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.
Correspondence from Aussieguy:
I agree with your approach as you describe it in challenging your friend over his treatment of his wife. I can feel that my desire to objectify women is part of a selfish mood I am in. At the same time, I have an urge for instant gratification of all my other desires as well. I also agree that in choosing to indulge my desire to voyeur and objectify women, I am violating real people, potentially harming them and in any case taking something I have no right to take. I really benefit (and more so, the women I otherwise harm may benefit) from your unflinching and clear statements about what is going on here.
It is also an important point you make about remembering who has the power. I reread my description of what has been going on and I definitely wrote it from the position that these things were 'happening to me', rather than that I was behaving in these ways. I picked up that language from reading about, and supporting my partner in, depression. In that case, it is important to remember that depression happens to people and is not something they are doing themselves. Our case is different and you are right to remind me to always acknowledge that I am behaving in this way and I am making an empowered decision to do so. (Empowered by the very system I profess to be fighting against but that makes no difference.) The emotional issues underlying it are another matter and I would feel justified in using that type of language if I had been talking about an emotion I was experiencing.
I had a very telling insight into my fantasies and what turns me on. I found that in all my voyeuring fantasies, an essential ingredient is that the woman doesn't want to be seen naked and either doesn't know I can see her or is embarrassed when she does know. It horrifies me that I carry that desire around but my behaviour has been an equally horrible indication of what's going on inside me anyway. The fantasies I have about actual sex are entirely consensual but there is still the problem that a woman's sexuality exists for my pleasure.
I don't know what to do about that desire. Did you find a way to address it? I have an idea that it is so much a learned fantasy that if I manage not to indulge it and reinforce it, it will fade away on its own. (I don't expect that to be a quick result.) Do you have any experience with this one?
On power again, it occurred to me that sometimes the important issue isn't that men are empowered by pornorgaphy or objectification of women, it is that we are empowered by the unwritten rules of society to make and view pornography and to join in the objectification of women.
(This is a slightly random collection of paragraphs but there are a few different things I wanted to chuck in here.)
I had a sudden insight a year or two ago about 'the gaze'. I remember when I was smaller, when I walked past some older kids and they just sat and looked at me without acknowledging me in any way, it was very threatening. Still now, I feel threatened if I'm in that situation with someone that I think is capable of doing me serious harm. I don't necessarily think they're going to attack me but I'm on the defensive in case. I think it's an instinctive thing. When you're in a space with someone else, if you're not being friendly and sharing the space, then it's presumed that you're in competition in some way and not to be trusted.
When I perve at women, I don't acknowledge them at all or engage in communication with them as people and I realised that I am doing exactly the same to them. It's a rare, self-assured woman who feels secure against attack from a full-grown man and I was forced to realise that just the act of voyeuring a woman is threatening her. In addition to the political implications of men's access to women's bodies - which is the context in which it takes place and provides the fuel for women's nervousness - the act itself is an aggressive one in a really basic, physiological way.
That goes unnoticed a lot of the time because we spend so much time sharing space with strangers and not communicating with them so we're in that threatened, competitive mindset already. It would be good for society if we were to act to berak down that separation in general. But I think actively watching someone takes it a step further. Of course, I can imagine women not wanting to be talked to by every man they meet and 'unwanted attention' is rightly part of the definition of sexual harassment. I don't mean we should engage women in conversation while we stare at them. I have started a habit with all people of meeting their eyes, giving some minimal kind of smile, nod or other acknowledgement and looking away. I do that with people I walk past in the street, people on the bus etc. To be genuinely respectful, it needs to be accompanied by minding my own business after that and not ogling women, otherwise it's pretty fake.
I didn't quite get the part where you said:
But at some point the fact of paying for access to dehumanising images of people, or of images of dehumanised people--whichever most applied, was a main reason for not seeking out Internet pornography, or any other pornography. I considered that a more humane reason, one in greater consistency with more of my professed and deeply held values, than "just" not looking at it because I didn't want to pay for it.
I think I probably know what you mean but maybe you could say it again. For me, not paying for porn has also never been a matter of boycotting the industry. I have paid for magazines and once I even subscribed to a website so I could look at the hardcore stuff and archives they had. Giving my own money to those companies felt pretty nasty but my political brain tells me that I'm giving just as much support by looking at the free stuff because it's all funded by ads and sponsors who pay when I look at it or follow their links. Try as I might, I can't imagine that I'm not supporting the industry (financially, as well as philosophically) by looking at free porn sites.
Sometimes I think the problems all stem from the fact that boys don't play with dolls. That's a bit glib but it comes from this train of thoughts:
- Men's sexual abuse of women is selfish. All levels of abuse and violation have a common thread of men satisfying a desire regardless of whether the woman we use wants to take part or not.
- Environmental destruction also takes place for selfish reasons.
- Selfishness is about seeing oneself as the only real being and everyone else as objects in one's world.
- Playing role plays with dolls is training in imagining someone else's perspective the world and understanding what they would do in their position
- GI Joe doesn't really cut it
I am not in denial in a general sense about the fact that
"When you or I choose or have chosen to objectify someone, we are being oppressive jerks. We may feel "weak" but we are behaving in ways that strengthen male supremacy."
I don't always have it in mind as I walk around and look at women in the world though. It is a real training to go through and keeping on bringing myself back to these facts seems like the way to do it.
It's not only training in the empathy that I failed to learn as a kid, but also unlearning lots of bullshit I was taught - and finding ways to deal with the fact that most men still hold onto the bullshit.
Thanks again for all your correspondence
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
Pornography Use and Other Violations: A Conversation Between Two White Men, part eight
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.
Correspondence from USguy:
Thanks for that honest update.
The level of struggle you describe, or, rather, the particular "draws" are ones I have had to deal with over the years, both before and after giving up the practice of violating already violated, or at the very least self-objectified, human beings by looking at "home-made" pornography.
This raises a few matters for me. At least one is somewhat tangential, while others are more directly responsive to the emotional-political conflict you're currently facing.
One tangent: Part of my own process for not using pornography was to understand how and to what degree misogyny + racism/white supremacy + capitalism + Western cultural imperialism/genocide = the possibility of, the practice of, and the mass access to pornography as an industry of human destruction. So, for example, decades ago I subscribed to Playgirl magazine. Once my access to pornography was primarily or only online, I never went to sites that required me to pay money. This wasn't done initially as a "grand gesture" at repudiating the financial support of racist, sexism capitalism, but, rather, was more due to the fact that I tend not to pay for things I can rather easily get (legally) for free. In that sense, my motivation was much more in keeping with my "recycle, resuse" and "anti-consumerist" values. (Why purchase cardboard boxes, for example, when book stores and hospitals throw out great boxes every day?)
But at some point the fact of paying for access to dehumanising images of people, or of images of dehumanised people--whichever most applied, was a main reason for not seeking out Internet pornography, or any other pornography. I considered that a more humane reason, one in greater consistency with more of my professed and deeply held values, than "just" not looking at it because I didn't want to pay for it.
The leads to a longer conversation we can have some time, if you wish, about why and how it is that "mass destructive consumption, capitalism, exploitation, greed, and objectification of human beings (turning people into things, or pornographised "genres" of human beings) become valued and necessary in contemporary Western post-industrialised societies, to the demise of humans, non-human beings, and the Earth. (How destruction is seen as "a right worth defending" for example. How "selling sex[ism]" or manufacturing and distributing racist sexxx is turned into a "social good" rather than being seen and felt, en masse, as a social harm. (Note: NOT a social/spiritual SIN; not the way the white Right holds looking at pornography or renting human beings for sex. Harm, as in political, emotional, psychic, economic, environmental harm. Human rights violation-type harm, not a "you're going to hell if you keep doing that" kind of harm.) Enough on that tangent for now.
Back to what you are struggling with. I think, once again, how we frame up and understand our challenges has a lot to do with how effectively we can approach and deal with them. So, note in your language who or what has the power. Often, in white male supremacist societies, the opppressed, in various and absurd ways, are imbued, by oppressors, as "possessing the power" to control the people who are socially-politically-economically dominant, when, in fact, the opposite is the case.
Pornographers and pimps have a kind of power that is real, to harm people in many ways. Procurers of women and others for sex or sexxx also have power to coerce and manipulate, as well as to exploit, abuse, and kill other human beings, usually with impunity, if not also fanclubs.
And you and I have real power, status, privilege, entitlements, and access to harm others at will, including by voyeuring them, by making them objects of our violative attention, by seeking to possess something of them, like a snapshot of a woman in a certain shirt or skirt, for us to "hold" in our minds for our own emotional and/or sexual and/or political gratification.
Psychotherapy, on the whole, and society, on the whole, if not Right-wing, tends to view voyeuristic activity as natural and normal if done by heterosexual males to adult females. It is not generally understood as "political opportunism" or "violative use of power" by those of us who have in the past or still do voyeur others.
A significant part of my shift in stopping voyeurism, including when walking down a street at night and noticing lights on in someone's home, and including when seeing a "cute man" walking or standing somewhere, came about when I would maintain a "he is like me" or "he is not different than me" or, better yet, "I cannot know his history of being violated" consciousness that I didn't chose to pack up when I wanted a quick fix by visually violating others.
Understanding what we're doing is not "a point of weakness" or "a period of slipping" but is more accurately "a willful act backed by powerful entitlements and privileges" shifts, for me, how I understand what I've done in the past, and do very infrequently, if at all, now. Keeping "the other" person real, in other words, not necessarily known, but not projected onto, not turned into my fantasy object, is critical to my profeminist political practice, which is to say, my practice of being a humane human being.
Anyone I choose to gaze at has a personal life and history, with feelings that are not accessible to me and a past that may or may not include experiences of terrifying violation or gross objectification. That not only means that they may be vulnerable and sensitive to being visually violated, but also that they are not "mine" to look at. It means other people don't exist "for me".
For whites and men, especially, and for Westerners generally, we are raised to believe everyone and everything is "for us". The Earth, animals, the air, and oppressed people, allegedly exist for us, for me. I am the center, a "white whole" of consumption, greed, exploitation, and abuse, whereby my actions of harm and destruction, due to my status and entitlements, are seen as ethically ok or good or appropriate. Sometimes our (white men's) actions are actually mandated, enforced, policed, and encoded, meaning that if we don't do them we are ostracised by our social-political peer group.
That we can surround ourselves with people, including white men, who do not approve or condone and celebrate white male supremacist use and abuse only means we have chosen to take in another perspective, one rooted, hopefully, in the experiences of the oppressed, not the "generosity of character" of the oppressor. (As long as we, white men, are oppressors, individual acts of kindness and small group decisions to not do as much harm are relatively ineffectual, except in our own personal lives and the lives of those around us.) You and I are agreeing to correspond, and you or I could opt out with little to no consequence, right? And if this conversation stays between us, who benefits, concretely?
I can surround myself with radical feminist and womanist friends, but can also do whatever the fuck I want when they are not around, right? Unless part of my connection to them involves me not hiding practices I know they would rightfully, appropriately challenge and critique.
So the process, for me, involves developing an ethical, political, spiritual center that doesn't place "me" at the center, but, instead, places the pain and degradation of those I am entitled to harm at the center of my emotional/sensible/intellectual world. At the same time it means creating and supporting systems of accountability that mean that my private acts of harming others cannot be privatised.
I do get it that someone, an oppressor, can act in ways that harm others while not feeling particularly empowered, and while not intending to do any oppressive harm. But choosing to look at a woman (or a man) in an objectifying way is a political act, and never is not. It might also reflect or be tangled up with other struggles in one's life.
A few months ago a heterosexual husband told me that he thought the reason he'd been more condescending to his female spouse was that he was "depressed lately". I don't remember all of how I responded to him, but I didn't accept "depression" as a legitimate reason for oppressing his wife. First, he oppresses her when he isn't depressed too. Second, even if being depressed renders him a more obnoxious and oppressive mate, unless he's taking action to alleviate that depression, and to find other ways to manifest it, he's choosing, whether he owns it or not, to be an oppressive jerk.
When you or I choose or have chosen to objectify someone, we are being oppressive jerks. We may feel "weak" but we are behaving in ways that strengthen male supremacy. We cannot or ought not be in denial about that. (Not that you are, necessarily.)
I challenge you to own your entitlements and power when you choose to behave exploitively and violatively around one or more women. To name your behavior as violating, as harmful to her, as misogynistic, and as in service to male supremacist mandates. In some sense we may be behaving cowardly when we turn away from profeminist values and behave patriarchally. But in the actual social world, cowardice kills, or, in this case, violates. You and I and every man have to decide, moment to moment, who we are going to be in a world that supports us having virtually constant visual and other contact with women. We have to estimate to cost to women's humanity of us having that access and entitlement. We have to decide who we are going to be and become. And we have to, in my view, priortise women's safety and freedom above our own fleeting wishes to feel something akin to pleasure by degrading and unethically intruding upon other human beings. Why we feel pleasure when we are violating others is a question worth asking, but not if it means continuing the behavior in search of the answer.
I'll wait to hear back from you about what you do and don't agree with above, before blathering on further.
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.
Correspondence from USguy:
Thanks for that honest update.
The level of struggle you describe, or, rather, the particular "draws" are ones I have had to deal with over the years, both before and after giving up the practice of violating already violated, or at the very least self-objectified, human beings by looking at "home-made" pornography.
This raises a few matters for me. At least one is somewhat tangential, while others are more directly responsive to the emotional-political conflict you're currently facing.
One tangent: Part of my own process for not using pornography was to understand how and to what degree misogyny + racism/white supremacy + capitalism + Western cultural imperialism/genocide = the possibility of, the practice of, and the mass access to pornography as an industry of human destruction. So, for example, decades ago I subscribed to Playgirl magazine. Once my access to pornography was primarily or only online, I never went to sites that required me to pay money. This wasn't done initially as a "grand gesture" at repudiating the financial support of racist, sexism capitalism, but, rather, was more due to the fact that I tend not to pay for things I can rather easily get (legally) for free. In that sense, my motivation was much more in keeping with my "recycle, resuse" and "anti-consumerist" values. (Why purchase cardboard boxes, for example, when book stores and hospitals throw out great boxes every day?)
But at some point the fact of paying for access to dehumanising images of people, or of images of dehumanised people--whichever most applied, was a main reason for not seeking out Internet pornography, or any other pornography. I considered that a more humane reason, one in greater consistency with more of my professed and deeply held values, than "just" not looking at it because I didn't want to pay for it.
The leads to a longer conversation we can have some time, if you wish, about why and how it is that "mass destructive consumption, capitalism, exploitation, greed, and objectification of human beings (turning people into things, or pornographised "genres" of human beings) become valued and necessary in contemporary Western post-industrialised societies, to the demise of humans, non-human beings, and the Earth. (How destruction is seen as "a right worth defending" for example. How "selling sex[ism]" or manufacturing and distributing racist sexxx is turned into a "social good" rather than being seen and felt, en masse, as a social harm. (Note: NOT a social/spiritual SIN; not the way the white Right holds looking at pornography or renting human beings for sex. Harm, as in political, emotional, psychic, economic, environmental harm. Human rights violation-type harm, not a "you're going to hell if you keep doing that" kind of harm.) Enough on that tangent for now.
Back to what you are struggling with. I think, once again, how we frame up and understand our challenges has a lot to do with how effectively we can approach and deal with them. So, note in your language who or what has the power. Often, in white male supremacist societies, the opppressed, in various and absurd ways, are imbued, by oppressors, as "possessing the power" to control the people who are socially-politically-economically dominant, when, in fact, the opposite is the case.
Pornographers and pimps have a kind of power that is real, to harm people in many ways. Procurers of women and others for sex or sexxx also have power to coerce and manipulate, as well as to exploit, abuse, and kill other human beings, usually with impunity, if not also fanclubs.
And you and I have real power, status, privilege, entitlements, and access to harm others at will, including by voyeuring them, by making them objects of our violative attention, by seeking to possess something of them, like a snapshot of a woman in a certain shirt or skirt, for us to "hold" in our minds for our own emotional and/or sexual and/or political gratification.
Psychotherapy, on the whole, and society, on the whole, if not Right-wing, tends to view voyeuristic activity as natural and normal if done by heterosexual males to adult females. It is not generally understood as "political opportunism" or "violative use of power" by those of us who have in the past or still do voyeur others.
A significant part of my shift in stopping voyeurism, including when walking down a street at night and noticing lights on in someone's home, and including when seeing a "cute man" walking or standing somewhere, came about when I would maintain a "he is like me" or "he is not different than me" or, better yet, "I cannot know his history of being violated" consciousness that I didn't chose to pack up when I wanted a quick fix by visually violating others.
Understanding what we're doing is not "a point of weakness" or "a period of slipping" but is more accurately "a willful act backed by powerful entitlements and privileges" shifts, for me, how I understand what I've done in the past, and do very infrequently, if at all, now. Keeping "the other" person real, in other words, not necessarily known, but not projected onto, not turned into my fantasy object, is critical to my profeminist political practice, which is to say, my practice of being a humane human being.
Anyone I choose to gaze at has a personal life and history, with feelings that are not accessible to me and a past that may or may not include experiences of terrifying violation or gross objectification. That not only means that they may be vulnerable and sensitive to being visually violated, but also that they are not "mine" to look at. It means other people don't exist "for me".
For whites and men, especially, and for Westerners generally, we are raised to believe everyone and everything is "for us". The Earth, animals, the air, and oppressed people, allegedly exist for us, for me. I am the center, a "white whole" of consumption, greed, exploitation, and abuse, whereby my actions of harm and destruction, due to my status and entitlements, are seen as ethically ok or good or appropriate. Sometimes our (white men's) actions are actually mandated, enforced, policed, and encoded, meaning that if we don't do them we are ostracised by our social-political peer group.
That we can surround ourselves with people, including white men, who do not approve or condone and celebrate white male supremacist use and abuse only means we have chosen to take in another perspective, one rooted, hopefully, in the experiences of the oppressed, not the "generosity of character" of the oppressor. (As long as we, white men, are oppressors, individual acts of kindness and small group decisions to not do as much harm are relatively ineffectual, except in our own personal lives and the lives of those around us.) You and I are agreeing to correspond, and you or I could opt out with little to no consequence, right? And if this conversation stays between us, who benefits, concretely?
I can surround myself with radical feminist and womanist friends, but can also do whatever the fuck I want when they are not around, right? Unless part of my connection to them involves me not hiding practices I know they would rightfully, appropriately challenge and critique.
So the process, for me, involves developing an ethical, political, spiritual center that doesn't place "me" at the center, but, instead, places the pain and degradation of those I am entitled to harm at the center of my emotional/sensible/intellectual world. At the same time it means creating and supporting systems of accountability that mean that my private acts of harming others cannot be privatised.
I do get it that someone, an oppressor, can act in ways that harm others while not feeling particularly empowered, and while not intending to do any oppressive harm. But choosing to look at a woman (or a man) in an objectifying way is a political act, and never is not. It might also reflect or be tangled up with other struggles in one's life.
A few months ago a heterosexual husband told me that he thought the reason he'd been more condescending to his female spouse was that he was "depressed lately". I don't remember all of how I responded to him, but I didn't accept "depression" as a legitimate reason for oppressing his wife. First, he oppresses her when he isn't depressed too. Second, even if being depressed renders him a more obnoxious and oppressive mate, unless he's taking action to alleviate that depression, and to find other ways to manifest it, he's choosing, whether he owns it or not, to be an oppressive jerk.
When you or I choose or have chosen to objectify someone, we are being oppressive jerks. We may feel "weak" but we are behaving in ways that strengthen male supremacy. We cannot or ought not be in denial about that. (Not that you are, necessarily.)
I challenge you to own your entitlements and power when you choose to behave exploitively and violatively around one or more women. To name your behavior as violating, as harmful to her, as misogynistic, and as in service to male supremacist mandates. In some sense we may be behaving cowardly when we turn away from profeminist values and behave patriarchally. But in the actual social world, cowardice kills, or, in this case, violates. You and I and every man have to decide, moment to moment, who we are going to be in a world that supports us having virtually constant visual and other contact with women. We have to estimate to cost to women's humanity of us having that access and entitlement. We have to decide who we are going to be and become. And we have to, in my view, priortise women's safety and freedom above our own fleeting wishes to feel something akin to pleasure by degrading and unethically intruding upon other human beings. Why we feel pleasure when we are violating others is a question worth asking, but not if it means continuing the behavior in search of the answer.
I'll wait to hear back from you about what you do and don't agree with above, before blathering on further.
Pornography Use and Other Violations: A Conversation Between Two White Men, part seven
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.
Correspondence from Aussieguy:
I'm having a bit of trouble lately, finding myself looking in lighted windows that I walk past or my eyes following women I see in revealing clothing of any kind. It doesn't even need to be clothing that will actually reveal her body, just something that makes me think it could or may or reminds me of something that would. I have weakened a couple of times just today, sneaking glimpses before looking back at my work.
Not looking at porn has continued to be obvious to me, though, and fairly easy. I have had a few occasions where I have been tempted towards finding a video with a sex scene in it to watch, but I haven't succumbed to it. I had a real clear vision of the seediness of porn the other morning. It was as I was waking up and it just flashed into my head, I don't know why, and then it was gone. Before that, I had only had a kind of political understanding of why it is wrong but I think I had a kind of moment of real empathy and understood properly what I hate about it for a second. Now I can't get that clarity back but it helps just having had that one moment.
I feel as though porn is really in the past for me. Even though I still get these impulses to look at it, I feel like my change of habit has been thorough enough to mean I will be able to resist them now. I can't say the same for objectifying women in general. I'm still struggling constantly with that and failing enough of the time for it to show in my behaviour sometimes. I think your advice about hearing the stories of women's experience of sexism is a good start and I've followed a few links from Julian's blog and read some stories there. I think I have a new round of work to do in eradicating this behaviour but I think maybe I need to keep reading and working on my empathy and understanding before it will be very effective in the long term. In the meantime, there is no harm in continuing to actively pull myself up when I catch myself at it.
That's enough for now
END OF POST.
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.
Correspondence from Aussieguy:
I'm having a bit of trouble lately, finding myself looking in lighted windows that I walk past or my eyes following women I see in revealing clothing of any kind. It doesn't even need to be clothing that will actually reveal her body, just something that makes me think it could or may or reminds me of something that would. I have weakened a couple of times just today, sneaking glimpses before looking back at my work.
Not looking at porn has continued to be obvious to me, though, and fairly easy. I have had a few occasions where I have been tempted towards finding a video with a sex scene in it to watch, but I haven't succumbed to it. I had a real clear vision of the seediness of porn the other morning. It was as I was waking up and it just flashed into my head, I don't know why, and then it was gone. Before that, I had only had a kind of political understanding of why it is wrong but I think I had a kind of moment of real empathy and understood properly what I hate about it for a second. Now I can't get that clarity back but it helps just having had that one moment.
I feel as though porn is really in the past for me. Even though I still get these impulses to look at it, I feel like my change of habit has been thorough enough to mean I will be able to resist them now. I can't say the same for objectifying women in general. I'm still struggling constantly with that and failing enough of the time for it to show in my behaviour sometimes. I think your advice about hearing the stories of women's experience of sexism is a good start and I've followed a few links from Julian's blog and read some stories there. I think I have a new round of work to do in eradicating this behaviour but I think maybe I need to keep reading and working on my empathy and understanding before it will be very effective in the long term. In the meantime, there is no harm in continuing to actively pull myself up when I catch myself at it.
That's enough for now
END OF POST.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)