[AFTERWORD]

YOU MAY NOTICE A COMMON thread in Episodes Six and Seven (beyond, well, Malcolm and Seong-Jae getting rather intimate):

Perpetrators whose dysfunction began with their fathers, passed down through a sort of heredity born not of genetics, but of the kind of toxic masculinity fathers often teach their sons.

Society and culture often reinforce toxic masculinity, but large part of that reinforcement begins in the home and starts at a young age. It starts with men telling their daughters to stay pure and virginal for them but telling their sons they have to score to be real men. It’s criticizing anything their sons do that might be considered soft, feminine, queer, or anything other than alpha manly. It’s deriding boys for emotional expressiveness, and demanding instead emotional repression. It’s teaching boys that they are exalted above all and entitled to anything they want, any way they want, and the world will hand it to them if they just demand—and if it doesn’t, they have been slighted and should exact revenge.

It’s everything about how we define manhood today.

I have a younger brother eighteen years my junior. He’s…fuck, he’s twenty now. I’m fucking old. I helped raise him during an extended period of his infancy and toddler years. I love him more than life itself, as if he were my own son.

And I can’t speak to him anymore.

Part of it is because of family divides with my stepmother, etc.

But part of it is that as my father’s Alzheimer’s worsened before his death, the terrible traits of toxic masculinity that he learned on the police force were amplified and further warped by his disease until he turned into someone I didn’t recognize. Someone a lot like Adam’s father; someone who raised my little brother to literally believe he was Jesus H. Fucking Christ until he was a preteen. My little brother has shaken that notion now, but the ego and god complex remain, and he’s turned from the precocious little shite who used to ride on my shoulders and pull on my hair into one of the most entitled examples of toxic masculinity I’ve ever seen.

And it fucking hurts me, because I tried so goddamned hard to break that cycle with him and now all I can do is watch from a distance and hope he gets a goddamned clue, because we’re not a part of each other’s lives anymore.

While I know (hope) my little brother won’t hurt people the way Derek Sterling and Adam Ivers did, that doesn’t change that he’s hurting people in other ways. It doesn’t change that the situations that create people like Derek, like Adam, like my own baby brother are entirely too real, and while it doesn’t absolve those boys of the guilt for what they do…it does point a finger at this shite beginning with their fathers, when their fathers could have made a conscious choice to do better. Be better.

Break that fucking cycle.

I often ask myself how I can re-establish my relationship with my brother and maybe influence him to do better before he’s older and having kids of his own, and passing this toxicity on to them. But everyone should be asking themselves that—no, not you. Not women and femmes. It is not your responsibility to educate your oppressors, though if you choose to they’d better appreciate the favor.

I mean other men.

We are the ones who need to break that cycle. In ourselves, in our brothers, in our sons, in our friends. It is our responsibility to make that conscious choice, and use that conscious choice to influence others to wake up and see the harm they’re doing as well.

Because this doesn’t just create Derek Sterlings or Adam Ivers—fictional characters who wear the face of toxic masculinity.

It created Dylan Roof. It created Elliot Rodger. It will continue to create men who feel entitled to others’ bodies, space, time, and lives.

And as long as we’re complacent about it, that is on us.

I have more to say about abusive relationships and the toxic cult mentality that can completely warp your reality and change who you are…but that’s too close to home for me, right now. And too close to home for a few of the people I know who read these books. I don’t want to get too deep into it, so I’m only going to say one thing:

If you have ever been a victim of this kind of toxic relationship…

It’s not your fault.

Abusers are masters at using gaslighting to make us doubt our perceptions, our own truths; to make us question facts and lose sight of what reality even is. It’s not some fatal flaw or weakness in you that they were able to do that to you. It’s their understanding of the human psyche and how to push things on you gradually so that you don’t realize how far you are from reality until you’re miles offshore and sinking with no hope of being able to swim. If someone hurt you that way, it doesn’t make you weak.

It makes them cruel, and terrible.

And that is never your fault.

If you have been in a relationship like that, whether platonic, romantic, or familial, I hope you’re safe now. I hope you find your way to something that feels like home. And if you’re still in that position, if you still feel endangered…

Reach out, if you can.

There are hands waiting to grasp yours, and pull you from the dark.

is a good place to start.

But so are the family and friends who care about you, and want to see you healthy and safe.

-C