I'm still here in this small town. Oregon is a magical state, and Ashland is a gem of a town. I've been working for the past few weeks, got a new job, at a domestic violence shelter. The shelter consists of women and children who have gone through some form of abusive situation and they are trying to escape the violence by temporarily moving to a confidential location. It's a home for the misplaced. A safe-haven for those who have experienced a recent trauma. The shelter gives them an opportunity to pick up the pieces of their lives so that they can survive. The house and the advocates are there saving many of these women from a life of isolation, torment, and constant struggle. Almost always the perpetrators or abusers are men.
There are moments where I honestly feel the word "masculine" is equivalent to the word "violent". I learned from the expert speaker, activist, and author on masculinity, Jackson Katz, that at a very young age men are taught to believe that being a MAN or masculine is being tough, a.k.a. being violent.
This is an excerpt from his book, The Macho Paradox, which talks about why some men hurt women and how all men can help.
The subject we're here to address, touches every single person in this room – whether you're aware of it or not. Gender violence – rape, battering, sexual abuse, sexual harassment – dramatically impacts millions of individuals and families in contemporary American society. In fact, it is one of the great, ongoing tragedies of our time.
Most people think violence against women is a women’s issue. And why wouldn’t they? Just about every woman in this society thinks about it every day. If they’re not getting harassed on the street, living in an abusive relationship, recovering from a rape, or in therapy to deal with the sexual abuse they suffered as children, they’re ordering their daily lives around the threat of men’s violence.
But it’s a mistake to call men’s violence a women’s issue. Take the subject of rape. Many people reflexively consider rape to be a women’s issue. But let’s take a closer look. What percentage of rape is committed by women? Is it 10%, 5 %? No. Less than one 1% of rape is committed by women. Let’s state this another way: over 99% of rape is perpetrated by men. Whether the victims are female or male, men are overwhelmingly the perpetrators. But we call it a women’s issue? Shouldn’t that tell us something?
A major premise of this book is that the long-running American tragedy of sexual and domestic violence – including rape, battering, sexual harassment, and the sexual exploitation of women and girls – is arguably more revealing about men than it is about women. Men, after all, are the ones committing the vast majority of the violence. Men are the ones doing most of the battering and almost all of the raping. Men are the ones paying the prostitutes (and killing them in video games), going to strip clubs, renting sexually degrading pornography, writing and performing misogynous music.
When men’s role in gender violence is discussed – in newspaper articles, sensational tv news coverage, or everyday conversation – the focus is typically on men as perpetrators, or potential perpetrators. These days, you don’t have to look far to see evidence of the pain and suffering these men cause. But it’s rare to find any in-depth discussion about the culture that’s producing these violent men. It’s almost like the perpetrators are strange aliens who landed here from another planet. It’s rarer still to hear thoughtful discussions about the ways that our culture defines “manhood,” and how that definition might be linked to the endless string of stories about husbands killing wives, or groups of young men raping girls (and sometimes videotaping the rape) that we hear about on a regular basis.
Why isn’t there more conversation about the underlying social factors that contribute to the pandemic of violence against women? Why aren’t men’s attitudes and behaviors toward women the focus of more critical scrutiny and coordinated action? In the early 21st century, the 24/7 news cycle brings us a steady stream of gender violence tragedies: serial killers on the loose, men abducting young girls, domestic violence homicides, periodic sexual abuse scandals in powerful institutions like the Catholic Church and the Air Force Academy. You can barely turn on the news these days without coming across another gruesome sex crime – whether it’s a group of boys gang-raping a girl in a middle school bathroom, or a young pregnant mother who turns up missing and a few days later her husband emerges as the primary suspect.
Isn’t it about time we had a national conversation about the male causes of this violence, instead of endlessly lingering on its consequences in the lives of women? Thanks to the U. S. battered women’s and rape crisis movements, it is no longer taboo to discuss women’s experience of sexual and domestic violence. This is a significant achievement. To an unprecedented extent, American women today expect to be supported -- not condemned -- when they disclose what men have done to them (unless the man is popular, wealthy or well-connected, in which case all bets are off.)
This is all to the good. Victims of violence and abuse – whether they’re women or men -- should be heard and respected. Their needs come first. But let’s not mistake concern for victims with the political will to change the conditions that led to their victimization in the first place. On talk shows, in brutally honest memoirs, at Take Back the Night rallies, and even in celebrity interviews, our society now grants many women the platform to discuss the sexual abuse and mistreatment that have sadly been a part of women’s lives here and around the world for millennia. But when was the last time you heard someone in public or private life talk about violence against women in a way that went beyond the standard victim fixation and put a sustained spotlight on men – either as perpetrators or bystanders? It is one thing to focus on the “against women” part of the phrase. But someone’s responsible for doing it, and (almost) everyone knows that it’s overwhelmingly men. Why aren’t people talking about this? Is it realistic to talk about preventing violence against women if no one even wants to say out loud who’s responsible for it?
For the past two decades I’ve been part of a growing movement of men, in North America and around the world, whose aim is to reduce violence against women by focusing on those aspects of male culture – especially male peer culture -- that provide active or tacit support for some men’s abusive behavior. This movement is racially and ethnically diverse, and it brings together men from both privileged and poor communities, and everyone in between. This is challenging work on many levels, and no one should expect rapid results. For example, there is no way to gloss over some of the race, class and sexual orientation divisions between and among the men ourselves. It is also true that it takes time to change social norms that are so deeply rooted in structures of gender and power. Even so, there is room for optimism. We’ve had our successes: There are arguably more men today who are actively confronting violence against women than at any time in human history.
Make no mistake. Women blazed the trail that we are riding down. Men are in the position to do this work precisely because of the great leadership of women. The battered women’s and rape crisis movements and their allies in local, state, and federal government have accomplished a phenomenal amount over the past generation. Public awareness about violence against women is at an all-time high. The level of services available today for female victims and survivors of men’s violence is – while not yet adequate – nonetheless historically unprecedented.
But one area where our society still has a very long way to go is in preventing perpetration. We continue to produce in the United States hundreds of thousands of physically and emotionally abusive -- and sexually dangerous -- boys and men each year. Millions more men participate in sexist behaviors on a continuum that ranges from mildly objectifying women to literally enslaving them in human trafficking syndicates. We can provide services to the female victims of these men until the cows come home. We can toughen enforcement of rape, domestic violence, and stalking laws, arrest and incarcerate even more men than we do currently. But this is all reactive and after the fact. It is essentially an admission of failure.
What I am proposing in this book is that we adopt a much more ambitious approach. If we are going to bring down the rates of violence against women dramatically – not just at the margins – we will need a far-reaching cultural revolution. At its heart this revolution must be about changing the sexist social norms in male culture, from the elementary school playground to the common room in retirement communities – and every locker room, pool hall and board room in between. For us to have any hope of achieving historic reductions in incidents of violence against women, at a minimum we will need to dream big and act bold. It almost goes without saying that we will need the help of a lot more men -- at all levels of power and influence – than are currently involved. Obviously we have our work cut out for us. As a measure of just how far we have to go, consider that in spite of the misogyny and sexist brutality all around us, millions of non-violent men today fail to see gender violence as their issue. “I’m a good guy,” they will say. “This isn’t my problem.”
