The Good Men Project: How Not to Have a Conversation about What It Means to Be a Good Man — Part 1

December 21st, 2012 § 2 comments

First, a full dis­clo­sure. The Good Men Project (TGMP) has pub­lished three pieces of my writ­ing. I will be dis­cussing that fact in more detail in the sec­ond part of this series, but for those who don’t know my work, or who want to see it in con­text at TGMP – which, given the title of this post, I can imag­ine some might want to do – the three pieces are For My Son, A Kind of Prayer; My Fem­i­nist Man­i­festo; and Towards a Dis­cus­sion of Male Self-Hatred. At the same time, I rec­og­nize that there may be peo­ple read­ing this who will not 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 Royse’s rife-with-rape-apology TGMP essay, “Nice Guys Com­mit Rape Too” and to Joanna Schroeder’s fol­low up piece, “Why It’s Dan­ger­ous to Say ‘Only Bad Guys Com­mit Rape.’” (Schroeder is TGMP’s senior edi­tor.) As it turns out, this post focuses pretty much exclu­sively on what Royse wrote; I will say what I have to say about Schroeder’s arti­cle in Part Two. In any event, the cir­cum­stances of my life and the inevitable end-of-semester pileup of work, got in the way of my fin­ish­ing this in a timely enough man­ner to say what I orig­i­nally wanted to say. As a result, a good many peo­ple were able to respond before I did, and so I think the most appro­pri­ate thing to do is pro­vide you with links so you can read what they wrote for yourselves:

There is, how­ever, one par­tic­u­larly insid­i­ous aspect of Royse’s argu­ment that I have not seen any­one else address, the way she defines rape more as a mat­ter of bad man­ners and poor eti­quette than as the sex­ual sub­ju­ga­tion of one human being, almost always a woman, by another, almost always a man. Egre­gious as the rape apol­ogy is in how Royse analy­ses the spe­cific sit­u­a­tion that moti­vated her to write, it’s impor­tant not to let this other aspect of her argu­ment pass. First, it fal­si­fies the social, polit­i­cal, and cul­tural func­tion of rape and, sec­ond, in this fal­si­fi­ca­tion, con­fuses more than clar­i­fies the con­ver­sa­tion about what it means to be a “good man” that TGMP claims as its mission.

In the event that you haven’t read what Royse wrote, here’s the gist: A “dear friend” of hers, the “nice guy” of the title, raped a woman who’d been “flirt[ing] aggres­sively with [him] for weeks.” Given that, accord­ing to Royse, no one dis­putes that the woman was sleep­ing when he pen­e­trated her with­out her prior con­sent, there is no ques­tion that he raped her. “This part,” as she puts it, “is sim­ple.” What is not sim­ple, at least to her, is try­ing to under­stand not only why he did what he did, but also how, in such clearcut cir­cum­stances, he could pos­si­bly have been “gen­uinely unsure” about whether or not doing it would con­sti­tute rape. As she tries to answer those ques­tions, Royse engages in the worst sort of what used to be called bleeding-heart lib­er­al­ism. She can’t change the fact that her friend raped a woman, but the real cul­prit, she says, is a soci­ety that makes it unrea­son­ably dif­fi­cult to rec­og­nize sex­ual bound­aries and/or the dif­fer­ence between actual and imag­ined consent:

The prob­lem isn’t even that he’s a rapist. [I’m sorry, but I need to repeat that again, because she really did write those words: The prob­lem isn’t even that he’s a rapist.] The prob­lem is that no one is tak­ing respon­si­bil­ity for the mixed mes­sages about sex and sex­u­al­ity in which we are stew­ing. And no one is tak­ing respon­si­bil­ity for teach­ing peo­ple how the mes­sages we are send­ing are often being misunderstood.

What’s worse, accord­ing to Royse, is that these mixed mes­sages actu­ally make rape inevitable:

Rape is what hap­pens when we aren’t allowed to dis­cuss sex and sex­u­al­ity as if it [sic] were as nat­ural as food, and instead shroud it [sic] in mys­te­ri­ous lan­guages and grant it [sic] mys­te­ri­ous pow­ers and lust for it [sic] like Gol­lum after the ring. Rape is what hap­pens [when] we don’t even under­stand what sex and sex­u­al­ity are, but use them for every­thing anyway.

As the writ­ers I linked to above point out, Royse’s rea­son­ing through­out her piece leaves apolo­getic loop­holes large enough for a rapist to walk through with­out even hav­ing to duck his head, but her rea­son­ing also does some­thing else, which is why it’s impor­tant to remem­ber that her argu­ment is not that her friend did not actu­ally com­mit rape, but rather that “soci­ety” did not teach him well enough how not to rape in the first place. As Royse defines it, in other words, rape is really a mat­ter of inad­e­quate edu­ca­tion and poor impulse con­trol, really not so dif­fer­ent in kind – though obvi­ously dif­fer­ent in degree – from what hap­pens on the play­ground between very young chil­dren who have not yet learned that hit­ting is wrong. Indeed, just as one might say of such chil­dren that they don’t really under­stand what they are doing, Royse wrote, in one of the most disin­gen­u­ous pas­sages I have ever read, “More often than not.…the rapist is just a per­son who may gen­uinely not real­ize that what he’s doing is rape.”

Leave aside the pro­found infan­tiliza­tion of men con­tained in that statement, and con­sider that this line of think­ing excludes from dis­cus­sion the fact that, what­ever else rape may be, it is now, and has been for mil­len­nia, the con­scious, pur­pose­ful, will­ful sex­ual sub­ju­ga­tion of women by men. Or, to put it another way, con­sider that by exclud­ing this fact from dis­cus­sion, Royse is able to argue, pri­mar­ily by impli­ca­tion and allu­sion, that because her friend is a “nice guy rapist,” he is essen­tially dif­fer­ent from, say, the sol­dier who rapes women as an act of war, or an abu­sive hus­band who repeat­edly rapes his wife as a way of con­trol­ling her, or the men who bru­tally gang raped an unmar­ried young woman in New Delhi recently for being out with a male friend who was not her father or hus­band. “[Ridicu­lous] as it may sound,” Royse insists, her friend “is a really sweet guy,” by which I assume she means that he’s the kind of per­son who, unlike the men I’ve just men­tioned, would never inten­tion­ally rape a woman. She goes on:

He was dev­as­tated at the alle­ga­tion of rape, and even more so at my con­fir­ma­tion that it was rape. We spent a week or so explor­ing how this could have hap­pened. Not excus­ing it, but try­ing to under­stand it. [T]he con­ver­sa­tions were painful and beau­ti­ful, and he under­stood. He claimed it, at least to me, and learned a hard les­son: he had com­mit­ted rape.

As far as it goes, and tak­ing Royse at her word not just that her friend was dev­as­tated, but that he fully came to under­stand what he’d done, I am will­ing to accept that he might in fact be dif­fer­ent from the other rapists I described above. The fact that he left town – largely, accord­ing to Royse, because of the fall­out from the rape – may sug­gest oth­er­wise, as does the fact that she reports no resti­tu­tive or restora­tive action on his part; but just for the sake of argu­ment let’s assume either that he already has – and that Royse didn’t report it because she did not know about it yet – or that he def­i­nitely will per­form those actions. The dif­fer­ence they would make – and I don’t want to deny that it would be a real dif­fer­ence – would not change the fact that he was not being, that there is no way he could have been, “a really sweet guy” while he was rap­ing his vic­tim. Nor could you char­ac­ter­ize him as “sweet” in the moments just before, when he decided he was going to rape her. Nor would any­thing change the fact that, in rap­ing her, he was being, as a man, just as pre­sump­tu­ous and dehu­man­iz­ing and enti­tled as those other rapists I men­tioned above. The fact that he was less bru­tal than they were, or that he deceived him­self into believ­ing that he was doing some­thing his vic­tim wanted him to – “To a large degree,” Royse says, “my friend thought he was doing what was expected” – is entirely irrelevant.

Royse gets this last point. Not only does she not shrink from call­ing her friend a rapist; but she also insists that his victim’s expe­ri­ence is pretty much all that is nec­es­sary to char­ac­ter­ize the sex he had with her as rape. This is from the intro­duc­tion to her essay:

How­ever, I was not used to get­ting the call in which a dear friend of mine says, “I am being accused of rape.” And I was cer­tainly not used to say­ing, “did [sic] you do it?”

It seems like a sim­ple ques­tion to answer. But he, like many peo­ple, strug­gled with it. He didn’t answer. So I asked the ques­tion from another angle, “What did she say happened?”

“She said I raped her,” he answered.

“Well, then you prob­a­bly did. What exactly happened?”

Pre­sum­ably because she doesn’t iden­tify as a fem­i­nist (scroll down to the comment’s end), Royse does not point out that her posi­tion in that last sen­tence is a quin­tes­sen­tially fem­i­nist one, borne of the need first to resist how men have for mil­len­nia denied, triv­i­al­ized, and oth­er­wise excused the rapes we’ve com­mit­ted and, sec­ond, to make the rape survivor’s nar­ra­tive cen­tral to how we talk about rape in the first place. Rape, accord­ing to this way of see­ing things, is rape regard­less of who com­mits it, where it is com­mit­ted, or under what cir­cum­stances, mean­ing that there is no essen­tial dif­fer­ence — though there is cer­tainly one of degree — between the expe­ri­ence of a woman whom a “nice guy” pen­e­trates while she is sleep­ing with­out her prior con­sent and the expe­ri­ences of each of the women raped by the men I talked about above. More to the point, accord­ing to this way of see­ing things, women’s com­mon expe­ri­ence either of liv­ing under the threat of sex­ual vio­la­tion by men, or of actu­ally hav­ing been sex­u­ally vio­lated, is also always the expe­ri­ence of a male dom­i­nant value sys­tem that explic­itly excludes women’s full humanity.

I don’t think any­one, includ­ing Royse, would deny that this was the value sys­tem embod­ied by those four men in New Delhi, each of whom might also have been, in other aspects of his life, “a really sweet guy,” though I some­how doubt that Royse would so eas­ily include them in the cat­e­gory of “nice guys” cre­ated by her title. Those men knew exactly what they were doing and why they were doing it. They were not con­fused because they had received “mixed mes­sages” from their soci­ety about con­sent or “what sex and sex­u­al­ity really are.” Rather, they were taught very pre­cise lessons, includ­ing the fact that rap­ing women “who deserve it” is their right as men. It may be dif­fi­cult to imag­ine that a lik­able, friendly, considerate-of-others “nice guy” in these osten­si­bly enlight­ened United States would share this dis­be­lief in the integrity of women’s per­son­hood; but if you want to under­stand how he, a man of good will could rape a woman while hon­estly, if self-delusionally, expe­ri­enc­ing him­self as hav­ing con­sen­sual sex – and let’s take Royse’s word that her friend was such a man – then you can­not pre­tend that the rape he com­mit­ted was at all dif­fer­ent in its hatred of women, though it was cer­tainly dif­fer­ent in the level of its bru­tal­ity, from the rape com­mit­ted by those men in New Delhi.

To put it more plainly, the self-delusion Royse’s friend prac­ticed upon him­self, in order to be effec­tive, had to be rooted in the pre­sump­tion that a woman who flirts, who lets you know that she wants you, who may even say while she is flirt­ing, “You know what would be really hot? To have some­one wake me up by fuck­ing me,” is actu­ally issu­ing to the man she’s flirt­ing with, whether she intends to or not, an any­time any­where open invi­ta­tion to her vagina. By the same token, the men in New Delhi clearly believed that a sin­gle woman out in pub­lic with­out an appro­pri­ate male escort is issu­ing an iden­ti­cal, if per­haps less per­sonal, invi­ta­tion. If Royse is right that her friend truly came to under­stand the injus­tice of this, that under­stand­ing did not reside in the fact that he’s a “nice guy.” Rather, if we are to assume that Royse’s con­ver­sa­tions with him were in keep­ing with what she says in the pas­sage I quoted above, he most likely owes that under­stand­ing to a decid­edly fem­i­nist analy­sis of his actions, his assump­tions prior to act­ing, and, one would hope, his val­ues con­cern­ing women and sex. Indeed, any dis­cus­sion of men and rape that is not explic­itly rooted in such a fem­i­nist analy­sis is unlikely to be one which fully holds men account­able, not because fem­i­nism in all it var­i­ous forms is always unerr­ingly accu­rate in its depic­tion of men, but because fem­i­nist analy­sis is the only one I know that places the misog­y­nis­tic val­ues expressed through rape at the cen­ter of the discussion.

Nei­ther that analy­sis nor the account­abil­ity it makes pos­si­ble appear any­where in Royse’s essay, not in what she tells us about her friend, not in the brief men­tion she makes of male sex­ual enti­tle­ment, and cer­tainly not in the way she triv­i­al­izes rape by call­ing it the inevitable result of a soci­ety refus­ing to be sex­u­ally hon­est with itself. Royse’s con­clu­sion, in fact, in which she throws her hands up in inar­tic­u­late frus­tra­tion, demon­strates that she wasn’t really inter­ested in account­abil­ity to begin with. Rather, she seems to have been more con­cerned with work­ing through her inabil­ity to com­pre­hend emo­tion­ally what she knows with­out a doubt intel­lec­tu­ally, that her friend is a rapist:

What hap­pened [to the woman my friend raped] was wrong. [He] raped her. But I am still try­ing to fig­ure out why. And no, it’s not as sim­ple as the fact that he put his penis in her. It is a lot more com­pli­cated than that. And we need to talk about it.

The fact that The Good Men Project pub­lished Royse’s piece as if it were rev­e­la­tory (it is not) of an aspect of rape that sim­ply has not been dis­cussed – i.e., that rapists often look like “nice guys” – suggests that TGMP is also not really inter­ested in hold­ing men account­able for the misog­y­nis­tic val­ues of male dom­i­nance. Indeed, as TGMP founder Tom Mat­lack writes, “The goal [on this site] is to pro­vide a forum for us as men to col­lec­tively become more skill­ful at liv­ing our lives well, to being good dads, hus­bands and friends. But there is no way to sum­ma­rize that up, to reduce man­hood to its core ele­ments, to judge us as any­thing but indi­vid­ual human beings” capa­ble of doing both good and bad. Alyssa Royse’s friend, in other words, and those four New Delhi rapists were act­ing not as men, but as indi­vid­u­als whose actions can only be fairly judged in iso­la­tion from each other.

I will have more to say about what Mat­lack wrote in Part Two. For now, I would just point out the inher­ent con­tra­dic­tion in claim­ing that one wants to fos­ter a con­ver­sa­tion about what it means to be a good man while at the same time insist­ing that one can­not gen­er­al­ize about what it means to be a man in the first place. This kind of con­tra­dic­tion is also appar­ent in how Mat­lack defines TGMP’s con­cept of good­ness, “a jour­ney, an aspi­ra­tion, not an end point.” There may be wis­dom in under­stand­ing good­ness as a process rather than a sta­tic qual­ity – the metaphor of the path, after all, is com­mon to reli­gious mys­tics and spir­i­tual seek­ers through­out the world – but a process that doesn’t end is mean­ing­less, a jour­ney with­out a final des­ti­na­tion is a jour­ney to nowhere, cir­cu­lar and self-indulgent. Alyssa Royse’s arti­cle takes us on that kind of jour­ney. As her pub­lisher, sadly, so does The Good Men Project.

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