As With Most Men

Click the link to watch Mark Gonzalez's spoken word piece 'As With Most Men'.

Here's a transcript for those that need it:

"As with most men it is easier for me to give hugs than to accept them

Lest the truth be known that men are nothing more than emotional sky-scrapers built with glass infrastructures spray painted the colour of steel and nick named strength

Strange isn’t it?

What walking contradictions are we called men

Men are taught to colonise at the age of 5 through gangs like cops and robbers, cowboys and Indians

At the age of 8 we are given helmets, and told to
hit each other in the head with it, bleed but do not bleed, cut but do not cry, be a man, join the military, die for your country

And if death comes to you look it in the eye and say “bring it on motherfucker I fear nothing…but intimacy”

When it comes to intimacy men quiver like fault lines,
crumble like cities

What walking contradictions are we called men.

Men sign peace accords while abusing their wives, Accept the Nobel Peace Prize while reducing health care, Pledge to rid the world of terrorism while simultaneously denying government aid to any country that defends a woman’s right to choose

During the 1970s, the US government forcibly sterilized an estimated 50% of the indigenous population of America’s mid-west, telling them the process was reversible.

Can you say ‘biological terrorism’?

And in a global war against terror maybe testosterone is the real terrorist

And if so, how many of these star spangled singing,
flag waving citizens would continue to do so if terror was not racialised. But gendered?

Would the US military turns its guns on itself
For its sex crimes throughout South East Asia, Africa and the Americas?

Would MTV be firebombed for its objectification, hypersexualisation of our womens of colour’s bodies?

Would we stop looking towards the Muslim world for misogyny and instead turns our sights to Madrid, Montreal, New York Los Angeles

And now I understand my sisters when they say “every woman has a story that’s been told a maximum of once or maybe less”

And that is why you will never hear me call a women slut, bitch or dyke. No matter what she does. Cuz I do not blame her.

I blame the men who have emotionally and physically raped her. I blame these corporations whose images tell her they hate her. And I put my arms on her shoulder and tell her how grateful I am to God that she created her.

Men take note this is how you give love this is how you receive hugs

Press flesh to flesh ‘til breasts crumple

Like emotional origami."