Sons and Others E-Book

Tanaka Mhishi

• Herausgeber: 404 Ink
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Inklings
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 112

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

In the UK, around one in six men will experience some form of sexual violence. Many of these men who experience sexual abuse are dismissed, only brought up as the butt of a joke, an exception to the rule or, perhaps at worst, are used as a rhetorical tool against female victims. Conversations on sexual violence have understandably focused on women's voices and experiences, with data indicating that women are still the majority of victims and not enough is being done to prevent this violence. As most perpetrators of this violence against women are men, it becomes almost easy to mistake that male survivors stories are exceptions or irrelevances. The fact is that we share a world and our experiences are closely interwoven. Sons and Others challenges misconceptions and misrepresentations of sexual violence against men across media and society and offers a new way of seeing and understanding these men in our lives, asking how the violence they experience affects us all.

Leseprobe

Sons and Others

Published by 404 Ink Limited

www.404Ink.com

@404Ink

All rights reserved © Tanaka Mhishi, 2022.

The right of Tanaka Mhishi to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without first obtaining the written permission of the rights owner, except for the use of brief quotations in reviews.

Please note: Some references include URLs which may change or be unavailable after publication of this book. All references within endnotes were accessible and accurate as of August 2022 but may experience link rot from there on in.

Editing: Laura Jones & Heather McDaid

Proofreading: Heather McDaid

Typesetting: Laura Jones

Cover design: Luke Bird

Co-founders and publishers of 404 Ink:

Heather McDaid & Laura Jones

Print ISBN: 978-1-912489-64-0

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-912489-65-7

Sons and Others

On Loving Male Survivors

Tanaka Mhishi

Contents

Content Note

Introduction: Asking better questions

Chapter 1: Sons

Chapter 2: Friends

Chapter 3: Fathers

Chapter 4: Lovers

Epilogue

References

About the Author

About the Inklings series

Content Note

Please note that there are depictions and descriptions of both adult and child sexual assault and rape throughout Sons and Others.

Introduction: Asking better questions

‘Hands up who has seen the Jim Carrey movie The Mask?’

Of the eighty people in the audience, maybe forty-five raise their hands. I let the question linger, look around the auditorium. The faces are inquisitive, some bordering on the suspicious.

‘Keep your hand up,’ I say, ‘if you remember the rape scene in it.’

A cascade of hands fall and confusion ripples through the room. I nod. As expected.

This is how I sometimes begin talks on male survivors of sexual violence. The scene in question happens near the denouement of the film, where the protagonist stops en route to rescuing the female lead to sexually assault two mechanics who wronged him earlier in the story. It’s played for laughs, the camera cutting away to a lightbulb while comic book boings and thwacks are laid over the mechanics screaming. It’s a throwaway gag that tells us a lot about our culture’s attitude to male survivors. As the evening’s event unfolds I unpick the myths that it reinforces; that sexual violence against men is funny, bizarre, outlandish. The talk segues into my own experiences, into the broader contexts and forces at play in the lives of men who experience sexual violence.

Afterwards, a woman comes up to me.

‘I couldn’t believe that,’ she said, ‘I showed that film to my kids.’

I nod. It is, after all, a kid’s movie.

*

Most of us grew up in this world, one which treated sexual violence against men as a harmless joke. I also watched The Mask as a child and barely noticed the scene. It was only in my twenties, as I began navigating life as a male rape survivor, that I began to notice the casual derision directed at men like me which is threaded through our culture. How could it be otherwise, when we have spent years being cued to laugh at this phenomenon, that we struggle to take it seriously?

The history of our conversations on sexual violence has, for understandable reasons, focused on women’s voices and experiences. The data indicates that women are still the majority of victims,1 and most of our communities and public services are not doing enough to prevent this violence. Most of the perpetrators of violence against women are men and it’s easy to fall into the position that male survivors’ stories are exceptions or irrelevances. The fact is, though, that we share a world and our experiences are closely interwoven.

In the UK around one in six men will experience some form of sexual violence.2 Recent data suggests that twice that number will experience sexual harassment in the workplace. Among gay and bisexual men, the rate of sexual violence is higher, hovering at around 47%.3That’s around two men per football team who will be assaulted or abused, five boys in a mixed class of thirty who will go on to be sexually harassed at work, and half the men in a gay club. The average British woman probably dates one or two male survivors in her lifetime, and there’s a decent chance that she will marry or mother one. Male survivors also far outnumber male perpetrators of sexual abuse in the general population,4 but we have historically been prone to denial about our experiences. One study found that men have been been less likely to recognise their own ordeals as sexual abuse; as many as 84% percent of men who had had experiences which met the legal definition of sexual abuse did not describe themselves as victims or survivors.5 We don’t know how this has changed over the past few years.

If we widen this thought out to any include unwanted sexual experience (including harassment, groping or sexual activity with an adult before the age of consent) some recent data suggests that as many as half of men will be affected.6 We do not know how this fits into the broader picture of sexual harassment in public and private spaces and how often the perpetrators are the same people who are perpetrating violence against women and girls.

‘What happened to you?’

This is the first question that people ask me as a male rape survivor. They often don’t want to talk about it at all, and the conversation is turned, firmly but gracefully, towards something less contentious. Anything will do. Religious taboo, major political upheaval, cryptocurrency. People would rather talk about anything else. But one on one, when the lights are low, people ask, ‘What happened to you?’

It’s a trap. Like most of the questions survivors are asked, the question dictates the terms of its answer. My rape, and the assaults which preceded it, are some of the least interesting things about me. The world is lousy with survivors; you probably pass ten of us on the way to work.

Knowing that someone is a survivor tells you nothing about them. It does not tell you that they make fantastic pasta sauce or spent a summer working in a ranch restaurant in Wyoming, or once patented a new kind of orthopedic shoe. It does not tell you that they are a good father or a great daughter, a ukulele player, or a great writer.

The second and third questions are equally useless.

‘How can that happen to a man?’

‘Why didn’t you fight back?’

We see representations of sexual violence against women frequently in our society, from the infamous scenes in Game of Thrones to the Carry On movies. These scenes are fraught and damaging in many ways, but they are at least a clear mythology to push back on. By contrast, sexual violence against men has historically been framed as as ‘bizarre’ or exceptional.

Of course, we all have questions. But I think we are asking the wrong ones.

A week after I was raped in 2015, I took myself down to the Jubilee Library in Brighton, where I was a student, in search of answers to my questions – to the questions that many male survivors ask in the wake of being raped or sexually assaulted.

I wanted to know what would happen next. Would I ever want to have sex again? Would I be able to fall in love – and would anyone want to fall in love with me? If so, who? Would people want to hire me if they knew I was a rape survivor? Would I now be a horrible father? Should I tell my family, and, if so, how?

These are altogether more practical questions, questions that, as the 1 in 6 figure indicates, millions of men are grappling with. In the UK, that translates to upwards of five million men who are attempting to find their own answers to these questions.

You, reading this, are sure to know some of us. But the silence around the sexual abuse of men means that he is unlikely to tell you. Even if you are his parent or his partner. Even if you are raising children together or working side by side. Even if he is your father. Even if you, whatever your gender, are a survivor or victim of abuse yourself.

If we want to know each other better, and if we want to love – and be loved by – men who have experienced abuse then our thinking has to change. We need to stop seeing male survivors as a slice of the pie chart, an exception, or an oddity. Instead, we need to grapple with what this experience means for all of us and our relationships in a world that is struggling to move towards equality and liberation. We need to meet male survivors on their own terms.

And we need to ask better questions.

Some of the questions in this book have no easy answers, because there is a lot we don’t know. Currently, most research on sexual violence is centred on female survivors of male perpetrated violence. There are sporadic pieces of research on male survivors’ experiences, and a smattering of studies which deal with the experiences of non-binary people. Proponents of this approach, which most people call ‘gender specific’, point out that there is no sense in pretending that men and women are having the same experiences of sexual violence, harassment and harm. There are others who argue for a ‘gender neutral’ way of understanding these crimes, who tend to believe that while the impact may be unevenly distributed, the feelings evoked by sexual violence are largely the same, and that it’s not right for some groups to be supported while others are not.

To my mind, both approaches are incomplete. Both have their merits, but they also mean that we are missing the rich and diverse landscapes in which survivors live their actual lives.

When I was raped, it was a female friend who showed up to my side in the months after. She made sure I was eating and taking the medication that would prevent me from contracting HIV. After a disastrous police interview a month later, I had to call her from the side of a main road. I had been trying to calculate where the trucks would be going their fastest so that I could throw myself under one. She cleared her evening to take care of me. Years later, after she was raped, I was with her in the moment she admitted to herself what had happened, and she half-cried, half-laughed, doubling over in shock.

Her trauma and my trauma are different beasts, shaped by our different experiences of gender, sexuality and race. They happened for different reasons. But we were parts of each other’s journeys towards recovery. Our experiences happened alongside each other, and ours are intertwined in a way that neither a gender neutral nor gender specific way of thinking can capture.

Over the past seven years I have worked with people of all genders who have widely different experiences of sexual violence, and I can tell you that there is more hope in this work than you would possibly believe. For every gut-twisting story of abuse I have encountered, I have also been blown away by the wisdom, compassion and courage in those who work with trauma; both their own and others. To capture and share this wisdom we need neither neutrality nor specificity, but diversity.

One of the great gifts I received early in my career was from a colleague who described our jobs as patchwork. A single square of fabric, no matter how diligently made, will not do much against the cold. We need to join it up to those around it to create adequate protection. This book is about that work of joining up, stitching together, linking hands. It is about holding the male survivor experience alongside others and thinking about how we fit into our society together.

One in six men. Probably more. I hope that as you are reading this you will think about the men in your life. About your father, your uncles, your brothers. About the men on your favourite football team or, if you are someone who is attracted to men, the people you have fancied, kissed, loved, had sex with. If you are a male survivor who is reading this I hope you will also think about the other people in your life, men, women and non-binary people, who may have similar experiences to you.

This is not just about supporting men and boys who have experienced sexual violence. It is about a web of connected experiences and solidarities – often messy, sometimes uncomfortable, but always real and worthwhile.

Chapter 1: Sons

A traumatic memory does not work like any other kind of memory. When I call them up, the process is graceless and spasmodic, as though I am wrenching diseased tissue away from my spine. You never know how deep the rot goes, it’s been part of you that long.

Here is what I remember.