TRANSCRIPT
I was looking through my newsfeed a few weeks back, and an article jumped out at me. What it was, was Amy Schumer, a comedian—I don’t know who she is, I hadn’t really even heard of her. She was talking with Oprah, and she was joking about spending a lot of her time cleaning poop off her son’s tiniest set of balls she had ever seen. She’s joking about this, and it said it was in front of an audience of 15,000 people. But apparently, they considered this really funny, and apparently, they considered it funny and interesting enough that it’s newsworthy, good enough for national news.
And then I thought, what is up with that? I was angry. I was disgusted. I had all those feelings back again, and I thought, hmm, I’m gonna make a video on it. So here goes. I’m gonna continue now.
Well, the first thought that came to my mind is, what if I was one of those 15,000 people in the audience? I think I would not have been able to control myself. I think I would have stood up. I really believe I would have done it. I would have stood up and said, “That is inappropriate! That is disgusting! That is bordering on sexual abuse!” You talking about your son that way in public? That is horrible.
And then I’m imagining I would have been censured. They would have escorted me out. They would have shot me up. People probably would have screamed at me. I would have been put down, shot down, and told, “How dare you say that?” And the reason I say I would have been censured is because my experience is that has been largely what has happened to me when I have spoken about such things publicly. When I said, “That’s inappropriate,” it’s inappropriate to talk that way about a little boy, especially a mom talking about her own son that way.
So then I start thinking about it. I take a step back and say, well, how would I argue that it’s not inappropriate for me to say that that’s a bad thing that she’s doing? That this is abusive, maybe even sexually abusive, certainly sexually violating of her son in some way to talk about him like that.
The first thing I do is I want to do a thought experiment because that’s often what helps me kind of judge, am I being sane? Am I being rational, or am I off the deep end like it can be suggested I am? And people tell me, “That’s wrong! She’s just making a joke! It’s okay! She’s just kidding! There’s nothing sexual about that.”
So in my thought experiment, well, let’s just say she wasn’t a woman saying that. Let’s say she was a man saying that, and he said, “Well, I spent all my days cleaning poop off, looking at my son’s tiny little balls, cleaning poop off the tiniest set of balls you ever saw.” If a man said that, and it’s sort of like, ooh, now I think it is more clearly sexualized when he says something like that.
Hmm, well, let me try a different version of the thought experiment. What if Amy Schumer had a daughter and said the female version of the tiniest little pair of balls that I’d ever seen, cleaning poop off them? Would the 15,000 people in the audience think it was funny? Would Oprah think it was funny if this woman was talking about her daughter’s genitals in sort of a humorous way, publicly, openly, for the whole world to hear? Everybody knows what the child’s name is. Suddenly I think, hmm, no, nothing. It becomes more sexualized even if it’s a mom talking about her daughter.
And then let’s go to the most extreme thought experiment. Imagine if it’s a dad, and the dad says, “Yeah, I spend my day cleaning poop off my daughter’s genitals,” and uses the actual word, kind of like the female equivalent of balls. Suddenly it’s like, no, he is a pervert. So how come when moms talk about their sons like this, it’s considered okay? Why do they get a pass by society? Why did they get a pass by Oprah?
And then let me take a step back and think also, wait a second. Oprah Winfrey is someone herself who came out over 30 years ago as a victim of child sexual abuse, even incest inside of her own family. I believe it was 1986 she talked about having been publicly, she talked about having been incest as a child by a cousin and an uncle and not a family friend. And it’s like, so why isn’t she more sensitive to this? Why is it okay that she’s up there giving this woman a platform to talk about her own child in a sexualized way humorously?
So what is it? Why do moms get a pass in this way? Because this Amy Schumer person, she’s fairly common. I think there’s a lot of women I’ve heard who’ve talked about their children in a sexualized way. And again, to bring it back to my life, my mom talked about me like that. My mom talked about my genitals like that. My mom was very open and joking about my body, joking about my sexuality with strangers in public, with other members of my family. She thought it was funny. Everybody thought it was funny. No one ever came to my defense. My dad certainly never came to my defense, and it was humiliating for me.
It was disturbing for me. It caused me to feel like I had to shut down. In fact, I did have to shut down to be able to survive in my family system. I wasn’t allowed to call out my mom. I wasn’t allowed to say, “That’s inappropriate! You make me feel horrible!” If I had done that, she wouldn’t have loved me. She would have loved me even less than she was already loving me.
But why did she joke about my body that way? Why did she joke about my sexuality when I was a little boy like that? Why did she think it was funny? Why did other people think it was funny? I’ve said this in my other videos, but I think it does come down at an unconscious level to the ways in which society treats women.
My mom was someone who was treated inappropriately in a sexual way. She was sexually abused in different ways. Her father was a pervert, and unfortunately, the sexual abuse that happened to my mom did happen in relationship to men in her life, males in her life. She was treated like an object in all sorts of different ways.
And what I think is when she had a little boy over whom she wielded 100% complete control, she was gonna get even. She was gonna work out a lot of her unprocessed rage and sadness and frustration and humiliation by passing it along to me. It’s like, tag, you’re it! I am now going to openly have to feel her feelings, and she’s going to get to watch me feel the feelings that she’s in used in me. And she’s going to get to feel them by proxy, and she’s going to now get to be in the power position of humiliating me and violating me in different ways.
Now again, I want to take one quick step back and say the caveat that I don’t think what this woman, Amy Schumer, did—I don’t think what my mom did to me was extreme compared to so many stories that I have heard. One thing is I look at just the comments that I see on my two previous YouTube videos on this subject. So many people are coming on and writing things about horrible things that their moms did to them.
Another thing is I’ve heard many women, they write it on there. They think they write about things that happen to their husbands and boyfriends, things that they actually see their husbands and boyfriends’ mothers doing to them. Lots and lots and lots of stories, and that’s just a tiny bit of evidence on a couple of YouTube videos.
Then there’s my whole time being a therapist. Again and again and again and again, hearing men share things that their mothers did to them that was perverse, sometimes in really extreme ways. And then there’s my time just out in the world as a regular citizen, listening again and again and again. I’ve overheard so many mothers say things that are perverse about their sons, and more than my mom even did. I’ve heard mothers talk about their sons’ erections. I’ve heard mothers compare the size of their sons’ penises. It goes on and on and on. Things that if the mothers…
Were talking about their daughters. Someone would call them out on it. And if it was fathers talking about their daughters, someone would probably call the police, and the children would be removed from the household. Their daughters would be removed from the household. But women get a pass. And why does society give women a pass?
Well, I said this in the first video in my series, and I’m going to say it again. Something that I’ve seen is that so often in our society, women are considered sexual objects, and men are considered sexual subjects. And because of this, it’s almost like nothing women do can really be considered sexual because, at some level, it’s like subliminally society has determined women are really sexual subjects. They’re just objects. We do things to women. We talk about women. We feel things about their body. Even women talk about other women as sexual objects.
Therefore, when women talk about their sons, it’s like they’re not actually sexualizing their sons in any way because women can’t do that. They are objects, and it’s males, even their sons, who are the sexual subjects. And it’s almost like women are sort of joking about their sons sometimes, even in a kind of a proud way. Look at what a sexual subject my son is by talking about his balls or talking about his penis and things like that.
And it really makes me question because, deep down, my experience in life is that women are not just sexual objects. Yes, society can deem them sexual objects and put them in the position of sexual objects. And often, when they get sexually abused, especially in childhood, 100 percent, they are victims. They are sexual objects to predators. However, that’s not an inherent part of being a woman. Women can be sexual subjects too, and so can men. However, men can also be sexual objects, and I think often society doesn’t acknowledge that. They don’t say that.
Another thing I’m thinking is when men do sexual crimes against women, not infrequently it happens. And some theaters, they get caught for it. They’re in the news. I read the comments, and so often people say, “I hope that person goes to jail and gets raped.” And it’s sort of like people seem to really enjoy this idea. And I see men and women, right? Oh, I hope Bubba teaches them something. So they’re gonna get what’s coming to them in prison. They’re gonna get raped by Bubba. I hear that again and again, and it’s like this idea that men being victimized in some way is a good fitting punishment.
And I think this kind of fits into the way that humiliating men, sexualizing them in different ways, sexually violating them in different ways, it’s kind of considered like an okay thing. So then I take a step back again. What does a mom really get out of it? What did my mom get out of it by talking about me this way? And why did nobody call her? Why does society accept this?
It’s like I think sometimes society just serves up little boys, serves up sons on a platter to be sort of the sacrificial lamb. It’s like that’s supposedly, I think by society, at some unconscious level, is supposed to make up for the abuses of women. And I don’t think it works, actually. What I think is it makes the problem much, much worse.
Because the other thing I’ve seen is where do misogynists come from? I think when boys are really mistreated by their moms, when their moms have really poor sexual boundaries, I think not infrequently this is something that really contributes to some men becoming misogynists. They have been violated by women. Sometimes they don’t even necessarily consciously realize that their mothers did it to them, but they have so much deep and buried rage and frustration and humiliation that they take it out on women kind. They take it out on all women. They don’t like women in general. Sometimes they really hate them.
And I think what happens is some of them turn around and they do actually actively violate women out of rage for what has happened to them. And I’ll say it as a therapist, I’ve heard that dynamic. I’ve heard this vicious cycle: mothers doing inappropriate sexual stuff with their sons, their sons not being able to deal with it, being traumatized, burying their traumas, and turning around and replicating it in relationships with other women. And then guess what? These women get violated, and then they have sons, and maybe then they pass it on. I think this is a big part of how this trauma cycle is passed on.
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