Literacy Matters Winter 2022

Tim’s Experience Examining His Role in Rape Culture

to protect themselves is easier than dismantling the entire patriarchal system that socializes men to subjugate women.

This conversation seemed to have a particular impact on Tim. From then on, he made a point to pull back and attempt to see the larger systems at play and inquire about how those systems impacted power, privilege, and inequity. During one book meeting, he said, “We should be talking about these issues all the time. Not just when major scandals break, like Harvey Weinstein or Bill Cosby.” Is #MeToo a Straight Privilege? Still motivated by the desire to be a good ally, Tim maintained his focus on the gendered and heteronormative aspects of rape culture during group discussions. However, he began to write more extensively in his journal about how LGBTQ+ culture is affected by rape culture and toxic masculinity. In a journal entry from a week later, he wrote, Why is it okay for girls to be pressured into kissing each other for a boy’s enjoyment, but boys holding hands are f**s? What’s the deal with ‘no homo?’ How can a boy actively hate the LGBTQ community and then go home and watch lesbian porn? The more conversations I have with my friends and classmates, the more outraged I am at these double standards. The circumstances surrounding and encouraging men to be so quick to defend their masculinity seem to be inherently toxic. What would it take to break this cycle? Tim also began examining his own dating experiences in town. He bemoaned the necessity of using Grindr, a dating app geared towards LGBTQ+ people, to meet men. He shared, “I can guarantee that when I next open the app, there will be at least five unsolicited [nude photos] in my messages [sent by strangers].”When another member of the group asked why he didn’t just delete his account, he responded, “Straight privilege is bumping into a potential partner in the grocery store. Gays are forced to turn to alternative methods like the internet and gay bars, both of which make sexual assault, date rape, and harassment easier to commit.” Tim’s casual comment about straight privilege was met with shock by his peers and represented a turning point in the book study. Up to that point, I had struggled to push participants beyond their hetero views of rape culture. However, literature for young people is historically lacking in LGBTQ+ representation (Kumashiro, 2006). While representation has improved significantly in the last decade, there is a long way to go. Unfortunately, this issue remained generally true with The Nowhere Girls . I selected the novel with the intention of capturing a range of experiences, but the text ultimately fell short in its LGBTQ+ representation. Though one of the three protagonists was a lesbian Mexican-American girl, the narrative primarily focused on the ways in which her ethnicity and socio-economic status intersected with rape culture. That she was lesbian was somewhat tokenized, though some debate took place in the study around whether it was good to have characters whose queerness was not their main personality trait.

Tim came into the book study primed to critically engage with concepts, though he did not position himself as knowledgeable on the subject. As with many other participants, his perception of rape culture at the outset of the study was gendered and binary. At the first meeting, he shared, “I hope to get a better understanding of rape from both sides: what drives men to perform/normalize such horrible acts, and what does the fallout really look like for women?” His “both sides” evoked a distinctly heterosexual understanding of sexual violence: That men perform the acts, and women are victims. While this perception is perhaps a valid interpretation of the #MeToo movement, rape culture is significantly more complex and confounding. Given his belief that sexual violence was inherently gendered and a heterosexual issue, Tim initially believed he had no personal connection to rape culture beyond “being an ally.” However, he quickly began connecting the novel to his own life. In the second week, after reading a scene in the novel in which an English teacher only assigns books written by men, Tim wrote, “This is so on point. My sophomore English teacher actually called The Bell Jar the ‘female Catcher in the Rye. ’” Similarly, he wrote of another scene where high school boys gather in the locker to brag about their sexual conquests, saying, “The locker room scene felt very real to me. I have heard similar conversations dozens of times.” As Tim began to use the novel to reflect on and examine his experiences in the world, he also began to consider his role in those experiences. In another group discussion, he referenced a scene from the novel, “As I read that, I immediately thought: ‘Oh god, I’ve never steamrolled a girl so hideously, have I?’ And I know the honest answer is probably!” In his journal, he later elaborated, “I’ve always been kind of a know-it-all, which was reinforced by a culture of toxic nerd masculinity at my high school.” As a result of this realization, Tim began to focus on the concept of toxic masculinity, which he defined as “social norms about masculinity that expect men to be dominant, aggressive or violent, and unemotional.” Fixating on toxic masculinity, Tim examined what he saw in the world and what he found within himself. At one book meeting, he shared that he was “sometimes guilty of leaning into the clich snarky gay persona” and wondered if he had potentially used his queer identity to ignore some of the ways that he engaged in toxic masculinity. He began to realize that his “perception of everyday things, like walking home or riding the bus, things I have always taken for granted, compared how women experience those same things, shows how truly frightening it is to be a woman.” Having his worldview so soundly shaken, Tim quickly began to problematize common assumptions and practices. During a discussion about how educational literature always seems to focus on providing tips to women on ways to ‘stay safe,’Tim said, “Why is the responsibility always on girls? Why don’t we teach boys not to be predators instead of encouraging girls to live in fear?”This resulted in a discussion about how teaching women

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Literacy Matters | Volume 22 • Winter 2022 | 17 |

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