by Jackson Katz
This incident was not the first time that violence against women became personal for me—and it was hardly the last. I would have a hard time counting all the women I know who are survivors of some kind of men’s violence, abuse, or mistreatment; there are way too many. And it is not just me: every single man I know has at least one or two women in his life who have been emotionally, physically, or sexually abused by men. Some of us have many more.
Naturally, some men think this is overstated. “Come on,” they say, “it can’t be as bad as all that.” It is an understandable reaction. After all, it can be pretty unsettling—especially for guys who care deeply about women—to admit to themselves that violence against women is not just happening to other people but to women we know and care about. It can be pretty unsettling for women, too. There are many women who will downplay the entire subject—and their own risk of victimization—with an exasperated sneer and a dismissive remark about feminists wallowing in “victimhood.”
My perspective on the problem is inevitably skewed by the nature of my work. I regularly travel around the country to attend and present at domestic and sexual violence conferences, meet and talk with students on college and high school campuses, and work with men and women on U.S. military bases. I hear profoundly disturbing testimonies of violence and victimization from women constantly. Most men who work with these issues have similar experiences. But it is not just the admittedly skewed sample of women I come across in battered women’s programs or college women’s centers. Men who get involved with women’s issues tend to hear stories from women—and men—in the strangest of places, stories that the average guy simply does not hear. I like to think it is because we radiate compassion and empathy, but I realize that sometimes it is just because we provide the promise of a supportive ear.
Consider this curious sequence of events that happened a few years ago. I was in a bank in Boston on a sunny, cold winter morning, completing a transaction with a teller with whom I had done business for a couple of years. She was a dark-haired Italian American woman in her forties, with a thick Boston accent and a smoker’s raspy laugh. We had always exchanged polite chatter but never a really substantive conversation. I was anxious about time; I told her I had to get to the airport. She asked me where I was going. When I told her Montana, she probed me about why I would be going all the way out there. “To give a speech tonight,” I said.
“About what?” she inquired.
“Violence against women,” I hesitatingly answered.
She leaned forward with theatrical flair, and across the teller’s window confided in me with a smirk of mock secretiveness. “Let me tell you about violence against women,” she said calmly. “I had a boyfriend who beat me so bad he left me in a coma. He’s dead now, but I’d kill him if he weren’t.”
Later that day, I was in the Salt Lake City airport, trying to figure out how I would get to Montana after my flight—the last flight of the day—had been cancelled. At the airline customer service desk I told the empathetic agent—a thirty-something white woman—that if I could not figure out a way to get to Missoula, I would have to go back to Boston, because I was scheduled to give a speech that night. Getting to Montana a day late would be pointless. “What’s your speech about?” she inquired. She lit up when I told her. “I could give your speech,” she exclaimed. “A former airline employee has been stalking me for months,” she said. “The case was just in the paper, since I filed a suit against him. Did you hear about it? I don’t know what’s going to happen.”
As I headed back through the terminal, I wondered something that I ponder to this day: How many of the women walking by me have similar stories to tell? Were these two women a statistical aberration? Are these types of experiences so common in the lives of women in our era that they are closer to the norm than the exception? Are stories like these just beneath the surface everywhere?
There is no more effective way to demonstrate men’s self-interest in gender violence prevention than to make the subject personal. Men are affected in many ways: as the friends of women who are living with abusive relationships; as the coworkers of women whose home lives are marked by episodes of tension and ugliness; as the concerned family members of girls and women who live with harassment at school or on the job; as the sons of women who were sexually abused as girls; as the sons of battered women; as the current husbands of formerly battered women; as the sexual partners of rape survivors; as the grieving fathers of murdered daughters. One of the most famous slogans of the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s was “the personal is political.” This is as true today as it was then. It is also as true for men as it is for women. The trick is to show men how their personal experiences with gender violence—as victims, loved ones of victims, and in some cases as perpetrators—are not simply shaped by individual circumstances or bad luck, but reflect much broader and systematic social forces.
Many women who have experienced violence keep it to themselves—or at most they confide in a few close girlfriends. Often the men in their lives have no idea. I am sure I have women friends who haven’t shared this sort of information with me. But I do hear more than my share of sad stories. For women who have been mistreated by men, confiding in a man who is committed to working against men’s violence can feel safer than taking the risk that a boyfriend or close friend will not know how to react or what to say. In fact, many men who get involved in gender violence prevention go through a phase where some of their female friends start to open up to them about their experiences of abuse or violence. I have a friend who had a close platonic friendship with a woman. When he got a job with an education program that had a rape prevention component, he began to share with her his newfound awareness about rape. She confided in him that she had been raped, not years before but during the time they had known each other. He was initially stunned, and a little hurt, that she had not told him at the time, but he understood why. Over time he came to realize that many women around him—including members of his extended family—had been through similar trauma.
Women’s reticence in sharing these personal experiences with men is perfectly understandable. However enlightened some of us imagine ourselves, there is still a stigma attached to violent victimization, especially sexual victimization. As a result, women often fear that even “well-meaning” men will blame them for “letting” something happen, for putting themselves in a compromising position, for falling for the wrong guy, etc. Better to never raise the subject and avoid the potential disappointment.
The result is that countless men do not realize how men’s violence affects the women around them. They comfort themselves with the often naïve assumption that “this isn’t a problem in my family.” They hear the incredible statistics that have been circulating in our culture over the past three decades but they do not think it touches their lives. It does touch their lives, whether or not they are consciously aware of it. In 2002, during a training I led in Los Angeles for violence prevention educators, we did an exercise where we went around the room and people talked about their experiences with violence and how those experiences shaped their attraction to issues of human rights and social justice. A gregarious man in his late fifties, who had been a teacher and social justice educator for thirty years, demurred when it came time for him to speak. He said he could not think of any relevant experiences with violence; he just liked working with young people.
During lunch, this same man took me aside and told me that he had been ruminating on the exercise all morning. He had had a revelation. Of course this subject was personal for him. What was he thinking? His mother had been a battered woman. Granted, this was before the term “battered woman” had entered the lexicon. He had grown up in New York in the 1950s, in a family where his father had emotionally and physically abused his mother. He was startled that it had never before occurred to him that this profound experience had influenced his life choices and his professional path, especially his desire to help others.
; People’s trauma histories can also present significant obstacles in their search for relational connection. This phenomenon was addressed memorably in the hit film Good Will Hunting (1997). The lead character, Will, played by Matt Damon, had been badly abused as a boy. When he started to get closer to his girlfriend Skylar, played by Minnie Driver, his vulnerability came closer to the surface, he became aggressive, and he withdrew. A similar thing sometimes happens to young women in college who begin relationships just around the time they first seek therapy for incest or sexual abuse experiences in childhood or adolescence. Therapists in college counseling centers deal with these problems on a daily basis. Many young men—and women—struggle to develop intimate relationships with women who are going through that process. Sometimes a partner can provide invaluable love and support during a difficult period, but it can be an emotionally trying time for everyone. The relationship partner has his or her own needs, and if a woman needs to focus on herself, she may or may not be fully present and available for them. Often male partners of female rape or abuse survivors feel frustrated and inadequate because, try as they might, they can not “solve” their partner’s problem.
Certainly men’s own behavior can be the cause of interpersonal conflicts with women. Men with the best of intentions sometimes say things and act out in sexist and abusive ways, either because they do not know any better, or because they are conditioned to mindlessly parrot what they have learned from peers or popular culture. Some men are conscious of the contradictions between what they say about how much they respect women and the things they have done as “one of the guys.” Some men feel bad because in quiet, introspective moments, they have to admit to themselves that they have participated in sexist or sexually exploitative practices. Maybe they paid a prostitute for sex, or they enjoy listening to music with sexist messages. Maybe they have not said anything in situations where male friends have made degrading comments about women. Maybe they know deep down that in spite of their self-image as a “good guy,” they help to perpetuate women’s subordinate status. Some men, of course, feel not only bad but guilty, because they know—even if no one around them does—that at some point in their lives, they, too, have mistreated women. They know in their bones more than they could learn from any workshop or book that the problem is not just other guys.
Some men do not need to experience an assault against a female loved one in order to grasp the urgency of the problem. They understand that men’s exploitation of women is a fundamental human rights issue that is tied to countless other social and political problems in the U.S. and around the world. But substantive reductions in gender violence require the involvement of a much broader cross section of men. Transformative social change will come about only if a critical mass of men realize that it is in their self-interest to reduce the level of men’s violence against women. Self-interest is a far more powerful motivational tool than is concern for social justice. Consider how opposition to the U.S. war in Vietnam in the 1960s increased dramatically—especially among white middle-class college students—when the government instituted the draft. When your own life is on the line, or the life of someone close to you, it has a way of getting your attention.
There is a further benefit to making the issue of gender violence personal. When men can feel the issue in their hearts as opposed to intellectualizing it in their heads, they are much more likely to gain the self-confidence necessary to confront their fellow men. It often takes special courage and strength for men to risk confrontations with friends and colleagues about the mistreatment of women, to rise above possible ridicule and disbelief, and to withstand whispering campaigns about their “manhood” if they refuse to conform to sexist and abusive norms.
But the question remains: is it defensible—is it even possible—to mobilize men to work against gender violence by arguing that it’s in their self-interest to do so? It is obvious that this work is in women’s interest. But whether it is in men’s interest is less clear—and more controversial. For example, some feminists in the 1970s advanced the argument that all men benefit from some men’s violence against women because that violence—and the threat of it—is a key tool in men’s continued subordination of women, from which all men benefit.
Today we know that the picture is significantly more complicated. Most importantly, men as a category are not homogenous. There are important differences between and among them. Not all men have the same interest in maintaining the current status quo. Take gay men, for example. There are aspects of male privilege that gay men enjoy. But they are also subject to some of the same discrimination and violence that women experience. In fact, violence against women and gay-bashing have a lot in common, not the least of which is that in both cases, heterosexual men—often with something to prove—are the primary perpetrators.
Men of color derive some of the same benefits from male privilege as dominant white males. But in other respects they do not have as much invested in maintaining the status quo as many white men do. How does it “benefit” men of color, for example, if women of color—African Americans, Latinas, and others—suffer disproportionately high rates of domestic violence and sexual assault, especially in poor communities? Poverty and racism surely contribute to the incidence of domestic and sexual violence by men of color against their girlfriends, wives, and daughters. But this violence then helps perpetuate poverty and racism in a continuous feedback loop. An early 1990s political slogan aimed at men of color put it like this: “You can’t fight the power if you’re dissing the sisters.”
Violence against women of color (largely perpetrated by men of color) actually subverts the fight against racism and ethnic discrimination by draining the energies of so many women. How can they fight for peace and justice in their communities if there is no peace and justice in their own homes? There are also the deleterious effects of domestic and sexual violence on children. Domestic-violence researchers have documented the relationship between violence at home and school drop-out rates, gang participation, street crime, and teen pregnancy—all of which are persistent problems in communities of color.
Although it is true that men who dominate and abuse women often “benefit” from their abuse in the sense that they get what they want from it, it is also true that it is in men’s self-interest to reduce the violence suffered by our mothers, daughters, wives, and girlfriends. Over the past generation, millions of boys—of all socioeconomic, racial, and ethnic groups—have trembled in fear and powerlessness as they’ve watched men beat their mothers. Most of these boys eventually grow up. If they can negotiate the rocky waters of male adolescence, today’s victimized boys will one day be men, many of whom will develop emotional and substance abuse problems linked to their traumatic childhoods. How many men today are in therapy—or AA meetings—to deal with the effects of growing up in violent families?
Of course, there is no comparison between the pain of men who care about female victims of men’s violence and the suffering of the girls and women themselves. Regardless, countless boys and men have suffered as a result of violence done to their female loved ones. Think about all of the boys whose mothers have been murdered. Approximately twelve hundred women each year in the U.S. are murdered by husbands, boyfriends, or exes. That is more than thirty-six thousand women in the past three decades. They have left behind tens of thousands of children.
Consider, too, all of the fathers whose daughters are raped. Parents know that seeing children suffer is probably the most difficult experience they can imagine. Is it possible to quantify the pain of parents whose daughters (or sons) have been raped? I have talked to many fathers (and mothers) who have gone through this. A father’s pain can be compounded by his sense of guilt that he failed in his manly duty to protect his family, however unrealistic a burden that is. Of course mothers experience their own guilt as well. I once had a male colleague whose only daughter was raped. A few months later, in the middle of a public presentation, his grief and anger at the rapist poured forth i
n a way that left people sitting in stunned silence. Another friend once called to seek my advice and support when his oldest daughter was sexually assaulted in her first week of college. For these men, violence against women is as personal as it gets.
If you factor in all the husbands and boyfriends of women with sexual abuse histories, or who suffer post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms from past abusive relationships, or the male partners of women who are sexually harassed in the workplace, the collective numbers of all these boys and men is in the millions. You do not need to convince a majority of men to prioritize gender-violence prevention in order to effect significant social change. If only a small percentage of the men with a direct personal stake made their personal experiences political, the reverberations would be culturally transformative.
Men’s concern for the girls and women in their lives
Most men care deeply about the girls and women in their lives. Millions of these girls and women live with abuse in the present; many more live with the effects of past abuse. But virtually all women live daily with the threat of men’s violence. Women’s consciousness about the possibility of assault—by a man they do not know—is so pervasive, in fact, that most women automatically take a series of precautions every day. These precautions, which were enumerated in the prologue to this book, include not walking or going out alone at night; holding their keys as a potential weapon; locking all windows and doors in the home and car; not making eye contact with strange men; not listing their full names in the phone book; not putting their drink down at a party or bar. The list goes on.
