Today, Simone has a conversation with Aart

"Some of the most important life lessons I’ve learned, I learned through sports. Sports taught me hard work, dedication, and teamwork. It also taught me some fundamental lessons about masculinity and sexuality.

Not all of these messages were problematic or harmful. Coaches often spoke to me in a positive (though sometimes paternalistic) way about "respect for women." But looking back, most of the messages I received about sex and the role of my masculinity within it were pretty horrific.

One of the most terrifying messages I received perhaps came from an older football player named Dave when I was in tenth grade. One day, he was bragging to me about his sexual relationship with his girlfriend, a girl who was generally known as "pretty" and "popular."

In the middle of his bragging, he told me that he wanted to perform an incredibly violent sexual act that would violate her consent and likely result in serious injury.

He said he was just joking, and I laughed along, but it didn't feel right. No matter how uncomfortable I felt, I didn't dare to challenge the 'joke.'

After all, I wouldn't just be doing that against a man I looked up to, but it could also lead to me being ostracized even further for being 'gay' (because apparently, men are gay if they resist violence against women, and being gay was the 'worst thing you could be' in high school).

To this day, I am ashamed that I never said anything about it, but I just didn't know how. I was a young man without self-confidence, and I thought it was 'normal' that we talked about women in this way.

Although some might dismiss this story as adolescent immaturity, it illustrates a broader problem of patriarchal masculinity and how we as men are taught to understand sex and sexuality.

Feminism versus patriarchy

For generations, feminism, in all its various forms, has impressively pointed out the terrible consequences of patriarchal masculinity. And increasingly, feminists are focusing on the way the patriarchy harms people of all genders.

With the rise of the internet as a dominant factor in the lives of so many, however, the backlash against feminism has only become louder and stronger.

The power of the internet for organizing men’s rights activists, pickup artists, and other anti-feminist groups has led to an increase in the number of people who view feminism as 'anti-male' or who despise the ways in which feminism undermines patriarchal masculinity.

Ironically, these groups exploit men who feel hurt and insecure, who think they are entitled to sex, but who struggle socially and cannot find satisfying relationships.

Men’s rights activists and PUAs tell insecure men that the problem is feminism, not patriarchy, thereby fueling a particularly violent form of online (and offline) misogyny.

Yet the pain and frustration these men experience when it comes to sexuality is almost always directly linked to the way patriarchal masculinity distorts male sexuality – a struggle that feminism is fighting.

In her book The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love, bell hooks describes the patriarchy as "the most life-threatening social disease that besets the male body and the mind in our nation."

If we ever want to fully engage men in dismantling the patriarchy and ending misogyny, more men must understand that the messages we receive about sex hurt more than just women. These messages hurt us too in countless ways.

While I could probably dissect almost every message about sex that we receive, I want to analyze five of the most prominent messages that men are fed about their sexuality.

1. ‘Sow your wild oats’

This is also known as “View sex as a conquest and have sex with as many partners as possible.”

Sometime in my early twenties, my friend asked his father for advice on women and relationships. His father told him that you shouldn't settle down in your twenties and that you should sow your wild oats. Since my friend was seeking advice on whether he should invest more seriously in a relationship with a woman, the message was clear.

From a young age, we men are told through the media and other men that our role in sex is that of a conqueror. I saw it in the way Dave bragged about his sexual conquests with his “sexy” and “popular” girlfriend, and we also understood the message in the conversation with my friend's father.

By feeling the pressure to comply with the “sow your wild oats” message, we end up viewing partners as disposable. This naturally hurts our partners, but it also ensures that we never build loving and/or responsible attachment bonds, unless we let go of this message!

Because whether it’s a one-night stand or a long-term relationship, connection (and thus good sex and healthy relationships) is driven by investment, love, and care. This is not to say that all sex must take place in a loving context, but we must invest in connection rather than detachment to ensure that both our partners and ourselves have a good relationship.

2. ‘Always maintain control’

I don't know exactly where it comes from, but somewhere along the way, I got the message that I must always be in control sexually. Of course, it can be “sexy” for a woman (because I never received a message about how sex with anyone other than a woman could or should be) to occasionally take control, but that message was the exception to the rule.

And I don’t think I’m the only one.

There is a reason why it is considered hugely subversive in dominant, masculine cultures for a man to be the “bottom” or “submissive” in sex with other men or in BDSM. And there is a reason why these men are called the “bitch.”

But letting go of control enables us to build responsible and trusting relationships, because trust cannot exist in a relationship characterized by control over the other.

Moreover, relationships in which one person always has sexual control are not only boring, but they can also hinder our full sexual expression! By letting go of control, we can experience things that can bring immense fulfillment and pleasure, things we would never have considered otherwise!

3. ‘Value attractiveness (traditional standards of physical attractiveness) above all else.’

When I saw the video that the school shooter made right before he committed his violent attack, I noticed a particularly disturbing trend: many of his rambling stories about women who rejected him were about women he found 'attractive' and about men who were approaching these women sexually.

And that got me thinking about the way I learned to value certain types of beauty in my relationships with women.

Since my first sexual experiences were with mainstream pornography, my understanding of sex and sexuality was shaped by a fairly strict definition of beauty. Apart from that, almost all the messages I have received from other men and from the media point to one thing: unless a woman is 'attractive,' she is not worth my time.

And to this day, this conditioning affects me both consciously and subconsciously in ways that I need to examine and rethink. I notice that I engage more intensely in a conversation with a woman who is stereotypically 'attractive,' and that I remember the names of women I find attractive much more easily than those of women I don't find attractive.

The bizarre thing about these tendencies is that they are not necessarily related to sex! I am in a happy and fulfilling relationship in which I am not looking for sexual partners, and yet I notice that I value women I find attractive more than women I don't find attractive.

How does this affect my relationships with the women in my life?

What relationships – sexual and romantic or otherwise – do we cut off because we have been taught to value physical beauty above all else?

The point is that when we value women as sexual objects, we don't just hurt women, but also ourselves, by missing out on friendships, romantic relationships, fantastic sexual encounters, or other relationships with people who fall outside a narrow beauty ideal.

When we decouple our understanding of beauty from patriarchal norms, we open ourselves to a range of wonderful human connections with people of all genders.

4. 'If she doesn't stop you, you can go ahead!'

I’ve had many awkward conversations about sex with my father. I think he wanted to make sure I understood the message about condoms, pregnancy, and STIs.

Aside from any mention of non-heterosexual sex, when looking back at these conversations, one strikingly absent subject stands out: consent. In none of these awkward conversations during long car rides was consent even mentioned, let alone discussed with nuance and depth.

This absence reinforced another aspect of sexuality that is "normal" within patriarchal masculinity: "Consent means continuing until they say you have to stop." Nowhere was that explicitly stated, but every model in the media, which my image of sexuality was largely based on, showed something else.

And as long as our model for consent is based on the negative, on a partner expressing displeasure to stop us, we guarantee two things.

First, we ensure that we are at high risk of hurting our partners by crossing their boundaries, and if our partners have received similar messages, they are at the same risk of hurting us and crossing our boundaries.

Second, we ensure that open communication during sex is the exception rather than the rule, and this message means we aren't having the best sex we could be having. A simple rule for good sex is: the more clearly everyone communicates, the better the sex will be.

5. All of this culminates in one thing: the male entitlement to sex

All these messages together teach men that we are entitled to sex and to the bodies of others. And this entitlement hurts everyone.

There is only one outcome for this entitlement: violence.

Of course, #notallmen ultimately express this learned entitlement openly through violence, but

We all receive the same message, and there are countless ways in which we can express our sexual entitlement by hurting others.

How does this entitlement manifest itself in violence?

The most extreme form of this violence emerges when men commit murders out of this entitlement, as we saw sensationally in the murders in Isla Vista and as we see every day when at least three men murder their intimate partner.

This violence manifests itself in the form of intimate partner violence, recently brought into the public eye by Ray Rice's violence against Janay Palmer, and with at least two million men per year who abuse their intimate partner.

This violence also manifests itself in sexual violence, where, although it is difficult to truly study perpetrators of sexual violence, the vast majority of perpetrators are men (yes, really, men’s rights activists).

This violence also manifests itself in street harassment, where the vast majority of street harassment is committed by men.

Unfortunately, I could continue this list endlessly, but the common denominator is the sense of entitlement that is deeply woven into patriarchal masculinity.

What should we do?

Knowing that patriarchal masculinity distorts male sexuality in ways that harm people of all genders, we must find ways to break the cycles of male socialization as we know them.

We must learn from men like those at A Call to Men, who are willing to raise boys differently and offer a more inclusive and non-violent masculinity. We must have the courage to teach our boys what it means to be a man: gentle, loving, kind, and to see the full humanity in all people.

We must take an example from The Representation Project, which opposes the way our genders are constructed and depicted in the media.

We must commit to government policy that holds everyone, and particularly men, accountable for healthy and non-violent relationships.

And we, as men, must do more to encourage other men to consider a new form of masculinity. When we hear our friends spouting MRA nonsense, we must challenge them and bring them to their senses. When we hear men talking about other people’s bodies in an objectifying way, we must challenge them and bring them to their senses.

And we must build relationships with other men that are based on non-violence, love, responsibility, and a transformative (rather than patriarchal) form of masculinity.

Because if we don't, we all suffer."