OR, “WHY WON’T YOU FUCKING LEAVE ME ALONE”

by Leo Steinmetz February 2019

Content warnings: violence, emotional abuse, rape and sexual assault

A Google Doc of this essay is available here.



I. Summer Camp at Thirteen

During the summer between seventh and eighth grade, when I was thirteen years old, I attended a day camp near Los Angeles. The camp had about fifty middle-school-age kids, mostly white and well-off like me, doing arts and crafts and playing games and going on hikes throughout the day for a week or so. It was a long time ago, and I only vaguely remember my experiences there, but one event is particularly vivid in my memory. We were split up by gender for different activities. The boys were led over to a grassy field and told we would be playing a game vaguely similar to tackle football. I had never played any tackle sport before, and I disliked most sports, being uninterested, unskilled, and afraid of injury. I had recently decided to try to get more involved with touch football and soccer at school, and I had almost immediately gotten seriously hurt, putting a quick end to my aspirations. The idea of tackling another kid, or of being tackled, was uncomfortable and frightening. I asked the counselor leading the activity if I could opt out, and he said absolutely not, I was sure to have a great time. I repeated my request, clarifying my discomfort, and the counselor told me I was required to participate. At this point the teams had been mostly picked and the rules mostly explained, and so I was shuttled onto a team with no clear idea of what I was supposed to do. A friend who had overheard my conversation with the counselor told me that if I was goalie I probably wouldn’t get tackled, so I told my teammates I wasn’t going to tackle anybody, and shuffled over to the goal. Play ensued, with much running and shouting and tackling, and I watched from the edge of the field, hoping nobody would come towards me. Inevitably, a boy from the other team escaped my teammates and hurtled towards the goal. I was much larger than he was, both taller and heavier. He reached me, I stepped out of the way, and he scored. Immediately, almost every member of my team began shouting at me, along with a few members of the other team and the counselor. I don’t remember the specifics of the things they said, but they were along the lines of “How dare you not tackle that person, don’t you know how to be a member of the team, don’t you understand games, I can’t believe you did that, what is wrong with you.” The counselor furiously told me I had to actively participate. I do not remember any other moment in my life when so many people became angry with me so quickly. Apparently, what I had done was completely unconscionable. I burst into tears and ran away. The counselor followed me, and attempted to persuade me to rejoin the game. I was crying so hard I was completely unable to communicate. The counselor abandoned me after it became clear I would not return. I continued crying off by myself for some time, until the game was over and we moved on to the next activity. This moment was formative, or perhaps emblematic. I had already begun to learn a certain lesson about masculinity, but this event made it painfully clear: as a young man, I would be obligated to be physically violent with other young men. I might feel unsafe, or violated, or abused in any of these physical activities, but barring running away in tears, I had absolutely no right to opt out, or to restrict what happened to my body. This experience was so formative because this was one of the only times I actually managed to decisively and visibly choose not to engage in physical conflict, and making this choice upset all of my peers as well as the person responsible for my well-being. It has taken me a long time to begin to comprehend the effects of that experience.



II. Boys Hurting Boys

Young boys experience many different types of violence that are supposed to be fun. In addition to unstructured roughhousing, wrestling, and play-fighting, dozens of games involve physical conflict and struggle, including tackle football, Mister President (everyone tackles the person who reacts last), the circle game (you make a certain gesture at someone, and if they see it, you get to punch them), and the slap game (two people slap each other’s hands until one person is in too much pain to continue). These games aren’t restricted to boys, but boys are the most common participants, and the more aggressive games occur mainly among pre-teens and teenagers. They focus on physical prowess (as with other sports), physical control over others, endurance of pain, and the enforcement of taboos or rules with violence—there are countless variations of the game “I get to punch you if X happens” or even “I must punch you or tackle you if X happens.” As a kid, I stayed away from most of these games. Many of the people who participated in them seemed to genuinely enjoy them, but I usually didn’t, and I could often escape to the bathroom or a different room if a game began and it didn’t seem to be possible to opt out. But sometimes I couldn’t escape, or I felt I had to participate, or I was forced in by someone abruptly jumping me as I shouted something along the lines of “Leave me alone, why won’t you fucking leave me alone.” Sometimes I even had fun, but sometimes I got injured, and often I was upset, and when I knew violence was coming, I had no idea how to stop it. My experience has been tame compared to what some of my peers have endured. I have friends who were regularly beat up by their friends or brothers, or who had arms and legs broken while roughhousing. But my intention is not to argue that these interactions can be dangerous. I am concerned that they are often not optional. I was swimming with a friend, and he wrestled me underwater and held me down; when he let me up, I shouted at him to stop, but he did it again a few minutes later. I was moving away from a group of friends to avoid a tackle game and five of them jumped on me, all at once. More than once, a friend has physically dragged me into a roughhousing game and prevented me from leaving. As part of a “poke war” I didn’t want to be a part of, my friend grabbed my arms to prevent me from blocking as another friend repeatedly jabbed me in the stomach, while I shouted at them to stop. Many people have jumped onto my back without any warning, sometimes leaving me injured; I think my being tall, but slow and weak, makes me a particular target for people jumping on my back—isn’t it funny that such a big person could be so easily physically controlled, made helpless, made miserable? Most of these interactions deeply upset me, but I had trouble figuring out exactly how and why I was upset, beyond my shame at losing a physical struggle. I didn’t know that I had the right of bodily determination, or even the capacity to be physically violated. The people who attacked me were usually my friends, and they seemed to expect me to enjoy the activity. They acted jovial and friendly while they terrified me and took control of my body. I rarely reported these actions to anyone else. The times I complained to friends, I received sympathy, ridicule, encouragement to participate, disapproval of those who engaged with me, disapproval of my own lack of engagement, or instructions to just “slap the shit out of” the offender. I rarely received supportive outrage at the violation of my bodily autonomy, and I was never given tools to help me deescalate physical situations or get roughhousing friends to stop. I might have received more support from my parents or from teachers, but I didn’t know that my problems were significant enough for me to go to those sources of support. Nobody taught me to expect those around me to respect my body, my personal space, or my right not to be attacked. My experience taught me that any such expectation was ridiculous, naively hopeful, or stupid. I absorbed the idea that participation in the struggle to dominate other people’s bodies was an important part of growth. I did not learn to make sure other people were interested before roughhousing with them, and I did not learn about the concept of consent. I learned that boys hurting other boys was an inescapable part of life, regardless of whether or not it was fun. I was repeatedly upset, repeatedly ashamed, repeatedly wounded and angry, and I didn’t even know that those feelings were legitimate. As a young boy I did hear some criticism of roughhousing behaviors, but the most common form was the allegation that young boys are inherently violent and crude, and that boys’ participation in violence makes them almost subhuman. “Ah, disgusting little ruffians. They don’t have any restraint or empathy.” I dislike this criticism, because I was a young boy struggling to develop restraint and empathy. I was devastated when, even as I struggled to escape violence, I heard that I was incurably and subhumanly violent. I might have hoped that the people vocally critical of roughhousing would be supportive of my desire not to participate, but instead their criticism framed young male violence as inherent and inescapable, as opposed to externally imposed and optional. There was no room for a young boy to choose not to roughhouse. But these activities should certainly be criticized. Boys are pushed into roughhousing primarily by friends, but they might be further encouraged by parents, teachers, relatives, counselors, role models, anyone. Friends, parents, or other adults might tell them to stay away from violence, but those people rarely help them escape it. These activities can be dangerous, and boys who are injured are encouraged to hide their injuries so as not to appear weak. Hiding their injuries prevents boys from learning how to ask for help when in pain, or that being in pain can affect their mood and their judgement. And through these activities boys can learn a number of deeply toxic lessons: my own consent doesn’t matter, other people’s consent doesn’t matter, violence is natural, resisting social norms makes you weak. Nobody should be learning those things.



III. Trapped By Shame

I have been dogged by a persistent fantasy through much of my life. In this fantasy, I encounter another man doing something horrible. Perhaps I stumble across him about to rape someone, or perhaps he begins drunkenly escalating a fight and refuses to back down. In the fantasy, I then beat the crap out of him, quickly and efficiently. He injures me, maybe severely, but I persevere and win the fight decisively. Maybe I throw him out of a window, or slam his head into the corner of a table, or break his arm. The conclusion to the fight is always extreme in its brutality, and that decisive violence certifies my victory. The fantasy continues beyond the fight. Afterward, I earn some sort of regard from my friends. They are somewhat more afraid of me, but they also respect me in a way they didn’t before, seeing me as more valuable. I imagine noticing my friends whispering about me and looking at me in awe from across the room. While physical self-defense skills are important—skill in martial arts is valuable, the ability to defend yourself is valuable—this fantasy suggests that my own capacity to do violence is something I overvalue, both as a piece of my self-image and as a way to gain respect from others. I don’t fantasize about talking down the aggressor, or about getting a victim to safety. The fantasy isn’t about competence in the face of conflict. It’s about extreme violence, and the conflict is only there to justify the violence. Not every fantasy represents a real-world desire, but I am certain that some part of me longs for validation through violence, despite the fact that in real life I hate and avoid physical conflict. The violence that young men do to each other nearly always has winners and losers. Some roughhousing is just rough-and-tumble sport, a struggle that goes until it stops. But most roughhousing creates winners and losers, or differentiates participants through feelings of pride or shame. I never felt validated in my feelings of violation after roughhousing, but I certainly thought that my feelings of shame and inadequacy after losing were appropriate. Rough games award status to the winners and shame to the losers, and the losers learn that the only way to escape their shame and gain status is to win. This shame makes it even harder for boys to opt out of roughhousing. A young man ashamed at losing might worry that trying to opt out will make him appear to be a sore loser. He also might feel that he has to reclaim his lost self-esteem by participating more until he wins. I was so ashamed of my inability to physically defend myself that I thought my being violated was my own fault. If my peers deliberately chose to take total control of my body without invitation, then what did it matter whether I wanted to participate? The games themselves centered around my friends dominating me and overwhelming my resistance. Without the ability to fight my peers off, my internal opposition to roughhousing seemed meaningless and even hypocritical. That prevented me from trying harder to convince my friends to leave me alone, or from reporting the abuse to adults. I felt trapped, as though the only path forward was to continue to accept physical violation. Of course, if a boy feels ashamed and decides to continue to play, he might lose more and feel more ashamed. That is a vicious cycle, and I think it is the source of my toxic power fantasy, in which I offset an entire adolescence’s worth of shame over losing and hiding, through an act of extreme violence. Even a few successes may not help boys overcome their shame, because succeeding in a rough game doesn’t always confer very much social status; the internal shame of losing is usually more dramatic than the regard gained from winning. I believe this makes losers overvalue violence and dominance as a path to status. I think the winners are trapped too, in a certain way. It’s not healthy to learn that the best way to feel good about yourself and to shield yourself from feeling shame is to dominate other people. If your self-esteem comes from the degradation of others, you may often feel upset or threatened by other people’s successes. Numerous studies (like this one) have shown that when men’s masculine identities are threatened—perhaps by being told they’re not masculine or by being asked to do a feminine activity like braiding hair—men will react by doubling down on hypermasculinity and becoming more violent and coercive in the short term. I am not arguing that systems with winners and losers should not exist. I don’t mean to say that competition is intrinsically unhealthy, or intrinsically restrictive. But when competition is inescapable, it becomes destructive. A young man who feels shame due to his repeated losses at roughhousing or pain endurance games should have the choice not to participate, without any social punishment for opting out. A young man who is proud of his roughhousing abilities or who simply enjoys wrestling or pain tolerance games shouldn’t feel the need to roughhouse with people who don’t want to, and he shouldn’t learn to rely on his ability to create pain and shame. Everybody deserves the freedom to walk away.



IV. Blurry Identities

I have so far in this essay spoken of myself as a nonconsensual participant in roughhousing. But the notion of consent in this context is complicated. There were times when I enjoyed roughhousing games, thrilled by the challenge or the physicality or the adrenaline. I initiated roughhousing games a few times, and perhaps even pressured some of my friends into joining. A person who is violated by the roughhousing of his peers in one circumstance might easily violate his peers in another. Who is dominant and who is not, who is pushing roughhousing and who is resisting it; these identities are blurry and fluid in a way that was deeply confusing to me as a young man, and that still gives me trouble today. When I’ve been dragged unwillingly into some form of roughhousing, I’ve had to quickly make a decision: do I accept this and go along with it, or do I resist and make a fuss, or do I just disappear? I learned at that summer camp, and in many other situations, that resisting and making a fuss might make everyone angry with me, and I found that disappearing wasn’t always an option. So I occasionally participated, overriding my actual desires. Sometimes I would do so grudgingly, perhaps with a sort of muted “Ugh, c’mon man, leave me alone,” hoping that whoever was tackling me would notice my disinterest and find someone more enthusiastic. But sometimes I would engage, wrestle or hit back, laugh, and pretend to enjoy myself. I did this because I was afraid to upset the people around me by protesting, by deviating from the official roughhousing script. I was also afraid of casting my friends as bad. If one of my friends started hitting me or wrestling me and I said “Stop,” and they ignored me, and then I said “No, stop, I really mean it,” I’d be telling them that their earlier choice to ignore my “Stop” was wrong, and that they were being a bad person or a bad friend. I didn’t want to send that message, even if it was true, so if they ignored my first “Stop” I usually wouldn’t repeat it. Because of these silent negotiations with myself, I sometimes had a hard time understanding whether or not I actually liked to roughhouse. My desire to play along could hide my extreme discomfort from myself. I might have imagined protesting and having someone respond, “Wait! You seem to like this sometimes!” but I didn’t need to have any such interaction because I was already telling that to myself. Without any role models demonstrating a graceful way not to participate, I didn’t have access to an identity that resisted roughhousing. I felt incoherent and hypocritical; I was both a deviant person who hated roughhousing and a regular person who liked it. In my attempts to square my discomfort with my desire to fit in, I think I also performed the role of roughhouser in a way that might have violated other young men. My playing that part might also have convinced other uncomfortable boys that they were the only ones who disliked roughhousing. In attempting to project the identity of a “normal, cool kid” I was reinforcing the same cultural expectations that were hurting me. I have no way to know how much this affected my peers, but I find the thought distressing. It’s perfectly understandable for a young man to feel conflicted about an activity. But young men figuring out how they relate to roughhousing still roughhouse in the standard, violating ways. I might have been uncomfortable, I might have felt violated, but I didn’t usually resist roughhousing very forcefully or visibly, and I even contributed to the violation of others. My point here is not to wallow in guilt, but to say that roughhousing games won’t get better by themselves. Even I, as uncomfortable as I was, didn’t understand my own feelings well enough to discuss them until much later. I have no doubt that more confident and more articulate young men may be able to convince their peers to be more respectful of each other. But I think there has to be bigger, structural change, involving not just roughhousing boys, but everyone else—counselors, parents, teachers—so that young men who don’t want to be violent can be comfortable in that choice. Without explicit support from their communities, boys with blurry feelings about roughhousing will just keep feeling ashamed and violated while continuing the harmful habits of their peers.



V. Respect, Trust, Support

I don’t have solutions to these problems. I’m not an educator, I don’t work with young men, and my total dissociation from roughhousing and contact sports disqualifies me from developing ways to do them respectfully. What I can do is describe how I would like to feel and how I would like to be treated, and attempt to imagine systems that would have better supported me. I’m going to phrase these desires in the present tense, but as I’m rarely exposed to roughhousing any more it might be better to think of them as applying to the past: I wish these things had happened for me. I want to feel like my choices are respected. I want everyone around me—teachers, parents, friends, mentors—to understand that roughhousing should not be mandatory, and that everyone should always have the option not to participate. I want institutions like summer camps and gym classes to allow children to opt out of contact sports. I want to be able to say, “No, I don’t want to do that,” and have my response be immediately recognized as valid. I want parents and teachers to explain to children that they have the right to decide how, when, and whether they may be touched. I want to know that everyone around me is aware of that right, and I want parents and teachers to tell children that it is wrong to roughhouse with other people who aren’t interested. If someone wants me to participate in something that I am uncomfortable with, I want that person to encourage me and not command me or manipulate me. I want people, whenever possible, to explicitly tell me I have the right to say no, even when they’re encouraging me to participate. I have found that I am much more interested in participating in a new activity when the people who are inviting me acknowledge my reticence as valid; if someone doesn’t accept my concerns, I tend to distrust their suggestions, as they are indicating that they don’t understand me. I want to be able to make different choices whenever I like. If someone is roughhousing and invites me, I want to feel completely free to opt in or opt out, regardless of my past choices. Sometimes people who have tried to convince me to do something would only leave me alone if I said, “I never do that, ever.” This has made me unable to explore those experiences even when I wanted to, because I know that if I indicate any interest, those people might disrespect my right to say no next time. I want to feel no obligation to be good at physical conflict. I want to feel comfortable and accepted in my total inability to ever fight another person, and I also want the option to participate in roughhousing games occasionally and to lose without being shamed. After a childhood spent avoiding sports, I’ve fallen in love with certain sports because I’ve discovered that I can have a good time while being terrible at them. I’m so bad at soccer that I can single-handedly propel my team to a crushing defeat, due to a combination of zealous engagement and total lack of control over the ball. Much to my surprise, I still find it extremely fun, but that fun depends on the people around me supporting noncompetitive play. I think the few moments when I enjoyed roughhousing games happened in similar circumstances, when for whatever reason, I felt safe and supported independent of victory or loss, able to enjoy the activity and the challenge for its own sake. I want to trust the people around me to respond to me without qualification. If I suddenly get uncomfortable and want to stop, I want to be able to stop. Going into a game, I want to trust that I will have the option to stop at any time. I want nobody to punch me. The form of roughhousing I experience most often in my life today (albeit rarely) is other men punching me, randomly and usually in a jovial way, maybe after they make a joke or give me a compliment. They often punch hard, and it really hurts, and I fucking hate it, and usually tell them “Don’t do that” or “Please don’t hit me” and they usually laugh, and sometimes they do it again right away. I want this to stop. I want to be open about physical pain. If I feel extreme (or even normal) pain during a game, or if I am injured, even in a small way, I want to be able to talk about it without feeling weak. I want to be able to discuss the nuances of enjoying something that is dangerous or physically painful. I don’t want to suppress my physical pain, or to view it as a weakness, or to misrepresent it to myself or to others in any way. I want to support other men and boys struggling to figure out how they feel about roughhousing, and I want to feel supported by them. I want boys to be able to say whether or not they enjoyed something and whether or not they felt violated, without worrying about upsetting anybody or being shamed. I want men and boys who have felt violated to be able to say so without worrying about hurting their friends’ feelings, and I want their concerns to be taken seriously by others. I want young men to be able to work together to find ways of reframing or escaping their shame, to openly discuss their desires and their reservations, and to support each other in processing their emotions. I want roughhousing to be optional, and I want everyone who engages in it to treat everyone else with respect, trust, and support. I almost never felt any of those things. I hope that changes for young men in the future.



VI. Closing Notes

There is an easy analogy here between coercive roughhousing and rape or sexual assault: a person violates another person’s physical boundaries without consent. I believe that roughhousing and sexual violence are deeply intertwined. Nonetheless, I tried to write this essay without making a direct analogy between them. I chose to describe the specific problems I faced, rather than compare them to a related but very different set of problems. I mention the analogy here because it influenced my perspective. I was able to begin thinking of these occurrences as systematically harmful because I noticed parallels between my own experiences with roughhousing and other people’s experiences with sexual harassment. I also modeled this piece on essays about sexual violence. Many of the problems I discuss affect people who are not men or masculine. I chose to focus my essay on men because the majority of my experiences of roughhousing happened among young men, but I expect that many people who are not men experience similar or even identical issues. Even people who do not have direct experiences with roughhousing can be affected by these problems, because the way young men treat each other influences the way they treat women and nonbinary people. Similarly, many of the problems I discuss vary widely for different men. Nonetheless, I left this piece fairly general. I believe that boys in many different communities and situations experience similar violations. I also want my conclusions and hopes about respect, trust, and support to apply to all young men. But my experience was just one young man’s experience. My analysis likely includes elements specific to my circumstances while also missing key features of the experiences of other young men. I feel that it is important to mention that this topic is intensely emotional for me. I started writing this essay because I was extremely upset. I had recently been violated by roughhousing again, and I had handled it poorly, suppressing my discomfort and engaging in a way that made me feel like I was a hypocrite who had violated myself. My belief that consent in roughhousing is a serious issue is rooted not just in my logical analysis, but also in my feelings of violation and distress, and in my resulting anger. However, anger subsides, and energy to do something about it often subsides too. As time has gone on, I have worried that this isn’t a real problem, that it doesn’t deserve to be talked about, that I’m the only person who was hurt by this kind of thing. To overcome that worry, I am trusting my memories of a few months ago, when I was very angry and wanted to tell everyone why. Finally, this essay criticizes the behaviors of people who might read it. I am not writing this to lay blame or to seek apologies; those events are in the past. I am interested in thinking about what happened, thinking about what the effects were, and thinking about what could change. I hope this essay leads you to wonder about the same things.



Acknowledgements

Many people were involved in proofreading and editing this essay. My sister Eva Steinmetz, in addition to helping me process these experiences and many others, read the first draft and gave me comments and encouragement. Andrew Oung, Stephen Yang, Deepika Pangarkar, Robert Hurley, and Yasmeen Musthafa gave me feedback on the second draft, and Maya Rappaport did a very thorough edit, finding elegant ways to break up some of my chronic run-on sentences and suggesting more effective word choices at key points. Jenette Sellin read both the first and last drafts and gave me useful feedback and support. My dad John Steinmetz line-edited the last two drafts with incredible precision, helping me improve almost every sentence and suggesting important tweaks to emphasis and argument crafting. I am extremely grateful for all of these people’s suggestions and support; any particularly graceful phrases likely came from them, and any errors are my own. Thanks also to Emily Edelstein for being constantly excited about and supportive of this project from the beginning. I am a habitual consumer of essays, and many of them informed this piece, in content, context, and structure. The three that I think I owe the most are Man Child by Audre Lorde, How to Tell the Bad Men from the Good Men by Caitlin Moran, and On Pandering by Claire Vaye Watkins.