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Here’s the thing - when you argue that it’s impossible to teach men not to rape, you are saying that rape is natural for men. That this is just something men do. Well I’m sorry, but I think more highly of men than that. (And if you are a man who is making this argument, you’ll forgive me if I don’t ever want to be in a room alone with you.)

And when you insist that the only way to prevent rape is for women change their behavior - whether it’s recommending that they carry a weapon or not wear certain kinds of clothing - you are not only giving out false information, you are arguing that misogyny is a given. That the world will continue to be a dangerous and unfair place for women and we should just get used to the fact. It’s a pessimistic and frankly, lazy, view on life. Because when you argue that this is “just the way things are,” what you are really saying is - I don’t care enough to do anything about it.

“ Also, the white trans experience has trumped trans people of color’s experience. This is another factor that arrests development for some trans people of color. We go online and do research on transfolks and only get the white trans experience, which isn’t ours–so there’s no way that we could be trans, right? Also there are other issues in being out and trans which seems to be what white transmen push for. As they become visible as trans, there may be backlash…but they are still a white man with privilege. As soon as we transition to be black men, our lives get much more difficult–especially if we are trans organizers. There is a lot of pressure to stay “stealth” and invisible within communities of color because who really wants the added marginalization and discrimination? It is hard enough to be a black man. Now you’ve got to worry about being accepted within your community, church, schools and jobs? Many say, “No, thank you.” And you know…some white transmen call us cowards for that. Cowards. Because they have no idea the experience of intersecting identities of being a person of color and queer among other identities.

“ Femininity is depicted as weakness, the sapping of strength, yet masculinity is so fragile that apparently even the slightest brush with the feminine destroys it.

“ Men’s misery does deserve sympathy, but not if it means we ignore how men contribute to that misery, where it comes from, and what men get in exchange for it. It’s all too easy to go from sympathy for men to forgetting that patriarchy and male privilege even exist. Part of what makes it so easy is misunderstanding what privilege is, where it comes from, and how it is distributed. Many men argue, for example, that men are privileged only to the degree that they feel privileged. A key aspect of privilege, however, is to be unaware of it as privilege. In addition, even though men as a group are privileged in society, factors such as race, class, sexual orientation, and disability status affect how much privilege each man gets to enjoy and how he experiences it.

Privilege can take many forms, and its distribution among people in a society is a complicated process. Privilege can be something as simple as being heard and taken seriously when we say something, of being served promptly and courteously in a store or restaurant, or of being free to move around or express an opinion. It can take the form of wealth or power or having other people clean up after us and take care of our needs. In every case, what makes something privilege is the unequal way in which it is distributed and the effect it has of elevating some people over others.

“ A lot of men can’t tell you what it means to be a man because they were never allowed to learn. They were only taught patriarchy.

“

This expectation for Asian American artists to represent one’s community “positively” at the expense of an expansive and complicated portrayal — the “burden of representation” — is something that Parreñas-Shimizu feels strongly about. “The demand to make films that represent your community does an injustice to the actual work the filmmakers are trying to do,” Parreñas-Shimizu says. “You can’t film an idea. You have to film very concrete things, a very concrete person who’s going through some kind of dilemma. This person may not be a positive person. I’m thinking of the work of Quentin Lee’s Ethan Mao, which features a character who’s bullied and silenced by his own father for his sexuality, and then wields a gun against his own family. I think it’s a story worth telling. But once you make the demands of, ‘Is this the kind of visibility we want?’ it can be unfair to the goals of the filmmaker, which is to tell stories that help make spaces for these people.”

At the same time, Parreñas-Shimizu understands and feels the importance of Asian Americans wanting to see themselves in a way that hasn’t been seen before. This is why she was instantly mesmerized by the breakout of NBA player Jeremy Lin, whose sudden emergence was coined “Linsanity.” “It’s interesting to watch all the cameras look for Asians in the audience, but Asians have always been there,” insists Parreñas-Shimizu, a long-time fan of sports teams from her hometown of Boston. “Participation in sports is itself an assertion of citizenship and belonging. For me, being a Filipina immigrant in Boston and just loving the Celtics and basketball, I remember loving that school was canceled because the Celtics won the NBA championship and you’re part of that group in the subway going to the celebration…But yeah, you see that hunger. I know that hunger. It’s painful.”

But the medicine that so many Asian American men use to heal that pain — what Parreñas-Shimizu calls a “phallic masculinity,” or what other scholars call a “hegemonic masculinity” — only hurts others in the process. “I think it’s very easy to define masculinity in terms of the hero who saves the day and beats everyone up and sleeps with a ton of women. So if you define masculinity in that way, the Asian American man has to fall short. You’re still proposing a straitjacketed definition of what is gender and sexuality for Asian American men,” says Parreñas-Shimizu. “I want to open up a world where someone like William Hung can be sexy! And the thing is, people did find him sexy! He got marriage proposals! So if we look at masculinity, and what people want from it, it reveals that there’s something very limited in that kind of phallic masculinity. It’s not really good for people.”

That tension between the desire for national recognition and the danger in subscribing to a phallic masculinity (which undergirds the nation) is what drove Parreñas-Shimizu to unearth the vast filmic repertoire of Asian American masculinities. “After I toured for two years for my first book, people kept asking, ‘Now that you’ve proven the hypersexuality of Asian American women, what do you have to say about the asexuality of Asian American men?’ I thought, “We have to historicize it and see if that’s really what’s going on. Because if it’s true that Asian American men have only been seen as asexual and effeminate, then how do you make sense of Sessue Hayakawa or James Shigeta? These huge heartthrobs from almost 100 years ago, fifty years ago? So many women fainted at the sight of their sexiness and beauty. So we have to be very careful about creating that blanket statement.”

“ There runs through the fundamentalist belief system a deep dread of ambiguity, disorder and chaos. Accordingly, the cult of masculinity keeps all ambiguity, especially sexual ambiguity, in check. It fosters a world of binary opposites: God and man, saved and unsaved, the church and the world, Christianity and secular humanism, male and female. These tidy pairings keep life from slipping back into a complicated nightmare. Reality, thus defined, is made predictable and understandable, something deeply comforting to believers who have had trouble coping with the messiness of human existence. There is, in this “Christian” worldview, clearly demarcated order and disorder. Behaviors that do not conform—such as homosexuality—are forms of disorder, tools of Satan, and must be abolished. A world that can be predicated and understood, a world that has clear boundaries, can be made rational. It can be managed and controlled. The petrified, binary world of fixed, immutable roles is a world where people, many of them damaged by bouts with failure, despair and their own ambiguities, can bury their chaotic and fragmented personalities and live with the illusion that they are now strong, whole and protected. Those who do not fit, who are not subservient to dominant Christian males, must be proselytized, converted and “cured” (if they are gay or lesbian) through quack therapy. If they remain recalcitrant they must be silenced. The decline of America is described as the result of the decline of male prowess. This decline has led to weakness and moral decay. It has resulted in a bewildering human and social complexity that, often seen as feminine, is the work of Satan. By submitting to the Christian leader, and to a powerful male God who will destroy those who misbehave, followers avoid dealing with life. The movement seeks, above all, to banish mystery, the very essence of faith. Not only is the binary world knowable and predictable, but finally God is knowable and predictable.

“ Perhaps the most basic thing we can do is end once and for all the indulgent “boys will be boys” attitude towards voyeurism. Whether it’s staring up girls’ skirts (Putzie in the classic musical Grease) or greedily watching young women shower through peepholes (most of the male cast of Porky’s), we’ve grown up with a pop culture that portrays the urge to spy on unsuspecting women as a normal, healthy, inevitable part of a dude’s coming of age. But as the arrest reports make clear, plenty of guys aren’t growing out of this behavior –- coaches, pastors, and grandfathers are among those who’ve been charged with spying on unsuspecting women. The sooner we see even boyish voyeurism as having less to do with healthy sexual curiosity than with predatory, boundary-violating behavior, the better.

“ Femininity is depicted as weakness, the sapping of strength, yet masculinity is so fragile that apparently even the slightest brush with the feminine destroys it.