by Jackson Katz
THE POWER TO BE HEARD
Ultimately, decisions about who gets listened to come back to questions of social power: the more you have, the more your voice is heard. That is why around the world, as women make progress in achieving economic and political power, they are increasingly in a position to push for the reform of laws, institutional practices, and customs that perpetuate gender violence. One of the first—and most important—steps in the reform process is to provide opportunities for women and girls to tell their stories, to make visible and public their experiences of violence, harassment, and abuse. For example, when an institution such as a college or the military decides to implement systemic gender violence prevention strategies—due to the initiative of responsible leaders or as a result of public pressure—they need to devise mechanisms to hear from women about how they have been treated within that institution. From 2000 to 2003 I served on the Department of Defense Task Force on Domestic Violence by appointment of the Secretary of Defense. As part of our fact-finding mission, the joint military and civilian task force traveled all over the world and met with personnel at U.S. military installations. Task force members met with commanders, enlisted leaders, military police, chaplains, and civilian social workers. But due to strong advocacy from both civilian and military members of the task force, we also met with civilian military wives who were survivors of domestic violence. Their testimony often cut right through some of the bureaucracy-speak and diplomatic niceties and told us exactly what had happened to them and how people in power had handled their cases. These women’s voices made an invaluable contribution to the task force’s process of designing recommendations for transforming Department of Defense policies on domestic violence.
Each time I hear a woman (or a man) talk in public about her or his experience of domestic or sexual violence (both the violence itself and then the often-ineffectual response of the authorities) my belief is strengthened that all male leaders—in educational institutions, religious organizations, sports management, the military—should be required to listen to survivors’ stories as a basic part of their training. This secular form of “bearing witness” should be seen not as something that “good guys” do to learn more about women’s lives, but as a fundamental responsibility of leadership.
CHAPTER FIVE
Male-Bashing?
“I am coming up against serious defensiveness, aggression, and on some occasions, personal attacks when I speak, and this is only high school! And not surprisingly . . . the strong negative reactions to even the mere mention of dating-violence education come from young white men. It’s been frustrating . . . that the ones who are the most defensive, or closed off, are the ones who need to be the most open.”
—Danielle Graham, victim advocate and anti-violence educator
“None love the messenger who brings bad tidings.”
—Sophocles, Antigone, 442 BCE
Women who dare to break the customary feminine silence about gender violence are often reminded that there is a price to pay for their boldness. They certainly run the risk of evoking men’s hostility and anger,because to challenge men’s right to control women is to threaten men who see such control as their birthright. Sadly, women who take a strong stand against sexual harassment, rape, and domestic violence can even be perceived as a threat by some of their fellow women.Women have been trained to take care of men’s feelings for so long, to stroke their egos and to curry favor with them by not holding them accountable for their sexism, that it is understandable that some women will denounce those women who expect more. This is especially true of women who do not want to risk losing status with men by appearing to side with those angry women. As a result, most women who have worked in the gender violence field have experienced some degree of social stigma.
When I give speeches on college campuses or do trainings for domestic and sexual violence professionals, I ask participants to name some of the words that are commonly used to describe women who publicly protest men’s violence toward women. This exercise often evokes spontaneous laughter from some women that only partially conceals their underlying frustration and anger at the way they have routinely been shown a lack of respect. I can barely write fast enough as the women—and men—shout out the condemning words:
Bitch
Angry
Ball-buster
Man-hater
Dyke
Lesbian
Feminazi
Liar
Irrational
Aggressive
Militant
Male-basher
Then I ask women to raise their hands if they have been called one or more of those names. Not all of them raise their hands—but many of them do. Some are clearly upset about the way they have been unfairly demeaned and caricatured. Others consider the criticism so inaccurate and ridiculous that they refuse to take it seriously. In any case, the list contains enough cultural stereotypes to fill a graduate seminar syllabus. One of its key themes is the false assumption that women who dare to step outside the strictures of traditional femininity and defy male power must be lesbians. In a culture where lesbians and gays continue to confront stigma and discrimination, this can effectively silence many women—heterosexual and lesbian. But for now, I want to discuss two of the other words: “feminazi” and “male-basher.”
FEMINAZI
The word “feminazi” combines two words: feminist and Nazi. Let’s look at each one separately. Who are feminists? In this society and most others, they were the first people to publicly name violence against women as a social problem. They founded the battered women’s movement and the rape crisis movement. They identified sexual harassment in the workplace and the schools. They were the first people to expose the sexual abuse of children. Feminists from all racial and ethnic backgrounds have been among the leaders in every social movement dedicated to expanding the freedom, dignity, and human rights of all people—women and men, adults and children. They are some of the most passionate and effective anti-violence leaders of our time—and of all time.
Who were the Nazis? They were the embodiment of masculine cruelty and violence. They were mass murderers, responsible for one of the most despicable campaigns of organized genocide and state violence in human history. One could argue that as a national movement they represent the low point—to date—in the history of our species. The Nazis are usually described as a political party driven by racial hatred, but they were also a hypermasculinist movement of white men who were obsessed with maintaining men’s control over women, parents’ control over children, and heterosexuals’ control over gays. In this regard the gender and sexual politics of the German National Socialists are remarkably similar to those of other far-right wing social movements, including those in the contemporary U.S.
To link feminists with Nazis requires a breathtaking leap of intellectual bad faith. Not surprisingly, the person most responsible for popularizing that leap is the right-wing talk radio icon Rush Limbaugh. When he is criticized for his regular use of the term, he claims that not all feminists are feminazis. “Feminazis are those feminists who are happy about the large number of abortions we have in this country,” he wrote in his bestselling 1992 book, The Way Things Ought To Be. Of course no such feminists exist. Limbaugh simply made up that idea to justify his use of a patently offensive epithet. But “feminazi” is undeniably a clever term of propaganda—and Limbaugh is nothing if not a master propagandist. The word focuses aggressive hostility on feminists, who by that characterization are portrayed as the despised and violent enemy. “Feminazi” has a powerful silencing effect, because what self-respecting contemporary American woman would want to be compared to the Nazis? Why say or do anything even remotely likely to inspire that association? Nazism is so deeply stigmatized in Western consciousness that any connection with it is bound to have negative repercussions. So the violence of the term “feminazi” does its job: it bullies into complicit silence women who might otherwise challenge men’s violence.
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br /> MALE-BASHER
The dictionary definition of the verb “bash” is “to hit” or “to strike.” Therefore, since “bash” is a violent term, a “male-basher” is a violent person. Let’s follow this twisted logic. Women who voice outrage about the fact that so many men bash women are themselves the true bashers? Women who speak out against men’s violence are the ones who are actually perpetrating violence? But the Orwellian quality of the term “male-basher” runs even deeper. It not only implies that women who speak out about violence are the violent ones; it also transforms men from the ones doing the violence into its victims. Unlike in the real world, where the vast majority of gender violence is perpetrated by men, in the strange world created by the term “male-basher,” men—not women—are the ones being bashed.
This whole process would be laughable were it not for the fact that this is deadly serious business. Words like “feminazi” and “male-basher” have real effects in the world. Many women simply do not want to feel the nasty sting of being called these names or risk other negative repercussions in their lives and relationships with men that might result if they were to protest men’s violence too loudly. So they choose not to get involved. They might talk to their women friends about harassment or abusive incidents they have experienced at the hands of men. They might tell an anonymous pollster that they consider rape to be an important issue. They might even take a college course on intimate violence, or read a book about the subject. In just the past few years, women readers have made bestsellers out of numerous books about women’s victimization, from Lucky, novelist Alice Sebold’s memoir of her rape as a first-year college student, to I Am the Central Park Jogger to Amber Frey’s memoir of the Scott Peterson murder case. But when it comes to confronting men with the truth about women’s experience of men’s violence—or holding men accountable for doing something about it—many women are still unwilling to go there.
This is one place where anti-sexist men’s voices can change the cultural conversation, because they can say things about men’s violence that most women cannot, or will not, say. Even more to the point, some men will listen to other men’s opinions about this subject more readily than they will listen to women’s. Men are socialized to discount women’s insights—especially when they might contain criticism. However, another reason why men may listen to each other on the subject of gender violence is that they cannot “kill the messenger” as easily. For example, they cannot credibly write off a fellow man with the accusation that he is anti-male. When a man says that men have to take responsibility for men’s violence, it would sound pretty silly to call him a male-basher. In order to make that charge stick, you would have to argue that he is a self-hating man who has somehow bought a mythical feminist hard-line about men as evil rapists and controlling bullies. There is no doubt that some people actually believe that men who challenge other men’s sexism are “pussywhipped,” or so eager to please women—especially feminists—that they would betray their fellow men in an effort to be “politically correct.” Or perhaps they were never “real men” in the first place. But these sorts of caricatures are increasingly difficult to sustain as growing numbers of men step forward as allies of women and begin to find a public voice on these issues. Is Joe Torre, the manager of the New York Yankees and founder of a program for battered women, a self-hating man? Is the former NFL quarterback and anti-rape educator Don McPherson a feminazi? Is Victor Rivers, the former football player, actor, and national spokesperson for the National Network to End Domestic Violence, a male-basher? Are business leaders like Gateway Computer founder Ted Waitt and Homegoods president Jerome Rossi wimpy guys who fund gender-violence prevention initiatives under the spell of domineering and manipulative women? One consequence of men’s increasing participation in gender-violence prevention efforts is the diminished power of terms like “feminazi” and “male-basher” to silence women.
Alleged victims and “accusers”
If the term “male-basher” silences women who speak out against men’s violence, a similar process applies to the increasingly popular convention in media where alleged rape victims are referred to as “accusers.” This usage accelerated during the Kobe Bryant rape case, when media commentators routinely referred to the nineteen-year-old alleged victim as “Kobe’s accuser.” This usage subtly but powerfully undermined the credibility of the alleged victim, furthering the mistaken impression that it was a “he said-she said” case. Language matters. Imagine if every time people said Bryant’s name, they referred to him as “the accused,” or “the accused rapist” Kobe Bryant. Whether it was intentional or not, the widespread practice of calling the basketball superstar’s alleged victim his “accuser” no doubt contributed to a shift in people’s perspective on what happened in that Eagle, Colorado, hotel room in the summer of 2003. Instead of focusing on the merits or deficiencies of the prosecution’s case against Kobe Bryant, the use of the term “accuser” subtly but profoundly turned people’s attention to the actions of the young woman.
As in so many rape cases—tried either in criminal court or in the 24/7 media—the effect was to put the woman’s behavior on trial, not the man’s. What were her sexual practices? Did she have emotional problems? What motive did she have to falsely accuse a famous man she had previously held in high regard? This fixation on her totally overshadowed questions about the actual defendant in this case: What were Kobe Bryant’s sexual practices? Did the public disclosure that at least one other woman—and perhaps several more—alleged that he had groped her provide evidence of a pattern in his behavior toward women? Did he have emotional problems? What could have been his motives for forcing a woman to submit to him sexually just minutes after she walked into his hotel room?
The case was ultimately settled out of court early in 2005, with a gag rule on all parties. We may never hear the alleged victim’s story in detail, and Bryant will never be forced under oath to describe his version of that night’s events or answer other questions about his sexual practices. But the now routine practice of calling the Colorado college student Kobe’s “accuser” gave Bryant a huge advantage in the lead-up to trial. The alleged victim was turned into the one doing something to Bryant—she was accusing him. This is the same sort of linguistic reversal that turns women in the rape crisis and battered women’s movements into male-bashers—with similar effects. In fact, in the Kobe Bryant case, it almost appeared—to the casual observer—that he was not really the one who was on trial for committing an act of violent sexual aggression. Instead, he became the victim of her accusation. Predictably, this encouraged widespread anger at her and sympathy for him. The fabulously wealthy athletic champion with high-powered lawyers was transformed into the underdog. As the Lakers made their way to the 2004 NBA finals, there were countless public comments from his teammates and fans about how courageously he performed on the court while enduring an unimaginable level of personal stress. At the same time, Bryant’s alleged victim received death threats and total disruption of her life ensued. Beyond her family and friends, and rape victim advocates who worked with her, how many people in the media praised her for how well she endured an unimaginable level of personal stress?
Obviously there are some women—and men—who occasionally or regularly denigrate and insult men. I would not defend this sort of prejudice or stereotyping, but I think the problem of “male-bashing” in the movements against domestic and sexual violence is wildly overstated. I have been doing this work for twenty-five years, and I have met only a handful of women whom I would consider “male-bashers.” And even those women—if pressed—will acknowledge that it is not men per se with whom they have a problem, but rather with a social system that limits and does violence to the full humanity of boys and men at the same time that it oppresses and does violence to girls and women. However, I have a problem with the term “malebasher” for another reason: it serves to obscure the harmful effects of men’s violence against women on boys and men. Girls and women are the primar
y victims of men’s violence against them, but they are not the only victims.
Boys and men are the perpetrators of most violence. But in almost every category they are also its primary victims. So when feminists and others in the battered women’s and rape crisis movements argue that we need to figure out ways to prevent men’s violence, they mean men’s violence against other men as well as women. In fact, cutting-edge violence prevention work across the U.S. and the world involves attempts to transform cultural definitions of masculinity that equate manhood with power, control, and dominance. To call this work “male-bashing” is to betray an ignorance, or utter lack of empathy with the realities of violence in the lives of boys and men—including sexual violence at the hands of other men.
“I am not a rapist.”
The term “male-basher” implies that innocent men are harmed when women make sweeping statements about men’s sexist attitudes and behaviors. Many women, in fact, are quick to rush in and defend men against the “man-hating” feminists. In a special “Men Can Stop Rape” edition of the feminist news journal Off Our Backs, the editors write that there seems to be a kind of “statistical dyslexia” when feminists start talking about men’s violence. “The statement ‘most violent crimes are committed by men’ is often misheard as ‘most men are violent,’” they write. “Thus . . . feminists find themselves in conversations like this:
‘Most of the violence around the world is committed by men.’
‘You can’t say that. My friend Jim isn’t violent!’
‘Nevertheless, the Bureau of Justice Statistics says that over 85 percent of violent crimes in the U.S. are committed by men.’
