2009 study<\/a>, sexual assault victimization rates among high school peers were 26 percent for boys and 51 percent for girls. But statistics can never tell the whole story.\u00a0<\/p>\nThe gaps, especially the framing gaps, the lacunae that throw everything else into stark relief, can only be filled by art, literature, and other less quantitative means of communication. The fact that my father never beat me, my brothers, or my mom makes me, in some people\u2019s eyes, unqualified to speak about what he did do. The fact that I was not molested by adults but rather ensnared in everyday \u201cboys will be boys\u201d mischief renders me uninteresting to others. And these laws of intrigue or compassion don\u2019t just pertain to the patriarchal mainstream. They are found in inverted forms as well, including among those who loathe the patriarchy but who still feel a need to give each hardship a grade.\u00a0<\/p>\n
If these strictures did nothing more than discourage people from talking about their lives, it would be troubling, but not catastrophic. But what they also do, and are intended to do, is ensure an inertial discourse on violence that is resistant to investigating the vast continuities in which injustice develops, festers, and spreads.<\/p>\n
My story is similar to others I\u2019ve heard or overheard, particularly from disgruntled marines, however much it differs in intensity. When I gave my initial go at OCS, the outcome was not a commission but instead the smashing of both my person and my worldview into a thousand irreparable pieces; the unexamined life of my youth came to a close. It was then, by force of circumstance, that I began a process of interrogation\u2014of myself and my nation. And it was then that I perceived the saga of pain-fueled masculinity, my own and others\u2019, and how this masculinity is cycled through a series of contests, as if we all were taking part in a unifying, lifelong tournament of pain.<\/p>\n <\/section>\n \n\n\n
This post was originally published on Current Affairs<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"To be a man in the Marines, as Lyle Jeremy Rubin explains in his memoir, was to be a person not so much in search of freedom or democracy but one\u2019s own manhood.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14257,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/891837"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/14257"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=891837"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/891837\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":891838,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/891837\/revisions\/891838"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=891837"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=891837"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=891837"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}