When men pressure other men to become predators

My thoughts over the last week have been on my time as a college student in Milwaukee, mostly in response to a tweet I had that went very mildly viral. Saladin Ahmed, a fantasy writer who I follow, tweeted that men often pressure other men into predatory behavior and that that is not getting the attention it deserves in the current national conversation about harassment and abuse. I replied that I had experienced this myself, and when people asked me to clarify how the dynamic worked, I gave several examples of things other men had literally said to me, trying to convince me to do things with women that I saw as predatory.

While my comments received a lot of positive attention, they also attracted attention from men who wanted to say that while they had spent their lives in male-dominated environments, they had never heard that kind of talk. And besides, if they had, they would have shut the men up themselves, and why didn’t I do that?

The short answer is that I did, eventually. The medium answer is that it’s really hard to confront people whom you otherwise greatly respect when you find yourself in a vulnerable position and they say something that makes you uncomfortable. It’s also hard to explain the entire context of every conversation in a 280 character tweet, and anyway, I don’t owe some mouth-breathing troll my life story.

The long answer is what follows. I tell it here in order to remind people that we all have circumstances in our lives that make doing the right thing hard, but it’s still worth it. What follows is my experience with other men pressuring me to become a predator.

I was 18 when I moved to Milwaukee for undergrad. I was away from home for the first time, and I barely knew anyone. The people I knew from High School who went to the same college weren’t people I knew well, and the first few weeks were lonely. What I did know was that I was social-justice-minded and I was interested in activism. I went to a meeting for Students for a Democratic Society and began my life in radical politics and got to know people who would be my friends years later. One person I met was my Persyn of Honor at my wedding about two years ago.

Like anyone in a new place and in a new phase of life, I tried to figure out who I wanted to be, and was desperate for a community. I tried to wear a fedora for a while. I read in the center of campus, holding my book so the title was visible to passersby. I downloaded five Smiths songs and talked about how into The Smiths I was. The people I met in SDS helped me figure out who I was.

In particular, there were three men who brought me into their circle. Within SDS and the bubble of related groups and splinter groups that made up the activist community at UWM, there were several already established groups of friends with varying histories. I became friends with two guys my own age, and they began to do music with some folks who were in a group called “Act Everywhere.” The guys I became friends with were different. One had graduated, one had spent time in the military before coming to school. They were all older. They were all well-read, and had expertise in things I was interested in, but didn't know much about, like history and art. They showed me bands I liked, movies I had never heard of. They bought me my first beer in a bar when I was nineteen. I even started dressing the way they did. I looked up to them.

They were seen as good guys by the activist community. They had girlfriends and roommates who eventually also became my friends. They knew people in other cities who I also got to be friends with. Through these guys, I picked up hobbies I still have to this day, I met people from all over the country, and I got a little closer to being who I am currently. They were, over-all a positive influence in my life. They gave me grounding when I was feeling vulnerable and insecure about who I was.

And that’s the rub. When I was interested in someone, they’d tell me to go for it. That’s great, but some of the advice I got from them made me uncomfortable. They’d tell me when someone was super drunk at a party and advise me to make my move. They’d give me shit for not “going for it” when hanging out with a female friend. I was once told that if I just tried to kiss them, they’d usually go along with it. This all might seem innocent to some folks, but to me, it was clear that this involved intentionally blurring consent. I decided to separate from these guys when one of them advised me to make a move, and if I was shot down, just say I was getting unclear signals. I was supposed to get unclear signals after interpreting everything they did with me as a sign that they wanted to hook up. This put all the blame back on the woman and encouraged her to think of me only as a person who was trying to sleep with her.

When I did hook up with people, which was rare, the praise I would get from them made me feel gross. Whatever little experience I had in college was precious to me and I genuinely cared about the people I had a connection with. To hear them talk openly about cheating on their girlfriends or, after those relationships ended, ghosting women they’d pretended to want a relationship with, felt like a punch in the gut. This is not the way I thought it was right to treat people. I thought what they did was predatory. I felt that they were using their positions as respected activists and the perception from feminists that they were feminist men to sleep with women, often by using some deception. I was uncomfortable because I thought it was wrong and they wanted me to do it too.

I confronted them, and I was told I was being crazy. I was told that what they did was fine and it wasn’t crossing any consensual lines. I was told that by telling them that I thought it was predatory, I was actually being sexist by calling into question that agency of the women they slept with. Still, I knew women who had been with them and felt strung along when they realized it was going nowhere. I knew women who had felt lied to and felt that they hadn’t been on the same page with these guys. I knew a few who did describe them as predators. I knew women who avoided these men, who warned other women about them.

So I stopped hanging out with them. In the process, I lost three close friends, people who had been like brothers to me. I also lost a social network of friends in other cities. Finally, the most hurtful thing was that many other friends I had who knew all of us thought I was over-reacting, and I lost esteem from them as well. I still think what I did was the right thing, but it was also very painful and left me feeling vulnerable and depressed. I made some other friends, and deepened some other relationships, but by the time those friendships got off the ground, I was moving away. I had lost time I would never get back.

And that’s my issue with those who suggested I should have just told these men to fuck off, or called them rapist garbage and walked out. It’s easy to say that’s what you would do in my situation, but when you’re actually a vulnerable young dude with very little clout, someone unsure of who they are, and being told by people you look up to that what they’re doing isn’t wrong, it becomes hard to know for sure which way is up. You can act like you know what you would do, and you can cast aspersions on me for not doing the right thing, but I know who I was and who I am. Calling out men in this way only serves to muddy the conversation and take away from the reality that there are systems of abuse and predation that exist in our society. Breaking those systmes up as individuals is difficult and painful. But it’s also worth it.