly that I’m misunderstood (I’ll leave you to guess what the worst fear is). So I have a certain amount of empathy for Ross Douthat fretting about that very thing after a severe backlash to his latest New York Times column, entitled “The Redistribution of Sex.” My empathy went out like a tide when I recalled that, in typical fashion, he refuses to be honest about the implications of his crypto-misogynistic thought experiments.

In the piece, he argues that while leftists and feminists are opposed to the idea that anyone is entitled to sex, this is a natural and logical outcome of societies that “look for fixes that seem to build on previous revolutions, rather than reverse them.” As he sees it, our vaunted sexual revolution means that we are inevitably sliding towards the society yearned for by mass-murdering misogynists like Elliot Rodger or Alek Minassian, because we have imbued sex with so much value — both personal and political — in the wake of the 1960s.

This has been mischaracterized as Douthat arguing in favor of the “incels’” ideal world. He doesn’t, but this is hardly exculpatory. While the caricature of Douthat’s argument misses the particulars, it nevertheless captures the spirit of a piece that is resolutely androcentric and utterly ignorant of sexual culture.

This Is The Story Of The Story I Can’t Write
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Although Douthat is not in favor of this proposed redistribution, by entertaining the idea at all and going so far as to propose it as an inevitable dystopia (which, really, is the fault of us damn feminists for wanting too much sexual choice) he nevertheless embraces fundamental aspects of a worldview shared by reactionary malefactors like incels and men’s rights activists. It all starts with the “sexual hierarchy” that he and other writers have cited as a social problem that gives rise to incel terrorism. In short, they can’t get dates or get laid, so they blame women and society at large; inevitably, some act out violently. But accepting this argument is to take the embittered propaganda of these communities at face value. There’s a difference between understanding that a worldview can shape behavior, and implying that the worldview is factually correct.

Thus, without endorsing their ends, Douthat endorses an MRA view of sexuality. He simply proposes a more conservative solution, arguing “that our widespread isolation and unhappiness and sterility might be dealt with by reviving or adapting older ideas about the virtues of monogamy and chastity and permanence.”

“The sexual revolution,” he argues, “created new winners and losers, new hierarchies to replace the old ones, privileging the beautiful and rich and socially adept in new ways and relegating others to new forms of loneliness and frustration.” This is strikingly similar to an equally credulous analysis advanced by the nominally leftist thinker Angela Nagle, who writes:

“Sexual patterns that have emerged as a result of the decline of monogamy have seen a greater level of sexual choice for an elite of men and growing celibacy among a large male population at the bottom of the pecking order.”

Pun unintended, I’m certain. Nagle’s words, which even more explicitly regurgitate MRA-ish talking points about sexual elites and celibacy, were passed around after the Toronto massacre by other leftists as “a perceptive point” about these men who keep killing women en masse. What Nagle and Douthat share, aside from being all too willing to take the promoters of these extreme views at face value, is an argument that fails to account for the existence of women and queer people.

There’s a difference between understanding that a worldview can shape behavior, and implying that the worldview is factually correct.
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In short, we have a good A/B test available to us that suggests the problem isn’t sex and who’s getting it, but how different groups conceive of their entitlement to it, and what they do about it.

So let’s break this down.

There’s a sexual hierarchy, but nerdy young white guys aren’t the only ones on the wrong side of it.

It is striking to me that these conversations proceed almost entirely without discussing women who are perceived of as sexually undesirable. Fat women, disabled women, nerdy women, non-white women, trans women, all fall short of beauty standards that are structured by prejudices as much as the advent of the “sexual revolution.”

Douthat does mention this when he tries to use a recent essay by Oxford professor Amia Srinivasan to buttress his argument, where he notes that Srinivasan makes the exact point I just made, but then breezes over its implications entirely except to suggest — bizarrely — that she implies sexually undesirable minorities must someday be redressed by the very “redistribution” feminists find so appalling. Neither Srinivasan, nor myself, nor indeed anyone in that milieu has ever made that argument nor sought to imply it. Douthat was undaunted: “This wouldn’t instantiate a formal right to sex,” he says of Srinivasan’s argument, “…but if the new order worked as its revolutionary architects intended, sex would be more justly distributed than it is today.”

This is speculation in its purest form and it mistakes analysis of ideology (recognizing that norms of attractiveness and desirability are highly politically charged) for a proposal of a “redistributive” solution. But beyond this, it also ignores the elephant in the room. If all of these groups experience a certain dislocation and loneliness from being on the wrong side of sexual hierarchies, why aren’t we awash in mass murderers from those groups? Where are the lonely, nerdy women who kill because they can’t get a date on Tinder? Where are all the black women mowing down pedestrians in a rental van because society’s beauty standards aggressively privilege whiteness? In failing to grapple with this, every writer who entertains incel/MRA ideology, even as a mere thought experiment, makes a catastrophic analytical error.

Being at the bottom of a sexual hierarchy does not mean you don’t have sex.

This is another point that should be obvious but has, apparently, been lost in the vacuous prattle that followed the Toronto killings. Society has hegemonic norms, but people violate them constantly and form microcultures. As an autistic transgender woman with non-white features, I’m certainly on the “wrong” side of a few beauty hierarchies in this society and I pay a price for that; I still have sex and two very committed partners with whom I share very deep connections.

Sexual hierarchies can be fluid and micrological. In some communities, they may even be reversed outright. This doesn’t even begin to grapple with how your individual notions of attractiveness, honed over the years by uniquely personal experiences, may affect things. Hierarchies of desirability do have an impact, but not necessarily on the practical outcome of whether or not you have sex. It may affect your ability to feel sexy, and hurt your self-esteem of course; goddess knows I’ve been there. But that’s less about your ability to have sex, than it is how you feel about yourself and what struggles emerge from that. Through it all, people from every position on the “hierarchy” still manage to frequently find meaningful and exciting relationships.

Sexual hierarchies can be fluid and micrological. In some communities, they may even be reversed outright.
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Even a casual glance in your own social circles will reveal many happily bonded people who, in one way or another, are considered socially undesirable or “unattractive” by the ruthless metrics of conventional beauty standards. Meanwhile, our media is saturated with the image of “unattractive” men who are loved deeply by conventionally attractive women; it’s the conceit of a dozen and one sitcoms and it does reflect a partial reality where men who look like, say, Kevin James are quite capable of finding loving relationships. (I say “partial” because, naturally, it fails to reflect what life is like for women of all shapes and sizes.)

In short…

Sexual hierarchies aren’t really about sex.

They’re wired in to all manner of socio-economic and political mores, certainly, but bear only a passing relationship to your actual ability to find dates and slap your genitals against someone else’s. Rather, they are norms about social value which determine other aspects of your reality that are untethered to your sex life. For women, those who are seen as conventionally attractive will have to endure constant imprecations about their careers — “is she sleeping her way to the top?” will haunt her every step, and her beauty will be taken as blanket consent for everything from drawing porn of heragainst her will to dismissing her point of view to undervaluing her accomplishments.

The Case For BDSM As A Feminist Manifesto In Art
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Conventionally “unattractive” women, meanwhile, will be ruthlessly mocked and derided by men (including incels — just look at what they say about women they deem undesirable, impervious to irony as reactionary bigots often must be). Such women may be ignored outright or deemed unworthy of making even professional connections with, seen as uncharismatic, unhealthy, or shamed for what they look like.

This is all, indeed, a function of the sexual hierarchy; but it’s markedly unrelated to one’s sex life as such. Which brings me to the final point…

Sex will not cure these extremists.

Implicit in arguments like Nagle’s and Douthat’s is the idea that if only these lonely nerd boys got laid more often, maybe the victims in Isla Vista or Toronto would be alive today.

There’s no evidence to suggest this is the case.

Men who hate women will continue to hate us, and hurt us, no matter how much sex they’re having. Domestically abusive men are often having sex with the partners they assault, after all. Meanwhile men like Harvey Weinstein or Roger Ailes were, indeed, raping countless women. These men were getting the sex they wanted, at the expense of women who were forced into silent submission to their power. In fact, as heterosexual men who were married they were, to a large extent, living Douthat’s ideal. But, if anything, their abuses begat more of the same; nothing was ever enough, and each new assault seemed only to feed a void that grew into the prodigious litany of crimes that each man is now justly infamous for.

These men were getting the sex they wanted, at the expense of women who were forced into silent submission to their power.
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The cancer must be cut out from the root. Implying, as so many often do, that the solution is to “give” sex to men like Minassian is merely to feed the lust of insatiable loathing. The problem is not that they aren’t having enough sex; the problem is that they despise women, and will do so no matter how much sex they’re having.

The proposition that sex is “unequally distributed,” which is taken for granted in all of these chin-stroking arguments, is a highly contestable claim. Being outside of hegemonic beauty norms does not inherently deny you love or sex; your place in that hierarchy instead shapes other things untethered to your actual sex life.

Yet this dubious claim has legs because, as ever, we must privilege the perspective of the loudest and angriest men as worth consideration. The scope of their entitlement determines the seriousness with which we must take their worldview, however horribly skewed it may be. Thus, lightly laundered mainstream interpretations of this worldview linger, despite the obviously dehumanizing implication of likening women to a currency or resource that must be paternalistically apportioned by the powers that be.

Douthat laments that progressives seem to be demanding that “the greatest possible diversity in sexual desires and tastes and identities should be not only accepted but cultivated, and that virginity and celibacy are at best strange and at worst pitiable states.” But by disingenuously linking these two things, he poisons the discussion he claims to want to have. Asexual people, after all, don’t figure into Douthat’s argument. Yet, as a political force, they’ve argued very forcefully against the idea of compulsory sexuality — and done so in a way that neither shades into anti-feminism, nor into arguing that the sexual revolution was some kind of mistake. Theirs is a call for greater pluralism, a far cry from Douthat’s lustful homogenization.

The proposition that sex is ‘unequally distributed,’ which is taken for granted in all of these chin-stroking arguments, is a highly contestable claim.
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It’s old hat by now to claim that crimes like Rodger’s or Minassian’s are the fault of growing liberalization, that somehow women’s choice has left some men so forlorn that they can only resort to murder. There is no way to take this argument seriously without courting a misogynistic worldview that stands ignorant of even obvious facts. Even if Douthat is worried about the coming of a “redistributive” sexual culture, such concerns are founded on the hot air of hyper-ideological drivel that he had no business entertaining in one of the nation’s largest newspapers. But I can see why he did: His preferred prescription for us would see — as always — women and queer people stripped of our rights and, presumably, forced into straight and monogamous relationships. In the end, Douthat does seem to believe in “redistribution,” just of an altogether different sort to produce a society akin to his fantasy of the 1950s.

In the end, all that needs to be said is this: Incels and their ilk do indeed believe they’re entitled to sex, and that such contact would cure them of all that ails them, sparing society from their wrath and vengeance.

We do not have to take them at their word.

I was recently at a house party for Halloween; I incidentally had not gotten the memo from the friend who invited me that it was a space-magick theme or some such nonsense and I showed up as…Ursula; my dear friend was dressed as Bill Lumbergh, his center-part glistening beneath ’80s power-glasses.

We were not on theme; in fact we were sorely out of place. “Adventure Time” princesses sashayed; steam-punk cowboys swaggered about in velvet, leather, and goggles. We knew one person between us and after smiling and waving hello at our entrance that rivaled some of my more traumatic school dances — I had caught a tentacle in my spoke, tripping and dropping my bike when I walked into their yard — we found ourselves talking to each other in the corner of their porch.

I was nervously smoking spliff after spliff and sipping champagne from a solo cup. “We gotta get in there,” I said. “We gotta mingle.”

He winced, looking around. “Yeah, I mean, everyone is cool,” he said. “We should just go in and do a lap.”

“I just want to talk to you,” I moaned. “But we’re at a party right? We gotta…party?”

So we wandered in. We did our lap. And before I knew it I was happily drunk, drinking whiskey, and chatting with the human equivalent of a pitbull-meatball — a hulking, thick man with a Bic-ed head. He was dressed as, perhaps, an intergalactic monk?

In truth, I don’t know how we got onto the topic. No one believes me, but I really don’t. But we started talking about butt stuff. Straight cis men butt stuff.

And suddenly I heard myself say, “Oh man, my dear friend is a straight guy and he’s very intrigued by his asshole, but he can’t just, like, set himself free. He is so hung up on it. I feel like he’s got all this….” I waved my arm around, “maybe, homophobic shit around his own ass? And it’s just so sad because, like, ass stuff is the best!”

My new companion’s face lit up. Like Christmas.

The glorious prostate is a walnut-sized gland; you’ll find it between the bladder and the penis, just in front of the rectum.

The urethra, which carries urine and semen alike, runs through the center of this flesh-nugget. The prostate secretes a fluid that nourishes and protects sperm — father’s milk amiright?! — in addition to squeezing this fluid into the urethra when ejaculating.

It weighs about 20 grams.

The word “prostate” is taken from the Greek expression meaning “one who stands before,” describing the position of the prostate gland.

Most importantly, perhaps, you can also “milk” the prostate, massaging it with your finger until the man’s mind explodes in the most dizzying orgasms of his life. Or so I hear.

My dear pal, let’s call him Bernard (which incidentally was the name of my feral orange cat in Brooklyn), is conflicted. He’s a tender man; he’s not afraid to cry, and is eager to talk about his feelings. To process. He is generous of heart and spirit…

and he’s got a girlfriend very keen to explore his butthole.

“You gotta get your friend onboard,” my new friend half-yells, his eyes glittering. “The prostate is amazing, man, just amazing.”

“Yeah!” I said laughing. “I’m with you. I tell him all the time he should try and examine why he can’t just accept the physical pleasure of his own body…especially as his lady is butt-drunk in love.” I took a sip of whiskey and shrugged. “But yeah. You can bring a horse to water, but ya can’t make him drink. It’s pretty complicated I think.”

I thought we had covered it. I thought we had sufficiently shared a mutual sadness around the fraught-ness of straight cis men’s buttholes. But no.

Like a bad sitcom, I see Bernard’s head peek over the crowd. “Hi!” he yells and weaves his way over to me.

“This him?” this meatball asks.

I feel my face growing very very hot. But I’m also drunk and thinking to myself, maybe this will be good. I also don’t want to lie and pretend I wasn’t just talking about this. Just be cool. Be casual. We’re fine. This is all fine.

In her Guernica essay, Rebecca Solnit writes:

“Feminism needs men. For one thing, the men who hate and despise women will be changed, if they change, by a culture in which doing horrible things to, or saying horrible things about, women will undermine rather than enhance a man’s standing with other men. There are infinite varieties of men or at least about 3.5 billion different ones living on Earth now, Klansmen and human rights activists, drag queens and duck hunters…

[So much masculinity] is predicated on the idea that violating the rights, dignity, and body of another human being is a cool thing to do. Such group acts are based on a predatory-monster notion of what masculinity is, one to which many men don’t subscribe but that affects us all. It’s also a problem that men are capable of rectifying in ways women are not.”

It’s a long, complicated, and nuanced essay, as is Solnit’s way, but in short, I agree that feminism needs men. One cannot identify a Problem, remove responsibility from the Problem, strip it from the Solution entirely, and believe change will occur. If men don’t believe they’re part of the problem — by deed or mere privilege — then they remain a potent obstacle to equality. The key, for me, is getting everyone on board to recognize the widespread fuckery of all shapes, sizes, and creeds, and swinging a hammer at the piece you’re occupying.

What gets slippery and exponentially more confusing for me is when men, identifying as feminists, are in actuality perpetuating the same dangerous shit — often unbeknownst to them — all wrapped up in the “right” rhetoric and bright smiles.

“This, indeed, is him!” I smile into Bernard’s face and give him a Christian-style side hug. Act like you’ve done nothing wrong. You’ve done nothing wrong!

“You were talking about me?” he says, all innocent curiosity.

“Oh yeah man. We’re talking about the prostate man. Male anal!” the meatball says, turning to face Bernard squarely in the face.

I choke-laugh on my whiskey. I’m trying to stuff my entire head in the cup. Maybe he can’t see my face in here.

“Dude you gotta let your shit go man,” yells meatball. “I let my girl get in there and I’m hands-free man. I’m coming and coming like a firehose — I’m flaccid but it’s pouring out of me. Hands free! It’s the most intense shit of my life.”

I am delighted. I am horrified. It’s better and worse than I could have ever imagined.

“Did you pay this gentleman for this rant?” Bernard laughs, incredulous. “You should trademark that phrase man, ‘hands-free coming.’ It’s good.”

“You laugh dude, but do you know the kind of vulnerability it takes to take it in the ass from a woman? Do you understand the inverse of the power-play that happens?”

“I think I do … yes.” Bernard stutters.

“It’s intense. Now she’s in control. You think your girl likes it when you’re just pounding away” — he slams his fist into his palm again and again and again — “no she doesn’t! You’re just BAM BAM BAM and she’s lying there like…”

I raise my hand. “I like being pounded. It’s really not that simple. One doesn’t really have much to do with the other necessarily. Rough sex can be consensual and amazing! I hear you that …”

He interrupts me to slap a friend’s arm who’s at the makeshift bar to get his attention.

“Yo, Miles! You feel me right? You know the pleasures of the ass, right? Tell this guy!”

“I mean, I really do like it,” Bernard insists. “I do! And I do it. It’s just a little hard for me and I don’t really like being pegged.”

“Pssssh. C’mon man,” the meatball scoffs. “You can be a man and wanna get pegged.”

“I…didn’t say you couldn’t…I just, don’t like it myself,” says Bernard.

“Ya gotta get over it; you’re depriving yourself man!” Meatball grips Bernard’s shoulders like a father sending his son to war. “Let her get in there man, you won’t regret it.”

“…I…have…and I don’t regret it. I wear it like a badge of honor! And I’m thankful because I think it did make me vulnerable — it’s really different when your partner is looking down at you and realize how little control you have…and I get it. Some people get off on that lack of control …but I don’t?”

Meatball snickers and swaggers away shaking his head.

I stood there—stunned. It was a complicated treatise on the strange and far-reaching tentacles of toxic masculinity.

Here I was, maybe betraying my dear friend’s confidences because, fuck it. Women never get to talk about fucking; they never get to take aim at men’s hangups around sex or discuss their own pleasure without being accused of being “too much,” self-destructive, promiscuous, craving attention, falling prey to the very trappings they’re trying to escape.

Maybe I thought this anal sex banter was giving me some kind of social collateral — I’m a girl who “gets it,” ya know?!

But there was also genuine confusion and sadness for Bernard. There was a real desire, a genuine belief that I might be able to use this stranger-man to get through to my friend-man. As Solnit says, I realized I wanted to enhance Bernard’s standing through the exposure to another man’s supposed feminism.

I thought another man could get through in a way I never could.

I thought that Bernard’s ass-pleasure was suffering at the hands of toxic masculinity. Being vulnerable is important to being human! Being penetrated is a potent symbol of that vulnerability! Let your body conquer the shitty steepings of your mind! Set yourself free!

But instead I exposed him to an even stranger brand of toxic masculinity. A man who thought himself enlightened because he had embraced the physicality of being penetrated—because he had had a singular thought about what that meant in terms of his own vulnerability.

I thought this anal sex banter was giving me some kind of social collateral.

But all he was doing with his supposed revelations on physical and emotional pleasure was using it as a tool to glean more power. To insist he was more enlightened. A better, stronger, more powerful man than other men. He was using his supposed newfound softness to make another man feel small, ashamed, un-evolved.

It was the same awful, aggressive shit. I’ll show you what a real man is.

I felt I could hear the gears turning in Bernard’s head.

Maybe I am shut-down. Maybe I am a weak man. Maybe I am homophobic and kind of pathetic and caught up in a narrative I thought I was working against.

It was a really twisted piece of alchemy, let me tell you.

We laughed, and I hugged Bernard tight. I told him he was exponentially more evolved than that shitty blowhard — even if he couldn’t come “hands free” and maybe didn’t want to, and maybe never would.

But inside? I felt awful. I thought about the brown and pink puckerings of Bernard’s orifice — that little starburst-ed sphincter that sits at the crux of so much.

I wanted to give it a kiss and say, we’re all in this together. I know you’re trying and it hurts a lot. Take all the time you need. But keep trying. Because we need you.

*This story was published with Bernard’s consent

A 27-year-old man with a history of abusing his girlfriend killed five people in Alabama last week, apparently because they tried to help her leave him. According to the Gun Violence Archive, there have now been at least 248 mass shootings in the first eight months of the year, which continues an alarming upward trend in this kind of violence in the U.S.

In a 2015 essay for The New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell explored whether or not the frequency of reported shootings in America has created a self-propagating “phenomenon” — with each new act increasing the likelihood that another person, somewhere in the country, will soon lash out.

Referencing the work of sociologist Mark Granovetter, Gladwell posits that school shooters, as a group, function much like a riot, in that each new participant’s “threshold,” at which they are compelled to join, is lowered by those before them. Riot instigators may be those on the brink of desperation, or people willing to destroy property for little reason at all, but at some point even otherwise “law-abiding” citizens tend to also suddenly take part in chaos. Gladwell uses this model to explain why it’s become so hard to create a single profile for shooters, or predict who might be next:

“The problem is not that there is an endless supply of deeply disturbed young men who are willing to contemplate horrific acts. It’s worse. It’s that young men no longer need to be deeply disturbed to contemplate horrific acts.”

This echoes a 2015 New York Times analysis of mass shootings in general, which concluded that “what seems telling about the killers . . . is not how much they have in common but how much they look and seem like so many others who do not inflict harm.”

Yet both the Times and Gladwell come to their conclusions while only glancing at a certain commonality: that these shooters are nearly all men (and mostlywhite men at that). Furthermore, these writers seem to presuppose that there is a “normal” or healthy ideal of how young men should behave in America. Which suggests that if it just weren’t for all these high-profile massacres, perhaps the threshold for violence amongst men would have remained higher, and so many of them would not be choosing to “inflict harm” on society.

But, in the year of Donald Trump, as we process the loss of more than 270 lives at the hands of mass shooters — whether in Alabama, at a gay club in Orlando, or on the streets of Dallas (not to mention attacks in Munich, Fort Myers, Baton Rouge, Istanbul, Dhaka, Baghdad, Nice, Kalamazoo, and too many other places to list) — it’s important to ask the question again: What exactly is “healthy” behavior for men? When exactly do boys learn how to be men in ways that do not inflict harm on society?

Gladwell himself makes a strong case for broadening our lens on this topic, in further explaining Granovetter’s research:

“[Granovetter] was most taken by the situations in which people did things for social reasons that went against everything they believed as individuals. ‘Most did not think it ‘right’ to commit illegal acts or even particularly want to do so,’ he wrote, about the findings of a study of delinquent boys. ‘But group interaction was such that none could admit this without loss of status; in our terms, their threshold for stealing cars is low because daring masculine acts bring status, and reluctance to join, once others have, carries the high cost of being labeled a sissy.’ You can’t just look at an individual’s norms and motives. You need to look at the group.”

Similarly, mass shooters in this country can’t be entirely separated from Granovetter’s group of boys who act recklessly out of a fear of being called “sissies.” It seems likely that the killer in Orlando, who targeted a gay nightclub that he himself visited (and who also had a history of domestic violence), shared an overt fear of femininity. The shooter at UC Santa Barbara in 2014, who made a confessional video listing his frustrations with women, was also clearly disturbed by the idea of appearing less than manly. As were countless other killers before and after them.

And though a majority of young men do not become murderers — or even “delinquent boys” — it’s no stretch to say they are mostly being socialized to carry in their hearts that same fear. So perhaps we should consider that so-called “healthy” visions of masculinity exist at the edges of society (if at all), and that the dislike of women and all things “feminine” is much closer to the center.

If mass shootings are akin to a new kind of cultural “riot,” then, it is a riot born in the traditional culture of masculinity — thriving in a country built on the macho mass violence of genocide and slavery. And it is occurring within a global society still dominated by hypermasculine straight white men, and where men of all backgrounds are cheered more for their loyalty to other men, than for their resistance to oppression.

But why exactly has this particular threshold been lowered in the last few decades? Gladwell points to the 1999 shootings at Columbine High, and the way news of that spree, and many subsequent ones, spread online and openly taught young men the rituals of mass killing. He emphasizes the role of visual storytelling in this process:

“[T]he sociologist Nathalie E. Paton has analyzed the online videos created by post-Columbine shooters and found a recurring set of stylized images: a moment where the killer points his gun at the camera, then at his own temple, and then spreads his arms wide with a gun in each hand; the closeup; the wave goodbye at the end. ‘School shooters explicitly name or represent each other,’ she writes.”

Illustrating this point, last month in Munich, a man who killed nine people at a shopping mall was found to be using the photo of another shooter (who killed 77 in Norway exactly five years before attack) as his own WhatsApp profile picture.

These killers don’t consume or create their stylized images of masculinity in a vacuum, though. We have long seen them elsewhere. If those who planned Columbine “laid down the ‘cultural script’ for the next generation of shooters,” as Gladwell writes, they did so within the context of other scripts and images which have also encouraged young men to, as Gladwell put it, “contemplate horrific acts.”

If knowing the stories of past shooters helps to lower the barrier of entry for these killers — or if this is a riot “in which each new participant’s action makes sense in reaction to and in combination with those who came before,” as Gladwell claims — perhaps it’s worth thinking more about how these stories intersect with those we most often tell about men.

Like all American institutions of power, popular cinema — one of our most celebrated forms of storytelling — is filled with white men, and is often centered on a conception of masculinity which encourages a fear of being called a “sissy.”

The stars of the year’s top live-action film, Captain America: Civil War (Captain America and Iron Man, played by Chris Evans and Robert Downey Jr.), or in last year’s blockbuster Jurassic World (Owen Brady, played by Chris Pratt), were not hellbent killers, but seemingly noble heroes intent on saving humanity from evil. These guys recall beloved movie characters like Han Solo, the kind of hard-shelled, wise-cracking white men who aren’t afraid to bend a few rules in pursuit of justice.

That seems different than how we might initially describe someone like Travis Bickle, Taxi Driver’s “lone wolf” protagonist who plots the execution of a presidential candidate and takes out his frustrations by murdering a pimp. Yet films like Taxi Driver or Reservoir Dogs aren’t cult hits because they necessarily differ from the status quo of popular cinema, but because they zero in on specific, familiar representations of masculinity, and then take them to extremes.

Why The ‘New Masculine’ Movement Is Just As Toxic As The Old One
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Similarly, SUNY professor Tristan Bridges says that instead of seeing mass shooters as “outliers or oddballs . . . we should actually think of them as conformists . . . They’re over-conforming to masculinity.” The truth we tend to avoid is that the norm is for men to be valued for harmful anti-social behaviors, and that most stories about men, intentionally or not, reinforce this norm.

Physical toughness, lack of emotion, and power over women are just as linked and celebrated in blockbusters like Captain America, or this year’s Deadpool, as they are in films like Taxi Driver, only slightly more obscured by romantic subplots, CGI-ed villains, or a framework of fantasy. But at his core, the immensely popular Iron Man is also a “lone wolf” type who rarely cries, makes rape jokes, and uses aggression to gain the respect of other straight men.

How many of our favorite movies — from American Sniper to Dirty Grandpa to The Revenant — give men ways of overcoming challenges that don’t appeal to aggression, power over women, and other limiting ideas of “manliness”?

Films like Batman vs. Superman tend to reiterate that (white) men are entitled to control, and that acceptance into the “group” of masculinity requires dominance. But they also risk providing a script for how men should go about obtaining that power — or at least reaffirm the vision of what it looks like to “become a man.” This echoes the underlying messages about masculinity we see in the videos of mass shooters, or even ISIS propaganda.

And, at the end of the day, there is no mainstream counter narrative for how masculinity should be performed. Instead we see Hollywood’s ideas about the man “club” replicated in mainstream politics, in the culture of law enforcement, popular music, comic books, video games, and in our everyday lives. Adding extreme violence to that mix — or guns, or racist, homophobic, or otherwise oppressive rhetoric — only fans the already rising flames.

In The Atlantic, James Hamblin recently expounded on the problem of “toxic masculinity,” but again emphasized its specificity: “The idea of toxic masculinity is — critically — not a sweeping indictment of bros or gender. It’s an admission that masculinity can be toxic at times.”

Yet, just as in Hollywood, “toxic masculinity” remains the most pervasive mode of masculinity in this country. Our patriarchal constitution, embedded in white supremacy, was written with these very behaviors in mind. As R.W. Connell has described, there are indeed many different “masculinities” in existence, and race, ethnicity, class, and a myriad of other factors can alter one’s experience. But the version we most often see, hear, and value — everywhere from cable news to talk radio to within our police departments — is primarily toxic.

This same fear of being excluded from the club is exactly what’s fueling Donald Trump. And though it’s certainly terrifying, we can no longer pretend that his is a fringe vision of manhood.

Toxic masculinity remains the most pervasive mode of masculinity in this country.
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It’s no coincidence that one of the common ways men criticize Trump is by resorting to the same type of hypermasculine shaming which accelerated his rise — ridiculing his penis size or calling him a “wuss.”

Can we expect to put out the fire in the hearts of “violent” men if we don’t recognize that we — all of us who have been socialized to be men — are also standing in flames? That we are a part of that same riot?

This isn’t to say we shouldn’t critique the inciting words of men in power, or completely denounce the thinking of mass shooters, but that we might spend more time considering broader context — and looking inward. Because improving mental health care or eliminating access to guns alone (just like removing extreme violence from cinema) will not change the harmful context of masculinity. Neither will defeating Trump.

In fact, we might ask ourselves: In our pursuit of a “healthier manhood,” are we more interested in creating a safer and more equitable world for others, or just putting ourselves above the ugliness of these men — creating new hierarchies? Why is it that straight cis men are more comfortable talking about “reimagining masculinity” than simply embracing “femininity”? Are we still holding onto that same fear of being called a “sissy,” of being associated with women?

Gladwell frames that New Yorker essay around the life of John LaDue, a young man who was caught planning a school shooting in Minnesota. The writer suggests that perhaps LaDue, who “never expressed a desire to hurt anyone,” was more attracted to the ritual of being a mass shooter — like a rioter who stumbles into the crowd — than he was to the end result:

“LaDue was fascinated — as many teen-age boys are — by guns and explosions. But he didn’t know the acceptable way to express those obsessions.”

Isn’t it strange that there is an “acceptable” way to express a desire to destroy others? As bell hooks writes, “many boys are angry, but no one really cares about this anger unless it leads to violent behavior. If boys take their rage and sit in front of a computer all day, never speaking, never relating, no one cares.”

On the 4chan message board where a 2015 shooter in Oregon allegedly left evidence of his plan, there are a number of casual replies from men who offer ideas on how to best enact mass murder. Most of them may not have imagined they were talking to someone who was seriously planning one, and yet they feign seriousness as a way to impress others — to prove their masculinity. And as subsequent reports revealed, the deceased killer himself may have once been one of those men, with those “obsessions,” who performed on message boards in an effort to be acknowledged by others.

These men may perceive themselves to be anti-establishment, but they are in fact — like Trump, Deadpool, or the Orlando shooter — just replicating the same systems of the establishment. The same fear of isolation, and same obsession with gaining entry into the club.

LaDue eventually received a plea deal, and on the day of his last hearing, Gladwell recounts how his father, David LaDue, stood outside the courthouse answering reporter’s questions:

“He wanted to remind the world that his son was human. ‘He had love,’ LaDue said. ‘He liked affection like anybody else.” [ . . . ] He talked about how difficult it was for men — and for teen-age boys in particular — to admit to vulnerability.”

Before he learned the rituals of mass shooters, John LaDue was taught the rituals of manhood. The way you must shut yourself down to matter. How physical force always speaks louder than a cry for help. These are the ideas which have been plaguing society since long before the Columbine shootings, September 11th, or the hateful murders at Pulse nightclub.

Regardless of what else we do, without transforming our cultural understanding of gender — without being vulnerable as people who call themselves men, without embracing love and what we call feminine, and including ourselves in this work of better, less gendered storytelling — the riot will rage on, taking new forms, attracting more and more fearful people searching for a way to prove that they belong.

Twelve days after my brown-skinned boy turned 21 in this country to which we immigrated, another brown-skinned young son of immigrant parents, from a country that borders mine in South Asia, shot 49 people dead in Orlando, most of them also brown-skinned males from immigrant families. And before any right-winger swoops down to make a ridiculous statement about how this is a “brown” or immigrant problem, I will declare — as a social scientist and as a mother — that this is a struggle for all of us raising boys in America. Our boys are hurting and we are asking them to “man up.”

We are measuring our presidential candidates by their small hands and big walls, we are “straight-washing” the attack in Orlando on the LGBT community, we are serving our rapists the briefest jail sentences so they may quickly return to their true calling of being athletes and champions, and we are doing nothing to change a gun culture that’s led to so many tragic murders.

I will especially say this as an immigrant mother — it is not easy to raise a young man in America’s culture of masculine dominance. I sought in America a personal refuge from the culture of violent patriarchy in my own country, India. I wanted to shield my son from the privileges of patriarchy he would automatically receive there as an upper-caste male, while the women around him were subjected to sexual assault or verbal and physical abuse at the hands of men he looked up to. In America, though, he has grown up alongside a generation of boys with rage — from the Columbine shootings in 1999, the year before we arrived here, to the massacre of 20 six-year-olds in Sandy Hook a few months before my boy left for college, to the murderous rampage of a college boy, Elliot Rodger, who felt turned down by girls the year my son turned 18; each milestone in my son’s life was marked by the violent end of others’ at the hands of young men.

Barely weeks before 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was shot dead by a raging George Zimmerman, my own 17-year-old had the police called on him by a neighbor as he tried to enter our home through an open window because he had forgotten his keys. A white American friend quickly advised him to wait for the cops with his hands visible, dressed in nothing but a T-shirt and jeans, definitely no hoodie. When Zimmerman was acquitted for “standing his ground,” my son and I were traveling in India, where I woke him to give him the news. He held back tears. I wanted him to cry openly.

The fast-growing religion of hyper-masculine, gun-toting hubris is gaining ground worldwide. The day after one of the worst mass shootings in modern American history on June 12, a group of men in my home country pledging allegiance to the right-wing Hindu Sena that propelled Prime Minister Narendra Modi into power now celebrated the birthday of U.S. presumptive presidential nominee Donald Trump, laying a 15-pound cake before a poster of Trump holding a double-barreled gun, proclaiming him a “messiah” and a “savior of the world.” Trump’s brand of hyper-masculine certainty expressed as unflinching rage, typified in the statement “Ban all Muslims,” has struck a chord with men in my homeland, who saw the Orlando shooting as Islamic terrorism while also declaring their cultural loathing of homosexuality. In Russia, Trump has found admiration akin to that reserved for the hyper-masculine Vladimir Putin. The English-language news site The Moscow Timesstates: “Both are anti-mainstream and self-confident people who don’t feel constrained by political correctness.”

While the Indian instance of birthday worship for a distant white savior seems laughable, not much is different in America. As a social scientist studying political communication, I have documented how journalists over decades look desperately to source and quote the authoritative white male, especially in times of crisis such as the aftermath of 9/11 and during anti-war protests.

As a mother, therefore, I have tried to counteract these things, pushing against my own conditioning to be a “quiet, likable female.” A female who knew exactly what Indian activist Soni Sori did “wrong” in speaking out for tribal rights, for which she was sexually assaulted in jail in 2011 and recently assaulted with a chemical substance that left her face burned. Or the “mistake” that Sandra Bland made when she talked back to a state trooper in Waller County, Texas. I have worked to make sure that my son heard my voice — my loud voice, my angry voice, and, especially, my voice of clear and urgent reason — during private or public events of insult or assault on women or on innocents in mass shootings. And, I have listened when he said he didn’t want to spend time with friends who may not be too different from Stanford rapist Brock Turner, who took a picture of his victim’s breasts and shared it with his buddies on his swim team. Turner’s pleasure did not lie merely in what his body was doing but in the approval of his friends at what his body could do — be male, dominate, bring back a trophy.

Here’s the thing: I have also taken a deep breath and asked my son questions that carry great risk and pain. After the shooting at Umpqua Community College in Oregon by a 26-year-old white supremacist last year, the FBI learned, via the website 4chan, of a similar threat of attack at a Philadelphia-area college. After reading the news, I called my son, who was going to school near Philadelphia, to ask him to hide out in his dorm room. He dismissed my fears. I then asked him, “It wasn’t you that posted that threat, was it?”

He responded with reasonable outrage and I flinched at the hurt I inflicted on my son. But, also, he understood. Over the years, I have urged other parents to talk to their sons and ask them about alienation, fear, masculinity, rage, and what it would take for them to resort to violence. I have asked this because I know families like Turner’s, who would see little fault in their 20-year-old son’s “20 minutes of action.” You and I know wives like the two who were married to 29-year-old Omar Mateen, both the wife who escaped his violence and the wife who drove him to Pulse to scope it out. Friends of 19-year-old Boston Marathon bomber Dzokhar Tsarnaev swore he was the kindest kid ever. The men and women in a Black church in Charleston thought the 21-year-old white supremacist Dylann Roof who came to their bible study was a pleasant-natured friend. These were the ordinary boys among us, born in the same decade as my son, until they raped us or killed us.

Last week, as my son went back to college after a brief visit home, he told me he felt some sadness, that he would miss me and that he would call me if he got lonely. He said this in the presence of his friend, a young man who had recently rejected his Mormon religion for what he felt was its inherent misogyny and homophobia.

In front of me were these two college men, both heterosexual, smoking cigarettes with swagger and talking about sadness, loneliness, and loving their families. I felt fortunate to be a safe space in which they could speak with tenderness of such things that most of our hetero-normative culture would discourage in males. I want more such safe spaces everywhere they may go. Pulse may have been once such safe space in the eyes of Brenda Lee Marquez McCool, the 49-year-old mother who liked to go dancing with her gay son, until it, too, wasn’t. Until a man walked in with rage and guns, until she took a bullet for her son.

Somewhere, like so many of our boys, her 21-year-old son is hurting.