Richard Jeffrey Newman

Trig­ger warn­ing for sex­ual violence:

I am a fem­i­nist because fem­i­nism is the only pol­i­tics I know that com­mits itself explic­itly to a world with­out sex­ual objec­ti­fi­ca­tion and the per­sonal, cul­tural, socioe­co­nomic and polit­i­cal vio­lence — mostly, but not only against women — that comes from it;

I am a fem­i­nist because it was in fem­i­nism that I first found the lan­guage to name as abuse what the man who lived on the sec­ond floor of my build­ing did to my thirteen-year-old self when he forced his penis into my mouth, pushed my voice back down into my throat and filled me with a silence that made any words I spoke after­wards feel simul­ta­ne­ously untrue and unreal;

I am a fem­i­nist because that silence left me voice­less when the sec­ond man who pre­sumed that my body was his to do with as he pleased did pre­cisely that;

I am a fem­i­nist because, like both those men, I was raised in a cul­ture where men are taught that it is our right sex­u­ally to objec­tify those who are weaker or are per­ceived as “less than” we are, start­ing but not end­ing with women;

I am a fem­i­nist because I do not want that right, because I never want to stand on the same side as my abusers;

I am a fem­i­nist because, if I am hon­est with myself, I can­not deny that I am, as a man, always and already on that side, because to be hon­est with myself is to rec­og­nize the changes that “my side” needs to make;

And so, since fem­i­nism is the only pol­i­tics I know that com­mits itself explic­itly to a world with­out sex­ual objec­ti­fi­ca­tion and the per­sonal, cul­tural, socioe­co­nomic and polit­i­cal vio­lence that comes from it — mostly, but not only against women—I am a fem­i­nist.

Tagged male heterosexuality, Rape and Sexual Assault, Sexuality, Violence Against Women

§ 5 Responses to My Feminist Manifesto"

• Lissette says:

  October 17, 2012 at 7:36 pm

  I’m moved to tears; not pity tears, no not those, but the ones that swell when another pulls at our core and dares to speak out loud for us all. Thank you so much for that. Oh and I noticed your in Jksn Hgts-I’ll have to make a trip to the old neigh­bor­hood soon. Best of luck!

  Reply
  • Richard Jeffrey Newman says:

    October 17, 2012 at 8:04 pm

    Thank you, Lis­sette. Your words mean a great, great deal to me.

    Reply
• Heather X says:

  October 18, 2012 at 8:21 am

  Thanks for these mov­ing and impor­tant words.

  Reply
• » The Good Men Project: How Not to Have a Conversation about What It Means to Be a Good Man – Part 1 Richard Jeffrey Newman says:

  December 21, 2012 at 8:16 am

  […] want to click through to TGMP, so you can, if you want to, also read those pieces on my own blog here, here, and here. I started writ­ing this post more than a week ago in order to respond to Alyssa […]

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• » Why, Even After the Catholic Church, Jerry Sanduski, and the Boy Scouts, is No One Asking “Why Boys?” Richard Jeffrey Newman says:

  February 16, 2013 at 1:00 pm

  […] failed is that I tried to root the dis­cus­sion too deeply in my own expe­ri­ence of fem­i­nism as a source of heal­ing and peo­ple saw this as a politi­ciza­tion of heal­ing, which was not […]

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