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

by Jackson Katz

  Later, a professor at the college who had been sitting in the audience told me that my response to the young man had been totally inadequate. “You should have slammed him,” she said. “You shouldn’t let him get away so easily with that statement.”

  There have been a number of media stories in recent years about the disturbing phenomenon of “honor killings” in certain Arab cultures and South Asian tribal societies. The rationale behind these murders—which persist but are not mainstream practice in Arab or South Asian countries—is that the entire family is tainted when a woman has sex outside traditional marriage, even if she is forcibly raped. She must be killed in order to restore the family’s honor. Incredibly, brothers often willingly take the lives of their own sisters in these circumstances.

  My take on the personal politics of gender violence is clearly culturally specific, because in cultures that practice or tolerate “honor killings,” being a close relative or friend of a girl or woman who has been the victim of another man’s violence presents a very different set of imperatives than it does in our culture. Honor killings are repugnant to Western sensibilities and beyond the pale in contemporary U.S. society. Even so, the underlying sexist belief system is not as alien as many Americans would like to believe. Western civilization has come a long way since the days when, under English common law, a man for all intents and purposes owned his wife. Some etymologists believe that the phrase “rule of thumb” has its origins in English common law, where a man could legally beat his wife with a stick—provided it was not as wide as his thumb. It was not until 1993 that marital rape was considered a crime in all fifty states, after years of lobbying by women’s organizations. The Uniform Code of Military Justice, which sets down the law for U.S. military members, also criminalized marital rape that year.

  But while many old sexist laws have been reformed or removed from the books over the past thirty years, and egalitarian relationships between women and men are the contemporary heterosexual ideal, the ideology of men’s ownership of women hasn’t died so easily. Batterer-intervention counselors in every county in the United States, every day and night of the week, hear men say things like “She’s my wife, and she’ll do what I tell her.” And to this day, sadly, many young women confuse their boyfriends’ jealousy and possessive behavior with true concern for them, rather than with the boys’ obsessive need for relational power and control.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Listening to Women

  “Listen to Women for a Change.”

  —Feminist slogan

  “It all started with women learning to listen to each other. The battered women’s and rape crisis movements drew strength from our understanding that what happened to individual women was not isolated. At first we just wanted to help . . . later we began to hear about women’s experiences, and see commonalities and patterns not only in the abuses they suffered but in the responses to them by the police, the courts, the clergy. We then began to use what we’d learned to confront men both at a personal and an institutional level.”

  —Debby Tucker, cofounder of the National Center on Domestic and Sexual Violence, volunteer in the first rape crisis center in Texas, and director of the first battered women’s shelter in Texas

  I memorized the words to “The House of the Rising Sun” before I was out of elementary school. Like some of the enduring classic tunes, that song possessed an indescribable, mystical power. I was a sexually naïve young boy, but shivers went down my spine each time I heard the signature guitar lick that opened the famous cover by the Animals. I knew what was coming: a cautionary tale of temptation, sin, and the hint of illicit sex in the dark purples and deep burgundies of a New Orleans bordello.

  The most famous couplet in the song struck an especially personal note with millions of boys of my generation:

  And it’s been the ruin of many a poor boy

  And God, I know I’m one

  How many of us imagined ourselves to be that poor boy? How many of us sang along with Eric Burdon as we daydreamed about what it would be like to spend our lives in “sin and misery” surrounded by girls in black garter belts? It was not until many years later that I learned the back story behind the British group’s number one hit. In order to make the lyrics acceptable for radio play in the 1960s, the Animals had changed the main character of the song from a prostitute to a gambler. But no one was fooled. We knew it was about a house of prostitution. What we did not know is that “The House of the Rising Sun” was a traditional blues-folk song from the 1920s and 1930s whose original lyrics were written in the voice of a female prostitute. But the classic rock version—with a male narrator—positioned the listener to identify with that poor boy. It was his experiences—and his reality—that were the stuff of fantasy for many of us sex-starved pubescents.

  Then I heard Tracy Chapman’s version, recorded in 1990. By that time I had sung along to “The House of the Rising Sun” thousands of times. But her words stopped me cold:

  It’s been the ruin of many poor girls and oh God, I’m one.

  The song’s meaning changed for me forever. Now, every time I hear the Animals version on the radio I think about the girls and women who are used up and kicked to the curb by the callous and indifferent men (and women) who run the “sex industry.” One old version of the song has a line that says, “Tell your baby sister not to do what I have done.” This had not even occurred to me until I heard Tracy Chapman’s version. Up to that point, I was too busy envying the corrupted life of the “poor boy” to empathize with the girls and women who live, work, and sometimes die in the seedy and dangerous world of prostitution and sex trafficking.

  It can hardly be a coincidence that my guide in this mini consciousnessraising experience was a socially conscious female artist. This often happens when women have the opportunity to describe their reality—and when men are in a position to listen and hear what they have to say. I know I have learned a great deal about gender violence and other forms of sexism from some of the women in my life. Some of this knowledge is unsettling, because it has forced me to reassess my thoughts about certain customs and rituals in male culture, as well as certain types of people. For example, a number of years ago I was in a car on the highway with a close woman friend and we passed a shiny, gleaming semi-trailer. I said something about what an impressive machine it was, how I loved trucks, and how I was fascinated by some of the varieties of trucker masculinity. She had a different take on the subject. Ever since she started driving, she said, she had been objectified, harassed, and intimidated by male truckers. They regularly leered down at her, trying to catch a glimpse of her breasts. Some had mouthed sexually aggressive comments. One man pushed a handful of twenty-dollar bills up against his window. One time a trucker actually started to masturbate in his cab as he rode alongside her car. As a result of these experiences, she has a pretty negative visceral impression of male truckers—even though she knows it is unfair to the majority of them who do not do those sorts of things. When she told me about her experience with truckers, I quickly realized why so many women I know loved the scene in the 1991 film Thelma and Louise where the women blew up a fuel tanker. The explosion represented a cathartic release for so many women who could identify with the female characters’ sense of anger and outrage—emotions I had never before experienced in relation to trucks or truckers.

  Men can learn a lot about women’s experience of men’s violence by simply listening to the women in their lives, and asking them questions about their perceptions. In addition, the modern women’s movement catalyzed a dramatic increase in the volume of women’s voices in the public sphere. Today, many women expect to speak—and be heard—in a way that previous generations of women could not even imagine. Women who have come of age since the 1970s have historically unprecedented public voices as community leaders, politicians, business leaders, members of the clergy, college professors, journalists, television producers, songwriters, playwrights, artists, novelists, and poets. (Of course whit
e, middle-class women are much more likely to have a public voice than are women of color or poor women.) And yet public conversation continues to be dominated by privileged white men.

  To cite one example: recently a spirited debate arose in newspapers across the country about the fact that women comprise less than 20 percent of opinion columnists in print journalism. Parity between the sexes might be a stated ideal, but it remains an elusive goal. An even more insidious way that women’s experiences are marginalized and their voices silenced is the stillcommon sexist practice of using the word “man” or “mankind” to refer to “humanity,” like when a headline writer invokes “man’s quest for meaning,” or the president of the United States talks about the benefits of peace “for all mankind.” In the late 1970s the sociologist Gaye Tuchman popularized the term “symbolic annihilation” to convey the effect this sort of linguistic exclusion has on women and their ability to be recognized as full persons whose reality, scholarship, and opinions are every bit as valid as men’s. As Richard Tarnas, author of the 1991 bestselling intellectual history The Passion of the Western Mind: Understanding the Ideas That Have Shaped Our World View, writes, “Like many others, I do not consider it justifiable for a writer today to use the word ‘man’ or ‘mankind’ when straightforwardly referring to the human species or the generic human individual…I do not believe that such usage can be successfully defended.” His explanation is that no motive—such as style or brevity—is sufficient “to justify the implied exclusion of the female half of the human species.”

  Of course sexism is also alive and well in popular culture, especially when it comes to the question of who gets to narrate the stories we tell about ourselves. Women studio executives have made advances in recent years, but most Hollywood films and television shows are written, produced, and directed by (white) men. Rolling Stone magazine’s list of the five hundred greatest rock-and-roll songs of all time included fewer than ten that were written by female songwriters, and Source magazine’s list of the one hundred best rap albums includes but a handful of women artists. Outside of the world of entertainment, men far outnumber women in positions of economic and political influence. There is still a glass ceiling for women in the business world and many of the professions. At the end of 2005 there were only seven female CEOs of Fortune 500 companies. And of course millions of women (and men) continue to be stifled by the deprivations of poverty and racism. Even among relatively privileged whites, as Carol Gilligan famously observed, girls in patriarchal culture feel significant pressure to censor expressions of their authentic selves in order to fit in and avoid social stigma for not being “good girls.” There are generations of men who have grown up with the modern women’s movement, have learned a lot from women, and sincerely respect women as their equals. But make no mistake: the beating heart of the backlash against feminism that continues to this day is the desire of some men to put the genie back in the bottle; to tell strong, smart, vocal women to sit down and shut up—and stop complaining.

  The battered women’s and rape crisis movements were created by women who had the audacity to stand up and speak out about the ongoing crisis of men’s violence. Many of the slogans that came out of those movements reflected this theme: End the silence, no more violence. Break the silence. Silent no longer. In the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, feminist authors wrote books about rape and domestic violence, and feminist collectives published pamphlets and leaflets—the precursors to today’s websites and email list-serves. Activists organized speak-outs to give a public voice to rape survivors. They tried—with varying degrees of success—to get mainstream media to cover violence against women as a social problem with deep cultural roots, not simply as an endless succession of salacious crime stories.

  By the 1990s, all of these efforts had begun to shift the terms of the discussion toward women’s experience, women’s reality. But change has not come easily. The courageous women who built the movements to end men’s violence—and they come from the full spectrum of racial and ethnic backgrounds—have pushed us all to look at the world through the eyes of women, especially women who have been raped, stalked, battered, and abused by men. They have achieved a great deal in the past thirty years. But their efforts have come at a huge personal cost to many of them. Women who work with battered women, rape survivors, and sexual-harassment victims—as well as women who have been at the forefront of reform efforts in the courts, law enforcement, higher education, and K–12 school systems—have routinely been ignored or marginalized by men in positions of influence and authority. I hear stories from women all the time about men in power—or in their personal lives—who just “do not get it.” For many of these women, the growing presence of men in gender violence prevention evokes mixed feelings. They are happy to see more men shoulder the burden of responsibility for changing men’s and boys’ attitudes and behaviors, but they are also frustrated that some men can be heard in ways that women cannot.

  In 1990, when I first started to give speeches on college campuses about men’s violence against women, I knew that some students came out to hear me because I was a man. Likewise, when I decided to write a book about violence against women as a men’s issue, I assumed that many people would be particularly interested in my perspective on this subject because I am a man. I am fully aware that this is unfair to women whose voices have been stymied or ignored. I am also cognizant of the fact that many of the ideas presented in this book originated with women, and many of my own ideas rest on a foundation that was built by women. This is true for all the men in the U.S. and around the world who are part of a growing movement of men opposed to men’s violence against women. We would not be doing this were it not for the leadership of women in our own lives and in the larger culture. As a small token of the debt we owe them, I want to share some testimonies from women about their efforts to speak to men and to advocate for themselves or other women, and what happened when they did. (Note: some names have been changed and descriptive details slightly altered to protect the privacy of individuals.)

  SURVIVORS AND ACTIVISTS

  It is no secret that many women who work in the battered women’s and rape crisis movements are themselves survivors of men’s violence. It has been this way since the beginning of these movements in the 1970s, as many of the founding mothers in the field were formerly battered women or rape survivors. The experiences of survivors have always played a critical role in the movements to end men’s violence; after all, they are the ones whose lives have been most directly affected. Their testimonies provide conclusive documentary evidence of the extent of the problem, and put a human face on what otherwise could be seen as dry and abstract statistics. From women who disclose to their loved ones that they were sexually abused as children to college students who talk in front of public gatherings at Take Back the Night rallies about their experiences of being raped to domestic violence survivors who testify in legislative hearings when new legislation is before the Congress, the courageous voices of women who dare to speak out loud about their own pain and trauma have provided the moral foundation of this work for decades.

  One of the most powerful public education/political art campaigns ever conceived is the Clothesline Project, created in 1990 by a group of women in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Its design is deceptively simple: a clothesline with Tshirts hung in building lobbies in college campuses, community centers, museum lobbies, and other venues. On each T-shirt is a hand-written message from a survivor of incest, rape, domestic violence, sexual harassment, homophobic violence, or stalking, or from a friend of a homicide victim. Most of the messages are written by women, some by men. The idea is to give voice to survivors in a public forum. T-shirts say things like “For years I drank to numb the pain, guilt, and shame. No one asked me. I didn’t tell. Today I know a child can never be responsible for rape or incest.” “Tears, blood, and scars. But I’m here. I’m winning.” “What part of no didn’t you understand?” “Erase my memory so I can feel free again.” “You batt
ered my body but my spirit survived,” etc. People walk down the row of shirts in respectful silence and read each one. The power of this display is that while each survivor is anonymous, their T-shirt makes an eloquent and emotional statement about their refusal to be shamed into silence. For men who walk down the line and read the shirts, the experience can be deeply moving and sobering. When the clothesline is displayed on a college campus, men who have the courage to attend are exposed to the intensity of their female peers’ feelings in a way that many have never encountered directly. The personal testimony contained in the shirts conveys an intensity of grief and perseverance that can touch them in a way that no recitation of statistics could ever match.

  Of course it is true that survivors are not always embraced with open arms. Their stories are often ignored or disbelieved, and they are often bullied and shamed into silence. Many women who have been assaulted by men do not talk about their experiences, either to family and friends or to colleagues and coworkers. In fact, many women who work on the issues of domestic and sexual violence do not publicly discuss their own experiences. They might wish to retain their privacy, or perhaps they are concerned that people will not take them as seriously if they suspect they are motivated by personal trauma.