Maybe toxic

I am trying to explain diffusion through a cell, though I am not trained to be a science teacher. Still, I like science enough that the residents never much mind that I am teaching this.

He doesn't want to talk about the selective permeability of cell membranes. He doesn't have the attention for this and doesn't care about anything academic.

He wants first to make fun of my jacket, which I wear with as much an eye to fashion as an art teacher in a smock. I brush this off, because it is such a petty thing to fixate on to try to distract from the lesson. I do not care how I look when I am working, aside from the camouflage of professionalism.

He then transitions into asking if I "clap" my wife's "cheeks." I assure him this is not an appropriate topic for a classroom and I won't answer it.

He asks if I beat my wife, or if she beats me.

Now, I have to say something. This shows a fundamental misapprehension on how romantic relationships work. This went from his desire to stop the lesson because he is bored to genuine inquiry I need to address.

"No one should be hitting anyone in a relationship. That's abuse. You do not hurt people you love." I feel as though I am explaining this to a six-year-old, but that is the tone that most appropriate to something this elementary. "If you beat your wife, you will be arrested."

"Okay, but do you cheat on her?"

"Of course not," I say. "I love my wife and would never be unfaithful."

"She cheat on you, though?" he asks, and this is a sincere question. How can there be a relationship like that, where no one is being cheated on or beaten? It must seem impossible to him, or he has never known differently.

"No, she is faithful."

He sucks his teeth. "What you do if she put all your stuff on the lawn? You beat her then?"

"No. It is never okay to hit someone who isn't trying to hurt you first," I reiterate. "But she would not do that because we are adults. Adults can talk things out and don't have to resort to melodrama."

"I dunno," he says. "I hit my wife she did that."

I am not sure this is a hypothetical or a confession. He is at least fifty, one of the guards at my job. I hope this is just curiosity, but he seems to be asking out of experience. The boys are laughing, but they are also watching to see if I will cede to him, to his misogyny. I love and respect Amber, but I also understand that I must represent a moral man in front of my students. They have encountered few. This guard isn't up to the task today.

The guards do not always understand the implicit task of being a good person when near the kids. A few will talk about gang affiliation, adultery, drunk drag racing, weekly drug use. Some try to score points with the kids over these or otherwise do not understand that these are not topics one shares with twelve-year-olds. Some guards were like my students, felonious youth that cycled through the system. To them, abusing women is a neighborhood mandate. Telling the residents otherwise makes them soft. Their mothers were beaten. They cheat on their wives. Why shouldn't the kids hear the truth about what life is, rather than letting the guy in the blazer fill their heads with nonsense like "It is bad to hurt women you love"?

These are the same men who assure my minority residents that they are "acting white" whenever they aspire to anything other than rapper, power forward, or dead on the street. Their definition of what a man can be is small, and what a non-white boy can be is so narrow as to be impossible to see through.

When I relate this conversation to my supervisor, he tells me that the guard was trying to bond with me. Is this why I have trouble making friends with men? That you must do it by blustering spousal abuse? I can't believe that. Trying to bond with me is asking if I've watched the game or the latest Marvel movie, not demanding I justify why I wouldn't assault someone I love.

I'm certain this man didn't want to bond with me. He just couldn't fathom that I wouldn't punch my wife in the face for being late with dinner. I'm not innocent enough to mark this as anything other than toxic masculinity. I had tastes of this growing up in America in the late twentieth century, where punchlines were trans- and homophobia and declarations that kids needed to "man up" were rampant. Even as a straight, white, middle class boy, I had accusation of transgenderism and homosexuality lobbed my way often enough that my responses grew offensive in my defense. Getting out the sentence "There is nothing wrong with being gay or transgender, but I don't happen to be" is hard when choked against the bathroom wall for the sin of being in drama club.

I survived, but not without detoxifying myself in my twenties, realizing I had internalized a lot that I hated. I saw where I went wrong, where I let people I despised paint me into corners, where I repeated homophobic jokes and slut-shaming, and made amends.

Some see toxicity as their culture, passed down from father to son for generations. Much of what they take for heirlooms are latter-day inventions given a hasty patina. What they think is their destiny is propaganda from some loudmouthed racist a hundred years ago. It would be like Jews today taking The Protocols of the Elders of Zion for the Torah.

I've never made much of an issue of my gender. I have no issue being a man; I am not dysphoric; I am not a woman. I do not think the core of my identity would change if I were born a woman, though my experiences would have affected its manifestation. So I take personally when men are bad examples of my gender, feeling entitled to persecute women (and, frankly, other men). I must step in when I am trying to teach teenagers on the precipice of monstrosity and these men want to push them into the abyss because it was one done to them.

I can't begin to bond with someone who thinks I ought to beat one of my favorite people in the world. I refuse to see that as manly, or that being awful to women is masculine. I have had decades to examine my missteps when I did want to fit in which insecure, stunted men. I know how impressionable my students are, how hungry they are for the adult male approval absent in their lives. I want them to internalize my example of what a man can be -- intelligent, self-actualizing, responsible, honest, kind, patient, forgiving, not a wife-beating cheater -- before they accept the testimony of men who regard their wives as servants and punching bags, who tell the residents in my English class that "reading is for faggots."

I am far from alone in being a role model at my facility. There are good men there who know at least to pretend virtue in front of dysregulated boy (though I warrant that knowing the performance required of them and why marks them as good enough men). As with all things, there are always a few who are the worse of the crowd and will not shut up about it, so we must make our light impossible for the kids not to see. We outnumber the toxic.

Soon in Xenology: Premature poetry.

last watched: Angel: the Series
reading: Fast Times at Ridgemont High
listening: Damien Rice