(CW: chapters 4 and 5 contain explicit discussions of sexual assault)

Hello comrades, it’s time for our third discussion thread for The Will to Change, covering Chapters 4 (Stopping Male Violence) and 5 (Male Sexual Being). Thanks to everyone who participated the last few weeks, I’m looking forward to hearing everyone’s thoughts again. And if you’re just joining the book club this week, welcome!

I’ll be sharing my full thoughts later as there’s quite a lot of unpack in these chapters.

In Ch.4 hooks delves into how patriarchal repression of men’s emotional worlds most often manifests as violence and rage, especially against women and children, and how patriarchy conditions both young boys and young girls to perpetuate the cycle. Ch.5 explores how patriarchal attitudes extend to the bedroom and twist our popular conceptions of sexuality, sexual fulfillment, and physical and emotional satisfaction.

If you haven’t read the book yet but would like to, its available free on the Internet Archive in text form, as well as an audiobook on Youtube with content warnings at the start of each chapter, courtesy of the Anarchist Audio Library, and as an audiobook on our very own TankieTube! (note: the YT version is missing the Preface but the Tankietube version has it)

As always let me know if you’d like to be added to the ping list!

Our next discussion will be on Chapters 6 (Work: What’s Love Got To Do With It?) and 7 (Feminist Manhood), beginning on 12/18.

edit: the previous post didn’t have the proper links to the pdf book and audiobooks, sorry for that

  • Lemmygradwontallowme [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    3·
    3 days ago

    In patriarchal culture everyone is encouraged to see the penis, even the penis of a small boy, as a potential weapon.

    During these formative years, when a boy’s sexual lust is often intense, he learns that patriarchal culture expects him to covertly cultivate that lust and the will to satisfy it while engaging in overt acts of sexual repression.

    The boy learns as well that females are the enemy when it comes to the satisfaction of sexual desire.

    Shedding light on the negative impact of this socialization in the essay “Fuel for Fantasy: The Ideological Construction of Male Lust,” Michael S. Kimmel demonstrates that sexual repression creates the world in which males must engage constantly in sexual fantasy, eroticizing the nonsexual.

    Men’s sense of sexual scarcity and an almost compulsive need for sex to confirm manhood feed each other, creating a self-perpetuating cycle of sexual deprivation and despair.

    It’s almost as if this western liberal patriarchal culture encourages stochastic SA.

    As for my personal experiences,

    I can’t say much. If there was any pushiness from my parents, even my father, to conform to patriarchal masculine notions, they don’t do it as much. I guess, it’s to say they overlook me at best.