We live in a society, but the bridge between that society and ourselves is family—in the elongated, African sense. Born into a family, we recreate it so others can cycle in and out. With each entry and exit, we accrue unresolved-ness that plays out in our being and in our family, at times violently. My view is simple: the source of and success against gendered intimate household violence is our families. If Covid-19 exposes, laying bare more than some imagined, the (ill-)health of family discloses intergenerational violence while granting us the tools to expunge it. I’ve digested Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyèwùmí’s The Invention of Women, as well as Tommy Curry’s The Man-Not and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me. And yet, I’m unconvinced the central problem is nor can be resolved by focusing on women/girls or men/boys as if contestants in the oppression game—jostling for who is the most oppressed. These approaches seem too schizophrenic and divisive. They fall short because they embody rather than challenge assumptions about the common denominator—gender.

The idea of “gender” is not cross-culturally valid in social relations. Though widely accepted, this concept, based on what Oyèwùmí calls a biologic, poses an acute danger for human relations. The English gender, from the Latin genus, only came to be used in the 20th century to mean “sex of a human,” its sense colloquial. In the 1960s, feminist writers ascribed to it social attributes and biological qualities. Created or extended was a central problem: gender exists when biological sex distinction carries moral and social expectations attributed to fe/male. Fe/male refers to biological anatomy, while masculine/feminine are social constructions that signify specific moral and social attributes/expectations. Gender fuses the biological and the social/moral, especially in “Western” societies and languages. Think of Romance languages: gender is always declared via the article that comes before the noun, which is to say what a thing is more important than who it is. African languages such as Yorùbá or Akan/Twi, which I speak, are gender-neutral, offering up a different set of ideas to work through human relations. What I’m suggesting is that family is the arena where we have to confront intimate household violence and that we need to reconsider the violence fixed in the language (a system of ideas), in the very grammar and syntax, we have used in that arena.  

When we think out loud or act out our lives through this conception of gender, we play into the culturally structured thoughts and behaviors of “Western” societies. On several levels, we accept their faux ideas: women are emotional or the receptacles of violence. These ideas are anchored in biologic, in that to be “women” is to be without penis, power, and the prowess of logic—the possessions of men. Women are also potential property, as in the assumption of a man’s surname upon marriage, or referring to a room full of women as “you guys,” or the idioms “my wife” and “the girl is mine.” What, then, does a woman possess? The traits belonging to but also exclusive of motherhood: menstrual cycle, pregnancy, nurturing—all packed with emotion. Under the disguise of gender, women accept and act out this script, partly due to social expectation, partly due to real biological and chemical interplay. They also yield to this script when they tolerate boys under no pressure to grow up, men who think their penis will fall off by changing diapers, fe/males who violently codify intimacy in violent codes—hittin’ that, smash that, beat it up. Women concerned about their own emotions and the desire for men to affirm them are seldom concerned about men’s emotions. Rejected is the idea that boys and men have emotional lives, and yet boys and girls find themselves stubbornly socialized into these understandings.  

Our three daughters have a role in shaping this mutual conditioning, which begins early. There’s not a boy I know who hasn’t cried and cried a lot. Around age 10 or 11, something not so magical happens. At puberty, most boys stop crying, at least visibly, and they not only develop penis consciousness but discover that girls possess something different. At age 10, I was embarrassed when my mother wanted to bathe me, so I said to her one evening, “I got it.” By that age, the physical pouncing, verbal ridicule, and emotional assaults force a metamorphosis, which convinces boys that only girls cry when hurt, crying is weakness and vaginal, and real men are strong, demonstrated by the sheer will to fight back those tears. And yet, I recall my younger sister being comforted with the patronizing line: “It’s okay to cry and share your feelings.” Rarely did mother or father comfort me as a child or allow me to express a feeling other than anger. Fe/male kin and friends curate this conditioning, where male emotional content might live on, but his affect and capacity to humanely connect dies a slow and inevitable death. The concept of gender accelerates a fight it initiates—sexes are always in conflict, and only one can win! Why do you think men authorize and fight wars, conflicts in which the premise is always that the opponent is less than human? I know conflicts are inevitable, but I wonder what men sacrifice to become dehumanized male bodies. I wonder if surrendering their humanity is worth the price of losing their loved ones. Surely some resurrection is possible, but the labor and self-inducing love required is so tremendous the task might be too daunting.

Girls and women have come to expect an emotionally amputated man, a process underway since boyhood. As boys learn not to cry and pretend not to feel pain, I’m reminded of this each time our daughters hit me, sometimes very hard, thinking it is fun to do so. Not once do they think or even ask if their punches, jabs, chops, jumping on my back, etc., actually hurts. Their ramp onto gender and social conditioning are that men are physical but not emotional beings. This physical male, however, embodies the people to which he belongs, for white societies and those under their tutelage tell us peoples of African ancestry don’t feel pain. What I am poking at is not merely the violence of the language we use, the social spaces where we live (or try to do something called living), the intergenerational conditioning in front of us, but also that we are a wounded species. The areas where our wounds hurt the most need the urgent care, but not by fe/male adults competing against each other, with child(ren) bystanders, to play out a gendered script authored for us. We need not a script but a premise. We are all wounded but in different yet not essential ways. Our fight-flight instincts are always on, never allowed to rest or recalibrate. Without rest, we turn on those who offer some solace, a safe space to bleed, where we can lick our wounds, and keep fighting or fleeing. Our language is honesty at all costs, working and fighting in the arena of us, most effectively through a series of linked families.