Events

We all know that feeling of acting stronger or tougher than we actually are, just to give others the impression that we are strong, not easy to break or to impress people as cool and collected. Or what about those moments in which we strongly stood our intellectual grounds even though deep down we weren’t completely sure about our statements or we even knew that we weren’t right. This lack of vulnerability, connection and openness for learning contribute to transgressive behavior and gender based violence and limit us incredibly.

Our question is: what makes it so frightening for us to be vulnerable, to admit that we’re wrong or that we don’t know or cannot do something? Why do we always vantage from a point of ‘i already know this’, or ‘i can do this’ and not from a consciousness about our limits and flaws and the will to learn new things? Does it emanate from our desire for control, or our desire to always feel better than others? Or is it a way to compensate for our lack of self-confidence?

In this session we want to share our experiences with (our lack of) vulnerability and reflect on where this led us. We also want to examine how all of this is linked to our masculine, patriarchal socialization and how we can help each other in cultivating vulnerability. For this session, too, we explicitly invite people who have internalized masculinity. 

Did it ever happen to you that during or before having sex you said ‘yes’ to things you actually didn’t want to do? Or did you do things to others that you thought were ‘supposed to go like that’ without checking if the other person actually wanted it? Do you notice that you are following a script during sex without reflecting on if this is the kind of sex that you want to have?

There are a lot of norms and expectations around sex(uality) that we have internalized ourselves. These norms are disseminated through pop culture (music, movies, social media) but are also hidden in the things we’ve learned at school, from our parents and family and in interacting with our friends. What are those unconscious norms and expectations that we’ve internalized? And what pressure does it create? What is the sex script you struggle with?

In our sessions we have often heard people with internalized masculinity say that they feel a pressure to perform in a certain way when it comes to sex. In this session we want to find out how our internalized sex scripts look, how it affects us in shaping our sexual interactions and what we can do to create more authentic, healthier and consent-based sexual relationships.

For this session, too, we explicitly invite people who have internalized masculinity. 

Date	March 19th
Time	19:30
Location	Moira Wolvenstraat 10 3512 CE Utrecht

This Patriarkraakt session Wednesday the 19th of February we’ll talk about our image of masculinity. What aspects of masculinity do we hate and have tried not to be? What parts work well for us or are we (too) comfortable with? What brings us positive things in life and therefore we instinctively prefer to ignore? And how stable or in flux is all this in relation to our self-image? How dependent is it on circumstances? In short: We are going to talk about the comfort and uncomfortability of all kinds of aspects of (our) masculinity.