Dear asshole,
You’re still the ? Do you hope that we will forget you or that we will absolve you? Me, I’ve been waiting to write to you for a while. Five years of #MeToo and then a slight undertow of guilt for a week, like regurgitation on the shoulder. The pain of injustice is not as linear as the exhilaration of domination: it fluctuates.
I feel bad for my profession and its lesson givers, bad for feminism, bad for these women who systematically take up the defense of patriarchy and place themselves under its yoke, consciously or not, bad for the right to be bothered, bad to “Women for Trump”, bad for our “feminine” conditioning, bad for our atavistic benevolence, bad for our hope that things will change or even evolve, bad for this resignation for 95% of them, bad for man of good will who is sorry for his own reputation, hurt by our slippery silence, hurt by the aggressors/abusers who have been part of my life and whom I unknowingly endorsed.
I have so much pain in the male that I read Dear asshole, by Virginie Despentes, to calm me down, and I find her at the same time caustic, lucid and very understanding: “It’s the one who is chained up who brings shame. Like a tattoo, a mark on the forehead. An indelible stain, which we don’t know what to do with. It’s always the harm we’ve been done that we try to forgive ourselves, ”writes Rebecca, its main narrator.
I so understand the victims of not wanting to be part of it anymore. Jesus carried his cross long enough and no one would believe in a virgin giving birth anymore, except at midnight mass.
But I saw, around me, women breaking apart one by one. That it is done in the dignity of silence will not have advanced us.
Have you read author and columnist Catherine Éthier on FB this week? Another burst abscess. But I’m going to tell you what disappoints girls of all generations the most, or rather, I’m going to let Despentes write it to you when Rebecca, a movie star almost 50 years old, admits finding you less attractive than before. “You don’t hold up. We must take care of you all the time, reassure you, understand you, assist you, take care of you. It’s too much maintenance. They are right, little ones, your masculinities are fragile. » You will read For the love of menLiz Plank’s essay on toxic masculinity, it’s all explained.
I have to come to the same conclusion as them. It would also be necessary to console you for the evil that you do to us or to feel guilty when it is you who are. As an old heterosexual friend with a lot of mileage in the engine and a few attacks on the clock recently admitted to me: “I idealized them too much. »
Justice for all (and all)
The problem, dear asshole, is that the justice we dream of has not yet been born. Specialized courts, restorative justice, mediation, giving time to time, paying a shrink at $150 an hour, drinking too much, it’s still wobbly. We want you to be humble and empathetic rather than whiny and suicidal or straight out of Jupiter’s thigh. You will understand that there are only equally imperfect means left to obtain justice. Five percent of women denounce by the long circuit. None of my hetero sexually assaulted friends (that is to say all the women in my immediate circle, except my mother, who remained a virgin) has yet filed a complaint, even for rape or incest. Here, read the statistics: https://bit.ly/2HmP2Ds.
As a psychiatrist friend, very familiar with the issue as a clinician, wrote to me: “I am in favor of a public discussion on the risks of mob justice and the related media treatment, but not of an instrumentalization of the complexity victims’ regrets to question the reality of sexual assaults or the relevance of a social movement that serves to better protect and support them and which constitutes a means of overflowing a traditional legal system that is unsuited to this complex issue. »
In a system of domination by violence, there is no pleasure where no one cries. All desire must be associated with destruction, otherwise it is not masculine.
In Despentes’ book, the asshole in question is a writer who took the bottom of his whiskey glasses or his lines of coke for whims and who assaulted his young publicist. She’s the attaché we fired before she went viral on social media.
Of course the backlash for the few assholes of his ilk is immense, an unparalleled lynching. You better manage silence with formal notices.
I remind you that one in three women bears the marks of assault, rape, incest, whatever you want, I have a collection of them around me. And to that student who wrote in The Press “It fell on him”, I answer “no: it fell on them”.
Sorority
“The culprit is always the victim,” writes Despentes. “But the percentage of storytellers remains tiny, among the victims, while the percentage of rapists among the male population should alert you to the decay of your sexualities”, continues his Rebecca.
But let’s stay benevolent, since that’s what is expected of us. In his test Bitter sweets. Who benefits from our kindness?, the former journalist Véronique Alarie examines this very feminine quality that is socially encouraged: “If the pressure for a certain virility too often messes up the mental health of men, we have to admit that the pressure for benevolence seems to have an effect similar to that of women. »
I have nothing against benevolence, I practice it while preparing my Christmas caramel, but we should not forget sisterhood. “There is a male solidarity in life, but it has a price,” writes Despentes. You have to show that you are a good man, that you behave well, you earn money, you have a nice fund, you have a nice girl. There is masculine solidarity — but there is no fraternity. »
That’s why assholes feel so lonely when they fall: only caring women can pick them up. They are doubly pitiful.
Joblo