For months, every morning when my daughter was in preschool, I watched her construct an elaborate castle out of blocks, colorful plastic discs, bits of rope, ribbons and feathers, only to have the same little boy gleefully destroy it within seconds of its completion.
No matter how many times he did it, his parents never swooped in BEFORE the morning’s live 3-D reenactment of “Invasion of AstroMonster.” This is what they’d say repeatedly:
“You know! Boys will be boys!”
“He’s just going through a phase!”
“He’s such a boy! He LOVES destroying things!”
“Oh my god! Girls and boys are SO different!”
“He. Just. Can’t. Help himself!”
I tried to teach my daughter how to stop this from happening. She asked him politely not to do it. We talked about some things she might do. She moved where she built. She stood in his way. She built a stronger foundation to the castle, so that, if he did get to it, she wouldn’t have to rebuild the whole thing. In the meantime, I imagine his parents thinking, “What red-blooded boy wouldn’t knock it down?”
She built a beautiful, glittery castle in a public space.
It was so tempting.
He just couldn’t control himself and, being a boy, had violent inclinations.
She had to keep her building safe.
Her consent didn’t matter. Besides, it’s not like she made a big fuss when he knocked it down. It wasn’t a “legitimate” knocking over if she didn’t throw a tantrum.
His desire — for power, destruction, control, whatever- - was understandable.
Maybe she “shouldn’t have gone to preschool” at all. OR, better if she just kept her building activities to home.
I know it’s a lurid metaphor, but I taught my daughter the preschool block precursor of don’t “get raped” and this child, Boy #1, did not learn the preschool equivalent of “don’t rape.”
Not once did his parents talk to him about invading another person’s space and claiming for his own purposes something that was not his to claim. Respect for her and her work and words was not something he was learning. How much of the boy’s behavior in coming years would be excused in these ways, be calibrated to meet these expectations and enforce the “rules” his parents kept repeating?
There was another boy who, similarly, decided to knock down her castle one day. When he did it his mother took him in hand, explained to him that it was not his to destroy, asked him how he thought my daughter felt after working so hard on her building and walked over with him so he could apologize. That probably wasn’t much fun for him, but he did not do it again.
There was a third child. He was really smart. He asked if he could knock her building down. She, beneficent ruler of all pre-circle-time castle construction, said yes… but only after she was done building it and said it was OK. They worked out a plan together and eventually he started building things with her and they would both knock the thing down with unadulterated joy. You can’t make this stuff up.
Take each of these three boys and consider what he might do when he’s older, say, at college, drunk at a party, mad at an ex-girlfriend who rebuffs him and uses words that she expects will be meaningful and respecte, “No, I don’t want to. Stop. Leave.”
The “overarching attitudinal characteristic” of abusive men is entitlement.
![green-evening:
thesixpennybook:
Plus the fact that a number of prominent women in the BDSM community (eg. Maggie Mayhem and Kitty Stryker) have publicly come out and said that sexual abuse of women is absolutely rampant- Stryker has stated that she “[has] yet to meet a female submissive who hasn’t had some sort of sexual assault happen to her” [tw on that link for misogyny and sexual violence].
lol @ haters in the notes.
I was in the scene for years and witnessed (and experienced) tons of manipulation, lying, abuse, and circling the wagons around known abusers rather than admitting to the systemic problem of abuse and rape in the scene. I’ve known dozens of people who dropped out of the scene due to sanctioned abuse. I’ve had title holders and organization runners physically follow me around and touch me without my consent. I’ve had people send me disgusting messages about my status as a rape survivor. I’ve listened to sociopaths brag about “breaking” people and how fun it is to prey on 18 year old girls the second they enter the scene. I’ve attended consent workshops and classes led by people who everyone but me knew to be notorious serial abusers, who were protected by the “see no evil” attitude of scene leaders. I left the scene after a nationally known title holder—who uses his real name, as title holders tend to do—described, in graphic detail, how he raped an intoxicated and unconscious stranger and then bragged about how the stranger was afraid of him afterwards, and how that furthered his “leather journey.” It is this way everywhere. There are no exceptions and there are no safe spaces and there is nowhere—NOWHERE—that will put safety above the scene’s continued survival as a source of new sexual partners and of REVENUE (the scene can be incredibly lucrative to event planners, vendors, etc)
I invested years of my life into that bullshit and I am a worse and a poorer person for it, socially, financially, and morally. BDSM scene ain’t shit.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/791f1880c7953fa33f23acd7ec405568/tumblr_mk830dggHX1qbn6wdo1_500.png)
