I have experienced sexual aggression at the hands of other men – toxic masculinity silenced me

First there was the man on the metro. I was 16 (but looked 13) and on my way to a party. It was dark – maybe 8pm on a winter’s night. We were the only two people on the carriage. He’d been leering at me with yellow eyes and muttering to himself for the past two stops. I tried to ignore him but then he moved across the aisle and sat next to me. His hands were buried deep in his pockets, rubbing at his thighs as if to keep warm. Then he asked me to give him a blowjob. He wasn’t a big man. I wanted to push him away but I was frozen. It was all I could do to turn away and stare at my own reflection in the black glass of the window while he whispered obscenities in my ear. At the next stop he got off.

Then there was my close friend. I was 18. We’d been out clubbing and I stayed at his parent’s house afterwards. We topped and tailed in his bed. In the middle of the night I woke up in a blind, disoriented panic to find his hand inside my boxer shorts. From his steady breathing it sounded like he was sleeping. Was it some kind of accident? I tried to push his hand away and roll over, but he rolled after me, pinning me with his knee and groping more forcefully – all the while maintaining his slow, deep breathing. I knew he wasn’t really sleeping. But somehow allowing the pretence was more bearable than acknowledging the horrific reality of what was happening. When he finally stopped I lay awake all night feeling hollow and shrunken. I left at first light and experienced a kind of mental tinnitus for days afterwards. Things the shape of thoughts passed through my head but they were illegible to me. And just as I had had to pretend to be asleep, I also had to maintain our friendship for years afterwards to avoid acknowledging what had happened. To this day I have never confronted him.

Finally there was the attendant at the historic monument. I was 20 (by now I looked 16) and sightseeing in Jerusalem. I went into the ticket office to pay the admission fee. When I asked how much he walked around the counter towards me. He didn’t say anything but stared at me with a toothy grin. I asked again if I could get a ticket and he reached out to stroke my chest, telling me I was handsome. I stepped away but he followed, grabbing my waist. I shook him off and backed out of the door, leaving without seeing the monument. He laughed as I walked away.

A few weeks ago, I had a strong urge to type #MeToo. I didn’t. There was a good reason for this; the nauseating sense of entitlement that has been laid bare in the actions of many prominent men against women in recent revelations is part of an endemic, gendered abuse of power. As a man, I didn't want to conflate my own experience with the experiences of women on the receiving end of violent misogyny.

But this wasn’t the only reason I couldn’t type those characters into my keyboard. The other reason is shame. An illogical, lingering shame that I have been doing my best to chip away at for over a decade. The shame lives in a nagging feeling that I was responsible. Not in the sense that I encouraged or invited harassment, but that there was something innate to me that these men had sensed. I could not fit the experience of being a victim with that of being a man. Real men could not be victims of sexual harassment. So in my inverted logic, I was victimised because I was not a real man. The experience reified my deepest insecurities. I believed that these men had looked inside me and seen something weak and pathetic. Something unmanly.

“Masculinity is a hard, small cage”, the author Chimamanda Ngozi writes, “and we put boys inside this cage. We teach boys to be afraid of fear, of weakness, of vulnerability. We teach them to mask their true selves.” I did not share my experiences with anyone or seek out comfort in their aftermath because to acknowledge my pain – to acknowledge that these men had succeeded in hurting me – would be to further negate my masculinity. And as a shy, late-developing teenager, manhood was the glittering prize I yearned for. My hopes and dreams were inextricably linked to the coming time when fear and anxiety would wash away and I would be bestowed with muscles, self-confidence and coolness.

Growing up, boys are bombarded with thousands of subtle messages – from nursery rhymes to James Bond films – telling them that to be a man they must dominate or be dominated. That masculinity is a winner-takes-all endeavour. In trying to comply with winner-takes-all masculinity, men end up anesthetising their own humanity and blinding themselves to the humanity of others. In short; they end up less alive.

Unless I have am an unfortunate statistical anomaly, I have a hunch that far more men are victims of sexual harassment and violence than are willing to acknowledge. But toxic, winner-takes-all constructions of masculinity render us silent. Men have been permitted to be dominators and aggressors, but we have no script for the times when we are on the receiving end of domination.

I hope the fallout from the Weinstein saga is a cultural watershed. I hope that our society becomes a less hospitable place for abusers and predators, and that deep-rooted misogynistic mind-sets are challenged and undermined. But I also hope that men take this opportunity to reflect on what a hollow prize masculinity can be. Because in letting go of the masculine obligation to dominate, we have a chance to reclaim our humanity.