Why Don’t More Men Hit Each Other Below the Belt? – Pacific Standard

Lisa Wade published an article on her blog page theorizing that the reason men are so sensitive about getting hit in the groin is that it reveals that they aren’t actually powerful; it threatens the facade of male strength. After doing this, something very interesting happened, which she described in a follow up article (this article seems to be missing at the moment; if i track it down, i’ll include a link above. It was in “the society pages”). Men would make public comments about the relative efficacy of groin strikes, how this tactic weighs up against other ones, etc, but would message her privately about how right she was, and add their own reflections about their feelings, their own experiences, etc.

There is a lot to say about these articles and the ideas in them, and I’ll devote a handful of short posts to her.

I’ll be saying much that is critical of Lisa Wade’s articles and ideas here, so I want to get this out early; I give her very high marks for 1) addressing this topic at all in the first place and 2) noticing and describing what happened subsequently. She is on a very short list of people who have made any sort of insightful observation on this topic, and for this she has my gratitude and admiration.

I also want to point out something more subtle in her defense. She’s writing a blog post; she has no responsibility to be thorough, to defend points in a way that endures academic scrutiny, anything like that. So I want to be up front that I’m treating her articles in a way that’s potentially a little unfair, picking apart things that I perceive to be weaknesses in an argument that may well have simply been casual speculation, in an environment where casual speculation is not only permittable but maybe ought to be protected. Take it that I’m using her articles to address points that I read into them, but that she might not stand by, were she approaching this topic with rigor or in some other environment. I don’t mean to punish her for speculating, even though I intend to use words and ideas her articles to criticize perspectives that one COULD extrapolate from them. Finally, I’ll be reading into things far enough to turn them into clear assertions, which means I could be reading in way past anything she would agree with at all. I see it in her article, but it might not reflect HER considered positions.

What do I think of her thesis? It does feel to me like the least imaginative application of feminist theory onto the topic one could make, basically “Men don’t like getting hit in the groin cuz patriarchy.” I am also perennially disappointed that people on the left don’t take their considerable tools for understanding how people can be marginalized and apply them to everyone, rather than just the group they care about on the most primitive, tribal level. She’s a woman taking a critical stance on non-womanhood, specifically looking at a special way men can be violently sexually assaulted, and turning it around to be about men’s privilege and power. Another way to state her thesis could be “if men just got over their patriarchal bullshit they’d be a lot cooler with getting sexually assaulted, and this kind of assault would be more widely accepted and embraced.”

…And, there may actually be something to that. If you imagine a rape with no pregnancy, no STD contracted, no lasting physical damage, we would all (I hope) agree that this rape was still horrible. But why? Why, if there are no lasting material or medical consequences, should the rape victim be particularly upset about what happened? Why should be care about this “victim,” when there were no damages, as normally defined? You could, if you wanted, describe the reason we care about this victim as power, loss of power. A society that frowns on the sexual assault of women confers privilege and power to those women. They have the right and privilege to not get raped from a legal perspective, accompanied with a robust societal stigma against rape. If they do get raped, they have the right to legal recourse, as well as a variety of kinds of social support. This power is the power to be human, the power to be seen as more than a worker, a baby factory, or cannon fodder. One part of the power is that we believe that it is a horrible thing for a woman to get raped; the other part is that, as best we can, we confer legal and social power that reflects this belief.

This is, of course, a weird way to talk about it. This is “privilege” and “power” that lies very close to the foundation of human need, in a category with the privilege of not getting murdered or starving to death, the power to avoid those things, the power to seek justice in those unacceptable conditions. Losing the power to be an integral human being is deeply traumatizing. We should all agree that something like rape is simply way, way off limits, and if your power to benefit from that agreed upon privilege is violated, you lose something that can’t be measured in dollars, athletic output, work efficiency at the factory, etc. Essentially we do believe that there is something inside of you that can be hurt in a way that we can’t measure. Or, at least, we believe there is something inside WOMEN that can be hurt that way.

I think when we apply that framing, “power” and “privilege,” to a woman’s right to not get sexually assaulted, the words feel like an insult, even though TECHNICALLY you could describe the situation that way. I think we use those terms to describe men’s relationships to society because we are very comfortable dehumanizing men.

I assume that Wade’s question has, as it’s foundation, an assumption about the harm of this kind of sexual assault to men that is contrary to all of the above. When a man is the victim of mga, in Wade’s mind (I imagine, she doesn’t flesh this out), the damage caused to him is precisely the amount of permanent physical damage he endures. If he survives, there is no reason for psychological trauma, and such trauma would need an artificial, contrived explanation, like patriarchy. Were it not for the illusions and manipulations created by the patriarchy, he would properly understand that he does not have the right to bodily integrity, even his private parts. Men’s private parts are simply not properly private, certainly not like women’s. Women, not men, are full humans.

So you COULD frame the need for humanity, or the harm of dehumanization, as a matter of power, privilege, etc., and I think it is coherent that way. But I would say we DON’T frame it that way unless it’s about men.