Mini-Episode: Traitors to Patriarchy

Prentis is sharing a rageful invitation and calling all Traitors to the Project of Patriarchy. They are sharing their thoughts on how the manosphere manipulates men’s pain for more power, and how we need more traitors to reshape what it means to be a good man.

An hour after Prentis recorded this episode about patriarchal violence, they read the news about the man who took the lives of his wife and children in Shreveport. The femicide, as Tarana Burke reminds us, doesn't even slow down for us to name it.

Content warning: Prentis speaks about sexual violence, rape culture and the manosphere, please take care of yourself and come back to it when you feel resourced.

Notes:

• Listen to Prentis on the 10% Happier Podcast w/Dan Harris
• Check out Prentis’ Child’s Map of the World 

Transcript

SPEAKER_03 0:06

Hello, hello. Welcome back to Becoming the People. I'm Prentice Hemphill. And I'm once again so grateful to be with you all this week. It is lovely to connect with you. It has been such a journey this season of connection, of depth, of beauty. We just had an episode with Bio Kamalafe. If you haven't listened to that, you should roll it back. You should roll it back and listen to it because that one speaking with bio is always like, you know, it's uh it's uh disorienting in the best way. So I try to allow myself to be disoriented in that episode and kind of undone in that episode. And um, because of that, I still feel the conversation swirling around in me. And it's um, yeah, it's just beautiful to be in space with him. And I hope that you all enjoyed that episode. Um, I'm trying to think of like, I don't think I have any updates. I was on the 10% happier podcast, which, you know, I never know all the time who listens to what podcast, but I got such beautiful feedback from people on that conversation with Dan Harris, who's a lovely, lovely person. Um, so if you want to hear me talk more, which I'm not sure why you would, but you have that option, um, you can check out the 10% happier uh interview with Dan Harris. And it's I think it's the most recent episode. Um, I really, really enjoyed it. And he challenged me. He's one of those people that challenges me to be as practical as possible. Sometimes I'm I'm so resistant when people ask the question of like, okay, but how do you make embodiment really practical? Because I think you can practical the life out of something. Um, but I felt with in the conversation with him, I was able to get to a certain specificity that I think can be really helpful for people and just figuring out how to start practicing embodied practices in the first place, like even what embodiment means in the first place. So um, yeah, it felt like a good, ripe challenge to be in conversation with him. So please um check out that episode if you're interested in hearing me challenged to be less philosophical and much more practical as a person. That is always my edge. Um, yeah, please check that out. And I don't think I have anything else coming up. I am preparing to teach, which is um, you know, there's the logistics part, there's like getting all the pieces together, and then there's the I don't know what it is. It's the the embodied part, the emotional part of making myself spacious enough to be with so many people and their stories and their lives. And I'm feeling very excited about that, and also yeah, a little bit that it's that edge of nervous excitement. And I don't know if I don't know if we're supposed to say that as teachers, that we feel that way. Um, or maybe other teachers don't feel that way, but I I certainly feel that way, the anticipation of um the unexpected and the encounter with each other. I don't know what it will bring. So I'm preparing for that. And I think by the time I'm gonna record a couple mini episodes now so that I come back to this sometime the middle of May with some new mini episodes. So I think I will be on the other side of it by then. So that's what's been happening for me. I posted a video of my daughter in her map. If you are interested, she mapped out the world as she sees it and includes places like um everywhere and nowhere, the place where the cat lives, the heart place, uh the the deep, the deep ocean. Um so I I posted that on my Instagram if you're interested in in my child's map of the world. I found it very poetic and inspiring and deep. So it could just be me being a parent and being totally biased. That is also quite likely. But um, I think it was a special little video and glimpse into who she is, the person who I talk about so much on this podcast. And uh yeah, I think this week has been, as usual, a hell of a week. It's hard to know like what to enter in with because there's just so much that's happening. There's so much I could speak to. There's so much that like heartens me about how people are coming together and what they're building and how we're caring for each other. And there's so much that just pisses me off in the deepest way these days. And I don't think I'm alone. When I get with my friends, is always the both and the beauty and the what in the entire hell is this dumpster fire of a planet at this moment. But I'm really trying to live in the both and I'm really trying to practice in the both end because it feels like the truth. Um, yeah, it feels like the truth, but it is always a both and. And this week, uh, you know, the I think the big well, it's not just this story, but I I think it's the theme. And it's a theme we keep visiting in these many episodes that I want to come back around to. And I wish that I could leave this theme where it was and not come back around to it. But uh, it is the world that we live in. So um, yeah, I want to I want to come back around to this theme and I want to offer right here a little bit of a trigger warning. Um, I will be talking about sexual violence in this episode. Um, I will be talking about an example, but I will not be giving details of that. Um, but I will be talking about the existence of rape culture. So if you're in a situation or a moment in your life or with folks that you'd rather not listen to this with, I'm letting you know now so you can push pause and come back to it later, or come back when you feel resourced. But I want to talk a little bit about that because I'm sure many of you heard um the story this week. A CNN did an investigation on what they called a rape academy. So, like an online site where men were sharing practices uh about how they sexually assault women and girls in their lives. And uh they found in one month there were 62 million hits on that site. I think the next month they found there were 80 million, 80 million visits to that site. And those numbers have you know just like really illustrated how pervasive, and this is this is global, and it's one site, and yes, they're visits and not necessarily individual men, but it's 80 million that we're talking about, 62 or 80 or who whatever, millions and millions and millions of people visiting this site in order to learn how to assault the girls and women who are closest to them to learn how to do it, to get encouragement from each other, to tell each other stories, an academy of people learning how to do this. This has set me off thinking. I mean, there's so many, this is it it's a uh a gigantic example, and it's zooming in on one example because we could talk about sexual violence in pretty much every capacity in the world right now. It's just everywhere. And I I wanna I want to just stay with this example um because it's so sickening, you know, it's so sickening in some ways, and I think it has rocked people because I think it's starting to dawn on people that this isn't the bad apples or the guys over there, or you could tell by the way they look that that's what they're into, that it is starting to let us know that it's actually much closer in. It's probably somebody you know, it's probably somebody who loves you or purports to love you. And we saw that in the case in France with the the woman who was drugged by her husband and then assaulted by so many men. But it's probably not who you think it is, or only who you think it is. It's probably somebody you know that is thinking about this or plotting this or has done this. And I'm it's like I think it's it's bubbling up a rage in me that you know I was sort of sitting with this week and I was like, do I speak from this rage? Do I share this rage? And what would cause me not to? Like, what would cause me to tamp down my rage so that I seemed nice enough or not angry enough or whatever it might be? I I feel deeply, deeply rageful about this story, but about all the stories that I that we're seeing so much. And um I I wanted to talk about men, and I want to talk about men as complexly as I can without uh being imprecise too. Um because I think this is important for the culture men are subjected to subjected to and produce, for men in particular, and masculines in particular, to have a look at the culture that they either are part of or collude with. Um but I think what I want to say first of all is that um I have a lot of men in my life, I have a lot of wonderful men in my life, a lot of beautiful men in my life. But I was thinking about this like this idea of the good man, and I feel sick of it, actually. I feel sick of it. I feel sick of this idea of the good man. I feel sick of the idea of the good man because I think a good man in our minds is a man that will be kind to you in an interaction, or that will listen to you when you talk, say words. Um, a man that might not physically assault you or sexually assault you, that that is a good man. And those good men are given and are taught to expect certain accolades for not doing, for not enacting certain violences in the world. And we call those good men. There's good men. He's a good guy. He listens when I talk. He's a good guy. He's never physically hurt me. He's a good guy. Or sometimes he's a good guy, but there's this other thing. I'm really sick of good guys. I'm sick of the idea of a good guy. I'm sick of the idea of a good guy, one, because the standard is trash. Like the standard is so baseline that um I I think we should be embarrassed by how base that standard is of a good guy. I'm also sick of good guys because it is such an individual act. It's such an individually oriented thing. I am a good guy. And I should be deemed as a good guy. I do good guy things. I'm a nice guy. Something in there implies that those guys or whoever is deeming people good guys knows that there is a system around these men that upholds patriarchal violence, that upholds the exploitation of women and femmes. It implies somewhere that people understand that and have singled out these individual men to be good because they don't actively engage with the most violent aspects of that culture. And what I'm feeling right now, what I feel clear on, is that that is not enough. It is not even close to enough. It is not even an interesting amount of anything to be a good guy in that context, in this context that we live in. It's not enough. And I was saying to um a guy friend of mine, someone I care about and think is wonderful, I was saying, actually, what I'm interested in, the bar for me, and you know, who am I? Who cares? But the bar for me of men that I want around me are traitors. I only want to spend time with men who are traitors to that project, the project of patriarchy and patriarchal violence. I only want to hang out with traitors. I want to hang out with traitors and snitches and betrayers of that system. If you do not actively identify as a traitor to that system, if you don't actively have receipts, I don't think that a lot of people should necessarily believe that they can invest time in you. Because if you're a traitor, that means that you have identified that there is a system, a system that is trying to absorb you into it, and you choose actually to undermine that system. You choose at the places where you have power to undermine that system. That, to me, and I mean that across the board, gender, etc. Traders of violent systems are the kinds of people that I want to spend time with, the kinds of people that I want to work with and learn alongside, that are trying to subvert things, that are trying to undermine these systems, not the ones that just sit there idly by and waiting for their individual praise for not partaking in the worst of it. Who cares? It is time for traders. It is time for people, for men who are traders to this system. And part of the work that I see for traders is not only individually taking on the system, which I think this is really important, but finding other traders. And then and then recreating and remapping actually what it means to be a man according to the standards of the trader. What does it mean to be a man? What does it mean to be masculine? I want the traders to define. I do not want the good guys to define. I want the traders to define. And I was thinking about this as a story, and I'm really grateful that um I have encountered traders to the patriarchy in my life. And I have one um story, an example from my own personal life. Um, it's a very personal story for me. I was uh when I was 16, I wrote about this in my book. When I was 16, I was sexually assaulted twice. And one of those stories, actually, both of those stories involve this person, but I'm only going to tell one today. But I was 16 and uh I was part of the, I was a theater kid. I was a theater nerd, absolutely through and through. And we used to go on these theater competitions and we'd travel across Texas and we'd compete with other schools. And we were traveling one night, the theater kids on a bus, and I was sitting next to this boy that I liked in this van. I was sitting next to him, and I got really sleepy, and he was like, you know, you can lie down and go to sleep. So I laid down on most of the seat and I fell asleep. And I woke up and we were we had arrived at the place where we were going, but I woke up and he had assaulted me while I was sleeping. And I remember being so disoriented, so confused. I got off the van. I said, what what what happened? And he just kind of smiled the smile. And we got off the van, and I remember I had this like nervous giggle that came over me. I was like kind of laughing and wasn't sure what had happened and what it meant, and how to reconcile that I actually liked him. I had had a crush on him, and this thing had happened, and the fury that I felt, the anger that I felt, but then I'm not supposed to get angry, I'm not supposed to make a scene, and probably I shouldn't have fallen asleep, et cetera, et cetera, all the things that happened to us. And I walked into the hotel where we all were staying, and I went to my room, and my friends were in there. I think it was like three girls, and this boy, I think he was probably 17 at the time, my friend Josh. And I haven't talked to Josh in many years, but Josh was there in the room, and I came in, and we were all, you know, kind of excited because we were staying in a hotel, and I was giggling, and I said, Y'all, the craziest thing happened just now. And I told them what happened. And I just remember Josh said, Hold on. And he walked out of the room, and he came back a few minutes later, and he had that boy by the scruff of his neck. I mean, had him hemmed up and brought him to the center of the room, and he said, apologize right now. And he was holding on to him. And the boy started to stutter. Uh-oh, uh. He said, apologize right now. And he said, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Josh said, Why are you sorry? I'm sorry I did that to you. I shouldn't have done that to you. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, sorry. And he made him keep going, and Josh asked me, What is there anything else that you need to hear from him? Is there anything else you want him to say? And I said, No, no. And then he kicked him out of the room. And the rest of that weekend, the boy kept apologizing to me. But the thing that has always stuck with me is the moral clarity of that 17-year-old boy named Josh, who somehow knew. Now, Josh was a defensive lineman on the football team. Josh was a strong dude, football and theater dude. But the clarity of him to step in, the clarity he had to try to figure out what accountability looked like in that moment. The clarity to care for my feelings and my repair in that moment of violation and to do it publicly in that way. I haven't had many Josh's in my life. And I think a lot of us haven't had many Josh's in our lives. But I was so lucky to have had that example very, very early on. Now I had to, you know, there was a lot of work that I had to do about the experience. But what I didn't have in that experience was a sense that I was alone and no one cared. What I didn't have in that experience was a sense that my friends and the people around me would collude with that violation. What I didn't have was the sense that men were incapable of seeing, or boys in that case, were incapable of seeing and understanding the violence against girls. I didn't have that sense. Because I had this experience with Josh, where he stepped up and stepped in. And that's what I'm talking about. It's it's that kind of behavior on the individual level that I think is so necessary, and I think is um almost unimaginable for most of us. To me, Josh was a traitor, a traitor to the project, a traitor to whatever messages that he'd received that that kind of behavior was okay, or at least, you know, something you could laugh off or dismiss. He could have easily let that go, and he didn't. He absolutely didn't. I don't know his story. You know, Josh was not, he was a friend of mine. He was somebody that I knew. He wasn't even, we weren't even super close friends, but something in him had a clarity about what was acceptable and what was not acceptable in community. I wasn't his girlfriend, we didn't date, it wasn't anything like that. That there was a clarity he had about what was acceptable inside of the community he was in. That's a traitor. And we need traitors like that. We need traders like that that know how to intervene. And I'm talking about men specifically in this moment. And I'm talking about the culture of men, the culture of masculinity, because I know a lot of people that have intervened. I have intervened. I could tell a story about moments of intervening on violence or moments of intervening on sexual assault. But I think there's something about the culture that keeps getting recreated and calcified that needs to shift with men. And I I think about this a lot. Like, how do the traders and the people that can see clearly and take action clearly, how do they not only kind of, you know, do their individual actions, but how do they create a culture? Because when I look around right now, I see that there is um a meaning that is being made of the pain that men feel, maybe the pain they feel at their own experiences of sexual violence or assault, the pain of their insecurity, the pain of their own pitfalls, their own unprocessed trauma, their own alienation in a world that discards and devalues labor, that treats all of us like nodes, like cogs in a wheel. But we see the manosphere is a place that has intentionally taken on speaking to those pains and that alienation and making meaning of it. And not making meaning in a way that asks men to confront their shame or to become clear on a system that actually objectifies them and everyone else around them. It doesn't ask them to confront their shame. They can stay in that without identifying it. They don't have to confront their fear, they can feel it without identifying it. The shame becomes useful, the fear becomes useful, but never explicitly identify because that would have them identify the system that is producing that in them. So that world uses that emotional reality of men and uses it for a political purpose. But it doesn't, it's not unclear that men are in pain. It's not unclear that men are suffering in their own ways or are trapped inside of certain standards. And I'm not saying this to let men off the hook. I'm saying that I actually think it's the responsibility of men who are traitors to intentionally create spaces that make meaning of that pain and identify another way of being. The completely the powerlessness that people feel, the constant pain, the fear of connection, the disembodied way that we have to live with ourselves when we carry that kind of sexual violence. And I mean, this is the individual, but then the the cultural aspects of it, what we are allowing separates us, what we are allowing breaks us down. What we are allowing lives inside of bodies for their whole lives. Because we're imposing some order on the world, because we're imposing this way of deifying certain traits, forcing people into them, forcing people to enact it. Because we live in a world that has the core logic objectification of turning real lives and real people into objects that can be exploited. Consumers that only consume. A world of products, a world of stuff, nothing real, no lives really meaningful. And that objectification and that sense of alienation from our own lives and each other is what creates this kind of pervasive violence. And the lie of patriarchy, the myth of patriarchy, the impossible mediocrity, conformity of patriarchy. And I can say all this from here, and I imagine most of people listening to this podcast or watching this podcast will align in a lot of ways. I would love for, I think really my call out is like, I actually want to be in conversation with men who are on those edges, who are being traitors. So if you have someone in mind, please send them my way, please send a name my way. If that is you, if that is someone you love, please come on here and talk to me about this. Talk to me about how this could be the year of the traitor. The traitor to patriarchy. How can this be the year of the snitch on patriarchy? Who's doing that work and who's doing it well? Who's building the emotional skills and the emotional bandwidth for men to not abdicate their own responsibility and sense of self to these entities that don't really care about them at all? Who's doing that work? Please send them my way. Um any of your thoughts, I know this is a big one, it's a big heavy one. Um, so I want you all to take care of yourselves this week. I know the world continues to be heavy, the news continues to be heavy, and for people who are survivors, there's so much to bear in hearing all these stories. But I think what we said in previous episodes, let this continue to be a connector between us, let it continue to be a way that we can, a place where we can witness each other, really hear each other, our stories, what we hold, and take away the individual shame that a lot of us feel, the individual uh weight, and realize this is not an individual problem. It is obviously not an individual problem. This is not an individual problem. This is a a problem of epidemic proportions that is reinforced by the systems in which we live. And that is daunting and it's overwhelming. But at the very least, let's not let it make us more lonely. Let's not let it pull us away from each other. So, um, you know, I would love to hear from all of you. Please, you can send your emails to becoming the people pod at gmail. Um, if there are things you want to share um with us there. We are also on our Patreon, always becoming the people podcast. We are after each episode in in conversation, storytelling, sharing with each other, connecting with each other. Um, would love to connect with you all there. If you want to follow up on this episode and just talk about what's been coming up for you, you can do that um there. And uh yeah, it's a it's a community effort, y'all. We have to come out of isolation, we have to come out of silence. And I think we have to come into this rage, this rage that actually helps to reorganize, that agitates, that calls for something else. And um, I hope this episode felt like a rageful invitation into another way of being. So that's it for me today on this mini episode. Um, thinking of you all. I hope you're taking good care this week, and I will see you all soon. Thanks. Becoming the People is produced by Devin Delania, sound engineered and edited by Michael Main. Our theme song was created by Miyata. And if you're enjoying these conversations, please subscribe, rate, and especially, especially leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever it is that you listen to podcasts. And if you haven't already, please join us over at the Patreon, apprentice hempill. We are having a great time over there, building community, learning together. Come join us. And as always, thank you for listening to Becoming the People.

SPEAKER_00 31:04

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