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The Male Therapist (Post-Christmas Navel-Gazing)
I’ve never been to therapy.
I think I badly need it, but I know I won’t ever go. And I’ve come to realize why this will never happen.
I was raised and abused by a father who was a male therapist. I won’t (in this post) even touch on my even more abusive mother (who was not a therapist). Between the two of them, I grew up to be an emotionally paralyzed, very confused, silent, angry, socially anxious and awkward, depressed individual, and then was further abused by these parents for being emotionally paralyzed, very confused, silent, angry, socially anxious and awkward, and depressed. Exactly the kind of person who could use a little therapy to untwist the emotional twine binding her.
But as I said, I’ll never go. Even though I went on to formally study psychology for years, I kept to the hard sciencey specializations (statistics, neuroscience, psychometry) and kept all my clinical dealings as a sideline through clinical and forensic research projects, coursework and collaboration/friendship with the more interesting of the clinical (female) crowd.
Even in the thick of things, I still declined therapy while feeling I desperately needed it at the same time. Instead, I self-examined. I know exactly what’s going on with me thanks to years of this relentless questioning and probing. Unfortunately, therapists are useful creatures – you can self-examine all you want and still not make much progress towards balance or health. Therapists are guides, and they are supposed to support you when you are at your most exposed and vulnerable.
As I am an expert in mind-fuckery, I often think about therapy professions. That was what I wanted to be as a kid, and I discarded it in college. At the time, I thought my classmates were too wishy-washy, and hey, I was really good at math and experimental design, but looking back, I know that I left because it was too threatening. Part of me didn’t want to have to address the nasty truths in my life and thus become vulnerable. I knew what vulnerable was and the therapist I grew up with both made me vulnerable and exploited it relentlessly. Who wants more of that?
And as I’ve explored the therapy professions (social work, clinical psychology, clinical psychiatry, etc), I keep coming back to the same question or set of questions.
What draws men to this line of work? And more specifically, what draws men to therapy for female victims of sex crimes (rape, sexual assault, incest)?
Let’s come back to this and talk about female therapists first.
First off, not all female therapists are good and/or appropriate for your needs. The therapist’s professional orientation may not line up with yours. The therapist has been educated by the patriarchy and likely holds patriarchal views of women and their illnesses. Speaking from experience with clinical psych undergrad and postgrad students and professors, many therapists (male and female) are not the most stable themselves. People with problems tend to gravitate towards this profession and the field is sooo competitive that often, only the most obsessive and neurotic are given admittance to programs. I can’t speak for social work programs, but most of the practitioners I’ve met have been really weird people with weird agendas. But I DO believe that it is people with problems who are exactly the people who should be working in these fields because they understand first-hand what the patient is going through. It is important, however, that the therapist have worked out her issues to minimize the intrusion of said issues into her patient/client’s situation.
All said, there are tons of well-meaning women who gravitate towards the helping professions. Well-meaning doesn’t mean effective or correct, but it is a starting place. Men don’t often have even the correct starting place.
To speak more specifically about work with female victims of sex-based crimes (aka hate crimes against women), it is easy to understand why women get into it. Women want to help women. Therapists are often victims themselves. Oh who am I kidding, all women are victims of at least one sex-based offense and are exposed to male filth on a daily basis. Female therapists want to get in there and do some good. Are they going about it the right way? I don’t know. I don’t think most of women’s energy expenditure actually makes any progress towards ending male violence. But someone has to put on the band-aids, I suppose.
I’ve also known female therapists who’ve worked with rapists and men who sexually assault women and children. I can even understand why women gravitate towards this. The work is, of course, pointless. You can’t fix men, and you absolutely can’t fix a rapist. But again, women pour endless energy into trying to fix male problems that can’t be fixed. It’s a misplaced, erroneous belief in male ‘goodness’ (whatever) and a desire to keep women safe. *Sigh*
So we come back to men. I’ve written about men and the helping professions and volunteer work before. What could possibly bring men specifically into wanting to ‘help’ female victims of sex-based crimes? It boggles the mind. Men have little capacity for empathy, and I have never met a man who can wrap his head around the fear women live with daily as a result of forced proximity to men. So to deliberately be around and ‘help’ female victims isn’t a problem in their minds. The last thing women need after victimization by a man, however, is to be made even more exposed and vulnerable with a man controlling her aftermath. Male therapists must be looking for control or a vicarious experience or something. Perhaps they are invested in putting forth a male agenda in ‘managing’ female victims. Does he want to show that ‘not all men are bad’? How completely selfish and self-centred, if that is the case.
We have a new problem with aggressive MtT’s targeting battered women’s shelters and demanding to work there and be put into direct contact with female victims. They are becoming so self-centred and disrespectful that they are bringing law suits to fight for their right to access female victims. Why are they doing this? Is it an attempt to use women’s real experiences to build up their own sense of victimhood? Whatever they are doing, it is assault. It is disgusting. And it needs to be stopped.
Men also love to gravitate towards helping male sex offenders. I have personal experience with one of these creatures. I was taking a course in a form of counselling and was paired up by phone with a black, American, Christian man who headed up his own church and specifically helped rapists get on their feet after (unfortunately) being released from prison. He and I were to do ‘counselling’ sessions on the phone. He was controlling of me from the very beginning, and took advantage of my commitment to the course. He cancelled our sessions, let me do all the work, and would take other phone calls while we were in the middle of a counselling session. But he was smarmy, saying all the right things to smooth things over. If I were 20, I would have accepted the abuse and chided myself that as a WHITE woman, I supposedly was the privileged one. But I was older and well-versed in how all men have privilege over all women regardless of other group membership. Penis trumps vagina, regardless of race, every single time. One day, I called him on his repeated disrespect of me, and the truth came out. He attacked me mercilessly, and threw all the information I’d given him in my vulnerable state as counsellee in my face. And then he played the god card – he knew I was an atheist, and let me know I was shit because of it. Pure abuse. I suspect he was a ‘recovered’ rapist himself. I put my foot down, complained to the school, and only after my fellow student attacked the teacher was he thrown out of the program.
So, I suspect that sex offenders help sex offenders, and any man who gravitates towards therapy for female victims or male offenders is just there to perpetuate the system of abuse, keep the male agenda alive and well, ‘help’ women to put their experience in a compartment and not paint all men or the patriarchy as bad, and experience personal control and vicarious excitement over female victimization. I advocate for keeping men out of all professions where they have access to vulnerable women and girls.
Conversations with Men: You’re White, So I Get to Fuck You
Eventually, I’m going to do a whole post on purported ‘white woman privilege’ that every single group (sometimes including self-immolating white lib-fem women) on the planet likes to shout to silence a white woman when she tries to speak. [Update: I went ahead and created the White Girl series to address this huge problem.] White women are still women, and there is the shit heap of hate and violence that goes with that. A white woman doesn’t have anywhere near the advantages that a white man has, and in many cases that a man of colour has, yet has to be held accountable for all the sins of the white man – her lord and master. But know that penis always wins over vagina, no matter the colour. Sex is the original, longest-existing, and most disregarded or pooh-poohed oppression in human history – all oppressions derive from it. Being white doesn’t erase woman-hatred, and can bring with it, in fact, a set of unique problems. But that discussion is for another post. I’m writing today about a recent conversation with a man that falls into this category of penis trumping vagina, despite colour. A man of colour targets a white woman for sexual assault based on sexual stereotypes of her.
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Rewind to six months ago: For those who aren’t regular readers, I live in Southern China. I work at a university that has a handful of campuses. I live on one of the smaller campuses in the staff housing. I am the only white person here. There are a few Filipino teachers and a handful of mostly black students here too. The bulk of the foreigners live at the main campus. I’m a bit lonely. I don’t know many people in my immediate area save a few of my better students who occasionally have lunch with me. While I’m open to meeting new people, I don’t actively seek it out. I’m quiet and a loner and I’m a-okay with that.
The night in question, I had gone into town to meet up with a Chinese friend, and I had arrived back at my campus mid-evening after a truly lovely day. It was starting to get dark. As I was entering the campus gates, a man sidled over and began to walk with and talk to me. I thought he must have been one of the black students who live at our campus. It turns out he was a French-speaker, which immediately piqued my interest as I seldom get to practise my French, so we switched languages. He said he was from Paris and taught French at our school. I was a little surprised. We have one woman from France here and she usually teaches Business English, not French. And we lost our Italian teacher after they started forcing her to teach English. But whatever. The school doesn’t inform me of new staff hires. So we chatted, and when we got to the fork in the road where I went off to staff housing, and he was going off to the dorms where he said he lived, we exchanged phone numbers. I was happy to have a new French-speaking friend who was an adult and had world experience. I like students, but I find there is always a teacher-student boundary that I don’t like to cross with regard to conversation topics. Sometimes, I just want friends – and here, I don’t meet a lot of adult women. Sometimes, I let my guard down and allow the possibility of a male friend. Usually a mistake. Men don’t become friends with women without there being a self-serving purpose. Women are there to be used in a variety of ways. I feel very stupid every time I forget that.
So, I went off on my way home.
Being female, I did what I always do when interacting with males. I checked behind me a few times. No matter how nice a dude is, you want to make sure you’re not followed. It had nothing to do with race (I can just hear someone screaming ‘YOU DID THAT BECAUSE HE WAS BLACK – WAAAAAAAH!!!!!’ Nope. I’m wary of ALL men. Men of all races have attacked me. No one gets a free pass. Penis = justified suspicion. I’d given him my phone number, yes, but no dude can truly be trusted, and I don’t let men know where I live. Ever. So I looked back. I was safe. No one followed me.
About half an hour after I returned, I got a phone call. It was Dude. WTF? And immediately, he aggressively started in with demands to come over and fuck me. Talking over me as I tried to say no. Repeating the demands over and over. At first, I fell into the typical girl thing and said I had a boyfriend. Didn’t matter, he said. He just wanted to fuck. Don’t be so serious. I asked him why he didn’t have a local girlfriend. He said he didn’t like Chinese girls. I knew what that meant. You can’t just fuck Chinese girls – they are more conservative here. I didn’t bother asking about the other African students – men who go abroad often don’t like women of their own race (white men never approach me here in China since they are after Asian pussy). So that meant he targeted me because I was white, and every man of every race knows that white women will fuck anyone. We’re ‘easy’. And that’s when I got really pissed. Like all men, a woman’s ‘no’ doesn’t mean a thing. And the racial component, which I’ve experienced soooo many times before, sent me over the edge. I switched to English to regain a slight feeling of power in the situation. I told him off. Made my position as clear as possible. He was being disrespectful of me. I was angry. And I was not interested at all in sex. I told him he lied to me. I was adamant that he not call me again.
And he called me again. And again. And again. Over the next few weeks, he called several times. I never answered. And I decided not to block him because I wanted to keep a record of the harassment in my phone log.
I went into the Foreign Affairs Office of my university, which unfortunately was at the main campus – not mine. I reported the guy. I only had a first name and a phone number. There was no record of him as a student. And he definitely wasn’t a teacher either. All I knew was that he was a potential rapist who had targeted me because I was a woman and white. The Foreign Affairs Officer said there was nothing that could be done. I asked if we could call the police (our campus is, in fact, beside a police academy). He said no. Apparently, in China, sexual harassment, stalking or even sexual assault aren’t police matters. What??? I think the guy didn’t want the reputation of the university to be tarnished by a sexual harassment complaint. The Foreign Affairs Officer (a man) suggested that I not go out at night. For fuck’s sake! So, this is MY problem. There is a rapist on the loose, and I have to alter MY behaviour.
I was terrified walking around on my campus. What if I ran into him? I am easy to pick out since I am the only white woman around for miles. What if he followed me? The guy was huge. There was no way I would be able to fight him off. And if I managed to hurt him, I would be imprisoned thanks to misogynist Chinese law. Rape isn’t taken seriously here.
Well, I mostly didn’t go out at night for a long time. I lived in terror knowing that no one was on my side. Eventually, the calls stopped. Maybe he found someone else to rape. All of this became just another of many similar dealings with men and yet another reason not to trust them or interact with them unnecessarily. I’m tired of being threatened and feeling terrified and having to alter MY behaviour and routines.
This is an example of my white female privilege. Are you jealous? We are targeted by men of different races because we are seen as the epitome of whores. The crème de la crème. All women are whores, and all women should aspire to be as light-skinned as possible. The whiter you are, the more of a prize fuck you are. And we are open to it, so the stereotype goes. We will fuck anyone and everyone. We are public property. If you can fuck a white woman – and of course, according to American TV and films (written and produced mostly by white men, many of whom are Jewish), all white women do is look for opportunities to get naked and fuck, so it must be true – then you score big time. You can check it off your list of things to do before you die. This is what happens when men define female freedom. Female freedom = happy for every many to fuck her. For free. Anytime. Anywhere. The word “no” isn’t in her vocabulary. And some white women (e.g., see the slutwalk brigade) have taken men’s words to heart.
I haven’t. Liberation means something very different to me. It means freedom from men’s desires, demands and crimes (which are all the same thing). It means freedom from fear. Fear of men and what they do and get away with. Adopting the dictates of slavery as your own does not free you. It just opens you up to more abuse. And all men know this and try to take advantage of this. So black men, Asian men, Arab men, aboriginal men – all men – have now proclaimed an open season on white women. Mark my words, white girls. By accepting your boys’ definition of (sexual) freedom, you must service all men free of charge. Rape is not possible when men believe you want it 24/7, and all they hear you saying is, “yep, I’m a slut”. I see you as brainlessly complicit in the shit that happens to me. Not the masterminds, but dangerous sheep-accomplices, nonetheless.
And though I’ll cover this in my future post on the intersection of race and sex, I’ll just be clear here since I know reading this will make people uncomfortable because white women aren’t supposed to experience systemic problems or talk about them. I am not negating violence against women of colour or their unique problems resulting from sex and their particular race and location in the world. I am saying that we are not responsible for what white men or men of colour do to them, though. Every group of women experiences a combination of racial and sexual stereotyping and punishment at the hands of men of all different groups. Including white women. The truth is that it is not all fun and games for white chicks despite what you might need to tell yourself to feel at home in your own particular oppression-group or to feel righteous when you attack the white women you feel obliged to ‘other’. We make much easier targets than men of any colour, and it is widely believed that hurting us, the property of white men, is the best way to sock one to the male masters.
Story Ending Never 
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