Rolling Maleness and Masculinity Discussion Thread

Gaslamp Killer's response statement is interesting, struck me as possibly the least objectionable one I've seen that still constitutes a denial

Yeah, I can't tell if it's just an unusually well-manicured version of the stock response or if it's a genuinely unusual situation, though I strongly suspect it's the former.

Kind of hard to believe him when it appears that one woman accused him, then he literally went to the other one to say "back me up here," and she was like "what the fuck, you raped both of us!"

The best benefit of doubt I could give him is maybe he was intoxicated and doesn't remember the whole series of events.

i have a question, and please do not feel like you need to respond or talk about it if you don't want to, but have any men posting itt been sexually assaulted before?

i have been, by an older guy, J, when i was a teenager. i think i was 16. J was probably 25 or so. it took me about 10 years to really understand that it was sexual assault, rape? i think so, given his age and mine, and that i was pretty intoxicated. it’s been a hard thing to process, for years i just thought, no, it wasn’t, because i wanted it, too. but looking back it was a fucked up experience.

J was the older cousin of a close friend of mine, and he would often housesit/babysit when my friend's mom was out of town. all of us thought he was a fun, outgoing, and hilarious dude, he would let us throw big parties at the house, buy beer for us, get drunk and smoke weed with us, tell us hilarious jokes. he was openly gay, quite flamboyant, and made frequent jokes about it, and among a bunch of teenage dudes attending a very homophobic catholic boys high school i found it wonderfully refreshing that everybody just loved J and set aside the rampant homophobia. the parties at my friend’s house when J housesat were generally the most fun parties we all went in high school.

at that particular time, a male friend, M, and i had an ongoing sexual relationship that we didn't share or talk about with anyone else. we didn’t even really talk about it between each other, it was always just “you wanna smoke a bowl and mess around a little?”) and that was that. M was possibly the most popular kid in any social circle i was a part of, but we were well aware that if our sexual relationship became public knowledge we would've probably been tortured and alienated. there were no openly gay kids at my high school, the harassment and bullying would've been too intense, all these kids' love for our friend's older gay cousin J notwithstanding. at the time i was not really sure if i was gay or bisexual, i knew that i was really attracted to women but i also really loved being sexual with M and fantasized about it all the time.

anyways during one of these parties when J was housesitting, i was very drunk and high and chatting it up with J. he was pretty drunk, too, i think. he was an opera and men's choir singer and he loved all kinds of music, and we're talking about music that we like. i really loved the pet shop boys at that point and when i mentioned them, J asked me, jokingly, “ha are you suuuuure you're not gay????”

no one to whom i would safely feel responding honestly to that question had ever asked me that before, and my inhibitions were down because i was pretty drunk and high, so i responded “uhhhh yea i’m not really sure” and i started to tell him about M and i, this secret that no one knew and it immediately felt so exciting and refreshing to be able to say it to somebody! and he then says excitedly “oh wow we gotta go talk!” and so we went to an empty room and i start telling him more and more about everything that’s going on.

he then, after i’ve told him this secret about myself and all this stuff i’m going through, says to me, “i really want to kiss you right now.” we kiss, and at that point i’m so excited by the attention. despite really wanting to date girls, i did not have much luck until college, and so to have someone show that attraction to me and seduce me felt really thrilling. he then took me to an empty bedroom upstairs where we spent the night together having sex.

i woke up the next day feeling so hungover, anxious, scared and ashamed. i remember taking a shower but feeling like i couldn’t get clean. mostly i just felt in a daze though. it’s weird, despite being so intoxicated i remember that night very clearly.

i saw J here and there at a number of subsequent parties. i kept kind of a distance and we were never sexual again. he asked me once “how’s the gay thing going?” and i was scared and just told him that, actually, i wasn’t thinking about it much because there was a girl i was crushing on really hard.

i feel like i put the whole thing out of my mind for years, until i was in therapy in my mid-20s and began to think about the whole dynamic. why hadn’t i considered it to be sexual assault/rape? how would i have responded if i heard about a 25-year-old straight dude buying beer for a teenagers party and then fucking a drunk and high 16-year-old girl? i still don’t know what to do with this memory sometimes, and i don’t always know how it fits into my sexuality as a whole or my life as a whole or my ideas about sex, consent, and sexuality as a whole. maybe sometime i will. right now the memory is there and sometimes it feels weirdly erotic and exciting and sometimes it just feels like shit.

marcos <3

wow that's intense

I do not think your story is that unusual as far as young men and early homosexual experiences go tbh

marcos <3

marcos <3

marcos <3

^

sometimes it feels weirdly erotic and exciting and sometimes it just feels like shit.

This is amazing. I don't want to get into the couple times I was assaulted as a child, but one of these men I was like really in love with, and I still feel completely confused by what happened

Thank you marcos for sharing

thank u all <3

Honestly I'm not comfortable disclosing my most upsetting brush with this subject (I was not directly involved; my then-partner was) but suffice to say it still has a profound impact on my life

<3 marcos

yeah I grew up associated w/hippie 70's communes and a guy crept into the room I was sleeping in one night (I was maybe 10?) and tried to molest me, I laid face down w/my hands over my genitals and passively resisted so he went away. for years I thought of this as a victory, and only late-20s therapy revealed the extent of the damage (sleep issues, etc.).

the killer thing back then when I started talking about it (late 20s) was that my mom still wanted to call the guy a friend. I'm not sure how we got over that in our relationship, but we did. there's more but this thread ain't 77.

Marcos <3

love and empathy to everybody here who's been victimized

i look back on my own drunken sexual history and tho i don't think i've ever crossed a hard line there's enough there to make me pretty ashamed of myself

marcos!

I spent a lot of my childhood with a family where the father later turned out to have molested someone I knew, I don't really want to say more than that about the specifics, but with my experience of being around the guy it was so not shocking that my reaction when I was told was pretty much "of course." He had been extremely inappropriate and disgusting with me and touched me in "non-sexual" inappropriate ways many times, hugs, kisses on the cheek, grabs that sort of thing. I was very resistant to it and while I don't want to blame the person who was his victim I think this might have had something to do with why he didn't choose me to prey on further. I can still smell/feel his gross facial hair and it's nauseating me as I type. What was shocking, and still hard for me to get over, was the realization that my parents had let me spend a huge amount of my childhood with this person, him driving me to school sometimes, me sleeping over at their house, etc. For years and years.

don’t always know how it fits into my sexuality as a whole or my life as a whole or my ideas about sex, consent, and sexuality as a whole. maybe sometime i will. right now the memory is there and sometimes it feels weirdly erotic and exciting and sometimes it just feels like shit.

^^^ see, THIS, right here, this is life.

So much of being a man for me is being scared of myself. I don't know, is manhood just a hormonal imbalance? The amount of anger and hatred and desire for cruelty I feel, no idea what to do with it, no idea how to even talk about it. Can I get shots to make me a gay space communist?

aw sleeve that is terrifying xps

man alive too

I don't know that I'm "scared of" myself per se but I do consider my retirement from dating to be a form of public service. (*Not* because I'm worried about trespassing in some way, just because I'm consistently an emotional wreck and too disgusted with dating culture to participate with any enthusiasm.) Disengagement feels like the only dignified option I can execute reliably.

and co-sign on

love and empathy to everybody here who's been victimized

dating isn't dignified, everybody who does it is a needy, fucked-up mess trying to pretend they aren't. but i've spent long periods of time single because i was too fucked up to be in a relationship, and i'm certainly not going to judge.

the killer thing back then when I started talking about it (late 20s) was that my mom still wanted to call the guy a friend.

― sleeve, Friday, 13 October 2017 20:19 (thirty-four minutes ago) Permalink

btw the reason I was reminded of my account was because of this. My mom did eventually end her friendship with them, but she put me in harms' way for years with a guy she knew there was something not right about, but I guess in her flawed way she was blindered about it. The family was like my second family growing up. I can't imagine letting my kids be alone with someone I had even the slightest bad inkling about. So I can see how that's one of the hardest things to deal with -- the lack of protection from someone who is supposed to protect you.

marcos <3

sleeve too. what a mess we live in.

these days I view it as a battle scar in the struggle to raise liberated children, which occasionally (frequently?) backfired in the 70's. There was so much of an emphasis on breaking with former traditions that an anything-goes vibe left a lot of room for people to take advantage of the lack of clarity regarding the brave new hippie world's limits.

yeah there was this strain of parenting that didn't want to be "uptight" or "inhibited"

I don't see so much of that these days re: sexuality

(I def see a lot of "let yr kid be whatever they want" re: gender tho)

that was it exactly re" not wanting to be "inhibited", in fact one of the things that made my parents leave the commune as members (we already lived off-land) was that this same guy had a community-approved "consensual" relationship with one of the other boys there who was slightly younger than me. we're still friends with the family 40 years later, but I have no idea how this all played out between them all in the long run. note that my parents had no idea anything had happened between this dude and me when they left.

n.b. this was in like 1978 or something

OMG, I totally hung out with a dude friend all day today at the store! Such good timing for this thread. My pal Willie. Who is an excellent musician and an excellent friend. We even drank some beers. Such a rarity in my boring life. It was fun. We just talked about music and I played him cool music really loud. It was nice.

If it's Willie L4ne I feel like he is one of the least macho dudes ever. great guy.

Maybe move thread to 77?

Not to speak for anyone, but

If this thread moves there i'm out

yeah keep it here pls

I'm glad this thread is working so well so far. I feel like even five years ago it might not have.

I'm good with it here fwiw

im fine with it here

When I was a kid my mom would force me to wear women's clothing as if it were normal... not dresses or anything, but clothing with a feminine flair. She did it so I would attract violence from other people, which I most certainly did! She'd make me hang out with kids who'd torture and murder animals in the woods I told her about.

The worst of it was getting kidnapped and almost murdered at 10 years old, which I had to escape from like in a fucking episode of 24. And they just laughed in my face, and my brother brought my kidnapper home to show me my life meant nothing to them.

My entire family created this fake identity of me as a gay faggy woman loser... when I was actually a pretty masculine guy. Heterosexual, too!

The crippling PTSD they induced in me they used as fuel for this alternate identity, because weak = woman/gay/non-man in our culture. It wasn't helped when I got molested at 14 by two older men I met off the internet, because I was forced to live in isolation from all human contact, and any human being taking interest in me was like water in a desert from genuine solitary confinement. Theoretically, the only salvation was school..

Which didn't work out. My older brother told everyone in high school I was gay after I got molested, and they all believed him, so I had to spend my entire high school career with everyone convinced I was gay. I'd ask girls out, and they'd say, "I thought you were gay!!!" and friends moms would say, "don't be alone with him, he's gay! Watch out!"

Of course I was never gay, or a woman, or even all that feminine. Just a regular heterosexual guy. That was a real head trip to live through. The foundation that built on led me to getting sexually harassed by creepy as fuck women and men at work... so on and so forth.

The world's a pretty fucked up place! I've made my peace with all this, so there's nothing "downer" here from me. And I left out the worst stuff.

Good vibes to you all who've lived through shit, it's nice in a way to see that it's not just me who lived through crap...

I'm having a little trouble with this narrative and especially the "faggy"/but I'm masculine part. If you're trolling uh fuck you

The "faggy" is what was forced on me. The "masculine" is what I personally identify with. I was a bare knuckle boxer when I was kid, my dream was to go to West Point and be one of those great generals from WW II I'd read about, maybe a captain of industry like Carnegie.

I was a fierce, terrible motherfucker. And they put that shit on me because they're the same way, just beyond psychopathic. I'm telling this because I think it's darkly hilarious, and I also consider it a badge of victory I survived that shit and made it out better than most people make out of their normal, healthy lives. Apple doesn't fall from the tree...

No, I'm not trolling you. This is real shit. There's way worse out there, and I've seen it with my own eyes. Ex. a case I worked on where a father chopped up his family and threw them out in garbage bags on garbage day. That one didn't make the news.

A - it's not darkly hilarious
B - claiming that a body in garbage bags didn't make the news is not helping your case

It wasn't "a body", it was an entire family. I think it's darkly hilarious, because if you lived through it and didn't, you'd blow your brains out.

note: my story as darkly hilarious, not that awful case I worked on...

ILX 2017, where someone opens up about being molester and abused and is immediately shouted down because it wasn't PC enough, kudos

*molested

uh Whiney are you familiar with carpet_kaiser?