Like a lot of folk in here, chapters 2 and 3 sent me on a deeply unenjoyable walk through my own childhood as if taking inventory of my experience as compared to what hooks speaks of; and I feel like her analysis that ‘the most present enforcers of fledgling patriarchal thought in a young boy is his peer-group’ links hand in hand with a lot of why I’m not willing to father children; the exact same root that my ‘by the time your seed is 5, your seed may as well no longer be yours with how much time your seed’s school wants to keep them there’ take springs from.

Your kid spends more time around peers and teachers than they do you by the time they’re seven or eight; which leads to the exact kind of anecdotes as the family that TRIED raising their youth to be anti-patriarchal only to find that their son was still being bombarded with messages-- with shame– from within the school to a point that it undermined and jeopardized the lessons the parents were trying to teach.

I think what sticks in my craw about it the most is seeing my own upbringing in that. Mine wasn’t a household where I could even think of becoming anything other than the demanding, every-flavor-but-sexually abusive patriarch my fill-in was. Even before it was my peers labeling me the ‘sissy’ or f/, it was him; any time I showed weakness, any time I let a tear escape, any time he could hear me reacting to the ways he’d hit me, or mentally cut me down. And it had the intended effect. I was emotionally dead by ten, and certain that if I didn’t leave home by the time I was 14, it was either going to boil down to me or him, one of us was going to kill the other. Which just walks itself back to those that live under abusive, domineering patriarchy praying for the death of the patriarch, doesn’t it?

What scares me is that I still could; that the potential for violence even in spite of all I’ve learned and all I’ve tried to un-learn, is still there. That man hasn’t moved houses in 17 years. I could go ‘home’, stake his neighborhood out a couple weeks, kick the downstairs sliding door through-- or maybe get in through one of the un-screened windows, 'cause I know without me to handle all the menial labor, he sure didn’t do it himself-- and put him down like a dog with cancer on his ratty-assed couch these days. Any number of ways, really; he prepared me for violence, and in spite of it all, that violence hasn’t gone.

I can’t forgive him for what he shaped me into before my actual father could get to me. Not that he was any better (he wasn’t abusive to me; if anything, I was my bio father’s golden child lost and found; but he WAS more or less a hyper-misogynist who cheated hard and often enough to more or less steer my patriarchal development in the ‘heartless casanova’ direction than the ‘nearly a school shooter’ direction by action even BEFORE he started ‘teaching’ me), but at least I got a couple good years with him.