"White Men as The Problem" by Joe R. Feagin

[above image of Donald Trump is from here]

[above image of John McCain is from here]

What follows is just a portion of a post from racism review. I greatly recommend going to the source and reading the whole piece.

[All the text that follows was posted by a man named Joe R. Feagin. A bit more info on the two men who contribute to the site follows the excerpted piece*:]

Unusual numbers of photos of elite white men are in the news lately, since the financial crisis hit. Almost all perpetrators of our “second great depression,” as with the first, have been white men. White male business “geniuses,” often with top-college educations. It is odd that no one yet, to my knowledge, has featured the whiteness or white-maleness of these malefactors of great wealth as a central feature of the life-devastating economic “problem” we face globally. One can be sure that if these agents of destruction were women or men of color that the reality of their gender and racial characteristics would be a constant topic of conversation by pundits and politicians, especially in the media. (Remember that Hillary Clinton is still blamed for failures in health care reform quite a while back.)

Come to think of it, white men (they named themselves “white” in the 17th century) created the modern Western (now world) economic system. They created the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Or should we say, the Predatory Ethic and the Spirit of Exploitation. Arrogant greed seems to be a major motivation behind the labor/land expropriation and exploitation euphemized by historians as “overseas exploration” and “settlement.” Certainly, white men created, expanded, and maintained the often genocidal taking of millions of indigenous peoples’ lands in the Americas and the Holocaust-like Atlantic slave trade. Mostly white men created the oppressive realities of modern capitalism and North American slavery, and have made huge profits and wealth off of it, now passed along to their descendants.

In recent centuries, elite white men have caused much death and destruction, probably more than any other elite group on the planet. White men are certainly not the only major sources of “democide” and related despotism, but they do seem to lead the list. (Consider not only the many indigenous genocides and Atlantic slave trade, but the Holocaust, Soviet gulags, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, two world wars). While white men are not alone in such actions, the consequences of their actions have been more far-reaching, especially for the planet in general than have those of despotic not-white actors.

White men set up the Western legal systems reinforcing modern capitalism and North American genocide targeting millions of indigenous Americans and enslavement of millions of African Americans. They created the white racial frame to explain and rationalize these savage operations. The white frame is a dominant worldview that a great many white men, including elite political-economic leaders, still seem to be operating out of as they today exploit the world’s majority, the 80 percent of the planet that is not white.

And it was these self-named white men who reinvigorated a very strong white-patriarchal frame, with its “great chain of being” notions (God at top, then angels, then European men, then European women, then European children, then “other races,” then animals). In the North American case, they easily extended this to the system of racial oppression they had devised for Native Americans and African Americans.

These men, centuries ago and now, see themselves as heroic and virtuous, even as they have created great destruction and misery for many people. Ronald Takaki speaks of this view of white men as “virtuous republicans.” Note that in this centuries-old process most white men have had little sense of their own weakness and venality, but have almost always accented their virtues. Today, as in earlier centuries, most white men generally do not see their group’s lack of virtues, their major weaknesses, and their major errors. They certainly do not like to admit error. Indeed, white men now often blame the victims, as in the case of this white male commodity trader who recently blamed homeowners and moaned about “losers” with troubled mortgages, and not the banks now being bailed out with billions for playing the central role in creating the housing crisis.

So we are rapidly moving today to the second of their “great depressions” in this country’s history, yet the arrogant framing and actions of a few hundred, or perhaps thousand, of elite white men have yet to be problematized. Indeed, one cannot do so in the public media and discussions of this society. It simply is not possible to problematize the ruling group, as they have too much control to allow for significant problematization.

*about us
Posted by admin on Sep 10th, 2007
2007
Sep 10
Contributors to RacismReview are scholars and researchers from sociology and a number of other social science disciplines and a variety of academic institutions across the U.S.
RacismReview is intended to provide a credible and reliable source of information for journalists, students and members of the general public who are seeking solid evidence-based research and analysis of “race,” racism, ethnicity, and immigration issues, especially as they undergird and shape U.S. society within a global setting.We also provide substantive research and analysis on local, national, and global resistance to racial and ethnic oppression, including the many types of antiracist activism.
Launched in 2007, RacismReview is produced and maintained by Joe R. Feagin, Texas A&M University and Jessie Daniels, CUNY- Hunter College.]
END OF POST.

Pornography Use and Other Violations: A Conversation Between Two White Men, part six

Here are the links to the whole conversation:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7
Part 8
Part 9

CAUTION: What follows is a conversation between two men about their abusive behaviors toward girls, women, and others. Any survivor of child sexual abuse, rape, or other form of sexual violation and objectification may be quite triggered by portions of this exchange. All violative behaviors are named as such by at least one of the two people, critically, with remorse and/or regret. Both people do not currently use pornography.

Email #4 from USguy: (Passages of Aussieguy's prior email/s are in italics below, just for a bit more clarity as to who is saying what.)

Re:
(Isn't it revolting to agree so wholeheartedly with each other...;)

lol. Yes. And it's also very rare!

I'm not sure I fully understood some of what you last wrote, and will comment on the paragraphs or sentences that I found problematic. Let me know if I didn't comprehend what you were meaning, so I can then correct my reply, if need be.

Re:
I have been thinking about privilege and power a fair bit lately and I think there is more to it than the fact that privilege persists despite our being opposed to it, even though that is very true. I think that the power that privileged people have is only power to exercise and enjoy our privileges. We do not have unequal power to create justice. When we genuinely act to undermine the unfair power we hold and the system that gives it to us, we find ourselves as disempowered in that moment as any person standing up to injustice. But instead of discouraging me from taking action, that experience makes me more committed because it is only when I work with others to resist oppression that I ever step down from my plinth so we can be truly equal.

If I'm understanding you, I don't agree with some of what you are saying above. First, "privilege persists despite our being opposed to it" refers to the few people who do that. Most whites don't oppose white privilege, nor do most men oppose male privilege, in my experience anyway. They/we may pay lip service to our woes as white men, but bottom line: we arrange our lives so we are not accountable to those we oppress. And bottom line: we don't, generally, interrupt or disrupt or stop other whites/men from behaving in racist/sexist ways. And also, I'm not convinced "the interpersonal realm"--the social and private spaces--are where most of the violence happens, although tons of it happens there. With racism and sexism being institutionalised, we needn't "act like jerks" all the time or even most of the time for the systems of oppression to keep on keeping on. Male supremacy, for example, can sustain many men being "against sexism". It can, it does, it always has, perhaps.

So, in response to this specifically: "I think that the power that privileged people have is only power to exercise and enjoy our privileges. We do not have unequal power to create justice. When we genuinely act to undermine the unfair power we hold and the system that gives it to us, we find ourselves as disempowered in that moment as any person standing up to injustice."

I don't agree. The power privileged people have is not only to enjoy our privileges. Our power is to maintain systems of oppression, and sometimes that takes hard work. Sometimes that isn't all that enjoyable. Whites don't necessarily "enjoy" behaving as white supremacists, for example. For many whites, the behaviors that are harmful come from irrational fears and stupid bigoted ideas. Some whites and men behave irrationally, in this sense, and are not having much fun in the process. AND, in my view, anyway, no matter what, we always maintain our social position over those we oppress. We don't ever, really, "find ourselves as disempowered" as the oppressed who are standing up to injustice. That understanding of "disempowered" for me, is woefully individualistic, psychological, and ignores that men and whites ALWAYS have great institutions backing up our views of our oppressive ways of being human. Yes, interpersonally, at any given moment, on any given day, one or both people in, for example, a heterosexual relationship, can feel disempowered. But even if I feel that way, I'm socially/structurally bolstered in a way that women are not. And in some heterosexual relationships, and in lesbian ones and gay ones, there are various ways power plays out between people. But no matter how "powerful" the more powerful woman is in a lesbian relationship, men have more power than her, structurally and institutionally--both gay and heterosexual men.

Re:
When you said "If she blames herself, it's one way to be less terrified, because once she realizes she didn't do anything to contribute to what happened to her, it can leave someone feel VERY vulnerable to future assaults." that was suddenly very clear to me. I have had a related vague feeling about how it's dangerous to confess to women instances of when I have objectified them or violated them without their knowledge, not because of the consequences for me but because they might feel afraid. Your explanation clarifies it really well.

I want to qualify that statement, however. Because victims blaming themselves is a crucial mechanism in making oppressive violence effective. It's not "only" a way for some survivors to "feel" more in control. Shame and self-blame are what survivors are left with. And I'd strongly argue that the shame that men feel for perpetrating is relatively minor compared to the shame that someone who has been victimized carries. As someone on both sides of some of those fences, I speak that as my truth, anyway. The shame I have felt for visually violating a man can go away in moments. I'm done visually violating him, so the shame dissipates rather quickly. But if I've been visually violated by a man, that shame or mortification, depending on the circumstances, can last a lifetime. It's like perpetrator's shame, in my view, comes and goes like the tide, but victims' shame is etched into us, branded into us. And the only time a perpetrator may get a taste of that level of shame is when, rarely, he is identified as a perpetrator to everyone in the town where he lives, and is made to never hide that history from anyone. And how many men, by percent, have THAT happen to us? One thousandth of one percent? If that?!

You wrote:
That comes back to a point that my partner [woman's name deleted] (better change her name if you publish this, too) made to me once: that men don't ever deal with this shit among ourselves. I am much more likely to confess this stuff to a woman than to a man. It's not because I'm afraid of being punished over-harshly by men. It's because I expect very little response and more likely even an attack for thinking there's anything wrong to confess and a defensiveness because they all have the same habits too. But actually, it is necessary for us to be confronting this behaviour ourselves and not leaving it for women to take on against men's threats (not idle threats) of violence.

It is so rare for men to confront one another, and it alone would be a cornerstone in bringing down male supremacy, if it happened consistently, and over a long period of time. Again, this would need to happen from male leaders of business, by CEOs, by presidents and prime ministers of countries, by male religious leaders, by those who own and operate news media, etc. This particular action, of men holding men accountable for what we do that harms women, would have to include and move way beyond "friends calling each other out." And, importantly, friendships and familial relationships would have to end, over this issue. I've lost friends and left friends due to them being unwilling to deal with their race, gender, sexuality, and class privileges.

Getting back to an earlier point, men acting to interrupt men's sexist violence IS one of our privileges. We have the privilege to do it and just maybe be taken seriously. Whites and men's words and actions carry more political clout, in a racist/sexist State. Me speaking out strengthens my voice, a voice that is already strengthened by centuries of mythic "heroism" and "greatness" by "people like me."

John Stoltenberg and perhaps also Robert Jensen speak of "acting on behalf of one's ethical self, against the interests of one's politically harmful self" or something like that. I think such analyses ignore how whenever men speak, we speak with power, and with a kind of presence that is often silencing of women, or which society, on the whole, listens more carefully and attentively to.

I think your story about the friend of you and your partner who justifies his use of pornography is a perfect example where one could, and I'd argue ought to say: "As long as you are not in struggle with this issue, as long as you think it is just fine to use raped women's bodies to produce your orgasms or arousal, as long as you consider objectifying women 'natural,' we cannot be friends."

Your partner's analogy works quite well for me, regarding arguing that "someone is empowered by global capitalism if they start a small business." We are all trained to not see the blood on our hands, if we are oppressors who only or primarily commit atrocity by proxy. All whites commit genocide daily, and all men commit gynocide daily. There is no way not to be a murderer. The question is only: do you know you are one? And what are you going to do about it? Read Andrea Dworkin's speech, link below, if you haven't read it several times already.

http://www.nostatusquo.com/ACLU/dworkin/WarZoneChaptIIIE.html

By the way, what have you read by Andrea Dworkin? And what other feminist writings have you read? Just curious.

When a man argues something like this to me:

"Implicit in some of his arguments was an accusation that we were interfering in his private life and trying to take away his only source of sexual pleasure while he was single. Afterwards, he said 'Wow. I don't think I've ever been part of such a conservative discussion about porn.'"

I respond by reminding him there's nothing conservative about the position I'm taking: it's actually quite anti-conservative, if by conservative we mean "that which is in the best interests of wealthy white men." And someone I know says: men are not entitled to privacy when that privacy is used to violate or otherwise oppress women.

That men think we are entitled to this is something created and protected by patriarchy. But it's in no way just, or humane.

Re:
"I think his justifications amount to nothing and that if he cant have a wank without using porn, he's not using enough imagination."

I think there's way more going on when men defend their right to use pornography. I think it is one arena of conversation where men are asserting their male supremacist power, authority, rights, entitlements, and privileges, which is one reason I believe in strongly going after any man's words that make that case. That his orgasms depend on rape-for-profit is one issue. That he thinks he can create "safe space" around him where his "complaints" or whatever they are, about not being able to enjoy masturbating without using pornography, is a very political matter, and oppressive when he's doing so in the presence of a woman like your partner. He's pissing on ground, marking his terrain, intellectual and physical terrain, even if it's in your home. Beware of men doing this.

I don't discuss my views on women using pornography with other men, usually. How women survive a pornographic society is for each woman, and women collectively, to determine. It's not for any man to determine, in my view. This is not to say that if a woman asks me for my opinion on whether I think it would be a wise decision for her to give up bar tending and become a stripper, I won't weigh in with my view that the price she's likely to pay for stripping, in many ways, on many levels, is too high, in my opinion. I will ask her what she would most want her sister to do, given the choices and financial dilemmas she's facing, or her mother. And this can be a very shaming thing to ask a woman, whose sister or mother or friend may well have had to engage in some form of professional male sexual exploitation of women, in order to survive. And she may have already begun stripping, but is feeling out how I feel about the issue. And being a bar tender, if young and female, usually means dealing with sexual harassment daily, as is the case with women being out in public spaces, working as servers, working in high-paying jobs, as managers, as heads of companies, and as women who are working in the industries which most graphically and unapologetically exploit and degrade women as a class. But that decision is hers, not any man's.

I look forward to hearing your therapist's answer, if and when you confront him on what he's doing to end men's sexualized domination of women, in his life outside his practice, and in his therapy practice.

Re:
One thing I have done, in a kind of sporadic way, is to call myself out among my radical community for my behaviour. I haven't actually admitted the worst to them, though I have to you. I have highlighted my porn viewing and general objectification and habit of perving down women's tops but not told them about any instances of deliberately setting up perving opportunities. But it has been the early beginning of a move to get this stuff talked about and shift our expectations of men's behaviour in our community at least.

I wrestle a great deal with this. I think that there's a way men can sort of get off on "confessing our sins" to the masses. And we can use this confessing in very irresponsible ways. I think stating what one has done generally is sufficient, and if any woman wants or needs to know more, she can ask you. But telling stories in details is likely to be triggering to many women, and is also likely to arouse many men. So the "telling" might just be reinforcing male sexual domination of women, not undermining it. Of course something can do both at once, also. So it is tricky. I think as a safe policy for women, tell your stories when asked. Most women know we do what we do, because they've experienced us doing it to them.
END OF POST.

Pornography Use and Other Violations: A Conversation Between Two White Men, part five

Here are the links to the whole conversation:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7
Part 8
Part 9

CAUTION: What follows is a conversation between two men about their abusive behaviors toward girls, women, and others. Any survivor of child sexual abuse, rape, or other form of sexual violation and objectification may be quite triggered by portions of this exchange. All violative behaviors are named as such by at least one of the two people, critically, with remorse and/or regret. Both people do not currently use pornography.

Email #5 from Aussieguy:
Wow. I have such a jumble of emotions in response to that mail. I agree with every point you made. (Isn't it revolting to agree so wholeheartedly with each other...;)

I have been thinking about privilege and power a fair bit lately and I think there is more to it than the fact that privilege persists despite our being opposed to it, even though that is very true. I think that the power that privileged people have is only power to exercise and enjoy our privileges. We do not have unequal power to create justice. When we genuinely act to undermine the unfair power we hold and the system that gives it to us, we find ourselves as disempowered in that moment as any person standing up to injustice. But instead of discouraging me from taking action, that experience makes me more committed because it is only when I work with others to resist oppression that I ever step down from my plinth so we can be truly equal.

Look, there I am writing about politics now. It seems like now that I've told you a lot of my story, I can spend some time on opinions and discussion too.

When you said "If she blames herself, it's one way to be less terrified, because once she realizes she didn't do anything to contribute to what happened to her, it can leave someone feel VERY vulnerable to future assaults." that was suddenly very clear to me. I have had a related vague feeling about how it's dangerous to confess to women instances of when I have objectified them or violated them without their knowledge, not because of the consequences for me but because they might feel afraid. Your explanation clarifies it really well.

That comes back to a point that my partner [woman's name deleted] made to me once: that men don't ever deal with this shit among ourselves. I am much more likely to confess this stuff to a woman than to a man. It's not because I'm afraid of being punished over-harshly by men. It's because I expect very little response and more likely even an attack for thinking there's anything wrong to confess and a defensiveness because they all have the same habits too. But actually, it is necessary for us to be confronting this behaviour ourselves and not leaving it for women to take on against men's threats (not idle threats) of violence.

You said "In my experience, in the last twenty years, increasingly, it isn't "cool" to be a feminist who isn't "into" porn."

It's really true. A friend of ours who had broken up with his girlfirend a couple of months earlier was round at our place and he mentioned that he likes downloading porn. He and [my partner] got into a discussion and he totally defended his right to look at porn. I said nothing, feeling strongly that porn was wrong but also feeling unqualified to tell anyone else not to use it while I continued to have the habit. He used as justification that some number of his past girlfiends enjoyed looking at porn with him and one of them taught him to download it. He also talked about how he had found websites where women and couples posted footage of themselves having sex and it was all very empowered and consensual. ([My partner] said later that that's like saying that someone is empowered by global capitlaism if they start a small business.) Implicit in some of his arguments was an accusation that we were interfering in his private life and trying to take away his only source of sexual pleasure while he was single. Afterwards, he said "Wow. I don't think I've ever been part of such a conservative discussion about porn."

I have looked hard for websites where I think the ethics are OK and the women are not degraded and I have not found a single one. I think his justifications amount to nothing and that if he cant have a wank without using porn, he's not using enough imagination. There are plenty of ways in which oppressed people buy into their own oppression, so women being into it is not the issue either. As well as that, one woman can objectify another, or one woman can objectify women generally, for her own sexual pleasure. It doesn't make it just.

A few women I know, who have had various experiences of male sexual violence, have been making DIY porn and exhibiting it as a self-empowering response to their experiences. Several of them talk about porn as a potentially women-friendly and consent-based thing. While I see some healing value for them in getting together and making the images, I think they miss the point about the mass porn industry being based on continual exploitation and also the way the content itself contains so much imagery of violence, degradation and oppression.

I agree with your points about the therapist being there to help me feel better about myself. It seemed a bit as though he was just there to help me with whatever I wanted and he would help me give up cornflakes if I told him I felt bad about it. He has offered no recognition that the problem really exists in society and that my response is an attempt to take responsibility for my own part in it. I felt a bit like saying "Well, what are YOU doing about it, then?" And in fact I will, but with less bitterness. I have the idea that you are doing good things and I'd like to get onto talking about what they are and start some activity on it in my life too.

One thing I have done, in a kind of sporadic way, is to call myself out among my radical community for my behaviour. I haven't actually admitted the worst to them, though I have to you. I have highlighted my porn viewing and general objectification and habit of perving down women's tops but not told them about any instances of deliberately setting up perving opportunities. But it has been the early beginning of a move to get this stuff talked about and shift our expectations of men's behaviour in our community at least.

I look forward to hearing back
END OF POST.

Pornography Use and Other Violations: A Conversation Between Two White Men, part four

Here are the links to the whole conversation:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7
Part 8
Part 9

CAUTION: What follows is a conversation between two men about their abusive behaviors toward girls, women, and others. Any survivor of child sexual abuse, rape, or other form of sexual violation and objectification may be quite triggered by portions of this exchange. All violative behaviors are named as such by at least one of the two people, critically, with remorse and/or regret. Both people do not currently use pornography.

Email #4 from Aussieguy:

You make some very useful points in your mail, such as describing my first story as "A memory of violation that you experienced as sexual". That really sums up a little thing that's been nagging at my brain for a while now, about how this stuff is not sex but is linked in my mind to sex. And it focuses on the bald fact that it is a violation. I committed a sexual assault at that age.

Your reminding me to think of the experience of the girl in that story is very confronting too. I think of myself as much more alert to a woman's experience of my sexuality now but I had not properly sat and thought about that particular girl's experience. It is frightening and very sad, reminding me of images of young children holding machine guns or other cruel intrusions of adult injustice into children's lives.

The idea that "males grow up to feel pervy, for example, but don't grow up feeling like systematic sexual violators" is also very eye-opening. It is something of a relief to really open myself and understand what I have been in my life, but it I am also very deeply sad. It is not like depression or despair, more that I want to have a good cry. Perhaps I will even be able to.

I am also excited by how clearly you explain the stuff about society appearing not to condone our abuse while actually requiring it, and also the point that it is the power of male sexuality that is dangerous. That last point is like the gorilla in the room: so glaringly obvious and terrible that no-one wants to address it.

Interestingly, I don't remember ever feeling any entitlement to look at women's bodies. I may have justified it or explained it away in some way but I think that in fact I just avoided reflecting on what I was doing. I shut down my awareness of my own experiences and with it my understanding of anyone else's experience too.

I am very confused about what the woman I saw in the shower felt. I saw that she was alarmed and she must have been embarrassed but afterwards she blamed herself. I apologised to her for looking in and she said she should not have left the curtain a bit open like that. I didn't tell her that I had opened it and I don't know if it occurred to her then or afterwards that I could have set up that horrible situation. I imagine her mulling it over in her mind and feeling revolted every time she considers the idea that I might have deliberately exposed her like that.

It was a fantasy of mine to be invisible too, and only for the purpose of hiding in women's rooms or shower blocks. Spy cameras and voyeur web sites are the high-tech equivalent of that fantasy, it seems. My fantasy is not quite reality for me though because I have so far resisted having the internet at home, so I do all my porn surfing surreptitiously on public computers. I try to set myself up in places where no-one can see what I'm looking at but it doesn't work very well. I have been caught probably half a dozen times that I know of and who knows how many times someone has seen what I'm doing and said nothing. My partner told me that if she was sitting next to someone and he was looking at porn she would be disgusted but also quite scared. She would not feel safe being near him. Even that, confronting as it is, did not instantly stop me from doing it.

I think a lot of it is, as you say, because I can. I can do it and I can get away with it. Even when I have been caught, it has not led to even moderate punishment, just momentary shame and that's all.

I saw a sexual health counsellor about this problem and she suggested setting things up to restrict my access to the internet. The counsellor I'm seeing now is not a sexual health specialist but he has been quite helpful already. Two things he told that have helped are that people usually take about 4-6 weeks to break a pattern of behaviour and start a new one, and the idea of saying "STOP!" in my head when my mind goes in the direction of porn or objectifying women. It's been really good to have a specified time period when I have to be 100% vigilant and then review where I'm at after that, instead of trying to just stop, forever, instantly. To know that I can expect my brain to have made a real change in that 6 weeks is a real encouragement to be firm and stay on track. And the "STOP!" thing is a good way to divert myself instantly before I get taken up with a behaviour pattern. My eyes will wander and start looking for a woman's cleavage as she bends over or something ad I say "STOP!" and look somewhere else, whereas before I may have stared at her, then at the next woman, then gone off actively looking for women to perve on, then gone to find a website to look at or a video with sex scenes in it to watch. So it helps me catch myself at the first moment of objectification instead of having to try to fight off the urge to watch porn when I've already followed my urges so far.

It's 4 weeks now, and I've been 100% vigilant so far. It feels like I'm really digging out some deeply held stuff.

There, I think that's enough for this one.
Until next time
END OF POST.

Pornography Use and Other Violations: A Conversation Between Two White Men, part three

Here are the links to the whole conversation:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7
Part 8
Part 9

CAUTION: What follows is a conversation between two men about their abusive behaviors toward girls, women, and others. Any survivor of child sexual abuse, rape, or other form of sexual violation and objectification may be quite triggered by portions of this exchange. All violative behaviors are named as such by at least one of the two people, critically, with remorse and/or regret. Both people do not currently use pornography.

Email #3 from USguy:

Corresponding twice a week works for me just fine.

I give you my word I will do nothing other than correspond with you, until you let me know if and when you are comfortable with me doing more with what we write to one another.

I'm not into twelve steps groups for "behavioral compulsions" or male supremacist/woman-harming behaviors, primarily because they don't frame up the behavior in ways that I agree with. I don't think pornography is something one is "addicted to" in the way one can be addicted to tobacco, crack, or alcohol. One could, for example, use pornography hours each day, get a call that there's a free trip to some place one has always wanted to visit--let's say Ireland, and leave for a week having a wonderful time seeing the landscape there, and not "suffer" from withdrawals, as one would if addicted to a substance. This assumes the person doesn't have access to pornography during the trip. Reflecting on my own experiences, I would actually feel "liberated" in such a scenario. Glad to be free of the access to the material and "fueled" desire for the behavior that, prior to the trip, was consuming so many hours of each week. I'd like to know if this fits with your own experience. Have you had times where you got to do something "out of the ordinary" that was great fun, or exciting, and where you didn't have access to pornography or to objectifying/visually violating women?

I make it a point not just to organize my life in such a way that I don't have "access" but also in a way that is filled with activities that remind me of the experiences of those who have been harmed by men like me. Part of my "recovery" (and that isn't the word I would use--I'd say "Part of growing my humanity and becoming more responsible and accountable") has entailed being out of denial that visual violation is not only creepy, to many, but is also threatening, terrifying, humiliating, and otherwise harmful to many if not all victims of this sort of invasion. That "they never knew" what I was doing was my line that allowed me to continue the behavior. That I was careful, covert, not physically intrusive in a way that made anyone feel threatened or in danger. And there are lies bound up in that, because of course there's no way to know if some of the people DID know what I was doing, by voyeuring, by sneaking peeks, copping glances, quickly and furtively sexually objectifying someone and then stopping the behavior before my gaze was "registered" by them. What I know, as a gay man is this: I know when I'm being looked at in ways that are dehumanizing or creepy. I know when I feel threatened or at risk. And I'm a guy with plenty of reasons gendered and class-related reasons not to be prone to being raped or grossly sexually assaulted. (Prisons, if seen as one place men are regularly "at risk" of being raped by or of raping other men, is overwhelmingly filled with people who are "not wealthy" and "not middle class." So that's what I mean by the class piece. Not that poorer men are more or less likely to be rapists or violators of women or men than richer men. In fact, given that richer men have many more opportunities to arrange "access" including by paying for it, I'd argue rich men are probably more prone to be perpetrators of sex crimes. They can purchase more elaborate means of viewing people, travel great distances to places where they have more access, etc. Having said all that...

Thanks so much for that background information, a lot of which I can relate to, except that for me it was boys/men I was interested in voyeuring and visually violating without their knowledge or consent, in ways that they would, if they found out later, probably experience as embarrassing, mortifying, humiliating, profoundly violating, invasive, and creepy.

I started using pornography, "light stuff" by today's standards, along the lines of Playgirl, when thirteen. A man who had a used bookstore pimps the images of women and men to a male friend (who, like me, was probably gay, but not out yet), and anyone else who was willing to cough up a quarter per magazine. (25 cents was affordable to middle and working class males, which was our class range.) This "bookshop manager" has the kind of stuff that was being published widely then: Playboy, Playgirl, Penthouse, Hustler, and a few others. It was only the Playgirls or others with images of naked men in them that I was interested in.

Prior to that, I'd already begun to understand visual violation as something of a right, an entitlement, even while I understood it was "wrong" or "bad." When I was eleven a man of twenty-one allowed me to take down his pajama bottoms while he pretended to be asleep, and to see his erection. This was a highly charged moment for me. Filled with fear of him waking up and being angry or enraged, and of sexual arousal, attraction to him as young man, some adoration too. I romanticized him. He lived with my family for three years, but was not "family of origin." He allowed me to violate boundaries that should have been firmly in place. Because he didn't, I began to feel like "I could get away with this kind of thing." For me, acts of physical contact with males were not the goal or desire. For me it was the act of looking, without them knowing. Me being invisible was a childhood wish. Then I could be in anyone's bedroom and watch them undress, masturbate, or whatever. This desire was with me from age eleven. In those years since, I have understood by behavior differently, understood its effect on others much more deeply, have become much more empathic to anyone I am attracted to and also seek to visually violate, and have removed myself from places and situations in which I might be tempted to do so, such as public (or private) beaches, or the gyms. I also don't have a home computer, for that reason, among others. But that is a significant reason.

The one major thing I hear in the story is how there was no responsible male-peer intervention, ever, regarding what you were doing. In fact, the opposite: two boys began harassing and violating a girl, and you took part, and were financially rewarded by boys for "keeping their secret" or for just being part of "the fun." I have to imagine this was a very frightening experience for her; and who knows what that behavior by three boys already triggered in her by way of being/feeling unsafe in the world, and who knows what followed in the near or distant future that had the same or a similarly dehumanizing and destructive impact on her spirit and sense of self, her sense of empowerment, her sense of safety, her sense of belonging to herself, not to males.

That lack of responsible intervention is fairly critical, in my view. This has to do, for me, in my own history, with learning "What is and is not OK to do." Now, "what's ok to do" from the radical feminist point of view I hold dear, is different for me than for those who hold to a more white conservative to liberal point of view. Liberally speaking, things we feel shame over may be "a cue" that what we're doing is not ok, either within our own ethical standards of behavior, or within our culture's. Needless the say, there is great overlap in what society condones, overtly or not, and what people do to harm one another. And of course cultures vary: some more strict on matters of sexuality, for example. But we know that "strictness" in moral preachings, for example, doesn't mean the preacher isn't a child molester. So we have a "culture of hypocrisy" in most white societies that I'm aware of, and Marimba Ani speaks to this here:
http://www.africawithin.com/ani/excerpt_chap6.htm

Left out of your story are bits of information that I'd be interested in knowing: what was your brother's role in your sexual development: was he older? If so, did he speak with you about "sex"? How did he treat girls and women? How did he speak with you about girls and women. If you were older, how did he see you treat, or hear you speak about women?

And, what were your care-givers/parents' role? Did they speak with you about sex and matters of harm and violation?

From whom did you most talk about sex with, say, before the age of eighteen, and what did they have to say about it? You mention aspects of this in what you have shared, so I mean in addition to what you've already told me.

I'll get to the heart of another aspect of my own radfem position.

If [a god] had a set of commandments, surely one of them would be "Thou shalt, as a white man, violate and dominate anyone and anything, or turn anyone into any thing."

As mentioned last time, I think "access" and "accountability" are two of the most critical factors in how and why sex crimes (and other violations of girls and women) occur. And each of these "factors" is usually and often not considered when "we" discuss male abuses of girls and women. This is partly because heterosexist patriarchal societies are organized to give men plenty of access to females of many ages, and plenty of permission to be dominating and violating. And such societies are notoriously horrendous when it comes to building any systems of meaningful accountability, particularly when it comes to boys and men being responsible around and not abusive to women and girls.

Of course society, white heterosexual male supremacist ones anyway, in my own experience, provides many means and methods with which to make abusive use of opportunities to be titillated and aroused by harmfully turning women into things. This is to say, society's institutions and industries do this for us, and supply us with a steady stream of objectified bodies, fashion, cosmetics, advertizing, and pornography being among the most egregious, but really all industries are complicit, as far as I can tell. Car manufactures that use objectified women to sell cars, auto mechanics who allow "pin-up" calendars in places of business, etc.

We also partake in "creating" the stream. Your story illustrates this well. We males seek out those who are vulnerable or unsuspecting. We find was to do our harmful deeds without being caught.

If you haven't yet, I recommend getting a book from the library, a graphic novel, called "Playboy," by Chester Brown. [This book is] about a white suburban teen male who uses pornography, and about its effect on his and girls' lives. Mostly about the effect on his. Mostly not from anything resembling a feminist perspective. This is no pro-feminist book. But it is "honest" about how society colludes with and created people who harm females in ways you describe, and appear to not know why we do it.

I'll send you a link. I think it will speak to you a lot.

http://www.amazon.com/Playboy-Chester-Brown/dp/0969670117

I'll respond more now to some of the stories you told me.

Swimming at 9 story: clearly an incident of male bonding over the domination, threatening, and physical violation of a girl. She was definitely violated, and the fact that she could have been more violated ought not allow us to pay close attention to what was done to her. Clearly, it is not due to responsible, ethical male-intervention that the behavior stopped. You indicate that the other boys "gave up" for whatever reasons, and then paid you. I was struck, when reading that story, how horrible that experience must have been for her, and how reinforcing this was for you, in terms of homosocial male supremacist behavior that harms women. You entered the scene, prompting them to violate her further, or with greater agility. And when the scene ends, what do you have? A memory of violation that you experienced as sexual, and some pocket change. No responsible intervention by males. Instead, not surprisingly there was encouragement mutually among the three males, and cooperation and collusion to take pleasure in making a female more vulnerable, threatened and unsafe, more violated, more harmed.

Lucky for her that it didn't go farther, and not lucky at all for her that it happened as it did, as I can well imagine it must have been a very scary and upsetting experience for her. Try and feel her experience of it, as much as possible. Being that helpless, overwhelmed in number and by gender. Imagine you are her, and two, then three boys are trying to do that to you, and one of them, the younger one, is "giving instruction." How do you feel about each boy in the story, when you are in place of the girl? How do you feel about a third boy entering the scene and encouraging them, offering them directions on how to be more successful at forcibly removing her clothing? This is a very sad story of sexual assault, by males of a female. How does that "reality check" leave you feeling?

One of the main functions of male supremacist bonding is to not encourage one another to feel what we should feel, to not do what we should do, so that we instead welcome and encourage each other to do things that are against the will and wishes of girls and women. It is in our interests, as men, who benefit mightily from male supremacy, to not disrupt one another's misogynistic behavior.

Likewise, with the two curtain shower story, how do you feel, as the woman spied on? What do you imagine she took from that experience? How about the girls whose skirts you looked up. Assuming, after the incident, someone shares with the girl, "I saw [him] looking up your skirt on the bus," try and feel how she would feel. I know you felt shame for doing it, and it sounds like "the fix" (the desire and the feeling during the acts of visual violation combined with your own levels of access), melded with your sense of privilege and entitlement, and also melded with what society allows or condones, even while it disingenuously simultaneously appears also to not condone it. I emphasize "appears" because I think little more than lip service is paid to the matter of men harming females. And when it is addressed, such as in religious institutions, it is often not coming from a place of understanding girls and women as equals, as full human beings. It is often coming from very misogynist places, loaded up with assumptions about "natural male desire" and "the power of female sexuality." (Clearly, it's THE POWER OF MALE SEXUALITY that's the issue here.) This socially mixed message is covertly and overtly stamped with approval by men as a class. Male supremacist society has created an atmosphere, an environment, an ethos, a culture, and has also shaped human males in ways that makes male heterosexual desire fused, to varying degrees, to repeatedly visually violating girls and women (visually violate, at least). This male-controlled society also provides men with plenty of access to "already visually violated" women. This is to say, men who aren't directly involved, do, socially, violate girls and women by proxy.

All of this is similar to my own story. Again, the only difference is "the objects" were male, not female.

It sounds like it was an early incident, perhaps the first, as you say, of you being an active participant in such an act of such overtly harmful violation.

What you did with girls, I did furtively in the locker room with boys, when I was a boy. Stealing glances, trying to see what, on some level, I knew would be considered wrong to "snapshot" in my brain, if said snapshots were made public. Obviously a huge difference in our own tales is that few to no males would have encouraged me to do what I was doing, and in fact I would have been beaten up had I been caught. For you, there was some money in your hand, and later the thrill of the violations at the time and upon reflection. Visually violating girls/women = sexual feelings/intense pleasure = sex. This equation was set up for me by me, and by aspects of the society around me.

I welcome you to use the language that seems most "natural" to describe what you were doing, and my "reframing" is meant to allow each of us to "see it differently." I think many males grow up feel pervy, for example, but don't grow up feeling like systematic sexual violators of others, like willful HARMERS of real human beings. We might feel shame and "bad" but rarely "responsible" for what we do. Even rarer still do we make ourselves accountable.

In my own experience, my mind worked hard to allow me to think I was somehow entitled to do these things. I was entitled because...(fill in the excuse, reason, "contributing factors", etc.), while also being afraid of doing them, sometimes a lot, with worry, with shame. It was especially important to me to not "get caught" which means doing things that generate shame, but are utterly and totally self-serving. The fact that there were no "meaningful, behavior-changing consequences," is what I hear in your story and my own.

Do you need to, and are you entitled to have access, via computer, to violated--incested, raped, and/or sexually exploited--women, and if so what is your argument for continuing to have this route of access?

Can you put (or have someone else put) up "blocks" in your computer so you don't have access to graphic pornography?

Can you imagine caring about women enough, feeling their pain of violation enough to not have a computer?

What comes up for you as you read all this? What does it stir up? Anger, confusion, shame, guilt, sadness? What else, if you are having feelings other than or in addition to those?

I'm not wishing to induce what is sometimes termed "toxic shame" in you, to be clear. In my experience, "toxic shame" becomes part of the fuel--the need to feel bad, to feel that one is breaking boundaries, is being naughty, is being anti-social--men, in relation to women, often have these needs, but what forms our behavior takes often depends on what life puts in our path, or what we get to first. So some end up being potheads instead, because there was no girl in the water, and there was an older guy urging you to "try this." This pot-sharer would still not likely responsibly intervene if you both, while stoned, then saw what was happening to that girl. You would likely not dive in and urge them on, unless the pot-dealer encouraged you to. Or maybe you would. But if you did, it is highly unlikely the pot-sharer would intervene.

You got a message of confirmation from at least one boy at school, but also from the two boys in the first story, and boys at camp that you wouldn't be normal if you DIDN'T want to violate girls/women: "There's something wrong with you if you don't look down girls' tops."

So, social permission? Check!
Access? Check!
Lack of accountability? Check!
Desire to violate? Check!

You and I had to arrange to be by ourselves, to learn how to be furtive to practice the behaviors necessary to "get away with" violating other human beings visually.

And in my life, each "practice session" that I got away with served to reinforce everything: my right to do it, my sense of entitlement ("if I did it yesterday, why shouldn't I do it again today? As long as the "fix" is stronger than any negative feelings, what's to stop me?), my arrangement of my social life to have access to people I could turn into objects for my arousal at their expense.

You and I still do have this entitlement and this access, if we want to continue doing this. And most men will applaud our efforts, or get off on hearing or seeing--if we use digital photographic or video technology--what we do, just as we have gotten off on seeing the photographic evidence of people being objectified, with histories we know nothing about. Once I saw a video online of a traditional college-aged male being photographed after becoming so drunk he was passed out, and also given a Viagra pill or two, so, even when passed out he got an erection. The "videographer" was laughing as he zoomed in on and played a bit with the male's erection. I felt something then that I try and keep close to my consciousness: I felt sick. Ill. I felt "This young man is being grossly violated totally without his knowledge, totally without any capacity to stop the behavior from going on." I shut it off probably one minute or so into viewing it, and haven't looked at any pornography since.

That was a few years ago. But prior to that, in the last ten or more years, my choice to "access" such material, almost exclusively "solo jerk-off sessions" by men, often taken by themselves (they adjust the camera angle, and it is clear they are alone in the room--but sometimes not: being "encouraged" by the man with the camera) has lessened more and more, because their humanity has become more and more real, and I have questioned, a lot, my "right" to view such material. I don't believe men have "the right" to violate others sexually, even by proxy. So now I don't do it, and am living to tell the tale. My life is not worse, in any way, for not using pornography. It is, in my mind, better.

This leads me to ask you: in what ways can you organize your life so that you do not have access to pre-violated women online?

I've got serious issues with twelve step stuff, btw, relating to matters of sexual behavior. I know of a heterosexual couple, in their fifties. He has been a compulsive user of pornography for decades, or, rather, a habitual violator of already violated women who he finds "sexy" in part because they are available to him and possibly also because they are repeatedly violated women. This last assumption may be giving him too much credit. The women from whom the images are made may not be that human to him, therefore he may seen them as "not violatable." He may have some fucked-up ideas about what it is, for many women, to be in situations in which images like these are made. He may believe they like it, desire it, or are paid well to do it. If any of that is so, then he's finding ways to shut out the knowledge that they are not acting with the level of agency he is, nor is he experiencing the harm they are likely experiencing.

I have spoken many times about my concerns about his behavior to the women, who is my friend. (I know him, but don't know him well at all. I've never spoken with him, for example.)

She told me that she didn't want to become "his mother" by policing him, by checking up on him, by repeatedly asking him "Are you using pornography again?" I asked her "Why is he entitled, in his own mind, to have a computer, if he uses it to violate often-raped women and engage in behavior that is deeply triggering and upsetting to you?" And, just to borrow from the twelve-step model, for the sake of making a point, I asked:

"If he were, instead, an alcoholic and wanted to give up drinking, for example, would it be better for him, if single, to move into an apartment in a community where there wasn't much drinking, or to move into a place above a bar or club?

She had never thought of this as an "access" issue. Nor, for certain, had he. I doubt he does to this day, except in a self-harmful way: "access equals me doing something I don't wish to do."

In the story about you and your brother finding something "softcore" you wondered, about getting erections, "Maybe you're getting ready to have it off." I think there may be some colloquial differences here, in the use of this speech. I'm not sure what that means, in other words. Does it mean "maybe you're getting ready to have an orgasm" (or to ejaculate)? "Have it off" is not an American English term. So I welcome the "translation."

I'm not aware of Mayfair magazine, as it must be uniquely Australian, or at least British. I don't think we have that magazine here in the U.S.

Someone had to sell you the magazines you didn't steal. Other males rented or owned or borrowed the hardcore stuff you all watched.

You're violative behavior intensified, according to your story of the communal shower block. And the use of mirrors. I have done each of those sorts of things, including in my thirties. (The mirror thing once when I was thirty, and the rest at a gym, where there were no curtains, just an open area in which naked men showered.)

I found this to be useful information:

"In the last few years, I have discovered porn on the internet. I first found it at uni but it was so slow it wasn't practical then. In the last 5 years, though, it has been my main way of looking at porn."

So clearly we need technology to have the kind of pleasurably violating access we desire. A slow modem = too much frustration, not enough fun and access.

It makes sense to me, given your sexual development, that you'd seek out what you do:
"I look at sites where people post photos they have taken of unsuspecting women getting changed and things like that. I also found some sites where there are totally explicit sex clips posted, many of them from standard porn sites and also some home made ones and you can just go on and see them without any signing in or anything."

Again, we note the level of "easy access" and anonymity that is a theme in your stories of violation of girls and women.

I would caution you that "being strong" is not what's called for, exactly, though there's plenty to be said for finding the will to behave differently, and to make that change long-term. I'd argue what's missing is a system of accountability, and your unquestioned "right of access" to high-speed computers with access to pornography sites.

I am glad you are in psychotherapy, although I doubt highly, that it would occur to the therapist to recommend that, for the sake of the women, you cut off your access to the Internet. But I'd really love to be proved wrong on that!!!

Please write again, as will I. And feel free to ask me questions about my own history, if this "self-disclosure" is feeling uneasy or too imbalanced.

My goal here is to participate in a process you don't wish to run from. So if anything he makes you want to "end it" please let me know, and we can discuss that further. Deal?

Email #3 from Aussieguy:
Definitely a deal.

Thanks again for your well considered reply. (I may keep thanking you all the time - don't read it as a grovelling gratitude on my part, but just me appreciating the value of your attention.)

I won't respond to everything you wrote today, but here are some parts.

Easy things first:
"Having it off" is the slang I used at that age to mean having sex.
Mayfair is a UK mag with pictures of women, highly sexualised nudity but no men or actual sex.
I don't have the Internet at home.

I think your framing of my story is very useful. I wrote it from my own perspective and a lot of it uses the language that I used about it to myself at the time, so it has some innocence, some false entitlement and some glossing-over-the-facts-of-the-violation about it. I have a better understanding of women's experience of the same situations now but you also bring out aspects that I haven't thought of or have pushed to the back of my mind.

About being public, a part of my behaviour change that I'm adopting is to 'call myself out' on my crap sexist behaviour. That involves opening up myself to the disapproval of my peers and relinquishing control of how the situation is dealt with. As well as that, part of my abusive behaviour has been to be very secretive, so part of my change is to spill the secret. Advice I have from the [online anti-pornography use site] is never to tell other people about porn addiction as part of my recovery but I disagree with that advice. That may be because the forum has a very firm "sex addiction" approach to the problem and not so much a "stop your abusive behaviour" approach. I think there are aspects of addiction to this behaviour and I think there are definite withdrawal symptoms but my motviation to stop comes from knowledge of the harm it does to women.

I totally agree with you about the role that a lack of meaningful consequences played in the development of my abusive behaviour. Obviously with the first incident when I was 9, I didn't tell anyone so it was down to the teenage boys who were as abusive as I was. I also agree that boys and men are positively taught to objectify and subjugate girls and women as a necessary part of being male. Another story I didn't tell last time is that when I was about 15, I was caught looking into my sister's room as she got changed. My mother gave me a talking to, just explaining that my sister had to have the ability to get changed in privacy. Although she subjectified my sister and her experience of the abuse and her approach was healthy, it didn't feel at all as though I was prevented from doing it again.

My brother and I never talked about sex at all in my memory. He is 2 years older than me and the only sexual experience I ever remember sharing with him is that time we found the porn magazine. I don't remember him talking about it at all then either. He was also reprimanded by our mother for a sexual abuse towards our sister and his consequences were as insignificant as mine. Actually, now another one comes back. My sister (she is my twin) and a school friend of hers went swimming in the river. My brother and I went down later and found that they had taken their swimmers off and were swimming naked. Her friend grabbed her swimmers and put them on but my sister was forced to hide under a rock ledge and we kept trying to look under and see her. None of us ever talked about that at all.

My father's only discussions with me about sex were a lesson or two when I was about 8 on the biology of reproduction and later a brief discussion about the importance of finding a partner whose sexual needs fit in with my own. There was never any discussion with me about abuse or harm, masturbation, or anything that related to any kind of morals around sex at all, that I can recall now.

As I said, more to say next time.

I don't have any entitlement or any need to have access to violated women. I don't have any entitlement to have access to any part of any woman's (or girl's, boy's, man's, dog's or giraffe's) body that she doesn't actively give me permission to have access to. That includes seeing her body. I am very aware that the desire for access is a desire for power over her and that my sense of entitlement is an example of the persistence of male supremacy in this society.

Part of my first realisation that my use of porn and objectification of women was wrong came from noticing the sexism of it. I have sexual relationships with people I am in love with. I have been in love with men and with women and have had loving relationships with each. But I only objectify women and only look at pornographic pictures of women. When I finally looked at that fact (that was staring me in the fact for 5 years before), I was forced to confront the sexist nature of porn. Since then, it has been a gradual building of understanding of the deeply misogynist nature of our society and (more slowly and uncomfortably) the ways in which that misogyny is threaded through my whole life and shows in my behaviour. The process continues.

That's all for now
END OF POST.

Pornography Use and Other Violations: A Conversation Between Two White Men, part two

Here are the links to the whole conversation:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7
Part 8
Part 9

CAUTION: What follows is a conversation between two men about their abusive behaviors toward girls, women, and others. Any survivor of child sexual abuse, rape, or other form of sexual violation and objectification may be quite triggered by portions of this exchange. All violative behaviors are named as such by at least one of the two people, critically, with remorse and/or regret. Both people do not currently use pornography.

Response/email #2 from USguy:
I am very glad to connect with you.

Regarding this portion of your email:

"There is a lot to say to you about my situation and where I'm up to etc. if you want to get involved and help. I know you're a random stranger, possibly from another country, so you'll have to set a boundary on how deeply you want to attend to me in particular. I'm ready to write you about 500 chaotic words on where I'm at, and have a good D&M if you're up for it."

What country do you live in? I'm in the U.S.

I'd prefer to see this connection as "mutually beneficial" than "me helping you." I'm not sure to what degree I can be of help, for one thing, and think it might be good for both of us, in terms of possibly developing a model that is radically feminist, not intensely white male supremacist and Protestant to boot.

I am not easily shocked. Tell me whatever you want. I can be upset by things, of course, as I'm sure you can, so I'll just let you know when something is upsetting to me, and why.

How does that sound as a way to proceed? The only other thing I'd ask, if we're going to correspond, is that weeks not go by between correspondence. I'll explain that request: I've been in many, many situations with men in which I am engaged in a process that attempts to hold them accountable to various things that we men do that harms women. And my experience is this: virtually all men find every reason in the world to deal with anything and everything else first. Everything is a higher priority than dealing with our own misogyny and sexist behavior. And I'm so "done" with men who don't commit to a process. This process could include, however, you letting me know "I'm feeling really overwhelmed right now." I don't wish for you to be invisible in the process, or to develop a process that simply isn't working for you. Does that make sense?

So where are you at, and tell me a bit about your history with pornography. Especially this: how old were you when you first encountered it? And what were the circumstances? Take me through your teen years, in terms of answering that. I find that the early parts of men's stories often hold lots of information that is important. And I'm also not one to take a psychoanalytic approach to explaining why men use pornography. I believe we use it primarily for three reasons:

1. We can. (It's mass produced and made available to us.)
2. We desire to. (And we are, or believe we are, entitled to objectify women in any number of ways, at our own whim.)
3. There are virtually no systems of accountability set up to keep our behavior from harming women. (Which is also to say, there are usually no consequences so meaningful as to warrant us shifting our behavior dramatically.)

I look forward to hearing back from you soon.

Response/email #2 from Aussieguy:
Thanks for your reply. I feel very comfortable with all of it and I will respond to the specifics and questions a bit at a time.

About commitments, I am happy to commit to ongoing and frequent communication. I don't check this email every day but I can confidently say that I will be able to email about twice a week. What we commit to other than frequency of communication can be an ongoing discussion.

I would like it to be mutually beneficial too. I'm interested in what you are trying to gain, so that I can help our contact to give us both what we're looking for.

I'm in Australia.

So, here's an intro to my story. I'm sure there'll be more to fill in later.

When I was about 9, I was swimming at the creek just near our house. My brother and sister went home and I stayed a little bit longer. A couple of teenage boys and a teenage girl came down to swim. The boys started swimming around the girl and trying to take her clothes off her. They told me to help. I swam over and was very excited. I started telling them all the things they needed to undo to take the girl's top off and things. After harrassing the girl for a while, they gave up without taking her clothes off. We all got out of the creek and the boys gave me all the change out of their wallets and told me not to tell anyone.

I used to think that this incident was the beginning of my objectification of women. It was probably a significant event but I now think more along the lines of what you said: "I believe we use it primarily for three reasons:


1. We can. (It's mass produced and made available to us.)
2. We desire to." ... etc

At primary school, I started perving up girls' dresses. I also discovered wanking when I was 10 or 11 and still at primary school. I used to position myself on the bus so that I could look up a girl's dress across the aisle if she sat the right way.

At high school, I continued perving on girls, looking up their skirts as they went up stairs, and looking down their tops. I thought it was a kind of seedy thing to do but I did it anyway. A friend of mine at school said "There's somethign wrong with you if you don't look down girls' tops." I thought that wanking was wrong as well and that I would have to stop when I started ejaculating or people would find out.

We lived in the bush from when I was 10 until I went to uni. In the summer, I used to watch people who came down to the river form the other side. I saw 3 women sunbathing in small bikinis and I hid and watched them and masturbated. After that, I used to come down to the river often and I sometimes saw people swimming naked. I would masturbate then too. Whenever I heard voices down at the river, I wanted to come and see who it was.

When I was about 14 or 15, I found a porn mag at a family friend's house. I can't remember what magazine it was but it wasn't very hardcore. My brother and I looked at it. We wondered why your penis gets hard when you look at the pictures. I remember saying "Maybe you're getting ready to have it off."

When I was about 16, I was camping with friends. Someone brought a few copies of Mayfair magazine and we all had a look at that. I was really drawn to it and kept going back to have another look.

After that, I started buying some of the magazines that you don't have to be 18 to buy. They're pretty sexist but the pictures are not that explicit, although they are fully nude. I also started stealing the ones in packets from the newsagents.

When I moved to Sydney for uni, I discovered the restricted premises where you can buy hardcore porn. I started buying those magazines then, and we also watched some porn movies that someone got from somewhere. They were really hardcore, with scenes of two penises fucking the same vagina and stuff. I remember thinking at the time that the sex is really not loving or nice at all.

After I left uni, I travelled around for a while and continued buying porn magazines. I also kept perving on women. When I have stayed in youth hostel dorms, I have lain awake with my eyes nearly closed and watched while a woman checked to see that I was 'asleep' and then quickly got changed.

My perving has gone to shameful lengths. I was on a little camp once and there was a communal shower block. The showers had a curtain and then another curtain for a door. I pulled the outer curtain open a little way when a woman was showering so that when she opened the other curtain, I would be able to see her. When she did that, she saw me and was very alarmed and pulled her curtain closed again and reached out for her towel. I was very ashamed.

A few times, I have used mirrors to look in on women in the shower.

In the last few years, I have discovered porn on the internet. I first found it at uni but it was so slow it wasn't practical then. In the last 5 years, though, it has been my main way of looking at porn. I look at sites where people post photos they have taken of unsuspecting women getting changed and things like that. I also found some sites where there are totally explicit sex clips posted, many of them from standard porn sites and also some home made ones and you can just go on and see them without any signing in or anything.

I'm back at uni again now and I have to go to a class so I will finish this story later. I'll just say for now that I think it's time I stopped this shit. I'm on a new run of being strong with it a the moment and seeing a counsellor and it's going well.

until soon
END OF POST.

Pornography Use and Other Violations: A Conversation Between Two White Men, part one

This is the first part of a multi-part post. Here are the links to the rest of the series:
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7
Part 8
Part 9

CAUTION: What follows is a conversation between two men about their abusive behaviors toward girls, women, and others. Any survivor of child sexual abuse, rape, or other form of sexual violation and objectification may be quite triggered by portions of this exchange. All violative behaviors are named as such by at least one of the two people, critically, with remorse and/or regret. Both people do not currently use pornography.

What follows is a conversation that has transpired (and continues) by email, between a profeminist man in the US and another one in Australia. There are places both of significant agreement and disagreement. The correspondence has been and will be shared with me (and you) as long as I use no one's name, which, primarily for the sake of the privacy of a woman involved, I'll honor. (I know the US guy but have had no knowledge of the Aussie guy, other than reading the exchange that follows in its "unabridged" form. I'd put the whole thing out there, but I think there's some places of repetition, so am making this more streamlined than the originals.) I find it, overall, to be a responsible conversation.

First contact:
Email #1 from USguy to Aussieguy:
As I understand it, you have found Andrea Dworkin's writings to be very useful, and would like some support around giving up the habit of using pornography.

I've been an activist in the feminist anti-pornography movement, and in other areas dealing with systemic violence against and exploitation of women by men, which includes, of course how every individual man regards (through behavior) women's humanity and right to privacy and dignity.

I gave up using pornography years ago. I know there are many approaches, and have spoken with many men over the years about how to do so. Rarely, though, do the men ground their motives and desires for change by sharing the compassionate concerns of a radical feminist who understood, more deeply than do most people, what the cost to women is, individually and as a class, of maintaining a pornography industry. So I am encouraged by your commitment to learning and changing behavior due to reading the work of someone who has written so astutely about the subject of turning women into objects for men's use and unjust gratification.

I look forward to hearing from you soon, and can hopefully offer meaningful woman-centered support in this area.

First response (email #1) from Aussieguy to USguy:
Thanks for getting in touch.

Yeah, I was saying to [woman's name removed] that reading Andrea Dworkin's Pornography really made me understand how my entrapment by porn is illusory and I'm actually empowered to choose it or not. It made the choice to stop objectifying women seem totally real.

It comes as part of a longer project, of course. I've been [part of an online support group, the membership of which is seeking to give up using pornography], seeing a counsellor, doing a little bit of work on a modified 12-step programme and stuff like that. I originally decided to give up porn about 7 years ago but slipped back in within about 6 months. Since then I've had times of putting varying amounts of effort into it and also discovered a few things. I noticed how it's become harder to stop as I've hated it more. Someone described that once as "defining the battle" or something, that really rung true for me - now that I've identified that behaviour as the one I'm challenging, it's in my mind constantly. I've also discovered how much broader it is than porn. Objectification of women enters into my life practically every hour and is so habitual that I had no idea how much I do it. I've found that parts of my life are structured around creating opportunities to view porn or perve on women.

I'm glad to hear you're keen to offer support, and that you seem to be coming at it from a pro-feminist perspective too. It's been really hard to find people to talk to about it who fully identify with my analysis of the porn industry and its place in society. I don't think I'm evil but I think that the mass media porn industry is really horrible and my support of it is a serious thorn in my conscience.

There is a lot to say to you about my situation and where I'm up to etc. if you want to get involved and help. I know you're a random stranger, possibly from another country, so you'll have to set a boundary on how deeply you want to attend to me in particular. I'm ready to write you about 500 chaotic words on where I'm at, and have a good D&M if you're up for it.

I'm interested to hear about what you think, on reflection, were the most important things in your giving up porn.

good to hear from you
END OF POST.