I think these two chapters do a decent job of voicing why I am uncomfortable being cishet in a way. Seeing patriarchal relationships all around I got some gender essentialism stuck in my brain. I just couldn’t understand why women would ever want to be in a relationship with men, it got as far as me trying to date men instead to spare women (sorry lads, didn’t work out). I was inherently bad and attraction to women was a violent dirty impulse. Like woke catholic guilt I guess. But these are my very personal brainworms, so lets look at some other stuff.

In How Can I Get Through to You? Terrence Real includes a chapter titled “A Conspiracy of Silence,” in which he emphasizes that we are not allowed in this culture to speak the truth about what relationships with men are really like. This silence represents our collective cultural collusion with patriarchy. To be true to patriarchy we are all taught that we must keep men’s secrets. Real points out that the fundamental secret we share is that we will remain silent: “When girls are inducted into womanhood, what is it exactly that they have to say that must be silenced. What is the truth women carry that cannot be spoken. The answer is simple and chilling. Girls, women—and also young boys—all share this in common. None may speak the truth about men.”

This is something that hits after my grandmother died. She was survived by her 3 children, two women and a man. My uncle was adamant that she would have wanted to be buried with her mother and her mother’s husband, but both my mother and aunt vetoed that in no uncertain terms. My grandmother’s father had been abusive to her while she was growing up and that was apparently kept as a secret between only the women of the family. There was a slightly similar thing when I started venting about my father to my mother (who never said a bad word about him while he was still alive) and peeling back how the break up actually went. She took all the public blame and let him constantly bad mouth her to their common friends even though it was bs (leaving her with no friends, since all their friends were in common). She argued that he needed the support more than her. She then confirmed a couple of my suspicions about how he never really cared about me or my brother, but how he kept partial custody mostly as a means of controlling her. She said she wanted us (me and my brother) to give him a fair shake, which I guess we did and both ended up disliking him. Ironically he thought that we were somehow indoctrinated against him by my mother on his deathbed.

In conversations with men whose mothers were passive as their sons were victimized by fathers or other male parental caregivers, I found that the men were far more likely than other men to idealize their moms, seeing them as victims without choice.

This got me thinking about how my mom and her partner, they got together when I was 7-8. Now, he was never really presented as or has attempted to take the role as male role model or father figure, but there is still some ways in which his behaviour, and mums behaviour in turn, conditioned me. While he has never been physically violent, he starts yelling and gets angry at the drop of a hat. The slightest provocation would set him off, which left emotional regulation of this adult ass man as my responsibility as a child. Just to have peace and quiet if nothing else.

She would bite back if he ever started yelling at me or my brother directly, but it was still a constant source of stress to live in the same house as him. I don’t think he is an inherently bad person, and she does say she loves him. I’ve questioned her a couple of times about it, as far as I know he has never been physically abusive at least. But it is hard to be sure given her track record of ignoring her own needs.

Now that patriarchal straight men have been compelled through mass media to face the fact that homosexual males are not “chicks with dicks,” that they can and do embody patriarchal masculinity, straight male sexual dominance of biological females has intensified, for it is really the only factor that distinguishes straight from gay. Concurrently, homophobia becomes amplified among heterosexual men because its overt expression is useful as a way to identify, among apparently similar macho men, who is gay and who is straight.

This section however, I don’t understand at all.