“Paths Out of a Childhood Misogyny”

Ludicrous asked an excellent set of questions on a post here a bit ago, and I thought I’d take it out of comment-section obscurity and upgrade it to a post of its own:

How is it that some boys growing up in a culture that turns females into ‘the other’ are able to overcome the estrangement and others not? How did the these guys and especially the mra’s get boxed in?

I think there are many men, talented writers, who could describe their paths out of a childhood misogyny. There are many inspiring stories of folks escaping religion. What are the experiences that help men get over whatever blocks their ability to apprehend the experience of women. Women describe over and over and over what misogyny is and does and yet to these men it is somehow not real, a minor inconvenience at worst.

Several commenters answered in that thread, which tells me this is striking a chord, and more stories are out there. I’m throwing this open to everyone who found a path out of childhood misogyny, keeping in mind that any gender growing up surrounded by misogyny and sexism in their cultures can internalize this crap, even if it harms them directly. I know I did. I know I still do, and have to fight that internalized misogyny on a daily basis. So tell me your stories, and don’t worry if you’re still a work in progress: if you’ve managed to make your way to this side of the Deep Rifts™, you’ve made a good start on that journey.

I’ll include the responses from the previous thread to get the conversation started:

Patrick G:

Can’t speak for others, but for me it took repeated (figurative) smacks to the head. Eventually I realized that ‘wait, maybe there’s something I’m missing’.

After that, I was perfect, of course. *cough*

raymoscow:

My path away from the misogyny I grew up with was mostly about listening to women, trying to understand some of their concerns, and exercising some basic empathy. It’s not rocket surgery.

I won’t say that I’ve completely escaped it yet, because some of the worst stuff lingers unconsciously, but I’m working on it.

(Same for racism and other forms of bigotry)

John Horstman:

In my own case, while I identified as a strong feminist in high school, looking back I can see a lot of sexist attitudes that I held (and I’m sure there are others I haven’t yet recognized nor begun to dismantle). Some of the things I see e.g. MRAs say have come out of my mouth. Despite being reasonably smart and definitely feminist-oriented, my own experience in a society that treated me in a particular way because people read me as White and male and heterosexual led me to a certain set of conclusions about how people interact, how social systems work, what “fair” is, etc. And while I had any number of friends who are not White and plenty who are female, that alone isn’t enough to give one a good knowledge base of the experiences of people unlike oneself – friends don’t often relate the totalities of their experiences to each other, one’s personal group of friends is still going to be a small sample, and one’s group of friends is also going to be biased to particular kinds of experiences, as one is unlikely to wind up with friends who travel in very different social environments (becasue if you’re traveling in entirely different circles, you’re unlikely to ever meet or have enough in common to be friends in the first place). Hence non-White friends or female friends not actually being any sort of defense against charges of sexism or racism (and actually attempting to use them as such is a rather insidious appropriation of their identities).

So, to given an answer to your question, those guys who get boxed in are those who never have anyone or any event push them to expand their perspectives. They stay locked in their narrow worldviews and never see any reason to look for information outside their own experiences. That’s one of the things that social privilege allows one to do, because one’s perspective is treated as the normative default, so one is unlikely to encounter any push-back about the validity (or, at least, generalizability) of one’s own perspective and experiences (as one does when one’s experiences or perspectives are contra-normative). This also explains the intense defensive reactions to challenges to privilege (it may be the first time the person has ever had that perspective or interpretation of experiences challenged), and it’s one of the ways privilege self-perpetuates, by being invisible to the people who benefit most. Even with e.g. many women loudly and publicly sharing their experiences of street harassment and denouncing it, it is shockingly easy to remain unaware of phenomena like that unless one is actively seeking out perspectives and experiences of dissimilar people. Scientists ought to know better, but even they (like most people) are prone to universalizing/projecting our own perspectives and experiences – this is, of course, why the scientific method requires repeated testing by different researchers (and ideally researchers in very different cultural contexts) to verify results. While the preceding may not accurately describe everyone in the group we’re discussing, I have noted it as a common pattern. The default state is tribalist ignorance, and it takes active effort to start to overcome that, so even in cases where pushing past that is the normative (or simply preferred) course, people will wind up in the default state by default.

I could add that perhaps a willingness to question oneself and one’s experiences (or interpretations of them) is a necessary precursor to a broader worldview. In my case, my history of mental illness led me to recognize that my perceptions were not necessarily the only possible ones or even those most reflective of reality. A depressed brain lies to itself, so successfully coping with a depressed brain can mean learning methods of self-questioning and external validation of one’s interpretations of events, which are valuable skills for questioning normative assumptions.

Uncle Ebeneezer:

On the topic of escaping misogyny: I’m a white. male, upper-middle class and I played sports and music, so I was privilaged to the Nth degree and spent most of my life in environments where casual misogyny was the norm. Until only a few years ago I was pretty damn misogynistic in my attitude and approach to dating. And I would have probably gotten defensive if I was ever really called out on it or was confronted by one of those Feminazis I had heard tales about. Nowadays I find myself spending more time reading feminist articles and nodding along as new light bulbs continue to flash on. My turn-about has been so marked that a FB friend (who moved away about 7 years ago) saw one of my posts recently about Anita Sarkesian, I believe, and remarked that she almost didn’t recognize me from the wanna-be-womanizer who loved to defend the C-word, that she used to know. She asked what prompted the change and I told her that witnessing the fights in the atheist movement, listening to/reading/absorbing the concepts of actual feminism (rather than the stereotypes) and just questioning my own assumptions was all it took to see how clueless and wrong I was. Maturing, getting married and losing my Mom probably also played a role, but it was mainly just shutting up and listening. Anyways, I’m not looking for a cookie here, just wanted to illustrate that as others have noted above it really comes down to a simple flick of the switch and willingness to examine oneself that can get the ball rolling. And a little effort going forward to try and be better. IE- it doesn’t really take much. And for people like me who had all the privilege to comfortably keep our heads in the misogynist sand, just witnessing the Freethoughtblogs Wars of 2009-? can be all that is needed to wake us up.

Image shows a chipmunk with a walnut shell on its head, looking out a window. Caption says, "I start my journey today and I walnut fail."

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“Paths Out of a Childhood Misogyny”
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17 thoughts on ““Paths Out of a Childhood Misogyny”

  1. 1

    Well, it’s a bit hard to say. I was profeminist for as long as I can remember, generally agreeing with all the common feminist arguments. I think I had a bit of a turn for the worse when I hit puberty and began to find myself getting angry that girls never seemed interested in me. Of course, I became a bit misanthropic in general at that time, perhaps as a result of being stigmatized and harrassed pretty constantly from 7th-10th grade. My unfortunate social disabilities probably contributed to my susceptibility to certain PUA theories that I kept in the back of my mind through college. As I approached my midtwenties, though, my general misanthropy and misogynistic ideas began to subside, especially after ending a very unhealthy relationship. At the same time, I felt my confidence and self-esteem skyrocket and women started hitting on me far more often. I’m not sure what caused which, but I do feel these things were related in some way. In general, I think my misogyny was a result of hormonal sexual frustration and perhaps I just grew out of it once my brain fully developed its self-control mechanisms.

  2. 3

    As a trans woman (or more accurately, someone whose gender is mostly trans-feminine leaning), I was one of those who did not experience gender dysphoria as a child, and so was socialised as a boy without any inkling that this would not be ideal in the long run. The fact that some trans people don’t know they are trans from earliest childhood is one of a number of characteristics that transphobic feminists try to weaponise against trans women, which is why there is a somewhat political counter-assertion that trans people, like gay people, were ‘born that way’. This is as ridiculous as the phrase ‘women-born women’ given that no one is born as a fully-formed adult, but grows up enculturated from birth surrounded by a society that imparts subtle and overt sexism ubiquitously. And thus I was raised as a boy, which means I had similar bad ideas forced upon me which I’ve had to overcome to get to where I am. Obviously.

    If Dana can report the process of her socialisation as a girl involving some degree of self-internalising of misogyny and sexism coupled with the shame and hurt of having to root it out of your being, then I can equally well report that being socialised as a boy for so many years and then having to overturn that same sort of internalised self-hatred is not very much good for your self-esteem; I can’t say whether it’s worse, but while perhaps different in character it comes from a similar place of being wounded and hurt at the injustice of being regarded as lesser, just for being who you are. And the reward for that of course, is to be viewed with suspicion by some as not being a ‘real’ woman, one’s womanhood usually to be qualified as trans.

    I also wrote on my own blog about the particular bad ideas I’d unquestioningly swallowed and had to throw out as irredeemable, far too long to be posted as a comment but it might be of interest to some reading here. In terms of feminism, coming out as trans was something I don’t think I could have done successfully without a deeper understanding of feminism, that I’d very imperfectly grasped in my formative years. In fact the feminism wars of the last few years at this very site provided one of a number of spurs towards my self-growth – I might have come out as trans without that, but I can’t say that being exposed to feminist thought here didn’t play it’s part – because it did.

    http://creatinganxiety.wordpress.com/2012/08/09/atonement/

  3. 5

    I came to it through an anti-racist angle. While my mom did complain some about restriction because she was a woman, she complained more about the restriction put on her because of her race. But once you accept things aren’t as good as society says they are about race, it’s not hard to accept we have problems in the treatment of women.

  4. rq
    6

    I was one of those internalized misogynists – a Chill Girl. I had a really hard time liking other girls and making friends with them, because they weren’t as Awesome as me. I have come to realize that other girls and women are, indeed, Awesome, but I couldn’t really name one specific thing that led me down the right path.
    It may have something to do with having ‘masculine’ interests, and hearing bullshit from other girls/women about how they could never do something so difficult (i.e. math) and that women have problems with things so complicated (i.e. physics), and I knew of a couple other examples besides myself who were proving them wrong, it just… after pissing me off, made me feel sorry for them. Anyway, sometime after that I discovered Pharyngula and was blown away by all the obstacles women actually face in just liking these so-called ‘masculine’ interests. It really changed my perspective (and I stopped thinking that maybe I was defying biology by being good at math… no super-powers for me, hey) and I’m grateful for that. It made me a better feminist.

  5. 7

    I went through years of marriage counseling with my wife, and while “it’s not all my fault,” it seems to me that the biggest lesson I learned was that my wife is a person too. It gradually dawned on me that if my wife is a person, then other women might be as well.

  6. AMM
    8

    I don’t think I ever bought into it in the first place. The best answers I’ve been able to come up with are:

    1. I was subjected to all the usual male socialization, which, from what I’ve seen, is mostly a kind of basic training to be “tough” and cruel and to dominate (misogyny is just one piece of it.) Since I was never any good at those things, I was kind of the practice dummy for other boys practicing to be Real Men. So when I see someone being mistreated, I automatically identify with the one being mistreated, not the mistreater. It reminds me too much of what I experienced every day growing up. (Another result is that I don’t identify with being a man. At all. I learned enough to keep me from getting into too much trouble, but I’d really rather have nothing to do with it.)

    2. My mother was something of a feminist. At least, she was not quiet about the ways she would get the short end of the stick. For instance, she would get furious about the way auto mechanics would ignore everything she said when she brought her car in. She ended up going to a dealer on the other side of town because they were the only ones that wouldn’t just pat her on the head and do whatever they felt like with her car.

    This doesn’t mean I never absorbed racist/misogynistic/homophobic/etc. tropes. It does mean that once I see them for what they are (or have it pointed out), I don’t have much of an investment in defending them.

  7. 9

    I definitely grew up with the socialized meme that men are somehow superior to women. My mother was (far) more educated and earned more than my dad, so I think that fact helped keep me from really believing it at a conscious level. But, my dad is still a sexist shit to this very day, so I definitely picked up a bunch of baggage from him.

    It was the birth of my daughter that triggered me to dig deeper into feminism (and also the trigger to the discovery that I’m an atheist). Funny (in a “well, fuck” sort of way), there may have been a partially sexist motivation for this: “If men are so great, then I can obviously be an great father, right?” *sigh* I don’t think (possibly for my own sanity) that I was ever obnoxiously sexist, at least to an MRA-ish level, but I cringe at some of the ways I used to think about things and some of the things I said and did. And I’m still working on it. I find it’s easier to get the harder things right, because you’re forced to think about those things. It’s the smaller things, the subconscious things that I don’t think about, that are the hardest to unlearn (listening, reactions, etc).

    My advice to men who see the problem and want to be feminists or allies of feminism: Just shut up and listen to women. Focusing on improving yourself and the spaces around you.

  8. 10

    I have a rather complicated story, and I would really need to sit down and think it through to get the whole story down. But, off the top of my head, it helped that I was never fully in that mindset. I grew up in a rural community, so, as I suspect many rural communities are, my society was very patriarchal. But I grew up in a family with a father that didn’t really have it all together…the man seriously has a few psychological problems. I grew up seeing my mother as the more reasonable adult in the household, which led to questioning why would my father be the “head” of the household? It didn’t seem right. I think that really helped me out. While I did absorb some of the sexist ideas from my society, I had my own family as the anecdote that a lot of those ideas really were not true.

  9. 11

    I also had the benefit of 3 years of dating a feminist who had a 13 year old son who she had raised to be very aware of the misogynist culture all around him. So I saw first-hand that with a little instruction boys can very easily see why you shouldn’t objectify girls, make sexist assumptions, use gendered slurs etc. Her son would even call out his friends when they would say sexist/homophobic/racist shit. Which was especially laudable since I don’t know that I would have been that brave at that age. Anyways, it showed me that a different approach/model to parenting could make a huge difference in the way a boy would grow up viewing women and hopefully spread that view to his peers. And that approach wasn’t nearly as daunting as more traditional family defenders would have you believe.

  10. 12

    My introduction to feminism came rather late. I can date it to my mid thirties when in the summer of 1972 Sen. Birch Bayh of Indiana (Indiana, can you believe it) managed to get Title IX enacted. Betty Friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique” had come out only nine years before.
    When Title IX (requiring sports be available for girls in schools) became law my partner at that time and her friends formed a group to travel the state, MN, (there’s something about MN) speaking and encouraging school boards to get cracking with the sports for girls.

    So getting to know these women, these feminists, smoothed the path somewhat for me. They were quite gentle with us guys, not much awareness was assumed of men in those days. Of course the sexual uprising of the sixties was still blooming which didn’t hurt.

    There were other fortunate circumstances later which I won’t detail here except to give credit to several other thoughtful and generous women who continued to smooth the way for me. Much later I found myself in a men’s group, a men’s group led by a woman. She was fantastic, she knew what was going on with everyone in the group all the time. She also connected me to other resources(involving sexism, racism, all the ism’s) also populated by mostly women, and this just kept happening.

    So when I think about the Harris, Dawkins et al, (whom I was referring to in my original comment cited at the top of this thread) maybe they were unlucky, maybe when younger, they never found themselves in a place where they thought they could let their guard down enough to hear women. Once you’re in a hole, especially publicly, it seems you only go in circles.

  11. 13

    My path out was mostly female friends taking me to task for the dumb shit I said and did. These women clearly liked me, and were clearly reasonable people on most things, so it was tough to dismiss it as a personality conflict or outrage junkies.

    Basically I lucked into the right friends. It probably helped that I was never a worst case misogynist that these women were my friends in the first place, but still, so much of it was lucking into meeting the right people. If I had to rely on strangers, maybe I’d have still found my way out but I fear it would have been a much slower path.

  12. 14

    Growing up, my dad had his own business and worked insanely long hours, so my mother was the parent I spent most of my time with. She firmly believed that men were superior to women. This was a belief founded in the patriarchal household and environment she grew up in, and also by the traditional teachings of her Catholic church. So I was raised to be a good little Catholic and take my place in the patriarchy, and to further that goal I was sent to Catholic schools… right into the hands of a bunch of feminist nuns. They weren’t marching-in-the-streets feminists, but they incorporated the basic equality of all human beings into all their teachings. That meant women were equal to men. They were adamant about it. And after 11 formative years of exposure, I graduated from high school with a considerably different take on equality than my mother. She was not thrilled; despite all her efforts, her daughter had become a Women’s Libber! She never recognized the connection back to the feminist nuns.

  13. 15

    Oh wow, those nuns. I had 8 years with nuns, grades 1 thru 8. They were ok, very very subdued I think. They did drink coffee, you could smell it going by the door of their break room or restroom or whatever it was downstairs. Of course those were years 1940 to 48. The next four years were with the christian brothers, nothing remotely political there either. We all had to carry a rosary in our pocket so that if you reached in there to play you would encounter jesus on the cross. Of course we all had two pockets but only one rosary.

    And then there were your nuns, I would like to know the story of how that change came about, maybe there are lessons for us.

  14. 16

    John Horstman:

    A depressed brain lies to itself, so successfully coping with a depressed brain can mean learning methods of self-questioning and external validation of one’s interpretations of events, which are valuable skills for questioning normative assumptions.

    This. Very well written and very true. Depression forces you to constantly watch what your own brain is doing–that is if you want to live something like a normal life.

    Of course I internalized the misogyny too. Internalizing your culture is, in a general way, a good thing–except when it isn’t. But I never swallowed it whole. I have a keen and emotional memory of being told that “Girls can’t be cops” when I was about 8 (the late 50s). I was furious. My reaction was “says who,” though I did not say that to the woman who told me that. But I never accepted it. I didn’t accept that I could not be a cop until it was clear that I was going to be too small. By then, I didn’t want to be a cop any more but I always insisted to myself that I could if I wanted to.

    I know where some of the willingness to buck the system came from. When I was about 10 my dad got into CB radios and he never got into tech things a little bit. He learned exactly how they worked and then he taught me–starting with how electricity worked and going on from there. By the time he finished I could look at a circuit schematic and trace the pathways that lead to sending and receiving radio signals in a CB radio, explaining what each component did. You see, I had the HUGE advantage as a small child of a father who adored me. Me, not some image of a cute little generic girl that belonged to him. Oh, he had the usual “women are this and women are that” crap, but far less so than most and he had a tendency, when with a group of other men, to make fun of them when they started in on women drivers and such. He had a strong tendency to see people as individuals–men, women, black, white. I am not sure why. He was raised by a man who was a grotesque racist even by the standards of 1930s Dallas, but he decided when he was six that it wasn’t fair that he could go play at his “nigger friend’s” house but the friend couldn’t come to his and he let that injustice flavor his attitudes about many things the rest of his life (my father is not dead, but he is severely demented and we get only occasional glimpses of the real man these days).

    I am far from free of the stereotypes, but I have known since childhood that girls can do almost anything boys can do. My daddy said so. It took me a little longer to realize that boys can do almost everything girls can do. Yet the difference always was “girls can do mechanical things like boys can do” and “boys can be nurturing and gentle like girls can do”. The gender assumptions were still very much there, I just didn’t swallow them whole.

    But I don’t feel especially superior about it, just as I don’t feel especially superior about having quit smoking the first time I tried. I was never a heavy smoker and though I was addicted to the nicotine, it was a relatively short-term thing. The people I admire are the several packs a day for 20 years who quit. And I admire people steeped in this culture without the advantage of my Dad who manage to break out of the toxic thinking. You people have my admiration.

  15. 17

    I was Othered in a different fashion growing up. It didn’t involve any of the classic -isms (they can’t really be applied to me) but it feels like it was just as irreversible. Basically I was bullied. It got lighter or heavier at times and it was never as horrible as some of the stuff you read or hear about on tv, but I never got to be free and clear of it either, not until I was out of school. Although I made some mistakes along the way which I regret, this would later set me up to have a basis for understanding people who have been treated as less than whole, worthwhile human beings in their own right.

    I’m a fairly quiet person for various reasons, partly to do with the above and also majorly influenced by having a home environment that felt edgy and dangerous a lot of the time. I’ve also had an interest in roleplaying games (the pencil and paper tabletop kind) and at one point in smaller groups I used this to express sides of myself that I didn’t normally express. It was a less risky way of reinventing myself, trying out what I come up with and incorporating what I could and discarding the bits that didn’t fit as well. I primarily did this by playing female characters. Later I would play them online in text-based games and still later in MMO’s. The vast majority of the people I dealt with assumed I was female (or were unsure either way) based on how I spoke and acted. I’d start to find out how amazingly different people seem to treat you depending on what they think your gender is.

    That was my wake-up call. I’d had some exposure before then but I think my views really solidified from “of course we should treat people the same” while not necessarily doing anything about it (or fixing my own problems) to “this is a problem, one that requires personal vigilance and action to combat”. I’m hardly perfect on this score. I still have a bit of the “girls are delicate and need protecting (possibly from you)” thing going on for example. It’s an ugly, intensely disturbing left-over from being taught sex-ed by a nun with an eye toward keeping everyone celibate and screwed up about sex. My sole consolation is it seems to cause me more grief and hang-ups than it does anyone else. It’s a work in progress.

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