Psychological Harm is Physical Harm 2: Why Survivors Lose Their Voice

Have you ever had that dream where something bad is happening to you, but when you try to ask for help, you can’t speak? You try to scream for help but you just can’t get the words out? This doesn’t only happen in dreams. It happens in real life as well. Survivors of gendered violence experience this […]

Psychological Harm is Physical Harm 1: Abuse Shapes the Brain

The presidential debates, horrific as their results were, provided survivors everywhere with a strange, backwards gift. A recent piece notes: “It’s remarkable how many female viewers report feeling physically ill.” Trout has not touched any of them, not directly. Yet what survivors are reporting, watching him enter their living rooms via their TV screens, is that this kind […]

Two Models of Nurturance (Which One Are You?)

Of soup-friends and token-exchangers. I’ve noticed a pattern. (surprise!) It seems to me that two very different models exist of what people in our culture think we are doing when we nurture one another. This makes sense given that any modern culture is a complex swirl of ancestral inheritances only recently jumbled together and barely […]

Connection In Practice: The Tricks of Shame and Hope

My regular readers will know that I give my posts to a panel of mostly-male early readers before they go public. One of these early readers read For Men Who Desperately Need Autonomy and asked me to add a section flippantly called How You Can Put This Into Practice Right Now If You Are Flipping Out Because […]

Cipher

Gwen works at the Institute, the source of all knowledge production in the world. The Institute’s rectilinear stone columns and thin white cutstone steps fill her imagination, and her work fills her days. Slowly her orderly, linear world begins to crack at the edges. In the oldest part of the Institute, a woman in white stands in […]

There is another kind of boundary violation: the covert cross

There are two kinds of boundary violations: overt and covert. We know a lot about one half of boundary violations: the kind acted out in an anxious way. This first kind of boundary violation is hopefully already obvious. This is when you say no, or are unable to consent, and someone goes ahead and touches […]

Own, Apologize, Repair: Coming Back to Integrity

There is a variation on ‘Not All Men.’ It is called ‘I Feel Bad When You Say That.’ My godson Kyle is six. He is fairly emotionally perceptive for his age, as his grownups have been working with him to create an emotionally responsible and self-aware boy who we hope will grow into an emotionally […]

Dating Tips for the Feminist Man

Accountability