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We have heard many accounts from women of what it is like to live under the yoke of our self-serving construction of a violent, pathetic and problematic masculinity. It is time that we stop gaslighting their reality.

By now, many of you are probably saying, this doesn’t apply to me — I’m innocent.

It’s true that many of us, including me, have not committed vile acts of rape, sexual assault and sexual abuse the likes of which Harvey Weinstein has been accused of. We have not, like Charlie Rose, been accused of sexual harassment by dozens of women who worked for us; and we are not, like Bill Cosby, being sent to prison for drugging and sexually assaulting a woman, in this case, Andrea Constand. Yet I argue that we are collectively complicit with a sexist mind-set and a poisonous masculinity rooted in the same toxic male culture from which these men emerged.

I’m issuing a clarion call against our claims of sexist “innocence.” I’m calling our “innocence” what it is — bullshit. As bell hooks writes in “The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity and Love,” men unconsciously “engage in patriarchal thinking, which condones rape even though they may never enact it. This is a patriarchal truism that most people in our society want to deny.” When women speak out about male violence, hooks writes, “folks are eager to stand up and make the point that most men are not violent. They refuse to acknowledge that masses of boys and men have been programmed from birth on to believe that at some point they must be violent, whether psychologically or physically, to prove that they are men.” We have learned it. In the language of Simone de Beauvoir, “One is not born, but rather becomes” masculine.

We have hidden behind a myth that “boys will be boys” — a myth that distorts our moral compass , that stunts our growth, maturity and self-respect, and smothers our capacity to love and experience the genuine ecstasy of Eros. Audre Lorde writes in “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” (1978), “The erotic has often been misnamed by men and used against women.” She adds, “Pornography is a direct denial of the power of the erotic, for it represents the suppression of true feeling.” Not only are we as men taught to deny our feelings, but we also are taught that sexual vulnerability is weakness, not the province of “real men.”

We mask that vulnerability. I find hooks’s description powerful and true to my own experience as a boy: “Learning to wear a mask (that word already embedded in the term ‘masculinity’),” as hooks writes, “is the first lesson in patriarchal masculinity that a boy learns. He learns that his core feelings cannot be expressed if they do not conform to the acceptable behaviors sexism defines as male. Asked to give up the true self in order to realize the patriarchal ideal, boys learn self-betrayal early and are rewarded for these acts of soul murder.”

What does hooks mean by “soul murder”?

When I was about 15 years old, I said to a friend of mine, “Why must you always look at a girl’s butt?” He promptly responded: “Are you gay or something? What else should I look at, a guy’s butt?” He was already wearing the mask. He had already learned the lessons of patriarchal masculinity. I was in an unfortunate bind. Either I should without question objectify girls’ behinds or I was gay. There was no wiggle room for me to be both antisexist and antimisogynistic and yet a heterosexual young boy. You see, other males had rewarded his gaze by joining in the objectifying practice: “Look at that butt!” It was a collective act of devaluation. The acts of soul murder had already begun.