#59 The books I wish men read

Author’s note: I’m not interested in vilifying men, or anyone for that matter. I don’t enjoy or participate in takedowns or pile-ons, I don’t want anyone to suffer more than any of us already are, I don’t think shaming or telling someone what a piece of shit they are is an effective tactic, etc. This is not a “men are shit” conversation. It is to be read from a perspective of bewilderment and frustration and anger at what is. All of the men in my life, and there are many, want muchly to heal, become aware, do good, be good, be better men. But I so often find that rape and assault, abortion, childcare, unpaid labor, etc. are issues seen as gendered, left to women to understand, navigate, and enact change. This was written not as an indictment of anyone, but as a wish, really, that men might take a more active role in considering the things women have no choice in considering as part of whatever work they are doing. That men might read the books we write and believe themselves to be included in the intended audience.

Trigger warning: Rape, sexual assault

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A few years ago Melissa Febos wrote about empty consent (“I spent my life consenting to touch I didn’t want”), an essay and concept I think about often enough still and thought about especially a few months ago, when I ended up at a date’s house, in a freeze response I couldn’t even tell I was in, with ripped underwear and a lot of things done to my person that I did not consent to, laying awake in bed and trying to figure out how to leave without causing a scene.

It was not rape or assault by any measure¹. I just hadn’t been asked and couldn’t form the word “No” and temporarily forgot how to exit my body from a scene I didn’t want to be in. He was just deeply unaware and self-serving and probably narcissistic and also like nearly every other man I’ve ever fucked. But it sure felt like those things — like rape, like assault. When I got home that night I threw the ruined underwear into a ball on the floor of my closet, where it stayed until a few weeks ago as a manifest reminder of something I was supposed to do something with, that I still don’t know what to do with.

I told a friend about it a few days later, choked with a kind of shame I didn’t know I was capable of feeling anymore. How am I this old, this informed, this clear, this over it, this boundaried, this embodied, this {gestures to the entire structure of her life} everything — and still collapsing in on myself in this same old tired way?

No, wait. He is in his fifties. How is he still doing what he’s doing? And why is my first instinct, always, still, to interrogate myself about what I should have done?

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In 2021, when Melissa’s article was published (it was an excerpt from Girlhood, a book no man I know has read), I posted the article to Instagram and captioned it with a story from a recent relationship where I tried to put words to an experience that exemplified the countless and nearly invisible ways women manage things they don’t want happening to them. By the time I posted about it, it had been over a year since the event. It wasn’t to embarrass him, hurt him, or even about him really; it was anonymized, as was our relationship since I’d never written about that either.

A week or two after the Instagram post he contacted me. He apologized for anything he’d ever done that I’d construed as harmful (I believe he said he would not litigate my experience), and then moved right on to the actual reason he called, which was to tell me I was not allowed to write about him or us. The issue wasn’t about the issue, the issue was that someone might figure out it was him I was talking about. In other words, the issue was reputational, and the harm being done was to him.

When I said as much he hung up on me, and when he hung up on me I wrote a scathing essay about him, rape culture in general, and who the burden of undoing it falls upon. Mostly, I wrote about the anger one can feel just being a fucking woman surrounded by men who refuse to inconvenience themselves by learning about the things we are forced to constantly consider. The point of that essay was the same as this one: What might be possible if he read the books I did?

I published the essay and took it down almost immediately. It felt heavy, too much, too exhausting, too mean to him, too played out, too 2017, too MeToo. It was 2021 and I didn’t want to be mad at men anymore or be the person who is seen as being the one who is mad at men anymore.²

Over the years I’ve written hundreds of essays I’ve never published or opened again, just discarded and moved on from. This one though (originally called “Slap” because of the one time a massage therapist slapped my ass in the middle of a session), I’ve gone back to time and again, read and re-read, worked and re-worked, sent to multiple writer friends to read and edit.

It’s not that I’m scared to publish it (though to be clear I am). It’s more like this: I felt then (and even more now) like we’re in the part of history when things are unquestionably worse for women than they were in any of the years my (and every woman’s) anger was unrestrained or where some powerful terrible men actually suffered some consequence for causing it, and also the part where we’re really tired of being mad all the time, or when those of us who are still angry are treated as the problem or the one’s who can’t move on.

“The same group of us keeps getting outraged by men’s bad behavior. And the same group of men keeps perpetrating.” -

Kate Manne

, author of Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny (also a book no man I know has read), on the recent World Cup bullshit

Yesterday when I was talking to

Amanda Montei

(author of Touched Out: Motherhood, Misogyny, Consent and Control, a book that hasn’t been published but one I’m pretty sure no man I know will read) about her scathing, angry, bleeding book on motherhood (I say this affectionately, it’s one of the best books I’ve read in a long, long time), I told her I feel like because her book is so palpable and hot and rightfully furious about what it actually means to be a woman and a mother, that it’s almost subversive now. Like there was this small window of time where we got to be angry, where we published books called RAGE BECOMES HER and GOOD AND MAD, and now we’re supposed to be post-angry.

Or maybe that’s not it. Maybe it’s exhaustion, a feeling of resignation, a giving up. Maybe it’s because #MeToo feels more like a meme than a restructuring, destined to live only as long as #girlboss or #girlanything or every internet trend that flames out at a dizzying pace. We’re still talking about that? Why? It’s not like little girls are being forced to have children or anything. It’s not like we’re being criminally charged for trying to help our daughters obtain basic healthcare. It’s not like we’re, as Kate Manne put it in her essay and Jamelle Bouie put in his opinion piece for the New York Times, being legally fucking bred or anything.

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Last week, a friend³ (man, white, wealthy, cis, hetero — who I also want to be clear I shared this article with before publishing) sent me a video about meta-modernists and this all-white-male cast of heroes building the new world called the Liminal Web (the video was titled “The Liminal Web: Mapping An Emergent Subculture Of Sensemakers, Meta-Theorists & Systems Poets” and yes I am very into shit like this). He sent it to me because I read a lot of their work, or am starting to explore it (Ken Wilber, Alex Beiner, Charles Eisenstein). I listened to the talk for five or ten minutes until I heard the creator of the video (man, white, all the hits) assert that this group of mostly American/European white straight cis hetero men are the ones who will hospice the old world and usher in the new world, or something like that. (From his website, verbatim: “Everyone in the space is in their own unique way attempting to mid-wife a new kind of regenerative culture whilst simultaneously hospicing the old.”)

These white men.

I sent him a voice message saying something along the lines of how psychotic and out of touch it is to believe the ones who are ‘mid-wifing’ the ‘new world’ are the exact class of people who created the world we have to literally take out into a field and shoot. Where are the women, the brown and black people, the disabled, the ones that might actually have a thing or two to say about what, exactly, needs to be hospiced, and what needs midwifery?

His response to that (via several text messages):

• “[the all-white maleness] is called out”

• “I didn’t share it for it to be analyzed for what’s missing”

• [inserts name of one Black man and two women admitted to this group of thinkers to show exceptionalism]

• “It’s the difference between creator energy and victim energy imho. You can complain about the way these spaces have beeen defined or go define them yourself…I know which path you’ll likely take.”

Oof.

I don’t think this friend has read one feminist philosopher — I can’t be sure but I’m pretty sure because we don’t talk about Audre Lorde or Angela Davis or bell hooks or Sonya Renee Taylor or adrienne marie brown or Rebecca Solnit or Simone de Beauvoir, we talk mostly about white men’s work, so I am making an assumption based on negative evidence. But my guess is he has not.

What was so infuriating about the entire exchange was that he honestly believed what he was saying. That my criticism was out of context and missing the point. That a woman, a brown person, an indigenous person, a disabled person, a queer person, etc. is an ingredient to add instead of a foundation to start with. That raising these kinds of questions and criticisms is equal to victimhood. That we just need to work harder if we don’t like it and make our own thing. This is the thinking of a person who is privileged enough to not have to understand what men do or how any of it actually works.

The smartest men I know (and know of) still believe that *they* will create the future that will save us from the one we are living in, when they can’t even figure out how to minimize the kind of pain we experience now, in this world, or figure out how to take actual responsibility for what men do, including themselves. To value our philosophy and opinion or defer to it, to ask for consent, to not accidentally or purposely assault us, to not classify inclusion as gender politics or beside the point or progressivism or wokism, to not worry more about being seen as good than what it actually did to us. To say Sorry are you okay? instead of Can you not react this way? To read our fucking books as hungrily as we do, searching for an answer we already have and they refuse to find.

The thing is, I don’t want to be mad anymore. I just want the next man who wants to explain to me what the world is like, or the next one who penetrates me without asking, to be able to answer in the affirmative when I ask him whether or not he’s read a book on feminism.

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Ten Things Right Now

1. Some of the books I’d love men to read crowdsourced by some of my favorite writers and friends

2. Last night at pizza, me, a 44 year old woman, refraining from telling the 20 year old server that I wore her exact outfit of olive green cargo pants, vans and a baby-doll crop top to a Rage Against the Machine Concert in the year 2000

3. A #trad-wife explainer: “To embody ideal femininity is to serve others at all times, of course — but it is also to aspire to self-annihilation.” Just a brilliant piece. (AHP,

   Culture Study
   also recently wrote about infinite choice and that was so excellent too.)

4. “This is a trick, though, of patriarchal power, which has convinced many Americans that women parenting all alone without support or community is just the way things must be, and that a loss of ownership over one’s body is a biological inevitability rather than a political, economic and social problem.” Amanda Montei, author of forthcoming book Touched Out, in a NYT op-ed titled “Mother’s Want to Be Left Alone”

5. Related: Amanda and I are going to be in conversation discussing her new book, Touched Out, in Brooklyn on 9/27

6. Kate Manne
   , who is one of my favorite thinkers and writers (if you haven’t read Down Girl I can’t recommend it more), on why men's toxic sense of entitlement to women's bodies remains a depressing problem well over five years into the #MeToo era: “He expects to receive impunity. And if she dares to try to hold him accountable, he is made out to be her victim.”

7. Chris La Tray’s book One-Sentence Journal (of poetry and short essays), that I’ve been reading in the mornings before meditating. You can only get copies of it from his favorite bookstore, and they’re signed. Chris also just got voted poet laureate for the state of Montana which makes my whole heart swell.

8. This directory of all the Non-Alcoholic drinks ever

9. 93% of Americans, or 40 million, who need treatment for addiction (SUDs) aren’t receiving it and never will. This Longreads, Unknown Costs by Wilson M. Sims — a writer in recovery who also happens to work trying to place people in treatment — on the impenetrable and labyrinthine process of accessing treatment was horrifying. Less than one in ten people struggling with addiction get any kind of meaningful or effective intervention, and he breaks down why.

10. This podcast episode with

    Andrea Gibson
    and
    Clementine Morrigan
    (“Talking Shit with Andrea Gibson: A Difficult Life is Not Less Worth Living Than a Gentle One”)

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1. Enough of you will classify my experience as such — I do not classify it as either rape or assault. The closest thing I can think to equate it with is empty consent, which is why the article Melissa wrote has been coming to mind. As Amanda Montei said to me during our discussion about this experience, we need new words to describe some of these experiences. I don’t believe a word exists to adequately describe my experience, and I’m fine with that.

2. It remains unpublished, depending on how I feel after publishing this that may change

3. As an update to this, he and I ended up having an extremely productive and meaningful conversation about this, and the list of books I created was because he asked for them, and he’s already read a few books and yesterday texted me for “feminist podcasts” which just, melts your fucking heart