About male privilege...

The President of the United States today said that it is a "scary time for young men in America."

Men have been shaken by the wave of hostility coming at them from women all over the United States. And by men I mean mostly white men, but in gender issues the relationships become more complicated. Let's focus on the white dudes for right now, since they are the most egregious offenders.

You don't have to want to be a domineering asshole to find yourself the beneficiary of generations of domineering assholes. In fact, as a member of a privileged class it is basically impossible to separate yourself from your advantages.

Witness the rage of privileged white males in government who face a challenge to their anointed candidate for the Supreme Court. Witness the quivering indignation of the man himself. They know that they face the biggest challenge ever presented to their ability to rule with impunity over women and minorities. This is life or death for their way of life. Maybe the patriarchy won't fall immediately if Brett Kavanaugh doesn't get a seat on the Supreme Court, but the battle has solidified opposition to it. Losing it will weaken them further. Winning it, on the other hand, will fortify their defenses for an indefinite period. One can only hope that in either case the movement to end their hegemony will lead to a better world, not just another hegemony.

All I can say to white men -- as a white man -- is that this would have hurt a lot less if y'all had accepted it well back in the last century. Maybe your fear even then was fully justified, and the paybacks would have been hell. We'll never know now, will we? And the paybacks really will be hell now. They will continue to ramp up steeply as long as you drag your feet.

I will admit that I never gave it much thought when I was growing up. I worried about how I would earn a living. I wondered if I would be able to get a job that would keep me in the lifestyle to which my parents were accustomed, because I knew nothing else. As far as I knew, we weren't rolling in dough. My father did okay, but he and my mother had both been children during the Great Depression. They grew up with competing urges of compulsive thrift battling against the desire to live large. Everyone in America looked up to the wealthy. At that time, that automatically meant white people.

Add religion to this and you can write off a lot as God's responsibility. "God has a plan." "God will care for them." May God help them, because I won't do more than toss an occasional charitable donation at the problem."

No one that I knew of ever said anything about massive lifestyle changes to balance out the prosperity.

See how any discussion of white male privilege veers into economics? Daddy gives the allowance, see? Daddy gives Mommy the housekeeping money, and she'd better not blow it. The lucky wife gets a bigger allowance. Maybe she exerts her power by henpecking her man into bringing home more money and letting her get away with whatever she wants.

You heard almost nothing about the accomplishments of women.

Mostly white men did the hiring and firing, and engaged in the dirty business of politics and government. Rooms full of cigar smoke and self congratulatory flatulence were no place for a lady. The women who broke into those citadels had to be able to deal with that, and were changed by it to become something similar to their opponents. We are only now finally seeing women present their point of view without justifying it to masculine values. They may have gotten the vote in 1920, but they were still subject to the coercion of the male establishment.

Be afraid, white men. You're very close to finding out what it's really like to be a disadvantaged minority. I'm afraid, because I look like you. As much as I wanted things to be different, I was already in the minority of the privileged majority. I alone could not have stopped this. I had enough to do, weeding out the programming I had absorbed, as I learned to recognize each piece of it. Because you cherished dominance so much, and feared equality, you will soon be distinctly unequal for a while. The first effect will be the loss of credibility of a white male speaker or writer. It will be automatic suspicion and dismissal of ideas put forward by a white man. It will be a higher bar of proof, and greater scrutiny of sources and reasoning. The shoe will be on the other foot. You'll have to face prejudice just because, at long last, enough people are tired of your shit.

You want to know why there's black pride, gay pride, feminism? Y'all made that. Then you try to answer it with white pride, and white identity, and hetero male dominance. You made the whole situation happen.

We cannot know whether some other subgroup in human evolution would have appointed itself the Asshole Emperors of the World if white people hadn't done it. We live in this world, and in this world the gang that's on top right now got there by being the best at not playing nicely with others. You accepted life as a competition. When you were at the top of the game you could have changed how the prizes were distributed. Instead you just tried to be the biggest winners in the history of the world. Winning streaks end, boys. They always do.

The sex itself

I won't pretend that I banished my desire for sexual contact with women. I can no more do that than a gay person can become un-gay, or a trans person decide to ignore the inner being and conform to the outer plumbing. I am as attracted as I ever was.

This says nothing about whether I should be allowed it, or my odds of ever again getting an offer.

Regardless of my success ratio, I wanted to give as good as I got. Considering my darkest failures, that assertion seems laughable. Considering my best performances it inspires mirth as well. Both of those were in my thoughts as I guided my behavior starting in my 30s toward the most polished sexually neutral demeanor that I can bring myself to present, at all times and in all places. I started realizing years before the current wave of awareness that women needed relief from men's conscious and unconscious efforts to coerce or persuade. And I'm a dick. I can look back on years of unfounded arrogance.

Self denial takes conscious attention. If you happen to be young enough for your sexual behavior to matter, remember that the choice is always whether to indulge, not whether to want in the first place. If anyone were to ask, I would say that a man's regret will be stronger for times that he indulged than times that he didn't. It's not about being noble, or being canny enough to avoid some kind of entrapment. It's about the intrusive, invasive nature of men's apparatus, and the irrevocability of penetration. You can pull it out, but you can't un-enter.

Even in fantasy, it has become impossible to imagine a permissible scenario, nor does memory provide any comfort in the absence of any corroborating witnesses. As Meg Ryan taught us, don't believe what you want to believe just because you want to believe it. In addition, you might never know what motivated a woman to be with you in the first place. And if you're smart, you won't ask. You might not be flattered. Not only that, the past is untouchably gone. Your chances of flying to Pluto are way better than your chances of ever repeating something you can remember in vivid detail.

If you're a well brought up young man, or if -- without external intervention -- you've never had an improper thought, consider yourself very lucky. I had to cut my way through thickets of predatory impulses, often with companions who brought fertilizer instead of pruning shears. Most of the impulses were not overtly predatory, but objectifying women at all is fundamentally predatory, even if you believe that you love them and don't think that you could ever hurt one. Desire itself is the emotion of a consumer. Hunting urges bred down are what make border collies great herding dogs.

Sex can be fun. It can also be horrendous in a huge variety of ways. Sexual behavior connects to the most primal parts of our being while at the same time appealing to acquired tastes that are wholly intellectual. The primal urge intrudes like a pop-up ad in the middle of something unrelated. It arrives like an unsolicited dick pic.

No man can ever understand the full extent of  a woman's experience of sex. I don't care what you shove how far into what opening, it isn't going to be the same. And I guarantee that you cannot realistically imagine it. Hanging over a woman all the time is the prospect of impregnation. Even if both parties in a consensual encounter have taken redundant steps to prevent fertilization, the anatomy itself was designed for it and the most basic prompting seeks it. Recreational genital stimulation works around this in a number of ways. Even there, consent is not the whole story. What you might consider the beginning of a beautiful phase of long term exploration she might consider an experiment best discarded and forgotten. Even if she was really good at it.

Alternative methods raise another whole flock of questions. Is there a simple answer under all of the layers of possible motives? When you finally peel back all of the persuasive pressures, is the answer to whether she really gets off on that thing you really like a simple and perpetual, "no?" The answer probably changes with age, at the very least. It also fluctuates from moment to moment in the flow of feelings emanating from that spot in the lower abdomen that seems to connect directly to the brain and create the crucial link to success or failure of a pleasurable impulse.

Age changes everything. Returning to the primal prototype, sexuality is a preoccupation of young adults. Unrestrained by other conventions, the interest begins early in the teen years and continues to a finish line that varies by individual. Some people are ready to walk or run from it within a few years. When life expectancy was under 50, your average person probably died still horny. Because inside of every old person is a young person wondering what the hell happened, people who may be well beyond attractive youth, perhaps even physically incapable of participating, may still be plagued by the memory of what used to be possible, that they would love to try again.

Age and a sense of personal mediocrity probably do a lot to bolster my ability to be deferential. I'm good at what I'm good at, but that's a pretty narrow band. I struggle at a lot of other things, and that makes up the bulk of my life. Be assured that I don't see myself as handing down wisdom from a mountain top. I'm just sharing what I've learned from trudging along one particular road of life. Maybe it will prove helpful to someone.

The Woman Haters

When I was about seven years old, living in a little residential neighborhood called Rogers Heights, in Annapolis, my friends and I played in the woods that abutted all of our back yards, on the other side of a rainbow-hued trickle that flowed eventually down to Weems Creek underneath the Rowe Boulevard bridge. This was around 1963.

Our group included at least one girl. She was just another grubby kid looking for frogs, like the rest of us. We gave no thought to gender in our loose group of poison ivy finders. Not much, anyway.

We never saw anyone in the woods that we hadn't brought with us, but the other kids would refer to an ominous group of older boys who called themselves The Woman Haters. We never actually saw any of them that I recall, but we did see a tree fort that the kids in the know said was their headquarters. A flag made out of an old cloth diaper hung limply from it in the windless summer air. Whatever design had been painted on it remained obscured in its folds. Feeling that we might be under surveillance from that eyrie of junior misogynists, we withdrew quietly to the safety of our yards. We had no fences, so the collective yard formed a long strip of field between our houses and the near bank of the stream.

The day that safety was violated by a BB gun sniper who shot me in the arm, everyone agreed that it was the work of The Woman Haters. Apparently they weren't too fond of anyone.

I never encountered anything like that when we moved to Newport, Rhode Island, and then to Thomaston, Maine. And when I returned to Maryland at age 11 to face an unending assault of other preadolescent stresses, we lived in a different neighborhood where enmity was much more pointed and personal.

I wonder now whether The Woman Haters existed, who was in the club, and what became of them as they grew older. But I don't waste any time wondering enough to investigate. We're all too old to matter anymore. If they made careers of misogyny, they've done their damage. If they didn't, their club name was just another stupid boy thing. I don't imagine they inherited it as a secret society, as old as the Knights Templar, and passed their lodge rituals on to new generations. I think they just liked to sit in their tree house and take pot shots at smaller kids. It was the sort of thing that never surprised smaller kids. We were the punching bags and continual irritant of older siblings and their friends.

I was not aware of woman-hating sentiments among my fellow bottle breakers and stone skippers. I never went through a phase where I "hated gurlz." I always rather liked them. Later, in adolescence and beyond, I was cruel to some of them, but never out of malice, only out of selfishness and self consciousness. That makes it no less hurtful, and, therefore, unforgivable, but they weren't the acts of a twisted man with deep-seated hostility. Just another insecure dork trying to fake out both the bullies and the objects of his desire.

Self consciousness is very different from self awareness. Self awareness puts you on solid ground to figure out how to be the person you want to be. Self consciousness never finds solid ground. For some of us, the tension between the two forces never ends.

A hard and necessary realization

I was almost 30 before I realized that I was not inherently good.

Feeling good about yourself is a privilege, not a right. It is a privilege we are all born with, but it can be squandered before you even realize you've lost it. Doting parents mean well, but they give you the benefit of the doubt. Through that loving loophole you can slip forward, onward, downward, on a path of self indulgence, because you are basically good.

You don't make a person good by telling them that they are good. You do it by making sure they know all the ways in which they can be bad.

I had the goal of being good. I just had to learn how to identify it. It seems obvious in hindsight. Later generations love to condemn earlier generations on the basis of later knowledge and customs. Later forms of myself rip the earlier forms of myself to shreds even though the damage is done. My few good memories are islands in a sea of contemptibility. And rightly so.

I've met a few genuinely good people. They make me wonder if there really are chosen people for whom a heaven is prepared. I am not one of them. I am lustful, impatient, harsh. In eternity, all nows are equal. What I was in the beginning, I am now, and ever shall be.

This lesson is abundantly clear in the treatment of public figures who end up judged solely on their transgressions. Most sins are unpardonable. You would do well to identify them early and avoid them completely.

This will cut down on how often you get laid.

Sexual relations get complicated in a hurry. I once had a relationship with a woman who for reasons of her own liked it rough. She did not always like it rough, which was good, because I was not able to be rough. So she would get bored with me and go to the guy who would knock her around, and then come back to me to recuperate. Eventually, he made her an offer she liked, and she relinquished me to go with him full time. I have no idea how their relationship actually worked. I only know how she looked and what she told me when she arrived at my apartment one night, moving gingerly from the pain.

"Careful," she said. "He slammed me in the abdomen with a rifle butt." Then she smiled slyly. "Of course I was trying to shoot him with it at the time."

I've always been attracted to interesting women.

I was raised to develop a thick hide. Keep the pain on the inside, preferably far enough that you don't even feel it yourself. Show no weakness. Show no fear. My two years in an all-male prep school were a crash course in how to deal with constant bullying in an ocean of testosterone. Hazing and harassment were staples in male culture, and male culture dominated the adult world. 

My father's military academy stories often dealt with hazing by the dominant upper classes. The pecking order continued after graduation. The Coast Guard remained all male until near the end of his career.

Given the option to avoid it, I did. But I had absorbed the methodology even as I thought I was rejecting it. I had developed armored skin and iron heels. I could walk all over someone without noticing it, no problem.

Not being very perceptive, I fell into the trap of stereotyping. All of a given group were the same, or similar enough that I could treat them with a simple and uniform set of responses. This is common. Keep it simple.

You can keep it simple, if your default is polite deference. If your default is to look for your own advantage, you will constantly cross lines that you should have respected.

Good = Polite Deference.

Bad = Look for your own advantage.

It really is that simple. You can, with polite deference, look for mutual advantage. Then you need to look at the wider effects to see if this spreads disadvantage to third parties and beyond. But one on one, be respectful. This does not mean subservient.

I learned all this the hard way, earning my place in hell. I share it with you now in hopes of saving others. The worst of my sins are moderate -- as much as I would like to call them minor -- but, combined with the minor ones, are numerous enough to make any glance backward a painful and necessary reminder that a work in progress is never finished. Just because you are hopelessly condemned by your past misdeeds is no excuse to quit trying to be better.