Beginning the Path to
Nonassholedom
by Dim Undercellar
Quite a few men have asked me what I did to get off of porn and
on the road to seeing women as more than just receptacles for my
manly dudeness and its associated parts. The answer is actually
pretty simple.
When it comes to your actions, the first step is to notice and
analyze. For instance: you are approaching the door to the supermarket.
You are about the same distance from it and are moving at about
the same speed as a woman, who is also headed for the door. You
quicken your step a pace, she slows down a pace, and you go in first.
Why? How often does that happen? Was it just this once, or every
time? Do you do that with other men, too, or are there some instances
when you slow down?
You don't have to assume that it's all about dominance behavior
and male privilege; some things, you'll find, will just be odd idiosyncrasies.
But until you start paying attention and collecting that data, you'll
never know.
Pay attention to where your eyes fall, pay attention to your words,
your expressions, your intentions, and your justifications.
For another example, when you're driving your car, and another
car passes you in the left lane (or you pass another car), do you
look at the driver? If it's a woman, do you stare at her? If it's
a man, do you look away before he looks at you? Why?
Do you wink at women? Do you smile at women and say "hello"
as they pass you? Do you do that to men? How often? Why? Why not?
In bed, do you actually pay attention to your partner's clitoris
at all? Or do you just penetrate? Why? How often? Do you expect
her to go down on you? Do you return the favor? Do you resent it?
Do you like it? Does she like it? Why? Why not?
There are simply too many things that bear examining, that apply
to some folks and not others, to list them all. So the simple rule
is: pay attention to everything. It shouldn't be that hard, right?
I mean, you have control over your body and your mind, and it doesn't
take that much CPU time to register that your eyes have landed on
a strange woman's ass. But for some reason (and I'll give you three
guesses as to why), men are heavily averse to doing that. They give
millions of excuses, all of which really boil down to either "It's
too hard!" or "Why should I?", both of which themselves
boil down to "It makes me uncomfortable to notice how poorly
I treat/think of/feel about other people, especially women."
Another important thing is empathy. Actually think about how you
would feel, as a woman, if strange men bigger than you were staring
at you in the parking lot? All the time? Particularly since you
watch the local news, and hear about women being murdered and women
being raped for pretty much half the program every night, followed
by the one inner-city male-victim drive-by and the Humane Society's
"Adopt a Puppy" spot?
Quite simply, would your behavior, innocent as you may claim it
to be after the fact, frighten, scare, upset, unnerve, or be otherwise
unappreciated and unwelcome by a woman nearby? Yes, yes, I know.
YOU'RE different. YOU'RE charming and cute; those other guys are
just pervs. Sure, THEIR behavior might rattle that pretty little
cashier, but YOUR behavior will endear you to her and might get
you a date. Whatever. The perv who just did a subtle-but-insignificantly-different
variant of what you're doing thought the exact same thing and the
perv behind you in line is thinking it too.
That's why empathy is important. Don't think about how a woman
SHOULD feel, according to you. You're neither an expert on how women
should feel, nor do you have the authority to set a standard for
Appropriate Female Emotions.
A good rule of thumb to apply is: When in doubt, just don't.
Not completely sure the cashier will feel flattered by your comment
on how great her chest looks in that tight t-shirt? Just don't.
In doubt about what it says about your mindset that you stare at
Maxim covers as you pass them? Just don't.
Wonder if whatever you're thinking about during masturbation would
hurt or worry your wife if she knew about it? Just don't.
Eventually, you'll notice as you progress down the road that most
of the stuff you feel the need to defend, justify, or say "I
didn't know!" over after the fact, is stuff that reveals and
encourages a misogynistic and/or sexist mindset.
The most difficult aid to come by is also one of the most important.
You need someone to talk to. Someone to bounce ideas off of, but
someone who also won't discourage you, or encourage poor behavior,
or let you get away with bullshit around them. Someone who will
listen to you, but not let you talk yourself into things that are
clearly wrong, and who won't deride or disparage your attempts to
change. This person CAN NOT BE YOUR WIFE OR INTIMATE PARTNER.
Because, dude, how unfair is that? Let's go to the person I've
hurt the most and make them be my counselor, and make them feel
like if I continue to hurt them, it's their fault because they weren't
good enough at shrinking my head? Dude. That's like a rapist expecting
support and encouragement for his change from the woman he raped.
It puts a woman in an untenable position, and amplifies her pain
and misery and loneliness. Frankly she has every right and reason
to be enraged at you for a lot of the things you'll be talking about,
but in coming to her, you make her feel like she has to stomp that
down or else you'll stop changing.
I will admit that I made that mistake with my partner. I made her
my counselor, and hurt her worse, and made her feel like she was
responsible for my personal growth, so she therefore could not communicate
her feelings to me honestly. I continue to make this mistake at
times. It is wrong of me.
Instead, I try to keep a journal, and I comment on other feminist
livejournals and blogs with my ideas and questions, and stay away
from people who would tell me I was a nut for the things I'm trying
to do.
Yet another component of change in this regard is honest and open
communication. No, not about YOUR feelings, about HERS.
Listen to her feelings, let her communicate them, let her tell
you how much you hurt her.
Don't argue or defend yourself. Let her express herself like you
have always had the privilege of doing. Yes, it will be uncomfortable.
Yes, it will hurt. Yes, you'll feel like shit. But dude, if hearing
about the consequences of your actions makes you feel like shit,
well, that's an important learning moment.
And when she takes a break (because she may stop talking for the
moment, but depending on how long you've been with her, she won't
be "done" for a long, long time), go read the stories
of rape survivors. Go read the testimonials of women who escaped
from porn and prostitution, from women who came out of abusive marriages
and incestuous families, from women who, for all intents and purposes,
could be your next-door neighbor. Read what they went through, without
arguing and without defensiveness.
Avoid self-pity. That's tough; I still fall into that mud pit more
regularly than I like to admit. But self-pity is nothing more than
taking the focus off the pain you've caused to women, and the putting
that focus back onto your own pain. "Oh, it's so HARD not to
be an asshole, and nobody UNDERSTANDS me or CARES or SUPPORTS me..."
Remember the "When it doubt" rule, above? Apply it to
self-pity too: "Just don't."
The whole reason you're trying to change, unless it's just a faux-change
for the attention of hot feminist babes, in which case crawl back
under your rock and don't come out until you're ready to give a
shit, revolves around the fact that you have hurt people and you
don't like who you are. Focusing on the hurt you've caused others,
examining it, listening to it, learning from it, is paramount. As
long as you're focused on the pain you're causing to yourself, you're
stuck. A man who says "It's so hard", in whatever phrasing
or variation that suits him, is not progressing nearly as far, nearly
as quickly, as he wants everyone around him to believe he is.
Rule of thumb: You have been a victimizer. You do not deserve that
pity or sympathy. Your victims do. Give it back.
The basic principle behind pretty much all male assholedom towards
women and male privilege is this: selfishness. Men are raised to
believe, and do not ever question or fight this belief even when
they become old enough to realize it's kind of stupid, that they
are the most important person in the room. Everything in our culture
caters to men, and men, for the most part, enjoy it so much that
they turn a blind eye to any suffering caused in the meantime.
In any case, the root is selfishness. Most of the behaviors that
men feel entitled to, regardless of how the objects of that behavior
feel about it, are the result of selfishness. "I want to do
it, so I will do it. I got mine, so screw the rest of you."
Change is not a destination. It is a journey. Recently, I thought
I had achieved my goal; that I'd gotten to the end of the road and
that I had arrived. At which point, I stopped examining myself,
stopped paying attention to my thoughts, and stopped noticing my
selfishness. Because if I didn't have any, why bother looking for
it? But there were still mindsets, a good number of mindsets, which,
while smaller than what I had started with, still encompassed selfish,
sexist misogyny. When I was examining and paying attention, I could
catch the thoughts and behaviors they produced before I actually
DID them. After a while, I caught the thoughts still in the fetal
stages and aborted them before they could survive outside the mental
womb as articulated or actionable ideas.
But when I assumed I was done growing, and stopped paying attention
ENTIRELY, those thoughts started slowly creeping back in, and selfish
behaviors became slowly more frequent and slowly more serious.
I got to where I didn't quite need to be ever-vigilant 100% of
the time, but it wasn't 0% of the time, it was more like 97% of
the time. I got to where I could catch developing sexist/misogynist
thoughts in the fetal stages and abort them, but that did not mean
I could simply say "All done!" and go to bed.
I absolutely had not been looking through this lens and walking
this path long enough to be "enlightened". It was pure
pride and hubris and laziness and male privilege to think so in
the first place.
The point is, you're not done. A year later, you're not done. Two
years later, you're not done. How long have you been benefiting
from a Patriarchal culture that goes out of its way to accommodate
your every selfish desire, from pornography to the airbag systems
and interior console designs of Chevy Suburbans? 20 years? 30 years?
40 years? How many? A year of "Humanity 101" will not
eradicate the habits you've built up over decades of culturally
approved selfishness. You will need to keep growing and learning
and paying attention to yourself much longer than that before it
becomes second nature. That's the downside of having taken advantage
of the privilege society offered you for so long without examining
or questioning it.
I'm not done. I have a long way to go, longer now thanks to my
pride and stupidity, and it's not easy. But big honking deal - life's
hard, get a helmet. It's that much harder for the people around
you, the women you care about, and the women whose names you may
never even have known but who were afraid of you or hurt by you.
But walking this path, truly walking it, I have moments when I can
truly look at my behavior and feel proud of it, without feeling
the need to crow it from the rooftops, and those are some of the
most peaceful, amazing moments of my entire life.
My life is my own, my choices are my own, and now that I'm not
busy trying to control and dominate everyone else, I finally feel
like I have some control over my own life.
There are parts of this path that directly benefit you, as well
as the women who live in this society with you. I don't talk about
them much because, again, that misses the point and puts the focus
on the person who did the hurting rather than the people he hurt;
on what YOU get out of it rather than why you should do it for THEIR
sake.
But there are some personal benefits. For one thing, the vicious
cycle of self-loathing can finally be broken. For another thing,
it's a much much more amazing feeling to be loved by someone you
know for sure loves you, rather than always wondering if you trapped
them and if they'd be better off without you. Is this person with
you because you emotionally manipulate them or trap them with economics,
or does this person really, honestly choose, with serious agency,
to be with you and love you? There's a big difference, and even
if it's hard to articulate, you can absolutely feel it.
Sometimes, both can exist in the same relationship. Sometimes,
my partner feels love for me that is unfettered and truly an example
of free will. Other times, she is wary of me, and loves me because
if she did not, she would have to kick me out to stay true to herself,
and that would most likely mean poverty, or at least the crushing
of her dreams. That is probably pretty common during the long transitional
period between "asshole" and "nonasshole", and
it should not discourage you from continuing, or make you think
that it's all for nothing. We live in a very black-and-white society,
where there is no middle ground, moderation, or transformation.
But you will not go from "asshole" to "nonasshole"
instantly, and the women around you will not suddenly go from "feeling
unsafe" to "feeling amazing" with you as if you had
flipped a light switch.
Anyway, that's a good start. If a man follows this advice in good
faith, he'll be in pretty good shape, and the rest of the pieces
will probably start falling into place on their own.
|
