Shawn Maxam believes when we get too distracted by the language used by our friends than we end up invalidating their stories.
If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.
-Nelson Mandela
I recently had a conversation with one of my closest friends about a very traumatic experience. He was nearly raped at six years old by a relative’s female partner. This early experience of near sexual-assault by a woman had caused him to suffer from anxiety and PTSD symptoms.
Now my friend never used any of these academic, esoteric or suffostacated terms when discussing this. He said that he developed a fear of women because of near sexual assault and that it affected his “swag”. He was shy around women for a long time. My friend was framing his experience with the language he felt most comfortable with. He didn’t have well-constructed gender theory analysis. He just knows some fucked-up shit happened to him in his childhood that altered his interactions with women.
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I have know him for twenty years and this is the first he has ever told me of this. He himself admitted he suppressed the memory. A black male with a high-school education may not have the sexy language to describe his experience in the eloquent and articulate manner we are fond of using but the validity of his story doesn’t matter any less.
So I ask where do we meet the average man on his journey towards self-discovery? Do we engage in a dance of high-brow know-it-all-isms or do we respect everyone’s starting place? I try to ask myself this question everyday.
Please share this with friends, enemies and temporary allies alike.
Thanks for reading, sharing and commenting!
R.I.P. SKH
About S. Maxam
I appreciate you writing and posting this. I often find myself uncomfortable discussing my experiences and how I am affected by gender stereotypes – especially in spaces where it seems everyone has a Ph.D in gender studies (at least that’s how the conversations feel to me sometimes). I can only frame my arguments upon my own experiences in language that I am comfortable with. I really appreciate you recognising that not everyone has the same knowledge or experience but we still deserve to have a voice and to be heard all the same.
I’d also like to add….It seems to me that part of the problem is that boys and men have not been taught to use the language needed to describe our experiences – especially experiences of abuse and sexual victimization. How can we as a society expect boys and men to report or disclose these things when many of us simply have no idea how to put into words what happened to us?
Thanks for your honest and insightful comments 24KAuGuy. I agree with your sentiments especially the following “How can we as a society expect boys and men to report or disclose these things when many of us simply have no idea how to put into words what happened to us?”.
Agreed, I had to learn new vocabulary at around 25 years of age. If you have no word for a certain type of pain then how do you tell people you are hurting? You can spot the anger, despair amongst quite a few men who talk about their experiences, or even just in how they act. But next time you see it, ask yourself why they are so angry and/or hurt. Hell quite a lot of womanizers have probably got a past full of pain but they didn’t know how to tell anyone about it, or people didn’t care, and they didn’t get the help needed. Bitterness, anger n hurt spiral up and it can become easy to hate people who remind you of who hurt you.
SOmething interesting I find is the “nice guy” phenomenom. Quite a few I’ve talked to and even myself at one point felt bitterness towards women and people often assume it was because they didn’t get any action from women, tell them that they aren’t able to expect to get laid for being nice. But deeper down much of it is pain from some women who actually use their nice behaviour, know the guy will do nice things and go out of his way to help her, string him along with hints at more than friends and then crush his hopes after he’s fallen for her. He didn’t expect to get laid/have a relationship, he hoped he would based off signals he got from her. Hell often it’s just the friendship part that hurts, what hurt me the most was me being there for a few female friends, they would enjoy my attention, keep coming to me with problems but if I had a problem they magically were not able to respond, too busy, would not talk to me for a while and then come back when they wanted my support. But how do I explain the violation I felt of my trust in the friendship? It sucks being used and strung along, I hated women for a bit until I met awesome women that are now great friends but I see other guys who get jerked around and end up angry at the entire gender because most of their experiences are negative.
How does one explain that experience to someone else whilst also giving it the appropriate impact it deserves? Too often presumptions in the other person colour the response, so these nice guys are seen mostly as guys who expect sex for friendship when I think many just expect trust and not to be fucked about. Are they traumatic? Not sure, they definitely have a big impact for some and can really fuck them up for quite some time. It caused me to be even more shy around women, less confident as I felt I was only good for being used, never good enough for decent friendship or even dating, made it hard to trust women bigtime.
The words used by these men can be distracting and look like they hate women, but the signal they send out with their actions is more like they are afraid of women, in a lot of pain and their trust is broken. I’ve seen people say they hate women, hell I’ve said it, but deep down I still loved some women but felt like I in particular would only meet bad women. So the “I hate women” really means “I hate women who use n abuse me”, and any reminder of those women trigger them into feeling bad again so they might see a woman and call her a slut because they aren’t seeing that woman as neutral, but they are believing she will hurt him if he got to know her.
I was bullied heaps in highschool, and one of the most painful aspects was the beautiful preppy/sporty girls who bullied me. For quite a while after highschool any beautiful woman that reminded me of them I would think was a bitch, not knowing anything about them but judging them on their face n looks. When 9 women like that bully you, the 10th can look like just another bully. Luckily I was fortunate to know some very beautiful women (one an ex model) who had hearts of gold, were very nice, and they taught me to stop judging on how someone looks and that I can’t know if they’re good or bad from first impressions.
Those who go though trauma, or even just enough bad shit to lead them to build prejudice, they need to meet GOOD people of the group they fear and usually it will build their trust up again when they realized that 10th, 11th, 12th, 100th beautiful woman isn’t going to bully or abuse them.
Now this post of mine wasn’t on sexual abuse (although a few women did sexually assault me), but I think some of what I said can apply to sexual abuse victims. See past their words and look at their actions, some might hate the gender of their perpetrator but that can just be because they remind them of the abuse, and it can be hard to trust that gender, group, etc after such trauma. Meeting people of that gender who are good will probably lower that fear over time, basically a lot has to do with the amygdala I believe and our experiences cause an automatic fight or flight response so we avoid danger. In my case women triggered danger in a particular way and the way to combat this is to reprogram it by increasing the positive experiences with that gender. I believe your mind knows unconsciously that being around a person who is very similar to your abuser puts you at risk and that each negative experience increases that risk, so every positive experience will dilute the pool and reduce the risk as it knows you meet that type of person and no abuse happens, so you can rebuild trust.
I’d also like to add….It seems to me that part of the problem is that boys and men have not been taught to use the language needed to describe our experiences – especially experiences of abuse and sexual victimization. How can we as a society expect boys and men to report or disclose these things when many of us simply have no idea how to put into words what happened to us?
And what a lot of people don’t realize is what you say here is why boys and men are now just describing their experiences with such language, not some desire to “play the victim”. It’s hard to speak up when you are stripped of your voice.