Ideology is not an explanation
The role of trauma and dissociation in men’s perpetration of sexual violence
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Recently, an online content creator and therapist, Therapy Jeff, made a post in response to the Motherless “sleep content” porn website and the Rape Academy chat, wondering why there are no hotlines available for men struggling with impulses to sexually abuse girls and women. He was called out and told by many people on the internet that sexual violence is not an issue of intrusive ego-dystonic urges, but of a deliberate desire for power and control. He apologized and stated that he was wrong, and was approaching the issue from an OCD lens, which he now realizes was an inappropriate approach. There’s a lot I could say about the Therapy Jeff situation, but I would rather use it as a jumping off point for discussing a larger question: Is sexual violence perpetrated by men ego-dystonic or ego-syntonic?
First, what are these words I’m using? Ego-dystonic means that a thought, urge, or behaviour is not in alignment with one’s own values and worldview, and therefore the thought, urge, or behaviour is experienced as distressing and unwanted by the person having it. This word is used when discussing OCD: people with that diagnosis often have intrusive thoughts that they find deeply disturbing and out of alignment with their values. For example: they may have intrusive thoughts about murder, harming people, or having sex with people they would never want to have sex with, etc. These thoughts are not pleasurable (even if they sometimes elicit a genital response). They are experienced as deeply distressing and unwanted. Ego-syntonic is the opposite: it is when thoughts, urges, or behaviours feel justified and in alignment with the person’s value system and worldview. Ego-syntonic does not have to mean moral or ethical. For example, a misogynist saying degrading things to a woman will not feel distress, and will feel a sense of “rightness,” because the misogynist behaviour is in alignment with the misogynist person’s patriarchal worldview and values.
The people critiquing Therapy Jeff are correct that a lot of sexual abuse can’t exactly be called ego-dystonic. Most sexual abusers don’t suffer from overwhelming distress at their sexually abusive desires, and have various ways of justifying those desires and behaviours, making them ego-syntonic. Many sexual abusers feel great pleasure and even pride about what they have done. They may brag about it to friends, take part in abusing women with other men, and fantasize about abusing women (this is different from intrusive thoughts because the fantasies are experienced as straightforwardly pleasurable). Misogyny and patriarchy are worldviews which offer justification and a sense of “rightness” and “naturalness” to sexualized and gendered violence. The people critiquing Therapy Jeff insist that sexual violence is about power, domination, and control, and that sexual violence is intentional, deliberate behaviour. All of this is true, and yet it is an oversimplification that prevents us from fully understanding misogynist sexual violence and how it operates.
Believing that sexual abusers are bad people who simply enjoy dominating others, and therefore choose to do so, leads us to an essentialist understanding of sexual violence. Many misogynists argue that sexual violence is natural to our species, and that men have an inherent, species-level desire to rape women. Some even argue that this serves an evolutionary function by allowing men to “spread their seed.” These misogynists ignore the fact that human beings are a social species who live in groups and depend upon the cohesion of the group for survival. Men who rape would, in a species-typical situation, be committing rape in the small group of individuals who they are dependent on for safety and survival. Raping members of the group would not be conducive to men remaining in the group, and it would therefore not be conducive to their survival or the “spreading of their seed” (puke emoji). While feminists would be disgusted at the misogynist argument that men are “naturally” sexually violent because it absolves men of responsibility and leads us to no solutions, many feminists make arguments that amount to the same thing. If men sexually abuse way more frequently than women do, and if men sexually abuse simply because they like to and want to, and if discussions of men’s trauma are irrelevant and “making excuses” because women have trauma too and don’t sexually abuse as often, then what are we left with? We are left with the idea that men are “naturally” or “essentially” more sexually violent than women, and that there’s little we can do about that besides being mad at men about it. We have recreated the misogynist’s argument.
The repeated insistence that sexualized and gendered violence is about power and control (true) and that it has little or nothing to do with the perpetrator’s experience of trauma (false) can be largely traced back to a book called Why Does He Do That? by Lundy Bancroft. I believe this book has severely damaged our collective ability to understand how and why men perpetrate abuse. Bancroft argues that men abuse deliberately, in an ego-syntonic way, because they are operating from a misogynist, patriarchal worldview that justifies their actions. He is right about that. He also argues that mental illness and addiction (aka trauma) are not the cause of abusive behaviours, and that these are used as excuses. He is wrong about that. The key piece that he misses is that indoctrination into a misogynist and patriarchal worldview is itself traumatic. As bell hooks explains “The first act of violence that patriarchy demands of males is not violence toward women. Instead patriarchy demands of all males that they engage in acts of psychic self-mutilation, that they kill off the emotional parts of themselves. If an individual is not successful in emotionally crippling himself, he can count on patriarchal men to enact rituals of power that will assault his self-esteem.”
All men were once children. As children they certainly did not have a natural and inherent desire to dominate and abuse others. Like all children of their species, boys are born with all the necessary biology for the pro-social behaviours of social primates who evolved to live in small groups (mirror neurons, the ability to read subtle changes in facial expressions, the capacity for co-regulation, the literal biological basis for empathy). Like all children, boys need attunement and attachment oriented parenting in order to develop regulation skills, emotional literacy, and relational skills. Like all children, boys have access to a full range of emotions: they feel joy, fear, sadness, excitement, anger, worry. Like all children, boys have empathy: they show concern when others are in distress. Like all children, boys are vulnerable and easily dominated: they are small and helpless and need others to take care of them. Like all children, boys have an inherent need for, and right to, protection. The process of male socialization under patriarchy is one of repeated humiliations that demand boys repress and hide their vulnerability and severely limit their emotional range. Boys experience this trauma at the hands of their parents and other adults (both men and women), and at the hands of their peers. Many boys experience physical and sexual violence and do not receive any protection or support. In fact, male socialization adds to the trauma. Male victims of physical violence are taught to “man up” and “fight back.” Male victims of child sexual abuse are often taught that they should “like it” if their abuser is a woman, and if they don’t, there is something wrong with them. If their abuser is a man, there is an added level of humiliation because patriarchy insists that men and boys should not be victimized that way, as it takes away from their “masculinity.”
Boys also witness violence against women and girls. Being made to witness violence is a form of abuse in itself, and is traumatic. In patriarchal families boys watch as their mother is degraded and physically abused. They watch as their sisters are sexually abused. This experience is extremely terrifying and overwhelming, and the boy, like all children, must find a way to survive. One classic strategy for survival is identification with the perpetrator’s worldview. This strategy is very accessible to boys under patriarchy — in fact, it is demanded of them. The boy child splits: the part of him who is terrified and vulnerable is exiled and repressed, the part of him who learns to identify with the perpetrator’s worldview in order to make sense of what is happening and feel safe begins to dominate. He literally learns to become a misogynist under duress. He learns to hate what is weak and vulnerable in himself, and he learns to project that hatred onto women and girls. Dominating women and girls is pleasurable for men under patriarchy precisely because it protects them from facing what is vulnerable and helpless within themselves: the traumatized boy that they were.
Many men’s first experiences of perpetrating sexual violence happens in a social context under pressure from other boys and men. Boys are often given explicit instructions on how to sexually harass girls, sometimes from their peers, and sometimes from adult attachment and authority figures like their fathers. These early experiences are often ego-dystonic. The boy does not want to. His hesitance causes the humiliation to be directed at him. The only way to avoid the humiliation is to take part in humiliating her. When he does humiliate the girl by sexually harassing her, he escapes humiliation and is instead rewarded with accolades. It is no surprise that under these conditions, the sexually violent behaviour moves from ego-dystonic to ego-syntonic. The child is literally being trained to be sexually violent. Sometimes this process is extremely violent. For example, Dominique Pelicot, the man who drugged and raped his wife for over a decade and invited strangers to rape her, was forced to witness a gang rape of a woman when he was 13 years old. For the 13 year old Pelicot, rape was ego-dystonic and being forced to watch was traumatic. By dissociating from the parts of himself that felt overwhelming terror, helplessness, panic, and shame, and identifying with the men who sexually abused him by forcing him to take part in a gang rape, rape became ego-syntonic.
It is definitely true that for many men, many acts of sexual violence are ego-syntonic. This is not because men are “naturally” or “inherently” more sexually violent, it is because the trauma of male socialization is a form of brainwashing that cuts men off from their empathy, their own disavowed helpless and terrified parts, and literally trains them to justify taking part in the sexual abuse of girls and women. But it is even more complicated than that. Saying that all forms of sexual violence perpetrated by men are ego-syntonic ignores the degrees and types of dissociation that are at play in various acts of sexual violence.
All perpetration of violence requires some degree of dissociation. Misogyny as an ideology is not enough to explain violence against women and girls. Ideology is just a set of ideas and a set of ideas, on their own, cannot shut off empathy. Empathy is a biological process. Shutting off that biological process requires dissociation. Misogyny is the worldview but the worldview only functions if you can dehumanize women: if you can see them as fundamentally different from yourself, if you can truly disconnect yourself from the reality that what happens to them matters as much, and is as real as, what happens to you. From a biological, animal perspective, it is obvious that another person’s suffering matters as much, and is as real, as our own suffering. It is as obvious as the sky being blue. I can tell you the sky is not blue and I can tell you that women are naturally inferior. Saying either of those things is obviously a lie. Words are not enough to make you believe it. The process of coming to believe something that is obviously not true on a biological, sensory level (empathy is a sense), requires dissociation.
One way violence functions is through justification. This is what I have been discussing so far. Misogyny and patriarchy provide the justification for violence made possible through dissociation. The empathy is shut off through dissociation and then the violence is explained as not-violence because it is “right” and “natural” according to the misogynist, patriarchal worldview. The equation goes like this: dissociation from vulnerability + identification with the perpetrator + dissociation from empathy + justification through misogynist and patriarchal worldview = ego-syntonic gendered and sexualized violence. And yet even when the violence is ego-syntonic and internally justified, it will be carried out with varying degrees of secrecy, betraying some ambivalence or some awareness that the violence is not considered acceptable in the larger culture. It is true that a lot of sexualized and gendered violence is carried out in public and bragged about, but men talk about the violence they perpetrate differently in different spaces. Among other men, they will often be more forward with their misogyny and more honest about their sexually violent behaviour. In mixed spaces they may be more secretive and dishonest about it. The Rape Academy and other online spaces where men teach each other how to get away with drugging and raping women is a good example of this. It is not carried out in the open. It is carried out in semi private spaces with other misogynists. The men share a worldview and they share dissociation. They also know that they can’t be entirely open and public about the behaviour because it is illegal, and because drugging and raping women is not considered socially acceptable in the larger culture. Cat calling women, on the other hand, is both internally justified and carried out in public.
There is an even deeper level of dissociation, even among misogynist men. While some sexually violent behaviour is justified, other sexually violent behaviour is disavowed. Rather than justifying the violence as not-violence because it is “right” and “natural,” the violence is instead disavowed: the perpetrator literally denies that it happened, he insists he would never do something like that, he talks about himself as two people (the loving husband/father vs the rapist), or he insists that he did something else other than what he did (he insists he was in a consensual romantic relationship with his daughter or that raping an unconscious woman was consensual sex). This level of dissociation complicates the argument that gendered and sexualized violence is always ego-syntonic, that it never has elements of the ego-dystonic. I would argue that many forms of gendered and sexualized violence are in a gray zone between ego-syntonic and ego-dystonic. Different perpetrators use different strategies for different acts, or they use both strategies for the same act. They justify some acts (ego-syntonic) and they disavow others (ego-dystonic), or they both justify and disavow the same act (simultaneous ego-syntonic/ego-dystonic).
I will use the Pelicot case to illustrate my point. The men who raped Gisèle Pelicot would clearly find a lot of misogyny and sexual violence justified and ego-syntonic. Yet, the majority of them tried to argue in court that they did not perpetrate rape and many of them seemed quite sincere in that argument. There’s some dissociative mental gymnastics here. Dissociation, patriarchy, and misogyny allows them to dehumanize women to the extent that they see women as their husband’s property. Therefore, a man’s permission for them to have sex with his unconscious wife qualifies it as consensual. And yet, at the same time, rape is experienced by these men as ego-dystonic. They insist they are not rapists. They felt justified in “having sex” with an unconscious woman due to a combination of dissociation from empathy, dehumanization, and patriarchal, misogynist ideology. At the same time they disavow that they raped her.
Pelicot admits that he drugged and raped his wife and invited other men to rape her for over a decade, and yet he simultaneously calls her the love of his life. Here the disavowal happens along an identity split. For the rapist Pelicot, the rape is ego-syntonic. He is a misogynist who deliberately plans and carries out complex sexual violence and brags about it with other men. As the husband Pelicot, he claims that the rape is ego-dystonic. He claims that he loves his wife. My sense is that the rapist Pelicot is far more “real,” complex, and developed than the “husband” Pelicot, and that the rapist Pelicot was operating all the time, consciously, even when he was being the husband. For some perpetrators the dissociative split is more intense, and the “not-rapist” part feels just as “real” and “true” as the rapist part.
There is an even deeper level of dissociative disavowal for Pelicot. This is with regard to incest. While Pelicot openly admits that he drugged and raped his wife for over a decade and allowed other men to rape her as well, he flat out denies that he ever touched his daughter. Yet there is a huge amount of evidence that he is an incest perpetrator and that he drugged and sexually abused his daughter: he comes from an incest family, he displays many of the classic behaviour of incest perpetrators, he took photographs of his daughter naked with hidden cameras and shared them online, comparing her body to his wife’s body, and the police found deleted photographs of his daughter on his computer in which she had clearly been drugged, undressed, dressed, and posed. Even for an extreme ego-syntonic misogynist and admitted rapist in one of the worst sexual crimes made public, some of his sexual violence remains ego-dystonic and disavowed.
This matters. Disavowal is a common strategy, especially when it comes to incest and the sexual abuse of children. If we insist that all perpetrators of sexual violence carry out their violence in an ego-syntonic way, in alignment with an articulated ideology, we miss a lot about how sexual violence functions, especially when it comes to incest and child sexual abuse. If we insist that the misogynist sexual violence of men is only ideological in nature and has nothing to do with trauma or dissociation, we won’t understand it and we certainly won’t be able to stop it. While I think that Therapy Jeff’s suggestion of a hotline for men thinking about committing sexual violence is a little naive and doesn’t fully understand how sexual violence actually works, I do think there is a period when sexual violence is clearly ego-dystonic and could be prevented, and that period is childhood. It would make a lot of sense as a strategy for ending sexual violence to pour resources into supporting boys and ending the traumatic indoctrination of boys into patriarchy.
I do not believe that men are a lost cause, even ones who have perpetrated sexual violence. But any strategy that does not address trauma and dissociation will fail. Acknowledging the reality that no one’s introduction to violence is as a perpetrator is not the same thing as absolving men of responsibility. In fact, I think that pretending men are just sexually violent and misogynist for no reason, except because they like it, is absolving men, and all of us, of the responsibility to face and transform the cycle of violence. The work of understanding and undoing the complex interplay of trauma, dissociation, dehumanization, misogyny, and patriarchy is challenging work in any individual, and challenging work at the level of culture and society, but it can and must be done. Therapy Jeff was right about one thing: supporting women and girls who have been sexually abused will not, on its own, end gendered and sexualized violence. Supporting girls and women is essential and necessary, both in order to end the cycle of violence (because women play various roles in the perpetuation of the cycle of violence: as victims, perpetrators, and enablers) and because girls and women inherently deserve to be supported. And, if we want the violence to stop, we also need to support boys and men. We need to make it safe for boys to be human just like we need to protect girls’ humanity. We need to abolish all forms of child abuse including the violent indoctrination of boys into patriarchy.
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Internal Family Systems has grown in popularity as a therapeutic model and it offers a lot of insight and tools. But many trauma survivors find themselves perplexed when working with this model. They may experience parts differently, have way more dissociation between parts, and have no idea who this calm compassionate “Self” is supposed to be. This workshop breaks down the basics of parts work, drawing on IFS but focusing on Janina Fisher’s therapeutic model for structural dissociation.
I am a trauma survivor living with c-ptsd who believes trauma survivors should drive our own recovery and be empowered to do so with clear information about therapeutic models. I am not a therapist and this workshop is not for therapists, though they are welcome to attend. This workshop is accessible, down to earth, and shared with love from one crazy bitch to the rest of you.
Whether you have worked with IFS or other forms of parts work or only vaguely know what I’m talking about, this workshop is for you if you want more tools and insight for working with your complex trauma.
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Important announcement: The writing club and book club have changed time to 1pm EST and the writing club will now be on the second Sunday. This is to accommodate how international the group is.
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When we’ve been hurt in our past, relationships can feel fraught, and polyamorous ones even more so. Firebrand author Clementine Morrigan is no stranger to the intense emotions and nervous system reactions non-monogamy can inspire, especially in those of us with insecure attachment styles and significant trauma histories. With vulnerability and unflinching directness, she shows us how to embrace the parts of ourselves that have acted out, confront oppressive dynamics, and learn new strategies to build the loving relationships we desire.
Morrigan offers a new framework, a set of tools, and the achievable goal of building a sense of safety so that our multi-faceted love lives no longer overwhelm us. She invites any of us who’s lived life on the edge to make our intimate relationships work on our own terms—without a constant experience of crisis.
A classic cancel culture episode. Clementine and Jay are joined by conflict mediator and zinester Juno Aventurine to talk about the relationship between trauma and cancel culture, the shadowiest of shadow parts, and the moral ambiguity of the human animal. We also talk about the stubborn spectre of identitarianism and the trials and tribulations of exiting social justice world. Listen to the episode here.
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Clementine Morrigan is an underground writer, cultural change maker, moral philosopher, and brazen truth teller. She is the author of numerous zines and books, including the cult classic zine Love Without Emergency, which will be released as a book with Microcosm Press in 2027. Her popular zine series Fucking Magic was released as a book with Revolutionaries Press in 2025. She co-hosts the podcast Fucking Cancelled with Jay Lesoleil. Her work is known for its unflinching engagement with taboo and difficult topics. She works for a world where the dignity of all beings is recognized and protected.