The outrage in Central Park on Puerto Rican Day shocked
and horrified not just New Yorkers but people everywhere. In its
wake, the media have rushed to find an explanation, focusing on
the "crowd" or "mob" psychology and the lack
of a timely police response. These are important, but there is
a far more central aspect that has remained largely unexamined:
that men attacked and abused women. Seemingly "normal"
men, perhaps fueled by alcohol, acted out publicly against women
in an incredibly hostile and aggressive fashion.
The time is long overdue for us to have a national conversation
about the way our culture teaches boys and men--across class,
race and ethnic distinctions--to think about and act toward
women. While this incident rightly shocked and angered a lot
of people, and has caused women in New York and elsewhere to
be even more vigilant about their personal safety, the most
shocking aspect is how long this kind of thing has been going
on with so little public response.
We are raising generations of boys in a society that in many
ways glorifies sexually aggressive masculinity and considers
as normal the degradation and objectification of women. Consider:
Misogynistic music and videos, the sexual bullying by entertainers
such as Howard Stern, the growing presence of pornography and
female stripping in mainstream culture and the crude displays
of male dominance in professional wrestling.
To demonstrate how deeply imbued our society is with the attitudes
that stem from this acculturation--i.e. how "normal"
the Central Park perpetrators were--imagine what the response
might have been if, instead of a group of men assaulting women,
the Central Park event had consisted of a group of white people
targeting and attacking people of color. Wouldn't the media
discussion have focused on racism as the proximate cause of
the attacks rather than on the "mob mentality"? And
would we be searching for sociobiological explanations for antisocial
behavior? No, we would focus, rightly, on the persistent problem
of racism in America and on the need to teach our (white) children
to respect and embrace racial and ethnic diversity.
Or consider if the genders had been reversed in the Central
Park attack. Media discussion would have zeroed in on what was
going on with the female gender that caused some women to act
out in this way.
Yet when a group of men target and attack women, the "experts"
talk about crowd psychology, marginalizing the discussion of
the societal sexism that fuels sex crimes.
This "degendering" of the discourse around male violence
is not unique to the Central Park fracas. In recent years, there
have been thousands of news stories, television specials and
town meeting discussions of "youth violence," which
is perpetrated overwhelmingly not by youths of both sexes but
by adolescent males. Last summer, Woodstock '99 featured several
rapes and countless sexual assaults by men against women. The
festival concluded with a shameful display of wanton destruction
by out-of-control males. And yet the discussion afterward blamed
it on the "crowd." More recently, when groups of men
went on a rampage after the NBA victory of the Los Angeles Lakers,
the media focused in again on a "mob" out of control.
One explanation for the reluctance of the media to make these
obvious connections is that the few brave souls who dare speak
the truth--especially if they are women--run the risk of developing
undeserved reputations as male-bashers, which can hurt their
careers. Therefore it is the special responsibility of men to
speak out.
Fortunately, there are signs that the tide is slowly turning.
High schools and colleges are paying more attention to the need
for gender-violence prevention education with young men. Recently
at the United Nations, there was an international panel discussion
of men talking about ways that boys and men could help prevent
domestic and sexual violence. In Namibia earlier this year,
there was a first-ever national conference of men that was devoted
to this subject. For the past decade, men in Canada have run
campaigns in which men wear white ribbons to symbolize their
refusal to be silent in the face of other men's violence.
These are small but significant steps toward creating a society
and a world where the crowd of men who are outraged by gender
violence overwhelms the crowd that commits such violence.
Copyright 2000 Los Angeles Times.
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