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Teaching the Cause of Rape Culture: Toxic Masculinity

Author(s): Jeremy Posadas
Source: Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, Vol. 33, No. 1 (Spring 2017), pp. 177-179
Published by: Indiana University Press on behalf of FSR, Inc
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 Short Takes 177

Teaching the Cause of Rape Culture: Toxic Masculinity

Jeremy Posadas

Every year, I teach a religious studies and gender studies course on sex and
sexuality. My institutional context is a small, private liberal arts college and a
religious studies department that is committed to nonconfessional and compar-
ative/critical approaches. Although the student population is 42 percent non-
white and we have a significant number of Catholic, Muslim, Hindu, and Jewish
students, the white Protestantism of North Texas, ranging from moderately lib-
eral to less moderately conservative, is still the strongest cultural current among
the student body.
The course, in its settled form, is titled Sex, Self, and Society and is offered
at the intermediate undergraduate level with no prerequisites. I structure the
class as an exploration of multiple ways sex and religion relate to one another
within US society. From the first day of the semester, I emphasize that we will
be examining how sex itself functions in religious ways as well as how organized
religion engages sex in various manners.1 Topics include gender roles and power
in sex, secular and religious cultures and ethics of sex, sexual health, marriage
and polyamory, pornography, same-gender sexualities, abortion, and legal regu-
lation of sex. In all of these areas, I am committed to queer and feminist stances,
directly addressing the gender- and sexuality-based power asymmetries and
inequities that heteropatriarchal (and white supremacist) capitalism imposes
and imagining alternatives thereto.
Such an orientation to the course makes it necessary also to feature a major
unit on preventing sexual violence, which began as one week in a fourteen-week
semester and has slowly lengthened to its current two and one-half weeks.2 My
overall goal in the unit is for students not only to understand the issue of sexual
violence better but also to begin imagining and experimenting with how we, as
everyday members of society, might work to eradicate it.
The framework I have used for this unit has gone through three stages. At
first, I framed the unit as empathizing with victims of sexual violence: we read
narratives from rape survivors and reflected on the many ways sexual violence
impacts survivors’ (and victims’) lives and communities. I soon transformed the
unit into one of analyzing and dismantling rape culture, in order for students to

1
  When considering organized religion, we mostly look at examples from Christianity because
in the United States, it plays the dominant role in establishing social norms related to sex.
2
  On this topic more than any other, the cost of only engaging superficially is too great, so time
is needed to work with students in a pedagogically, ethically, and emotionally appropriate way.
Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 33.1 (2017), 177–179
Copyright © 2017 The Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, Inc.  •  doi: 10.2979/jfemistudreli.33.1.23

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178 Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 33.1

appreciate sexual violence primarily as a structural phenomenon. After several

sessions detailing the mechanisms and extent of rape culture, students worked
in groups to design actions or programs that could chip away at some aspect of
rape culture that each group selected. These creative projects often resulted
in proposals that could contribute in real ways to eradicating sexual violence;
more importantly, students repeatedly began to see eradicating sexual violence
as something in which they had a stake.
Nevertheless, I came to realize that students could come away from the
unit without coming to consciousness of the truth that sexual violence in the
West is fundamentally a problem of masculinity—a manifestation of the phe-
nomenon that gender studies conceptualizes as “toxic masculinity.” Students
need to understand that while rape culture is the mechanism that channels
toxic masculinity into specific, socially legitimized practices of sexual violence,
if we want to eradicate sexual violence, we must transform the apparatuses by
which boys are subjectified into toxically masculine men. I find that the framing
in Jackson Katz’s book The Macho Paradox: Why Some Men Hurt Women and
How All Men Can Help is closer than not to the enduring understanding I want
students to take from the unit.3 Of course, sexual violence is perpetrated upon
(and to a lesser degree, by) people of all gender identities, as I point out to my
students: but the transformations of masculinity required to eradicate men’s
violence against women (sexual and otherwise) are also the key to eradicating
all forms of gender-based and sexual violence.
In addition to Katz, we study current statistics on sexual violence, summa-
ries of research on why women reporting sexual violence are often not believed,
and excerpts from Michael Kimmel’s Guyland as well as Transforming a Rape
Culture, edited by Emilie Buchwald, Pamela Fletcher, and Martha Roth.4 For
their daily reading accountability assignment (required throughout the semes-
ter), students (of all gender identities) accumulate a letter to the men in their
lives, explaining key points from the readings that they want the men in their
lives to be aware of. In the final week, students work in groups to design a
program, targeted toward either elementary-aged or adolescent boys, aimed
at forming their gender identities and interpersonal practices in alternatives to
toxic-masculine violence. I have struggled some over what is lost by not ending

3
  Jonathan Katz, The Macho Paradox: Why Some Men Hurt Women and How All Men Can Help
(Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks, 2006).
4
  Michael S. Kimmel, Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men (New York:
HarperCollins, 2008); and Emilie Buchwald, Pamela Fletcher, and Martha Roth, eds., Transforming
a Rape Culture (Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions, 2005). See the 2010 National Intimate
Partner and Sexual Violence Survey (NISVS), accessed January 7, 2017, https://www.cdc.gov
/violenceprevention/nisvs; Jenée Desmond-Harris, “9 Myths about Sexual Assault,” Vox, March 27,
2015, http://www.vox.com/2014/12/6/7342971/rape-myths-sexual-assault; and Dara Lind, “What
We Know about False Rape Allegations,” Vox, June 1, 2015, http://www.vox.com/2015/6/1/8687479
/lie-rape-statistics.

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 Short Takes 179

with a project focused on sexual violence per se, but at least at this stage of
my ongoing work with the course, I judge it to be worthwhile on balance to
reinforce the notion that to eradicate rape culture, we must transform how we
collectively raise “our boys.”

Jeremy Posadas is assistant professor of religious studies at Austin College,

located nowhere near Austin but on the rural border of Texas and Oklahoma.
He teaches critical studies of Christianity in society, including theology,
ethics, social issues, history, and biblical studies. He is also a core faculty
member in the Gender Studies Program, focusing on queer relationality,
ending rape culture, and related topics. His current project is a reconstruction
of the Christian ethics of work, drawing together concepts from the fields of
working-class studies, anti-work theory, queer and feminist theory, and the
reproductive justice framework. [email protected]

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