by Jackson Katz
Loyalty to our brothers and friends
Whether their violence is directed against women, children, or other men, most violent men are otherwise “normal” guys. They are average and unremarkable. How many times do we have to hear people on the eleven o’clock news naively proclaim, after their neighbor has murdered his wife and kids, that he is the last person they would think capable of such a crime because he was such a nice guy and friendly neighbor? The unsettling reality is that men’s violence toward women is so normal that perpetrators are generally indistinguishable from the rest of us.
You can’t tell if a man is a batterer by looking at him. Rapists don’t have distinguishing facial features. What’s more, the majority of violent men and boys are not isolated, loner sociopaths. To be sure, deeply disturbed individuals inspire morbid fascination, and thus are more likely to be featured in repeated headlines and on late-night cable programs. Because of occasional real-life figures like Ted Bundy or Jeffrey Dahmer, or the ubiquitous cultural presence of fictional characters like Hannibal Lecter, monsters have a disproportionate impact on our cultural psyche. But even they can present a normal front to the world. As the Time magazine headline read after the so-called BTK serial murderer was arrested in March 2005, “Was the Killer Next Door? Dennis Rader Was a Husband, Father, Church Leader—And Is Now the Man Accused of Terrorizing Wichita.” Still, deranged murderers and rapists comprise only a very small percentage of violent men. Most men who assault women are not so much disturbed as they are disturbingly normal. Like all of us, they are products of familial and social systems. They are our sons, brothers, friends, and coworkers. As such they are influenced not only by individual factors, but also by broader cultural attitudes and beliefs about manhood that shape their psyches and identities. And ours.
Most perpetrators are, in fact, “ our guys,” the phrase Bernard Lefkowitz coined to describe the popular white, middle-class New Jersey boys who gang-raped a mentally retarded girl in a 1989 case that achieved national notoriety. Those boys—like the vast majority of perpetrators of gender violence—didn’t speak a foreign language or adhere to strange customs. They were homegrown products of contemporary American society. There is no getting around the fact that violent boys and men are products of our culture, and as such are influenced by cultural ideas about manhood that teach individual males what is expected of them—in and out of relationships with women. Their violence says something about us.
To put it bluntly, we are unindicted coconspirators in their crimes. That uncomfortable truth is one of the many reasons why people—both men and women—have a self-interest in denying the extent of the problem. If millions of women and girls are abused and mistreated by men, then it follows that a lot of men abuse and mistreat women. Who are these men? Most of them are not strangers. Most women who are raped are raped by men they know. Women who are battered are battered by their partners. Women who are sexually harassed are usually harassed by fellow students, teachers, coworkers, or bosses. In other words, most of us who know female victims also know the men who have abused and violated them.
Who wants to think about their friends and loved ones as rapists, wife beaters, and sexual harassers? If people have reason to be in denial about the victimization of women they care about, isn’t it even more understandable that they would be in denial about male perpetrators they care about? At least the victims are sympathetic; something bad has happened to them. But who wants to admit that men they care about have done bad things to women? The motivation for denial is particularly acute for family members of perpetrators. What do his actions say about us as a family? It also brings up all sorts of conflicts for friends. Should I be loyal to my friend, even though I know he’s done something wrong? I wouldn’t hit a woman, but he did, and he’s my friend. Are his acts a reflection on me? Friends are also forced to make a choice. Unless they confront an abusive friend in some way and repudiate his abusive acts, the people close to violent men can be implicated either as complicit in immoral behavior or as cowards. The more you convince men of the need for them to take action, the more you challenge them to examine their complicity.
One of the underlying causes of the rampant victim-blaming that goes on in men’s discussions about violence against women is that it makes our ethical choices easier. If the (false) choice is between “She’s a vindictive slut who’s trying to take down one of my boys,” and “My friend is a rapist,” it’s a no-brainer to figure out which one is the easiest to live with.
Therein lies the central paradox of trying to mobilize men by shocking them about the reality of gender violence in the lives of the women they care about. If crimes like child sexual abuse, rape, battering, and stalking were relatively uncommon, it would be much easier to take comfort in the notion that perpetrators were unusual, anomalous, just bad seeds. It is less stressful to blame the demonized “other” than it is to engage in self-examination. It would be so much easier to blame this whole nasty business on deranged psychos—easier on the victims, too. But reality intrudes. Deep in our conscience we know that violence against women is committed by men whom the victims—and we—know all too well.
Buying into sexism
For men, the myth of the anomalous, disconnected sociopath exempts us from introspection when it comes to our participation in a myriad of sexist cultural practices. Rather than question how our actions contribute to the widespread incidence of gender violence, we can instead maintain the fiction that it is simply not our problem. We’re not like those pathological perps. We wouldn’t do bad things to women. This sort of distancing comes in particularly handy when introspection might otherwise prompt us to feel guilty.
By way of example, let’s speculate about how some Average Joes might react when they hear on the news about a man arrested for the abduction, rape, and murder of an eight-year-old girl. Feverish media reports of the crime might include the information that police have found an extensive collection of child porn videos and magazines in the suspect’s apartment. By now, this sort of news has become a regular part of the media landscape. Most people are outraged about crimes like these and repulsed by the men who commit them. Now for the tricky part. Realistically, at least some of the men who are genuinely outraged by these crimes have purchased Hustler magazine, or rented Hustler-produced porn videos. Some might even revere Hustler founder Larry Flynt as a “First Amendment hero.”
What is the connection? Consider this. Flynt also publishes Barely Legal, a porn magazine whose raison d’etre is the crude sexualization and commodification of young girls. The male consumers of Barely Legal would likely insist that naked eighteen-year-old models with bows in their hair, spreading their legs wide for the camera, are technically “consenting adults.” But everyone knows that the intent is to create the illusion that they are much younger. For years, a popular feature in Flynt’s signature publication, Hustler, was a cartoon that followed the exploits of a fictional sexual abuser of young girls, Chester the Molester. The cartoon was discontinued only when the cartoonist, Dwayne Tinsley, was convicted of sexually abusing his real-life daughter—who claimed that the art was a chronicle of her actual victimization.
It is not possible to draw a linear causal chain from the purchase of a magazine like Barely Legal to the brutal rape-murder of an eight-year-old girl by a middle-aged man. Many men would be outraged at the implication. But it is equally outrageous to suggest that no relationship whatsoever exists between our society’s pandemic of sexual abuse of children and the widespread availability of products like Barely Legal, where young girls’ sexualized bodies are turned into commodities that adult men can purchase for their masturbatory pleasure. You do not need to argue that legal porn causes illegal activity in order to assert that it contributes significantly to a culture where continuously younger girls are cast as the objects of adult men’s sexual desires and pathologies.
We can take comfort in the idea of the aforementioned child rapistmurderer as a horrible aberration. A monster. We’re
nothing like him. And in fairness, purchasing and masturbating to images of “consenting adults” posing as young girls is not criminal behavior. But one need not be a criminal accomplice to share some moral responsibility, or feel—if we are honest enough with ourselves—a certain degree of moral complicity.
This is yet another place where denial plays a useful function. Men who are not rapists, batterers, or sexual abusers of young girls are nonetheless citizens and consumers in a society where a shockingly high number of our fellow men are. It is much easier for us not to think about the hundreds of ways that we—directly or indirectly—contribute to their perpetration. Better to avoid the entire messy situation than have to wrestle with such troubling moral complexities.
Breaking through the denial
Men who educate other men about violence against women tend to believe that if only more guys knew what we know, a lot of them would wake up—like we did—and do something about it. After all, isn’t it true that at one point, we, too, were oblivious? Something had an effect on our consciousness. For many of us who were educated about these issues on college campuses in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, something snapped us out of complacency and forced us to realize that men’s violence—or the threat of it—was not some abstract social problem, but rather a routine part of life for our female peers.
Maybe it started with the disclosure by a girlfriend of abuse in a past relationship. Maybe it was catalyzed by reading assigned for a college sociology or psychology class. Maybe it was hearing with shock for the first time the often-quoted statistic that “one in four women will be the victim of rape or attempted rape in her lifetime.” For some men it may have been standing in the chilly evening air at a Take Back the Night rally, watching fellow female students bravely walk up to a microphone and one after the other tell stories of having been sexually abused by an uncle or raped by an ex-boyfriend. Some of us were so shocked and angered when we realized that for women in our generation these experiences were commonplace that we developed a passion to change the consciousness and behavior of other men in the hopes of affecting a wholesale shift in their attitudes and behaviors.
Our impulse was to jolt other people, to metaphorically shake them: “Can’t you see? It’s all around us. This isn’t one of those tragedies that happens to other people. It’s right here in our own families! Look at our women friends. So many of them have been mistreated by men, in some cases since they were little girls. Talk to counselors at the local women’s center and hear some of the stories they hear from women every day. Then do the math. You’ll see. It isn’t hyperbole to say that this stuff hits close to home for every one of us; it’s probability theory.”
When I started giving speeches at colleges and high schools, I would frequently begin by quoting a sampling of gender-violence statistics, in the hope of stirring the kind of outrage in others that I felt myself. Did you know that there is physical abuse in about one in four marriages? Did you know that over 29 percent of rape victims are raped before the age of eleven? I would lay down some particularly egregious stats when I was straining to impress a group of seemingly indifferent men. Do you realize that in the U.S. three women on average are murdered every day by their husbands, boyfriends, or exes?
In tough crowds, I would do my best to reference government and law enforcement statistics—the more traditionally “masculine” the source, the better. It was a defensive tactic. When people don’t want to face facts, the first thing they do is discredit the source of those facts. Why give men—many of whom have a self-interest in discrediting unflattering assertions—the ammunition to do so? So instead of using statistics from women’s organizations, I began to use those from conservative establishment sources. This provided a built-in defense against the charge that the problem has been deliberately exaggerated by “man-haters and male-bashers.” Admittedly, this cautious strategy has a significant downside. Mainstream statistics often dramatically understate the problem, mostly because crimes like incest, rape, and battering are so underreported to law enforcement.
I would sometimes begin a presentation by reading dozens of newspaper headlines about gruesome incidents of murder and rape that I’d clipped from local papers. Man kills wife, self. Girl, fifteen, bludgeoned to death. Woman raped in city park. College athletes charged with rape. I was trying to reinforce the message through sheer repetition.
Variations on the “shock therapy” approach to gender violence prevention have been a part of most rape-education strategies on college campuses for the past several decades. The idea is that by feeding students a litany of horrifying statistics, at the very least you’ll communicate to them an urgency about the seriousness of the problem. But until recently, women were the students on whom most awareness-raising efforts were focused. The presumption was that scary statistics would help women see that “it can happen to me.”
For women and men involved in the battered women’s or rape crisis movements, especially those who deal daily with victims, convincing people—especially men—of the urgency of the situation may appear to belabor the obvious. Doesn’t everyone already realize how big a problem this is? Don’t they know there are survivors in their own families?
Well, not necessarily. A lot of people cannot face the ugly reality—or don’t want to. It is important to remember that coming to terms with the extent of the problem can be disorienting, and profoundly disruptive. As a man, once you are aware of the degree to which women suffer from gender violence and all forms of sexism, you can’t simply go about your business and pretend everything is fine. You have to do something about it, or else risk losing your self-respect. This is where denial comes in. Denial is a tried and true method of coping with disruptive, traumatic, or discomforting information; it is much less painful than facing the truth. Not to mention that many Americans are so desensitized by repeated exposure to violence of all kinds—in their own lives, on the news, and in the popular culture—that denial isn’t even necessary.
A substantial portion of the population—including many young Americans who consider themselves world weary and media savvy—remains unconscious and unaware of systematic causes of interpersonal violence. Another young mother murdered as her little children scream in the next room? What a shame. Another college student raped in her dorm room? It’s not safe anywhere anymore. Another prominent athlete arrested for beating his wife? What’s wrong with these guys, anyway?
Feminists have maintained for years that all of these phenomena are linked, that in fact they are inevitable byproducts of women’s subordinate social position. They are not just a collection of unrelated acts. This is one aspect of the famously insightful slogan that the “personal is political.” It is also one of the many reasons why feminist ideas about gender and power threaten so many people. They represent real philosophical challenges to dominant modes of thinking, not to mention real political challenges to hierarchical and male-dominated power structures.
Call it feminist or not. If there is any hope of dramatically reducing the high levels of men’s violence to which we have become accustomed, we are going to have to find a way to look beyond individual perpetrators and their problems to the culture that produces them. This societal introspection is a daunting task, more daunting even than the war on terrorism. It is a lot easier to focus on external enemies, however elusive, than it is to look inward.
CHAPTER THREE
Taking it Personally
“My father was a violent man. His physical and verbal abuse terrorized my mother and all five of his kids. I was in my fifties before I truly realized how much this experience has impacted my personality and relationships. But the cycle can be broken.”
—New York Yankees manager Joe Torre
FATHERS, BROTHERS, SONS, AND LOVERS
Many years ago I was in a theater watching a movie with a girlfriend when she abruptly got up out of her seat and, without saying a word, ran out the door. I didn’t know what to do. Follow her out into the lobby? Keep watching th
e movie and wait for her to come back? I was not sure how to react because I did not know why she had left. Was it something she had eaten? Was it something I had done? I shifted anxiously in my seat. Was she angry with me?
Later, when we discussed what had happened, I was both relieved to find out I was not responsible and amazed at my own lack of awareness. Her response had been triggered by a scene of violence. She was a rape survivor, and something about that scene brought back intense fear and pain; she had to flee. I knew about the rape, which had happened when she was a teenager. At that point we had not discussed the details of her assault, or the trauma symptoms she still experienced. I spent some time agonizing over how I could have anticipated and prevented the entire incident. But she picked out the movie; didn’t she know it would have violent scenes? Eventually, as I moved through some initial—and reflexive—defensiveness, I realized there probably wasn’t anything I could have done. This was not about me, after all; it was about her.
But I was not a disinterested third party; I was her boyfriend. I cared about her. How could we even hope to get closer if I had no clue about what she had been through? If she retreated rather than reached out when feeling overwhelmed, how could I possibly help? There were practical concerns. How could I know when to touch her? How could I feel confident that I would not inadvertently trigger another traumatic flashback?
