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I spoke to Mischa Byruck about prison abolition, gender abolition, evolve.men, his new course called Beyond Consent, whether and to what extent white people are oppressors, and more!
Choice quotes:
“One of the most profound transformations that occurs in my one-on-one client programs is often this epiphany a man might have: Oh, I too am oppressed. I've been oppressing myself with this incredible pressure to provide for my family without demonstrating any emotion or a deep realization of the ways that women have harmed me and that that's okay. That it actually doesn't make me less of a man that my ex-wife really hurt me. That I'm allowed to be someone who experiences that depth and that emotion. That the general woke agenda can include me. That I can be a part of this whole thing of liberation. That there is something for me to be liberated from, something really deep and real.”
“I'm actually really interested as a coach and as a transformational engagement person, someone who actually makes my living doing these engagements, in what methodologically and pedagogically works to create such a transformation.”
“Constantly experiencing the nuance of people's experience and people's perspective is incredibly beautiful and humbling work. And I love it. I just love it. I love seeing an individual transformation at an individual level and holding someone's hand as they walk on a journey.”
Full transcript:
Cathy: Welcome to Sex and the State, a newsletter and podcast about power. Today I am joined by Misha Byruck. He is a well, let's just start with how I know him. I know him through organizing around sex-positive community in the Bay Area. He is an incredibly impressive individual with a lot of fundraising and organizing experience in politics and poverty alleviation and voter turnout and then more recently in the past few years on sex-positive community building. And most recently he has begun an organization called Evolve.men focused on one thing that you said in your webinar with the other Misha is that (or maybe you're the other Misha? I don't wanna say, but another Misha) is that there's hardly any resources for men that aren't about getting laid or making more money. And I just thought, man, that hits the nail in the head. That is a huge problem. As I've been focused a lot on masculinity and how to help men. So that's something that we definitely have in common. And your latest adventure is a course on helping people of all genders move beyond the basics of consent, to more healthy, ethical, flourishing human relating. And so I'm just super excited to have you on and talk to you about masculinity, men, and just generally like what the world can gain from sex-positive feminism, the framework that we're both kind of operating from. S again, thank you so much for coming on and it's so great to see you.
Is there anything that I missed in the intro that you want people to.
Mischa: No, I'm, I'm really flattered by that intro. Thank you. It's such an honor and pleasure to be here. I have such admiration for the explorations you're doing and the consistently original perspective that you're bringing. So it's a joy to be here. Thank you.
Cathy: Thank you so much. So why men?
Mischa: Why, why? I mean a little flippantly, I thought that as men's movements go, I was just so disappointed that we couldn't as a society do better than the pick-up artist community. When I looked around at the landscape, I was like, surely we could come up with a better philosophical stance and a vision for manhood that is more than simply a reinforcement of the most corrosive aspects of patriarchy, white supremacy, and capitalism. Surely we could do better.
Cathy: Yeah. I think the pick-up artist thing is so fascinating and it's something that, it's hard to argue with the basics of helping men do a better job approaching women.
Great. Absolutely. Absolutely. That's great work. That's important. But it so quickly goes into, on the worst end being a fundamentally misogynistic enterprise. But even to just steelman it a little bit, a lot of it just seems like a fundamentally impoverished view of sex and sexuality that almost sees sex as like conquest and like getting a woman to sleep with you is like some kind of accomplishment as opposed to something that can enrich both of your lives.
Mischa: Well, it's not pick-up artists who created that. That's a deeply entrenched both somewhat argued biological, but certainly societal message. The what pick-up artistry is doing is reinforcing patriarchy. It's saying all those messages you got are absolutely valid to men.
You should fuck as many women as you can. Sorry. Can I say, fuck?
Cathy: Yes. Say fuck.
Mischa: Like sex is a conquest. They are the enemy. They must be vanquished, as many as possible. And the man who has the most kills when he dies. That's not, again, an original message.
It's just a reinforcement of something that as a man and someone who works with men, I can tell you is already in us. It's very hard to move away from. Even people who were raised with feminist parents in liberal society like I was. I was raised in Berkeley. My parents are both together. They live in Mill Valley. They're very loving. We haven't had a lot of family trauma. This is a message I receive very, very strongly and there's many, many, many men like me. I would argue that all of us have this in us, that it takes concrete, concerted effort to remind ourselves on an ongoing basis that sex is not conquest.
Cathy: Totally. And one thing that I like about you is, you're very quick to, as the liberals say, check your privilege, right? To acknowledge the ways in which you've benefited tremendously from fundamentally unjust systems. But I think that that's something that I really relate to a lot because I feel like kind of step one is to see the oppression that people like you face. So like as a woman, step one is just, yeah, misogyny exists. I've experienced it. I've read about it. I hear about it. It matters to me. And then step two is to go beyond what you personally experienced to what people who are experiencing more oppression, however you might wanna gauge that experience.
It was just shocking to me to start following Black women on Twitter. And I didn't know, I didn't know what misogynoir was. I didn't know how deeply pervasive and entrenched racism was. If you'd asked me ten, fifteen years ago, is society fundamentally racist I don't know that I would've said yes.
Cuz I didn't know. And now I'm like yeah, society is deeply, fundamentally racist.
Mischa: Oh, absolutely.
Cathy: So. Yeah, you've gotta go outside of your own personal experience to understand the world. And so I appreciate that you do so, but I do think that there is an opportunity for men to speak to other men.
That's something that I wrote recently where AOC was talking about, maybe we could end misogyny without men's help. But it's gonna go a lot better and a lot faster if men are speaking to other men about how to be masculine in a healthy, constructive way. And so I appreciate your work in that way.
Mischa: Oh, well, thanks for saying that. And of course I agree with AOC in that GQ article that just came out. It's very true. And it's a statement that I think has been said and made by all the feminist thinkers that I read and who have influenced me.
Audrey Lorde didn't spend a huge amount of time on this. bell hooks spent a lot of time on this. Adrian Marie Brown spends a lot of time articulating this. One of my favorite philosophers now is, who writes very eloquently about men and men's role in society.
There's so much beauty when men come together. I think men's groups as a societal facet are a lot more ubiquitous in many ways than people might think. There's thousands and thousands of men's groups all over this country. A lot are engaging in just the fundamental project of creating a space where men are allowed more emotions than I think as you recently wrote, anger and happiness, which is really great, very healthy.
It's also very healthy from a feminist perspective for men to be exercising their own muscles of emotional space holding for other men. I think that's actually a very big part of it. When you're in a men's group, you don't have to rely on your partner, your wife, your girlfriend, for all of your emotional unloading, which I know many men do.
They're like, I don't need therapy. My girlfriend and I talk a lot. It's like, ah, right. My invitation is for every man to be in a men's group to start piecing elements of the toxic masculinity and patriarchy and frankly racism that's already inside them. And a lot of men's groups won't necessarily create the space for what I would call the path of a more evolved masculinity or evolved manhood, I try not to use the two interchangeably, which is a much more radical form of power, awareness, integrity, and accountability.
Cathy: Why do you differentiate masculinity?
Mischa: Well, because I associate the word masculinity with an archetypal force that people with any combination of genitalia can exhibit. A woman can exhibit a masculine trait. A man can exhibit a feminine trait. I think honestly, when society talks about toxic masculinity, they're not talking about toxic masculinity. They're talking about toxic manhood. They're talking about men being in the world, usually cis men being in the world in a toxic way. So it's kind of a semantic, nuanced point, but it's still kind of important to me, especially like, I think we should be talking about what we're talking about.
I think that it's the beingness of a man and how you are a man and wield your manhood in the world, that can be very beautiful and healing because you're transcending societal scripts, but can also be really toxic if you're reinforcing them.
Cathy: Yeah. I think if I'm gonna quibble with that, and I don't wanna spend a whole 40 minutes on some
Mischa: Oh, can we just go down into a semantic discussion for the whole time?
Cathy: I mean, it's my podcast. But I think that the problem I have is it does seem a little bit to reinforce the gender binary, which I'm not sure about. I've stopped as much using the word “toxic masculinity” without fully examining why. But I think the main reason I don't like it is because I don't think that it's really about femininity or masculinity. I think the root of the problem is rigidly enforced gender norms, to gender a trait, whether it's being conscientious and emotionally attuned, which we gender as feminine or being competitive and aggressive, which we gender as masculine. These things aren't toxic or non-toxic, they're not positive or negative.
They are extremely useful in certain circumstances and extremely not useful in others. And so just the fact that we gender these traits at all, I think is what becomes toxic, especially when we violently enforce when a man exhibits compassion or vulnerability and is punished by society because that's not masculine and he's not being a real man.
It's not the vulnerability that's toxic and it's not the aggression. That's toxic is that we are required to conform to these gender norms that ends up being toxic. So I think what you're saying about men needing spaces where they can be what society deems feminine and not be punished for it is absolutely essential.
But I think step one is just to recognize the water we're swimming in. Because when I started writing about these things, I had somebody on one of my Facebook posts say masculinity is never violently enforced on me, essentially. And I'm like, I guaran-damn-tee it is. You are not noticing it because it's literally the air you breathe, the water you swim in. It's default, and we don't by default notice defaults. We see them as normal. We notice violations of defaults. I think it's just really important to just start by recognizing the reality of the situation, which is that men are punished far more than women are punished for violating gender norms.
And so if we can just notice ourselves, if I make fun of a man for crying I'm violently enforcing gender norms.
Mischa: Absolutely.
Cathy: And so if we can just notice ourselves doing that I think we can start to dismantle.
Mischa: Yeah. And I wanna just just stay with that point for a second, because I think it's an important one.
The reinforcement (sometimes intensely, sometimes violently) of gender norms, it looks a lot differently. I mean, I live and work in the Bay Area. A lot of my clients come are privileged white men, privileged both socioeconomically and racially and in a gendered way, but also also culturally in that, in many cases, the men in the Bay Area have intellectually, at least, sort of made some sort of a transcendence of those or at least the most basic of the entrenched gender norms and have a sense of liberation for their genders. Men in the Bay, they hug, they kiss, they wear dresses when they want, they wear makeup. They express a whole range of emotions. And it can be a rude wake-up call when a man who at least outwardly can display many elements of femininity and a much wider range of emotions than is traditionally accepted in some in most of our culture still displays many elements of what I would call patriarchal harm. It just looks different.
There was a great article that I often send my clients in the New York Times recently about petulant vulnerability. I'm sure you saw this too. No? Yeah, just a toxic masculinity in its newest form, which is I now, like I'm a man who's been to therapy. I can totally manipulate a wide range of emotions to essentially weaponize my vulnerability to still achieve essentially patriarchal ends of domination and submission of women.
If you look at the abuse literature, this is also very common. You send an abuser to therapy for two years and he's just going to abuse better. One of the things about enforcing gender norms is that they're nefarious, much like racialized norms and racism. It's deep and entrenched and slippery and hard to pin down.
I did also want to pick up on another thing that you said about reinforcing the gender binary. Certainly as a man who is presenting as a men's coach there's always a risk of reinforcing the gender binary. My queer friend Michael Morganstern and I have a joke about this. When he goes to like Neo-Tantra retreats and as a queer man, and having the experience as he shared with me, we call it being Shiva Shakti-ed, where the binary is so strong. And it's like, this is the only way to be. If you're a man, you must be this and you must be attracted to the woman. If you're a woman, you must be this, you must be attracted to. And of course it's so critical to muddy those waters. It's so critical to notice the fluidity of expression. And it's so easy to just go into binary ways. I just wanted to acknowledge at least that that's always a risk being a men's coach. It's always a risk in my practice. And I just wanted to at least acknowledge that it's there.
Cathy: And I appreciate that. And I understand. It's a new world. We’re all learning. I think going back to your point about the slipperiness of systems like racism and sexism, I think one thing that I've learned over the years is that it's really easy and I think really default to look at people as enemies. The racists are the enemies. The sexists are the enemies. Or to get worse and to say, men are the enemy or white people are the enemy.
Mischa: Sure.
Cathy: And I think that what's been really helpful for me, and it's been concurrent with recognizing my own internalized misogyny and internalized racism is that I'm not a fundamentally bad person. I was raised in a fundamentally fucked-up society.
Mischa: Mm-hmm.
Cathy: And so I'm going to understand how the world works incorrectly because I've been taught explicitly that it works in an incorrect way. And so taking aside the concept of who's a bad person and saying, you know what? It doesn't matter.
We can't know. And it's best to assume we're all good. And to say these are bad systems has been really helpful for me. And I think with these men that you're speaking to, I think we are all really invested in the idea of being good people, obviously. And these men are really invested in the idea of being evolved, gender-wise. But what I noticed when I started writing about sex work almost 10 years ago, and I started OnlyFans in 2020. What I noticed from doing OnlyFans was that I'd been on the explicit sex-positive bandwagon for a decade. I knew in my head all sexual activity between consenting adults is inherently morally neutral.
I knew, but I felt shame and fear and stigma about doing certain things with my body that were totally consensual. I was under no real duress. I wasn't hurting anybody. But these messages that I had been raised with are deeper than my beliefs that I've adopted through education and learning and critical thinking.
And so to expect ourselves to adopt a new framework and then immediately flush away all of the programming and all of the emotional attachment we have to these ideas that we've been imbued with from a young age is unreasonable. It's an unreasonable expectation. It's a lifetime's work to dismantle the bullshit we've been taught from a young age. And if we can forgive ourselves and forgive other people for our unhelpful programming we're gonna move to better ways of relating a lot faster.
Mischa: Mmhmm. One of the most profound transformations that occurs in my one-on-one client programs is often this kind of epiphany that a man might have of like, oh, I too am oppressed. Like I've been oppressing myself with this incredible pressure to provide for my family without demonstrating any emotion or a deep realization of the ways that women have harmed me and that that's okay. That it actually doesn't make me less of a man that my ex-wife really hurt me. That I'm allowed to be someone who experiences that depth and that emotion and that the general woke agenda can include me. That I can be a part of this whole thing of liberation. That there is something for me to be liberated from, something really deep and real.
Which is of course what, again, bless her memory, bell hooks has been preaching for decades. But it doesn't land the same until a man associates it in his own reality in his own life. Like you were saying, when you really start to see the structure of the oppressions and to get back to that structure, I'm actually really interested as a coach and as a transformational engagement person, someone who actually makes my living doing these engagements, in what methodologically and pedagogically works to create such a transformation. In the seventies we called it consciousness raising sessions. You'd have these rap sessions, sometimes really transformational men's retreats. So it's not just men sitting in a circle emoting together or sharing stories or narratives, but doing gestalt-style immersive, ongoing, six-hour long sessions of therapy where you actually have a transformational experience and see something or liberate yourself in some way.
My method is heavily reliant on feminist literature and reading and writing assignments. Some people respond to that. Some people don't. I think that there's many, many ways to do this work.
It's also not appropriate for certain people in many contexts. But I found it huge to literally just put em in front of an author like Nora Samran or even Rebecca Solnit and see what their reactions are to some of their more beautiful writings. And one of the biggest transformations is literally just being able to sit with the writing and not reject it out of hand because it's written by a woman, even though you'd never admit that that's what he’s thinking.
Cathy: Totally. As someone whose life work is changing hearts and minds, I'm obviously also super interested in what works and what doesn't. Some of the things that I've come to believe work is storytelling. I think people respond a lot more to stories than to facts. Empathy I think is really useful. And I think that it's really unfortunate, again, going back to the “people are not the enemy, systems are,” there's so much talk on the left, especially, about oppressors. I think when we talk about oppressors, it is fundamentally unnecessarily alienating to anyone who could identify with any groups being labeled oppressors.
I think for white cis het men in particular, I think they feel rightly really alienated from any of these conversations about systemic oppression, because in those conversations they're often being framed as oppressors.
Mischa: Yeah, it sucks. No one likes to be an oppressor, right? You're turned off by the discourse before it's even begun, before you've even intellectually allowed yourself to be penetrated. You're turned off by the discourse and that's 100% true. I call this passing through the Rubicon for men where if you've done enough of the work – and I'll just make this really simplistic and probably overly simplistic for a second – but like, if you've done enough of the work and this is similar, by the way, to understanding racism as a white person, right.
If you have an immediate resistance to it, then it's definitely about you. This is kind of an overly simplified phrase, but this only applies to you if you don’t believe it.
Cathy: Well, I dunno if that's true.
Mischa: It's not quite true. But it's a useful phrase for getting through the Rubicon, right? It's an intermediate intermediary phrase. But of course, when Black people are talking about white people, they're still talking about me. Just because of an anti-racist discourse and an understanding of that, doesn't mean that like I'm exempt or somehow I can transcend it. But I don't take it personally and I don't get defensive. Because I'm like, yep, that's real. And I still have a right to live and I still get to be and breathe and live out my existence and contribute my gifts to this world while I still can.
And no one would ever deny me that. And I can use my discernment to dismiss anybody who would deny me that right. To live in the world. No one's really saying that white people can't live in the world. But a lot of my practice is actually teaching men to be able to like, withstand the initial fire of like, oh, I'm not an oppressor and I reject anything else that will come out of your mouth to being like, yeah, white people are the oppressor and. Now I'm gonna still live my life and navigate that and not try to find an intellectual way around it.
Cathy: Or white people inadvertently benefit from a system that oppresses Black people. We can phrase it without saying white people are the oppressor.
Mischa: It's certainly a risk of being alienating. But the way that I was taught anti-racism, and that I believe it's important. Fst of all, I don't teach anti-racism as a white guy. I think it's important not to. But I think it's important to be able as a white man to walk in the world and understand that when I meet a Black woman, she might think of me and have many judgements of me because of the way our society works and not to walk into the room and hold it against her. And also not try to prove that I'm one of the good ones either, but actually hold that nuance and truly be with that without necessarily putting blame on quote society or quote system and letting the interpersonal element of this be part of it.
Cathy: Yeah. I think that's fair. And I think one thing that I think is really interesting about what you're doing is that it's very like 301 content, right? This is not for beginners. It's high-level content. And I think that's excellent. I think that that's necessary. One thing though, that I find lacking on the left is a huge dearth of 101 content. When you look for really basic Idiot’s Guide To things like critical race theory or intersectional feminism or racism you have this whole ecosystem of really, really accessible content from the right, which is wrong.
It's blatantly false misrepresentations of these ideas. But it's accessible and it's available and it's free. And when you look to the real critical race theory and intersectional feminism it's academic papers written by scholars in academic-ese. And, “I shouldn't have to educate you.” It's just really difficult.
It's gonna be difficult to get an on-ramp to these things anyway, because of white fragility. And because it's just a hard thing to wrap your mind around and to accept emotionally. But then there's a dearth of institutions and material that would make it easy for people to get onboarded.
Have you found that to be the case?
Mischa: I mean, I suppose. To a degree, I think that a lot of popular culture defaults to being the messaging. If you follow a lot of popular culture, you're gonna find a lot of distilled, leftist messaging of trans and fat acceptance, of sex-positivity, of diverse gender expression, and certainly of basic human tolerance and compassion.
With the caveats, of course, that it's all celebrity, filtered through the lens of patriarchal beauty standards and money, money, money, money, money. But this is America.
Cathy: That's a good counterpoint.
Mischa: I personally don't believe that. I mean, I don't think that Jordan Peterson or Joe Rogan or like the Red Scare podcast for instance, are particularly speaking down to a low intellectual level. On the contrary, I think people are seeking already sometimes tangential, like really going off into tangent academic discussions of what it means to be a person in the world, what it means to be a man, what it means to be a woman, what a vision of an ideal society is.
I'm never gonna reach like a hardcore MAGA voter.
Cathy. I'm not saying that's your role.
Mischa: It's definitely not my role. On the other hand, I sit in a place and teach my clients a practice of compassion for everybody. I am humbled by the privileges I was raised with. I'm humbled to be in the Bay Area, a place that I particularly resonate with. When I say I'm not gonna reach a MAGA voter it's with the humility that I don't have the perspective to understand their full humanity. Except that I see them as humans. I see them as people worthy of love and respect. I see all of us as worthy of love and respect, every human. That's just my philosophy. And it's very important. I try to catch myself. If even a vestige of superiority creeps in I try to smack it down, because that's really dangerous and kind of fucked.
Cathy: Totally. Absolutely. And I appreciate that for my own personal curiosity. I guess I'm wondering two things. One, would it be more effective to do a YouTube series or write a book versus coaching or courses as far as social change? Two, are you doing the coursework and the coaching, and this is something I've thought about doing, kind of as a way to inform any future mass media that you might put out?
Mischa: There's a degree of that. I definitely have an academic background and I've always thrived in thinking spaces and in philosophical spaces. I love writing and I'm a natural writer in many ways. But I couldn't figure out how to make money with that. But I knew that I wanted to make an impact and I know that my vision for my life is to impact the national conversation around men and sexuality. That's very clear to me, and I won't get there exclusively through one-on-one coaching.
So I do have grander visions and the humility and the education of meeting men on a one-on-one level or in a small group level and seeing where humans are. Constantly experiencing the nuance of people's experience and people's perspective is incredibly beautiful and humbling work. And I love it. I just love it. I love seeing an individual transformation at an individual level and holding someone's hand as they walk on a journey.
I know it's not within the current therapeutic paradigm, but I've spoken with a lot of therapists who wish that it was okay to be a therapist with an agenda, to be a therapist with a mission. I know ASEC-certified therapists who specifically do have a vision of a form of manhood and accountability. But when a man comes to them and says, “Listen, yeah, I definitely raped someone last week, let me tell you how I feel” they just have to hold them in their feelings. They're not allowed to enforce a form of accountability or a code. They're not allowed to really hold that man's feet to the fire around right relationship with the people around him or with himself and his own morality. And that's just such a huge lack, frankly, in the therapeutic edifice. We don't have a mechanism for supporting people to be true to themselves.
We have a mechanism for supporting people to feel better about themselves.
I really do believe that there's an incredibly important function here that we're missing of social accountability and individual accountability around the interpersonal harms that we cause each other just on an everyday basis, just in relationship.
I just needed to mention that, because I think it's just such an incredibly important part and it cuts societal strata and race that we're all harming each other all the time. And it's a big, big part of what my vision is. In other words, I'm much more passionate about prison abolition than gender abolition, you know?
Cathy: Yeah, no. Prison abolition is really important. The thing that I like about the course is that I think what's really missing in therapy and just society is community. The traditional institutions that we've relied on to build and maintain community aren't available, aren't working the way that they used to, and haven't really been replaced by anything sufficiently robust. And so a lot of your work is better on community building and I think that that's super, super important, super valuable.
But I've got less than a minute left. Thank you so much for coming on. Thank you for your time. Thank you for your work. And check out the website, evolve.men. Check out the course. It's at the top of the page, it says “course.” And I'll talk to you soon.
Mischa: Thank you so much for your time, Cathy.
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