What is a Cis-handed Male?

I didn’t see the harm in talking to him. I thought he must have questions about how I achieved my fabulous success. Perhaps he’d wanted to learn from a real G about how to thrive in a discipline that purports to challenge the racism it often mobilizes instead to keep white men in positions of authority? There were few people in the city more versed in navigating this particular conundrum than me.

When we finally got on the phone, he didn’t seem to have much to ask me at all. Every now and again he’d ask me to explain this or that, but mostly I was listening to dead air. I kept thinking the call was dropped, and I’d be like, Hello? A second later he’d return lethargically to the conversation.

It only dawned on me right as he was suddenly rushing me off the phone after I mentioned his mother (dunt! dunt! dunt!), that he must have been masturbating to my voice, without my prior knowledge, or of course, my consent.

He is what I call a “cis-handed” man. It’s a man who gets off on masturbating to women who have not consented to be involved. It combines the idea of “cis-het,” with the backhanded compliment of being abused by a masturbating man who thinks you’re hot. It is one variety of fuccboi.

It disgusted me to realize that this student didn’t view me as a sensei, but only as jerk material. But more than anything, I was confused. Why would he have done this? Why would he have gone out of his way to get one of his mother’s friends on the phone for this?

Bill Burr to the rescue! At the time when this happened, I was a regular listener to his Monday Morning podcast. I especially loved when his no-nonsense wife hopped on to tell him and the listeners about themselves. Hilarious. But it just so happened that mere weeks after my surprise violation, he read a letter on the show. It was a young man asking if it was “OK” that he had a girlfriend, but nevertheless went on dating apps to find attractive young women, and masturbate to their voices over the phone, before ghosting them? Bill had enough sense to say effectively, No, it’s not. But better, he explained his view that what was leading this young man to effectively become a repeat masturbatory offender, was a pornography addiction.

Too many of us treat the ubiquity of pornography as if it’s harmless. This could not be further from the truth. In reality, pornography is addictive, and many people, especially straight young men, are addicted to it. 

There is a panoply of mental health issues associated with this. But for my taste, too much of the conversation about its social effects focuses on how men end up treating their partners, rather than how they come to view and treat women writ large.