TOXIC MASCULINITY AS SEEN BY A MAN

Masculinity is not inherently a bad thing, but when it’s about power & strength over everything else…it becomes toxic. Society allows toxic masculinity to run rampant, which feeds into misogynistic feelings towards women and a sexual assault epidemic.

How exactly does toxic masculinity 

feed rape culture?

And what can we do to detox? 

THE SMOKE SCREENS THAT MATTER

Hypothetically speaking,  I do care that men in India seem to beating their wives to death almost daily.  But I'd be lying if I didn't tell you I care more that my next door neighbor is beating his wife within inch of her life twice a month.

Proximity counts. Depth of Relationships count too.

Hypothetically speaking, if my Daddy was beating my Momma so she had black eyes 3x a year, I'd care more about that than the dead wives in India and the next door neighbor too.

You'd probably feel the same way if you were in my hypothetical shoes.


Therefore dearest black folk,

Please stop telling me what white women are not-doing over there when we're talking about  what black men are or are not doing to black women over here. I care quite a bit less about what the white women over there are saying.


Stop telling me what white men are not-doing over there when we're talking about what black men are not-doing and doing to black women over here. I care quite a bit less about what the white men over there are saying.


Stop telling me about who Stephen Collins is allegedly raping when we're talking about who Bill Cosby is allegedly raping. I don't even know what freaking series Stephen Collins was in as a TV Dad. And you probably don't either. And if you do, you probably didn't watch it very often.


However,


I do care that there's a group of women in India who seem to have the right attitude toward men who beat women.  And I also care about the reasons white women and black men are so similar in their ability to ignore black women's issues.


And while I sorta care about the destruction of the Cosby show's legacy,  I do not care about it enough to protect the actor that plays Cliff Huxtable who is very, very likely a serial rapist, a man's whose tastes haven't deviated that far from his almost white wife or the white women he went to see at Hef's place regularly for decades.

What I am actually trying to figure out about the Cosby conversation is how it turned into a conversation about black women's loyalty INSTEAD OF a conversation about black male loyalty.


To be specific, the colorism aspect of the Cosby rape allegations alone should have turned into a conversation about how certain black men develop a penchant for light and white women once they get a little money or a lot of money ala Cosby, Kobe, and Kanye?


How is it that this conversation on
black disloyalty is not centered on
being disloyal enough to throw
all women, including black women, under the bus
so as to align oneself behind Cosby?

Black people, men and women, ignore the Beverly Johnsons and Anita Hills on the regular but NOT standing behind Bill Cosby is disloyal? Really?

Guess what? Oppressed or not, black men are raised bathing in the same patriarchy as white men and they are just assured of their primary importance in the world as compared to women. In fact, black men can worry so much about proving their manhood (sans the money that white men use to prove their manhood) that they can use non-monetary methods to dominate women. It is not a mystery as to why black women die at the hands of domestic abusers as so high a rate. Where the stress of poverty is higher, death by domestic abuse is higher, regardless of race. 

Even worse? Black women are bathing in the same dirty bathwater as men and also white, latina, and Asian women. So we as women reproduce patriarchy and misogyny too - which partially explains black female defense of the indefensible (Ray Rice, Chris Brown, Bill Cosby)


Black people need to learn black women's history. Black women especially need to learn black women's history. When you know your history, you know your worth,


When you know your worth, you don't have to close your eyes and pretend people close to you aren't the ones hurting you most.

When you know your worth, you become completely unwilling to let anybody tell you that you are less important than they are.

When you know your worth, you know what a real ally looks like. When you know your worth, you know how brave and rare a real ally really is.

When you know your worth, you can get closer to knowing the worth of your brothers and sisters. When you know your own worth and the worth of your brothers and sisters, you become willing to demand that they behave accordingly.  And this is the moment at which we will all rise together, and not a moment before.

 * * * * *

 Black Women History Books





http://www.heforshe.org/  

A List of People Not Responsible for Damaging the Legacy of Bill Cosby and The Cosby Show

Feeling Rebloggy while giggling

1.  Ebony magazine. This includes Ebony Editor-in-Chief Kierna Mayo, Ebony Senior Editor Jamilah Lemieux and everyone else associated with the magazine.

2. The November cover of Ebony magazine.

3. The Root, The Grio, Clutch, Essence, Colorlines, VerySmartBrothas, For Harriet, Blavity and any other black-owned and/or black-managed publication that has published pieces critical of Cosby.

- The Root
Very Smart Brothas

lol ---> READ MORE OF THE LIST http://www.theroot.com/articles/culture/2015/10/a_list_of_people_not_responsible_for_damaging_the_legacy_of_bill_cosby_and.html

BLACK WOMEN DENIED ACCESS TO CLUB FOR BEING "TOO DARK" AND "OVERWEIGHT"

Read to end, friend.

Happy-ish ending awaits

Men and women across the United Kingdom are speaking out about a popular upscale London nightclub that allegedly denied entry to a group of four black women on Saturday night for being “too dark” and “overweight.”

 ~ From HuffPost

READ MORE HERE

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/what-went-down-the-night-4-black-women-were-denied-entry-at-a-uk-nightclub_560c0035e4b076812700098f

OMARION APPEARS TO HAVE
CANCELLED HIS APPEARANCE AT THE CLUB
OVER THE ISSUES BROUGHT TO LIGHT 
OCTOBER 2015

READ MORE
http://rollingout.com/2015/10/03/omarion-cancels-appearance-dstrkt-club-denied-black-women-dark/

I don't know anything about this particular brother BUT GENERALLY SPEAKING?
BLACK MEN WHO CAPE FOR BLACK WOMEN ROCK!!!

In case you want to ask the club about the incident:   https://www.dstrkt-london.com/contact-us

GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN Ikard about Baldwin on Black Female Patriarchy

A REPOST FROM NEW BLACK MAN BLOG
http://newblackman.blogspot.com/2009/07/book-review-breaking-silence-toward.html

A pivotal moment in James Baldwin’s novel Go Tell It on the Mountain (1952) sees the churchman and patriarch Gabriel being confronted by his sister Florence over a devastating past infidelity.

James Baldwin

Upon fathering a child with his mistress Esther, Gabriel stole the savings of his first wife Deborah and gave it to Esther to hush up the matter. Deborah wrote a letter to Florence testifying to Gabriel’s ruinous behavior, which left her neglected, isolated, and economically dependent on him.

When Florence musters up the courage to confront Gabriel, ten years after having received the letter, the effect on his psyche is profound:

“It had lived in [Deborah’s] silence, then, all of those years? He could not believe it…And yet, this letter, her witness, spoke, breaking her long silence, now that she was beyond his reach forever” (212).

Confronted with the suffering wrought by his patriarchal authority, Gabriel reels from the memory of Deborah as it is framed by Florence’s criticism of his actions. As if to underscore the power of speech in these women’s intertwined voices, Baldwin has Florence rebut Gabriel’s power over her by uttering,

“When I go, brother, you better tremble, cause I ain’t going to go in silence” (215).

****************************

David Ikard

Ikard’s chapter on Go Tell It on the Mountain is exemplary in this regard because it introduces the idea that both men and women have a stake in black patriarchy—a dynamic that underscores the need for genuine intergender dialogue (rather than, say, a feminist critique of male oppression as “ONLY” an issue of men dominating women).


On the one hand, Ikard shows how the novel’s patriarch, Gabriel, consistently shores up his sense of masculine identity by compelling the black women in his life to submit to his religious and familial authority.

When his mistress Esther is left on her own with their unborn child, she is “virtually at Gabriel’s mercy” because she is a “poor pregnant woman of disreputable social standing” (64). Esther might reveal Gabriel’s infidelity to the church, but Ikard understands this as an impossible choice, given the practices of community policing which downplay such infidelity in the name of securing strong black male leaders.


In this way, Gabriel’s sense of himself as “the chief victim of white oppression and the burden-bearer of his family” continues to justify his ill treatment of black women.


Yet in his chapter on Baldwin, Ikard is also keen to show how the novel “disrupts the victimization discourse that allows black men like Jones and Gabriel to explain away their subjection of black women” (50).



                                         *    *     *    *   *


Crucial to this narrative disruption, according to Ikard, is black women’s recognition of and rebellion against their complicity with black patriarchy.

In the figures of Elizabeth (Gabriel’s current wife) and Gabriel’s mother, Ikard identifies how “women unknowingly support patriarchy in their relationships with men,” particularly through the“internalized…expectation of black female self-sacrifice” (50, 67).

1) Elizabeth buttresses Gabriel’s authority by assuming guilt for being a “bad mother” and having had sex prior to their marriage.

2) Gabriel’s mother is a more resonant example of black female patriarchy in that she “rears him to believe that as a man he should expect black women to cater to his every emotional, physical, and material desire” (55).


In both cases, Ikard outlines a convincing case to extend the study of black patriarchy to women who support its ideological and institutional viability.

Importantly, this perspective does not cast judgment on black women for supporting patriarchy but instead seeks to understand

1) how their stake in it is conditioned by white supremacy, and

2) how a more inclusive politics of resistance would overturn both racists and gendered structures of oppression.


Ikard’s perspective is echoed in the character of Florence, who emerges as the novel’s privileged witness to the range of patriarchy’s harms precisely because she has also suffered from black women’s (her mother’s) investment in patriarchy.

***************************



FROM A NEW BLACK MAN A PARTIAL REVIEW OF
"BREAKING THE SILENCE: TOWARD A BLACK MALE FEMINIST CRITICISM"  by David Ikard. Read More -  http://newblackman.blogspot.com/2009/07/book-review-breaking-silence-toward.html



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