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How can we get a critical mass of men -- at UMass and around
the country -- to speak out about men's violence against women?
How can we make sexist attitudes or behaviors toward women socially
unacceptable among men? How can we encourage more than
a few good men to work with women on these issues as
partners and allies, and not against them as hostile
antagonists?
Activists in the movements to end rape, battering, and sexual
harassment seem to revisit these questions with greater urgency
each time we're confronted with high-profile instances of gender
violence, as opposed to the vast majority of incidents that
devastate individual lives and families, but never make it to
the local or national news.
You would think that it would be a fairly straightforward task
to find men who are willing to stand up and be counted in the
effort to reduce the outrageous level of violence -- physical,
sexual, emotional -- that our mothers, sisters, girlfriends,
wives, and daughters have to live with. But sadly, it is anything
but easy to find men willing to take that step.
In fact, there are a number of obvious and subtle forces at
work to keep the nonviolent majority of men silent. The obvious
forces include policing mechanisms in male peer culture that
stifle the voices of men who are uncomfortable with abuses perpetrated
by their fellow men. These policing mechanisms include questioning
the manhood and heterosexuality of men who would dare take the
"women's side" in the supposed "battle between
the sexes."
Using derisive appellations like "mama's boy," "p-whipped,"
"sensitive new age man," and "fag" for men
who dare to break the masculine code of silence, men often remind
each other that we'll never be considered "real men"
if we don't exhibit blind loyalty to our sex-class.
A more subtle force that keeps many men from becoming actively
involved in the struggle against gender violence is the defensiveness
many of us feel at the mere mention of the scope of the problem.
When we hear women say they're angry about all of the violence
men do to women, some guys respond indignantly. "Hey, it's
not all guys. I'm not a rapist," we say, as if we'd been
accused of being one. In this case, defensiveness is really
a form of denial that allows us to avoid being personally implicated.
Defensive posturing is responsible, in part, for the virulence
in some circles of the backlash against feminism. Feminists,
of course, have long been at the forefront, in our society and
worldwide, of efforts to reduce men's violence against women,
and indeed all forms of violence.
And yet they are all too frequently labeled "male-bashers."
This Orwellian inversion, calling the anti-violence activists
the "bashers," or the violent ones, allows us to disregard
the urgency of their message. It's a version of "kill the
messenger," the time-honored tradition of discrediting
the bearers of unpleasant or discomforting news, rather than
face squarely the implications of their message.
Killing the messenger is a tactical cousin of another popular
avoidance strategy, blaming the victim. If you believe that
somehow the victim caused herself to be violated, you sidestep
inquiry into the role of the aggressor. If you're a man who
doesn't want to look at the ways that you as a man contribute
-- through silence or more active means -- to a culture where
violence against women is so common as to be almost unremarkable,
focusing on the victim is a convenient strategy of psychic self-defense.
One of the notable features of the recent spate of gendered
assaults at UMass is that because several of the attacks were
alleged to have been perpetrated by strangers and took place
during the day, it's socially unacceptable to blame the victims.
As a result, it appears that a number of men -- and women --
have been politicized as never before about the pervasivness
of men's violence against women.
This is one positive outgrowth of an otherwise tragic series
of events, because awareness about the extent of the problem,
and outrage about it, are some of the first steps necessary
for mobilizing large numbers of people to organize for change.
If the perpetrators are caught, however, many people will be
tempted to believe that the attacks were the isolated acts of
a sick individual and/or group.
This is understandable, because it's easier to deal with the
concept of some psycho rapist-muggers than it is to look critically
at the culture that produces such men at a pandemic rate. We
know, however, that most violence against women is perpetrated
by men close to them, in their family and friendship circles,
men who are "normal" in every superficial respect.
This chilling fact means that if we truly want to reduce the
rates of gender violence in our society as we enter the 21st
century, we have to work hard to redefine what "normal"
means. If we can achieve a society where it is more normal for
men to speak out against gender violence than it is for them
to commit it, we'll be a lot healthier society than we are today.
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