Blog 9: Sam’s Story
While reading this weeks article on sexual assult and masculinty I found Sam’s story to be more interesting, so I decided to focus more on his story rather than John’s. We all hear about the “John” Stories boy who grows up in a bad home and carries that on with him in life. But what particulary struck me about Sam is he came from a lovely close-knit home. When asked Sam said his conceptions of masculinitly at the time was: success at work, power, strong, money being like dad. “Being like dad” showed his admiration for his father and what he believed his father was like. Sam didn’t experience abuse at home but rather at school (bullying). While processing this I thought that must be a scary thing going everyday somewhere where your force to go and constantly being bulled- that has to tramatizing ans scary for anyone!
When Sam confided in his father- where you can imagine Sam was looking for sympathy and love his father was telling him to fight back. He wanted to be tough and strong like dad and the fact that Sam couldn’t actually bring himself to fight the other boys (the fact that he was scared), he would be beaten up lead him to someone he knew he could physically have more power over.
So here we are: Sam was not percieved as tough because he wouldn’t fight back and he wasn’t in control because he was always being teased, so Sam had no power or control over what was happening to him at school. Consequently those happen to be two characteristics he listed in what makes someone a man. The baby sitting job gave Sam a time to feel he was in control. He felt he had power over the little girls he babysat, causing him to commit the sexuall assult acts.
After reading this article my mind was jumping all around because the one thing I could not seem to get out of my head was: If Sam had never been tease could we say that he would have not commited those Sexaul assult acts?
Stephany: You ask, “If Sam had never been tease could we say that he would have not committed those Sexual assault acts?”
To me, there is no way to really answer this question. BUT, the step before this is to ask, “what can we do to prevent the teasing, or to increase resiliency against it?” I wonder if reducing discrimination against women would in turn mean that teasing using the words “sissy” and “faggot” wouldn’t be so powerful anymore!