Macho Paradox: Why Some Men Hurt Women and and How All Men Can Help

by Jackson Katz

There is no difference between being raped

  and going head first through a windshield

  except that afterward you are afraid

  not of cars

  but half the human race.

  What does it mean to belong to the half of the human race that so many women fear? How do you figure out the best way to be a supportive partner? Can you still be one of the guys, or do you have to renounce your membership in the brotherhood of male culture? Do you betray your girlfriend or wife if you contribute, even passively, to sexist practices? One married man, who made a point of telling me that he loved his wife very much, said that he nonetheless laughed at the misogynistic routines of the late comedian Sam Kinison. He felt guilty, but he still laughed.

  Until recently, these private struggles in men’s lives were not even acknowledged as important, much less discussed in public. So men would keep it to themselves. This is changing, as more men write and talk honestly about their lives in newsletters, e-zines, memoirs, men’s groups, music lyrics, poetry, and spoken-word performances. One groundbreaking book that discusses men’s experiences of sexual violence against women close to them is Working with Available Light. The author, Jamie Kalven, is a human rights activist who works on the issues of gang violence and police corruption in Chicago. He writes eloquently and in painful detail about his family’s emotional struggles—including his own—after his wife was sexually assaulted one day while out running.

  Some men who work to end men’s violence are themselves survivors of childhood trauma. Like women, many have been the victims of men’s violence—physical, emotional, sexual. They take the subject personally. Several pioneers of anti-sexist men’s work are rape survivors themselves. Victor Rivers, the Cuban-born actor and domestic-violence activist, frequently tells audiences the story of how he grew up as a terrorized, angry boy with a brutal madman and batterer for a father. In his memoir, A Private Family Matter (2005), he recounts his struggles to escape his father’s legacy and find love and intimacy. Gavin DeBecker, security consultant to the stars and bestselling author of The Gift of Fear, says he learned valuable lessons about reacting to violence when he lived through numerous beatings of his mother by men. Casey Gwinn, a former San Diego city attorney and a Republican who is one of the most innovative and influential domestic-violence prosecutors in the country, shares his personal story in part to dispel the common myth that gender violence only happens to certain types of people. When Casey, a white Christian from a well-respected family, started to prosecute domestic-violence cases, his father sat him down and in an emotional conversation disclosed to him that his father (Casey’s grandfather) had been abusive to his mother (Casey’s grandmother). Sergeant Mark Wynn, a former Nashville police officer who is a national leader in the effort to educate law enforcement personnel and policy makers about domestic violence, testified at a congressional hearing in the early nineties that he grew up with an alcoholic stepfather who was so abusive that when they were young boys, he and his brother tried unsuccessfully to poison him.

  Perhaps the most famous man to speak publicly about domestic violence in his family, and to use his stature to prevent it in others, is the manager of the New York Yankees, Joe Torre. Torre, whose father for many years beat his now-deceased mother, started a foundation in her memory to raise money for battered women’s programs.

  These male leaders—and many others—have been courageously honest about a subject long shrouded in secrecy and shame. Until the modern women’s movement catalyzed unprecedented changes in men’s lives, male culture actively discouraged such disclosures. In Western culture men have been taught for generations to “suck it up” and “act like a man” in the face of adversity or emotional difficulty. They are warned early in life never to show vulnerability to other men for fear that they will be judged weak. But as more men from all walks of life find the courage to break their silence about traumatic experiences, this stigma is gradually fading.

  I have led hundreds of candid discussions about men’s violence against women with groups of men not stereotypically chatty about such matters. I have watched thousands of football, basketball, and hockey players, and United States Marines, walk into rooms with arms folded and heads down, as if to say, “Why do we have to be here?” I know that a lot of these men come in defensive and hostile, but leave having grown from the experience.

  When men talk with other men about their experiences as the fathers, brothers, sons, and lovers of women who have been mistreated by men, they see that their doubts and insecurities, as well as their sadness, are shared by many of their fellow men. They see that some of the struggles they face in relationships with women are issues that many other men face—and that they can learn from each other. There is clearly a need for more support groups for male partners of women (and men) who were raped and sexually abused. The simple act of bringing men together to have this sort of conversation can be—like women’s consciousness-raising groups in the 1970s—the crucial first step in getting them to see the bigger picture.

  But it is only the first step. If we are going to dramatically reduce men’s violence against women, we have to understand that individual acts of men’s violence are never “isolated incidents,” but rather part of a larger social and political context that it is in our power to change.

  One of the great challenges of anti-sexist men’s work is that many people grasp this principle more clearly when violence is racist or homophobic, rather than when it is simply sexist. When a group of white men in Jasper, Texas, murdered an African American man, James Byrd, in 1998 and dragged him along the street for two miles from the back of their pickup truck, there was an outcry across the country from people of color and whites. The case became a symbol of the enduring brutality and severity of racism—and it saddened and enraged millions of whites, many of whom joined with people of color to redouble their efforts against racism.

  When two young white men in Laramie, Wyoming, murdered a twentyone-year-old gay man, Matthew Shepard, in 1998 by badly beating him and then tying him to a post and leaving him to die, he instantly became a symbol of the ugliness of homophobia, and the awful consequences of anti-gay bigotry and behavior. His murder saddened and enraged millions of heterosexuals, many of whom joined with gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgendered people to redouble their efforts against homophobia.

  Meanwhile, it seems that every couple of weeks we hear about another case where a man abducts a girl off the streets and sexually assaults her. On average, three men each day murder their wives, girlfriends, or exes. Every few weeks, police somewhere find the mutilated body of a new victim of a serial killer. Judging from the media coverage these events receive, about the only thing they symbolize is the many disturbed people out there. People listening to the radio in their cars or watching the news in their living rooms shake their heads and lament the tragedies for the victims. They talk about what monsters the perpetrators are. But relatively few people connect individual crimes to a broader social pattern of men’s violence against women. And when was the last time you heard someone say—in the wake of yet another wife-murder or sex crime—that men need to redouble their efforts to fight sexism?

  The chivalry trap

  A number of years ago I was in Boston with my then-girlfriend on our way to an awards dinner for a local batterer intervention program. As we walked down the sidewalk on the way to the event, I pulled her close to me and said playfully, “You’d better stay right by my side tonight. There are going to be a lot of men in the room with a history of violence against women.”

  I thought I was being clever, but she was not the least bit amused. “That’s a really manipulative and controlling thing to say,” she said dryly. “It’s not funny.” I had not consciously intended to make her feel vulnerable by pumping up my own credentials as her bodyguard. It was a joke. But I had nonetheless reminded her that in a world where there are a lot of violent men, she would always need protection—and not coincidentally from good guys like me
.

  I might have thought the comment was funny, but it came loaded with personal and historical baggage. It is an old tactic: “good guys” positioning themselves as the protectors of women from the “bad guys” who would otherwise prey on them. (It was also a thoughtless cheap shot at the men who successfully completed the program—men I respect.)

  For men who are committed to working against gender violence, the question about when and if it is okay to “protect” women from other men is the source of ongoing introspection. Taken at face value, it should not be controversial. If a man—because he is stronger, knows better how to use a weapon, or is more accustomed to physical confrontation—is in a position to protect a woman from a violent man, then shouldn’t he? In principle, it is not just about protecting a woman as a woman. It is about the moral imperative of protecting a vulnerable person from harm.

  But there is more to it. In theory, men should be confronting other men about their sexist attitudes and behaviors toward women. For years, feminists have urged men of conscience to do just that. The reasoning is straightforward. If you are a member of a dominant group, you have a responsibility to challenge other members of your group who are acting in oppressive ways. If you do not, then your silence is tantamount to complicity in their abusive behavior. This is true about white people who challenge the racism of other whites, or heterosexuals who challenge other heterosexuals about homophobia. But it gets more complicated with men and sexism, because there is a fine line between encouraging men to challenge each other’s sexism, and encouraging deeply paternalistic chivalry.

  One pitfall in the effort to make the mistreatment of women a personal issue for men is the risk that it will tap into some men’s traditional chivalry without challenging their underlying sexism. It is one thing to talk about the problem of men’s violence against women in personal terms, couching it in words that acknowledge a man’s concern for his mother, daughter, wife, or lover. The women and girls who are victimized are not nameless, faceless statistics; they are loved ones. But when the focus remains exclusively on the personal, it may only encourage family loyalty, without truly challenging men to confront the larger problem of sexual inequality and male dominance.

  Another danger we have to guard against is the possibility that we might unwittingly perpetuate the idea that the solution to the problem is actually more men’s violence—but done righteously by the “good guys.”

  I once had a spirited discussion about this subject with a man who worked with batterers. I was taking the provocative position that I wished more men today would emulate previous generations of men who beat up men who abused female loved ones, rather than take a detached or passive stance. I did not wish they would act on this counterproductive impulse. I yearned for their passion to be channeled from violence to other forms of effective intervention. He would have none of it. “It’s that type of thinking we need to change,” he said. “The idea that violence can solve anything is itself the crux of the problem.”

  Yet another pitfall in this thinking is that women’s right to control their own destiny gets lost in the debate about how men should behave. As victim advocates point out, one of the most painful effects of being battered or sexually assaulted is the experience of a loss of control over one’s body. One of the most devastating things a perpetrator does is take this control for himself. So if a man steps in to defend or avenge the victim and he has not checked in with her about what she needs, no matter how well-intentioned he might be, he is also depriving her of the right to take back control of her own life.

  This is the dark side of chivalry. Under the guise of “protecting” or “defending” women, it prioritizes men’s needs. Besides, if women are always dependent on men to protect them, they will never achieve genuine equality with men, which puts us right back where we started.

  After several decades of modern feminism, chivalry still exerts a powerful tug on many men’s—and women’s—psyches. For men, it has been called superhero syndrome, or misguided paternalism. In spite of increasingly egalitarian aspects of male-female relations over the past generation, it is not hard to find twenty-first-century men who nonetheless have an unconscious yearning to be the knight in shining armor, ready to rescue the damsel in distress. They might express it in genteel language about being raised “never to hit a woman,” or in crude revenge fantasies like “I’ll kick his butt,” if another man does harm to a woman he cares about. This dynamic is true for me, as well as a lot of my colleagues and fellow anti-sexist men. We might be motivated primarily by our outrage at violence and inequality, but that does not preclude us from having rescue fantasies—some of them violent—and a visceral desire to protect women and children from other men’s violence and terrorism.

  It is easy to find men with an impulse toward chivalry, but it is just as easy to find women who—while professing to believe in equality between the sexes—nonetheless want men to take care of them. In her bestselling 1981 book The Cinderella Complex, Colette Dowling argued that, in spite of the women’s liberation movement, many women had an unconscious desire to be taken care of by others, based primarily on a fear of being independent. More recently, bell hooks writes that many women, including black women, long for “the stuff of romantic fantasy” that gender equality was supposed to do away with.

  Andrea Dworkin characteristically went even deeper. In her fascinating book Right-Wing Women (1983), she explored why many women are drawn to socially conservative movements that consign women to second-class status. She maintained that these women find comfort in the implicit promise that if they give themselves over to patriarchal authority, then find and submit to a husband, he will protect them from other men’s violence. The major downside to this “bargain,” of course, is that women—conservative, religious, or otherwise—are much more likely to be assaulted by their own husbands than they are by some stranger lurking in the bushes.

  On the other hand, plenty of women, especially in the post-sixties generations, recoil from the very suggestion that they need men to protect them. Many of these women were raised by parents who taught them to be selfreliant, assertive, and intolerant of sexism or abuse from any man. In addition, they were raised in the brave new world created by Title IX, when girls and women’s athletic opportunities skyrocketed, and more women than ever developed their physical strength and athletic confidence. In the era of girl power and self-defense classes, it is inevitable that some women will insist that they do not need even “well-meaning” men to protect them.

  What lurks just beneath the surface of the debate about chivalry is the question of men’s ownership of women and the historical reality that for centuries, men have controlled women through force. This force has come in many guises—both at the institutional level, by the church or the state, and at the individual level, by physical violence or sexual coercion. So the question is ever-present: what if a man’s impulse to intervene for women derives not from caring and altruism, or a sense of fairness and equality, but from a deeply held belief that women are, in a certain sense, men’s possessions? What if he is coming from a place where an attack on “our women” is functionally equivalent to an attack on him, or his honor?

  Consider the following hypothetical scenarios:

  • A group of men in their early twenties are in an apartment, drinking beer and playing poker. At some point, the conversation gets around to a crude discussion about women’s bodies, and all of the guys laugh and joke about what sorts of breasts and asses they find sexy on a woman. Then one of the guys says something explicit about the body of another one’s girlfriend. All of a sudden, the offended guy slams his cards down, and the laughter stops. “Hey, watch yourself. You’re talking about my girl,” he says sharply.

  • A crowd of people mingles in the parking lot of a club at closing time. A heterosexual couple stands talking with a group of people, when another man comes up behind the woman, grabs her behind, and smiles mischievously as he starts to walk away. The woman screams,
and her boyfriend leaps at the man. They end up wrestling and fighting on the pavement until the police arrive.

  • A high school student reluctantly tells her older brother—who is home on break from college—that the black eye she is trying to conceal with makeup was given to her by her boyfriend in a fit of jealous rage. The brother pounds his fist on the table and vows to “beat the shit out of the #@ %*# coward.”

  These stories—and hundreds like them—illustrate some of the problems with chivalry as a guiding philosophy. When men are driven by a desire to protect women, they are less likely to check in with the women to see if they want or need help. Ironically, concern for the woman’s needs is not these men’s priority. Doing what they think they are supposed to do takes precedence, regardless of what she wants.

  What if the men’s concern for the women is genuine? Does it matter whether or not they intended to be dismissive of the women’s needs? Does it even matter why men react to assaults against women they care about, as long as they actually react and do something? If they are truly interested in helping women, do we give men the benefit of the doubt? Or is this subject so loaded that we have to remain skeptical of every man’s intentions, even men who profess to be concerned about women’s equality?

  Once in the early 1990s I was giving a speech about violence against women at a new student orientation session on a small college campus in New England. During the question and answer period at the end of my talk, a young man—just a couple of months out of high school—raised his hand and said, “I can’t see how anyone could rape a woman, or harm her in any way. A woman is a delicate flower who needs love and attention, not violence.”

  A number of women gasped; a few others laughed out loud. I took a deep breath. I was not sure what to say, because although the young man had made an outrageously anachronistic and sexist statement, he had said it innocently and seemed totally unaware of how offensive it sounded to many of his fellow first-year students. I remember blurting out something like “I’m glad you don’t approve of violence, but I think you might want to reconsider what you said about women being delicate. I know a lot of women who are really strong and are decidedly not delicate flowers.”