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Sad Correlations
A portion of an email which I am keeping anonymous because I didn't ask his/her permission to print it (forgive me, please). It refers to recent mouth organ discussions.
In those pages, I have been forced into retreat on the statistic that one woman in three had suffered some form of abuse at the hands of men - I said that statistic couldn't possibly be true, and all the women (and some men) wrote in to tell me I was being optimistic and idealistic.
I've backed down on that one, but I continue to fight the idea that all men have a basic tendency toward rape, despite the fact that once again the mailbag is running against me.
My correspondent wrote:
Why do you think that most men are not rapists? Is it part of the same phenomenon in which you thought most women aren't abused? Because I've known that I think more of men than you do [then again, I've often thought that my messages sound like I really hate men], but what man do you know who isn't a de facto or potential rapist? And can I meet him please? (You don't count; you're not really a man.) I also don't know a single woman with whom I've discussed the subject who hasn't been abused or raped or molested by a man at least once. Again you don't count; you're not really a woman. [Follow THAT logic - I dare you!]
I replied:
"1. Because I grew up, apparently, in a fantasy world.
"Jette keeps commenting on the way that I preface remarks with 'In my family, it wasn't that way.' She told me I should just face up to the fact that my family was obviously wonderful, but not like any other family on earth. I told her I knew that already - that the disclaimer is supposed to mean 'I know I didn't grow up in the real world, so take my remarks to come with a grain of salt.'
"2. Because I'm not a man and not a woman, and I expect men to act like me but they don't, and then I get annoyed with them because they don't.
"3. Because I only have had face-to-face conversations (beyond a few sentences of social banalities, I mean) with six men in nearly ten years, and that includes family members:
- is gay.
- is gay.
- is kept on a tight leash by his wife, has a history of bisexual adventures, and even so, aggravates me with testosteronisms on occasion.
- is straight, but not like any other human I've ever met, let alone any male.
- aggravates me with testosteronisms on occasion, and is proof that a fierce intellect does not remove a tendency to objectify.
- is gay.
"Every time I find someone who looks like he doesn't act like an asshole about women, it seems like he doesn't have any sexual urges toward women at all, i.e. he's gay.
"I am clearly no saint, no better than anyone else, so how is it that I can be the only male human on earth who thinks women are sexy without having the slightest impulse to take advantage of them?
"Perhaps it's not gender at all. Perhaps it's because I don't have much of a sex drive - all my best sex is solo and/or mental. I don't dream of copulation; I don't fantasize about it. My sexual desires are re-routed into submission fantasies. You could make a case that part of my brain wants to be raped, but I cannot find a part that wants to rape.
"Even if I'm an aberration, though, it's a sad comment on men that sexual desire apparently carries rape as a correlation, always lurking beneath the surface. Can't you want something without feeling the impulse to take it?
"I expect people to be better than they are."
I also expect myself to be better than I am.
I've been talking to Nonelvis this evening about how my expectations are too high. What spawned the discussion is that I had a very frightening mental epiphany this evening, the kind that leaves me panting and wanting to cry and with acid unsettlement in the pit of my stomach. No, I'm not exaggerating. I barely made it into the subway. I felt like I'd been hit with a brick.
I don't have the strength to discuss it - as I told Nonelvis, for once I chose to have a conversation about the inside of my brain with her instead of to my journal, and now I'm exhausted from it. (I usually don't talk about my mental morass to people in person - it will bore and depress them.)
Besides, it's a complex mess having to do with gender, self-worth, what I want from life, my too-high expectations, a book I bought today which made me Hate Without Information so badly that I don't know when I'll be able to actually read it, and my two novels, one which has the gender themes that shouldn't have been there, and the other which I deliberately avoided putting gender into which should have had it.
Sigh. And talking about all these things - including several recent journal entries - normally relieves the tension and makes it better. Recently it seems to be making it worse. I need a bigger relief, or release if you will. And I am coming to suspect - the pit of my stomach is leading me to believe - that rewriting the Aedie novel is about to start.
But first, I have another entry to post. It's very democratic - it'll piss everybody off.
© Columbine
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