I grew up being told I was a boy. The doctor stared at my body and determined that I would be wrapped in blue. I’ll probably never know whether or not this decision was difficult, whether or not I existed in a place where I did not fit into what this doctor wanted to see. I was told that I was a boy, and I grew to fill that mold.

The world became my stomping grounds. The way white racism denigrated my existence and that of my community – killing some of us, pushing some of us to the margins with such force that only social movements could push back – was the way I existed in the boy’s club. To say that choosing the boy’s club was a choice of survival sheds light on the foolishness of such a decision.

My fellow boy friends were one of the primary factors of an incredible pain I went through during childhood and now. Their insistence on insulting me and my body and their sometimes violent insistence that I play their game of following boyish stereotypes, has fractured my sense of self close to the core. Still, I was able to join this group and reap the mental benefits of stepping on the world in retaliation for the world stepping on me.

I constructed a fantasy realm in which women were objects to be either pursued, used, positioned as conveyors of male frustration or expression, negated, silenced, and essentially downgraded from full human beings to either partial beings or worse: body parts. This fantasy played itself in the movies, the video games, the books, the commercials, my friends, my own desires for “strength,” and each time I met these expectations, I was enthralled. Sexism gave me a scapegoat in which to deposit my anguish. Instead of turning the lens onto myself, reflecting on the deeper realities of who I was as a human being, I crafted a misogynist, borderline infantile individual, who was barely able to support himself. The boy’s club was essential to this creation.

The world is much too large to fit into stereotypes continuously, I am much too human. The women in my life refused, in a myriad of ways, to fit into the boxes I had set for them, and those contradictions had to be addressed. Bro’s before ho’s my “brothers” would say. In other words, I would always be first. In all doubts, in all tribulations, my thoughts would always hold the most weight. The fear most of us have – of a giant crashing through our world, or an atom exploding in the most intimate folds of our flesh, or the unknown making itself known in a way we avoid and want to deny – that fear was numbed by the thoughts that me and my brothers were not only in solidarity, but solid in dominance. No worries that this brotherhood was an incredible fallacy: we were all suffering.

That wasn’t important – and essential. What is important is that we are manly men: men that speak of their partners in denigrating ways, that distinguish between “ho’s,” and “good women”; men that use a pornography that physically destroys the bodies of the women featured in such films; men whose love and ability to care genuinely is almost always contorted and twisted by images of Superman, of the (white) hero, of the nuclear patriarchal family where father knows best and cannot fear.

There are men who bleed and call themselves indestructible. There are men who fear deeply and then instill that fear in others by turning feelings of vulnerability or confusion into rage and violence and internal reinforced walls. The boy’s club is the test tube in which sexism – prejudice plus social power – is strengthened, and the aspects of men that challenge these sexist norms are diluted, contorted, marked as faulty.             

Yet, I want to be clear, I am not speaking of a “men’s liberation movement,” or as bell hooks describes in “Feminism is for Everybody,” “These men identified themselves as victims of sexism, working to liberate men. They identified rigid sex roles as the primary source of their victimization, and, though they wanted to change the notion of masculinity, they were not particularly concerned with their sexist exploitation and oppression of women.”                      

My choices grant me privilege, crafting a vehicle of sexist state-sanctioned violence. My life contributes to the sexism that permeates every facet of American society and myself.           

The boy’s club needs to be broken, and I don’t think men can end sexism themselves. Yet I feel these social formations of men talking sexism furthers the difficulty men face when challenging sexism, putting the weight of this monumental problem back on the backs of women and gender non-conforming people. Men need to examine how deeply sexism has invaded their humanity. My liberation requires the liberation of all; it requires that men begin to ask questions about what it is to be men, whether that means perpetual violence and repression, or whether this means a new way of what it is to be in this world; these questions in the context of sexism.           

There is a fraternity home on North Pleasant Street, across the street from the Studio Arts bus stop. There is a Bank of America ATM behind it, and it sits fairly close to Mahar. There is a dumpster behind this fraternity, and on the dumpster it reads, in letters about a foot high: “No Babies Please.” What is the effect? Who does it benefit? Why is it there?           

Will Syldor is a Collegian columnist. He can be reached at [email protected].