brendan halpin

It shouldn’t be surprising that the subjugation of women is a key part of the fascist program. That’s why they’re going after abortion and birth control and anything else that gives women a measure of control over their own bodies.

“Yes, I know,” some of you might be saying. “But I’m a liberal or left-wing man. I’m pro-choice and I support equal pay. I’m not the problem here.”

This is going to be hard for you to hear (it certainly was for me), but, actually, you probably are part of the problem.

The rest of this piece is going to talk in vague terms about sexual assault because you can’t talk about the subjugation of women without talking about sexual assault. So please bail if reading that will activate trauma for you.

I wrote a piece a few months ago about how hearing my students’ stories of sexual assault had really raised my awareness of the prevalence and horror of sexual assault, and how I wrote I See Red partly as a wish-fulfillment fantasy that men who do these things might actually face consequences.

I subsequently had a very clarifying conversation with a friend about this. Because I See Red contains a scene of sexual assault. (That the protagonists watch on a cell phone video.) I couldn’t quite figure out why it felt so important to me to include that scene, since its inclusion in the novel makes it much less likely that people who might enjoy the wish fulfillment part won’t read the book.

And then I thought back to a conversation I had with another friend— a woman I went to high school with— several years ago. “Our junior year of high school, you said NAME REDACTED was pretty but needed to lose ten pounds” she said to me. I didn’t remember having said this, but I have no doubt that I did. Now I’m deeply ashamed of having said this. Because it’s shitty and misogynistic, of course, but also, it reflects a really dangerous idea that is endemic to straight men.

The idea is that women’s bodies belong to us. You can see this in my awful comment about NAME REDACTED—she was but the custodian of a body that fundamentally belonged to me, and she had an obligation to maintain it in a way that pleased me. Of course if you had said it that way to me at the time, I would have insisted that such a disgusting, dehumanizing sentiment was the furthest thing from my mind. It’s not that I consciously believed this—it’s that I absorbed it on a deeper-than-conscious level from the culture.

I’m far from alone. In fact, I think I’m a pretty representative straight guy. Remember when two guys (Ryan Collins and Edward Majerczyk) hacked into celebrity accounts and shared nude photos of celebrities on the internet? And remember when untold millions of people who were not those two guys viewed and shared those photos? What makes anyone think that such a thing is okay? Well, it makes sense if you believe that those female celebrities’ bodies belong to us, the straight men of the world. If there are nude photos of their bodies, it is actually wrong for them to withhold said photos from us, the owners of those bodies!

One more example is the way (straight, because that’s the only kind we talked about at the time) sexual activity is talked about in straight male culture. Or was talked about when I was young, anyway. I hope it’s different now. The idea was that sexual contact was a competitive act. The job of the male partner was to try to escalate sexual contact; the job of the female partner was to, essentially, play defense.

Obviously this is all kinds of fucked up, starting the idea that sexual intimacy isn’t something fun you get to do with someone you like or love, but, rather, a game of domination. A competition that nullifies female desire and insists that men push boundaries and not take no for an answer until, like, the third time, if at all. This entire paradigm is rooted in the idea that men are the rightful owners of women’s bodies. They have to try to “take possession” of their property, but then, of course, if they do, then said property becomes inherently less valuable to others because it’s not new, but used.

I’m actually getting kind of nauseated typing this shit out. Because when you pull out these attitudes into the light and look at them, they are fucking hideous. And shameful. And the worst part of them is that they’re so pervasive.

Which brings me back to my book. Why did I include a scene of sexual assault that’s hard to read? Because I wanted men to understand that sexual assault is the logical conclusion of the belief that women’s bodies belong to men. That if you carry these ideas, indulge them, and pass them on, you are part of the problem. Even if you’re not the one doing the raping, you’re not blameless in that you help create the conditions that make people into rapists.

I don’t know if I succeeded. But that was my intent.

Back to fascism. Fascism celebrates the idea that women’s bodies belong to men, and, as you can see from their policy agenda, seeks to enshrine the idea into law in a variety of ways. So one of the best things you (and I’m speaking to you, the straight men of the world, mostly, though of course these ideas are so widespread that I know they take root in women’s minds as well) can do to fight fascism is to root this idea out from your own brain. And then work like hell not to pass them along to people younger than you.

And, of course, don’t even go along with this shit silently when you hear it. This is tough, of course, for a variety of reasons, chief among which is that young men use violence to keep each other in line (another beloved part of the fascist program), and so a lot of us are conditioned not to speak out against misogyny even in situations that probably wouldn’t end in violence because they remind us of being in situations that would have.

But just because it’s hard doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it. We have to be better about this stuff. We actually have the power to create a better world here. Let’s start using it.