I hear “I hate men” fairly frequently, within certain feminist communities. I once said it often. Then I became one, more or less. I can see how it might seem like I only started to care when it began to impact me, and to some extent that may be true. Sometimes our eyes are only opened to certain issues when we experience them ourselves or see them first-hand. To be completely honest, I think what opened my eyes to how hating men is useless bigotry was actually selling sex.
Most sex buyers are men, and the portion of men who are sex buyers is significant. For many people, their anger towards one group is easily transferred towards the other. When it comes to SWERFs (sex worker exclusionary radical feminists), they view buying sex as an extension of men’s entitlement to women’s bodies. Among sex workers, the way various clients objectify them while paying them for sex can easily be generalized to all men, especially when they are living very isolated lives where most of the men they interact with are clients or managers.
After a day selling sex, where some of my clients have treated me like I’m a sex toy and couldn’t possibly have real emotions, it can be easy to imagine that a man I walk past is picturing treating me that same way. A man may speak about how his date wouldn’t fuck him after he spent large sums of money on her, which makes it very easy to picture him paying for sex and viewing that as a fair exchange. When I meet a guy from Grindr and he’s immensely inconsiderate during sex and acts entitled to fuck me because he paid for dinner or the entry fee to a gay sauna for us, I find myself putting him in the same mental box that I place my clients into.
Whether a person is a sex worker or not, we all come across the way men are stereotyped in media and have an idea of the different archetypes of men and have expectations of how they may use violence. Men’s encouraged social roles include them being the dominant figure and protector, and these gendered expectations are those which require and push some level of aggression. Plenty of men conform to the roles they’re pushed into, and while there are many who do not it is easy to understand why people will generalize and err on the side of caution. That doesn’t make the generalization good or right, simply understandable and worthy of empathy.
I do not fault people for having a negative reaction to the men around them, whether that is anger or fear. That response often comes from deep-seated and genuine trauma and those reactions take a long time to work through. Men are often suspicious and hostile of other men because they are accustomed to competing with them and fighting, and women tend to be afraid of men attempting to control or sexually assault them. For queer people of any gender, we may fear homophobic attacks or sexual victimization or other forms of discrimination.
All of that being said, these negative reactions are often unhelpful and can result in harm. They’re heavily influenced by race and sexuality and disability. Men of colour, particularly indigenous and black men, are more likely to be viewed as more aggressive or dangerous as a result of racism. Men who are disabled and disfigured will be viewed as sexually predatory due to certain forms of ableism. Gay men will be viewed as predatory and unsafe to be around children due to homophobia. Among those who understand bigotry as a serious issue, the way these types of prejudice intersect with our biases based on gender are often well-accepted, but the idea that they’re interacting with a bigotry based on gender is not. Particularly, the idea that we would ever discriminate against a man because he is a man is seen by many as un-feminist and people will react with immediate defensiveness.
There are some behaviours that are seen as wrong when the perpetrator is a man and not when they are a woman, and to distract from this people will argue that the behaviour is essential to maleness or is something only a man would ever do. I hear this kind of claim constantly when it comes to sex. Sometimes the very same person will discuss a sexual assault perpetrated by a man, particularly one that involves coercion but minimal to no physical force, and call it rape – then discuss the same scenario perpetrated by a woman and refuse to call it the same thing. A person may excuse a cis woman groping a man while she’s in a gay bar, and see a man groping someone in a typical straight bar as totally unacceptable. In these situations, men still get away with perpetrating such harms far too often and there is rarely any kind of justice, so I don’t think it’s unreasonable that people would have concerns about how women get away with it and not with how men are treated slightly more harshly… because neither situation is usually regarded harshly enough.
However, when it comes to actions which are borderline or aren’t harmful at all, there is a case to be made for how “man” being often treated as synonymous with “predator” does harm to various men. An innocuous compliment from a woman is likely to be taken as non-threatening, whilst the same comment made by a man is more likely to be framed as aggressive or labeled as catcalling or sexual harassment. When we are talking about the difference between how white women are perceived in these situations versus black men, both racial prejudice and these gendered expectations collide so that even when a white woman is an aggressor the authorities or onlookers can often still be weaponized against the man who has done nothing wrong.
Once you get into this mindset that men are all violent and dangerous and condescending, it’s easy to see any time a man does something wrong as a confirmation of that bias and to believe that any men who treat you well are secretly bad. If a man is kind to you, you assume he wants sex, money, or status. If a man treats you poorly, you assume it’s out of an inherent desire men have to do harm.
I remember when I first started selling sex, having fallen into some radfem circles before then though I wasn’t totally entrenched, I would generalize my clients’ behaviour to all men. If a few men in a row tried to violate a sexual boundary, I’d rant to friends or other sex workers online about how men don’t respect consent. Later, when I first worked in a brothel, I’d rant to the girls there about how men were disgusting and how all they thought about was sex.
Eventually, I met a cis man who was selling sex. He’d been abused by his clients just like I had, who were exclusively men, and it clicked in my head that I’d been blaming men as a category for things clients were doing. My thought process was that this gay sex worker obviously wasn’t someone who should be lumped in with predators and abusers, he was like me. After that, I pivoted to generalizing clients when I vented, instead of saying men. By this stage, I was teetering on the edge of coming out and transitioning, and had stopped ranting about men’s reactions to me in broader society anyway. I carried this way of speaking through all of my discussions of sex work, including with other prostitutes.
One sex worker chat I was added to on Twitter, whilst I was early in transition, changed the chat name to “no men allowed” a few weeks after adding me. At the time, I tried not to take it too hard. I’m non-binary, even though I also use terms like “man” to describe myself, and I knew it wasn’t aimed at me. I was in a chat that was predominantly women, a few non-binary people, and I too still engaged in making disparaging comments about men as a group. The group name made me feel bad, but then I felt guilty for feeling bad because I’d said worse and often excluded men from things, and this guilt-spiral went on until someone else acknowledged it.
I responded to someone in the group chat who was asking for advice on latex-free condom brands. My message was responded to with “oh my god, for a second I thought there was a man in the chat” by another user. She had, presumably, assumed I was a cis man based on my profile picture and name and then checked my profile to see he/they pronouns and that I was clearly trans. I responded that I was a non-binary guy and I’d leave if that was an issue, but that I’d been added to the chat before the change of name and wasn’t sure if I was included given that I’m also non-binary. She then clarified that she “thought there was a penis in the chat”. I pointed out there were trans women there, and that having genital-based rules about who could talk was messed up, before other people awkwardly changed the topic. A trans woman in the chat messaged me and we talked about it, but it was otherwise ignored by the rest of the group. Even in a supposedly trans-inclusive space, maleness was being equated with having a dick and dangerousness was being equated with being a man. Trans people could be accepted there, as long as we didn’t disagree with the idea that it was the combined qualities of being a man and also having a penis that makes someone a danger.
Upon eventually meeting a client who had sold sex himself years before, and who treated me respectfully for the entire encounter, I was finally able to also let go of the way I was generalizing clients too. The client/prostitute barrier broke down. Being entirely respectful the way he was is not a common experience for me with clients, but upon reflection I realized that he was far from the first. It’s just the realization that he, too, was like me, that allowed me to realize it. The fact my empathy needed to be triggered that way made me realize how much I had othered clients, just like I used to other men before I transitioned.
Certain generalizations about clients can be made that don’t run afoul of this othering, don’t get me wrong. The one thing they have in common is that they decide to buy sex. If you have a fundamental issue with their decision to buy sex, a generalization on that basis is totally justified. I’ve gone back and forth with my feelings on it, and I think I’ve finally settled on the belief that buying sex is often wrong because of the circumstances but isn’t inherently so. Anyone who bought sex from me when I was 17 is a piece of shit, regardless of the fact I was over the UK age of consent. People who bought sex from me knowing I was extremely poor and that I was clearly doing it out of desperation are deplorable. Those groups clearly aren’t doing something of equal moral weight to the people who paid me for sex when I was established and in my 20s and using the money to buy a gaming console. Some of the times I sold sex I’ve felt miserable, and clients should have seen the risk they’d cause that as too great for it to be moral to buy sex from me. Other times, it seems perfectly reasonable that they’d pay me for a luxury service and we both walked away from it happy.
I don’t think someone’s buying into patriarchal structures and bolstering them when they pay for sex. There’s nothing in the act that’s inherently wrong, at least not more than paying anyone for any service, because I don’t ascribe some special sort of value to sex compared to other physical activities. If I couldn’t have sold sex, as someone marginalized based on my gender and my sexuality, I’d have been worse off. That’s why I did it! Poverty and discrimination drove me to sell sex, and some clients capitalized on that. Many clients just wanted sex, were willing to pay, and I was offering.
Characterizing all clients as abusers worthy of our hatred doesn’t do them significant harm. They have power over sex workers in most scenarios, they’re far less stigmatized for buying sex than we are for selling it, and overwhelmingly when we are abused it is by them or the police or our intimate partners. I want to cease seeing them all that way because I don’t think it’s true, not being it’s doing large-scale damage.
When it comes to hating men as an entire group, I see how that causes issues. To believe men have some essential quality that makes them bad will almost always lead to transphobia and sexism and an excusal of men’s poor behaviour. If you imagine men are simply born more aggressive, you’re giving them an excuse to act that way by supposing they cannot help it. Treating abuses they commit as being due to their genitals and hormones does the same thing, and also either lumps in trans women with these claims or requires that someone medicalizes transness to argue that trans women only become members of a safe sex class when they access medical transition. For trans men, either we’re gender traitors for choosing to transition into the abusive sex class or we’re not really men. All of this contributes to the argument that men have less culpability for their harmful actions than women, because they’re less able to stop themselves.
Men who are victims, including those who are victims of other men, are treated as weak for not being able to overcome it because they’re expected to be part of the abusive group. Among sex workers, men can be restricted from resources they need because of an assumption that they have nefarious reasons for being present. Even just the assumption that all sex workers using a service will be women, without an explicit banning of men, will make certain men less likely to seek help.
I think a lot about the first gay cis guy I met who sold sex. I think about how hurt I was around that time, how desperate I was for help and community and how there was nowhere near enough. Then I consider that of the few places I found, they were full of commentary about hatred of men and how he couldn’t have joined or wouldn’t have lasted there if he did. I don’t want to argue “but he’s an exception” every time I meet a man like him, I want to avoid the generalization in the first place.
Jack Talks About Sex Work 