In circumstances like these, you might be pressed upon to acknowledge publicly that while, yes, this article about a group of schoolboys filming themselves raping one of their school peers is absolutely an example of disgusting, animal-like behaviour, it’s not really fair to present such behaviour as being typically male. I don’t do that! the self-proclaimed left-wing supporter of women might insist. I’ve never raped anyone! If you want allies, you need to be nicer.
I mean . . . good? But, like, do you want a medal for it, bro?
Oh, wait—you do. That’s exactly what you want. A shiny ‘Not All Men’ medal to go alongside your ‘Best Feminist Ever’ giant golden key. I’ll have it sent directly to you as soon as I can summon up the energy to give a damn.
3. THE ‘NONE OF MY FRIENDS ARE LIKE THAT’ CONSPIRACY THEORIST
Reader, meet Matt Damon.
In a 2017 interview with ABC News in the US to discuss the widespread allegations of abuse that had emerged in Hollywood as a result of the #MeToo movement, Damon whined that not enough credit was being given to the men who don’t abuse women.
Yes, really.
‘We’re in this watershed moment,’ he said, ‘and it’s great, but I think one thing that’s not being talked about is there are a whole shitload of guys—the preponderance of men I’ve worked with—who don’t do this kind of thing and whose lives aren’t going to be affected.’
Let me translate that more directly into Not-All-Man speak for you.
‘All these women are claiming to have been touched or abused or harassed or whatever, but why are none of them making a big deal about the fact that I wasn’t the one doing it to them? It isn’t fair that the rest of us men should have to feel guilty when we didn’t do anything to hurt them. I mean, okay, we didn’t do anything to stop it, but shit’s complicated, you know? Plus, my friends are great too.’
I’d ask you to forgive my sarcasm, but I feel like if I don’t wear it as a suit of armour against these kinds of views then I might literally burst into flames and take down an entire city with me.
Damon is a Good Guy, so it pains him to know that people might be associating him with Bad Guys. Sure, he’s worked with a whole bunch of them. Harvey Weinstein launched his career, and Damon even admitted that he knew of at least one allegation against the mogul way back when he was filming The Talented Mr. Ripley in the late nineties. That allegation just happened to be made during the course of filming by his co-star, Gwyneth Paltrow (who was also dating his best friend, Ben Affleck, another man accused of improper conduct towards women). Let’s not forget that Matt ‘the preponderance of men I’ve worked with’ Damon has also closed ranks around Ben Affleck’s brother Casey, who was accused by two different women of multiple incidents of sexual harassment well prior to the Weinstein revelations yet still went on to win an Academy Award for Best Actor in 2017.
This casual collusion with men alleged to have abused women makes it all the more infuriating to hear Damon argue there is ‘a difference between patting someone on the butt and rape or child molestation. Both of those behaviours need to be confronted and eradicated without question, but they shouldn’t be conflated’.
Well, gee, thanks Matt Damon for explaining sexual assault to all us silly little women! What would we do without a sensible, rational man to interpret our experiences for us?
In response, the actress Minnie Driver (whom Damon famously dumped on-air during an interview with Oprah by claiming, to Driver’s great surprise, that he was currently single—yes, folks, he’s just that classy) tweeted, ‘Gosh it’s so interesting (profoundly unsurprising) how men with all these opinions about women’s differentiation between sexual misconduct, assault and rape reveal themselves to be utterly tone deaf and as a result, systemically part of the problem.’ Alyssa Milano, who has worked in show business since she was a child, responded pointedly, ‘There are different stages of cancer. Some are more treatable than others. But it’s still cancer.’
The belief that abusers comprise only a tiny percentage of the population is a popular one. One of the most common refrains sung in the Not All Men chorus is the one about how there are a lot of Bad Men out there, but 99 percent ain’t one of them. I hear this about as often as I hear I’m an unfuckable man-hating shrew with a rusty shipping container for a vagina that also doubles as a Hellmouth, which is roughly four thousand times a day. I mean, I added a bit of colour there because the men who comment on my angry, shunned snatch are not imaginative enough to have come up with that absolute banger of an insult. But you get the picture.
In the world of Not All Men, anecdotal evidence that barely extends beyond the four or five blokes you occasionally get drunk with is apparently enough to disprove years of comprehensive research, analytical data and crime statistics that place men as the primary perpetrators of violence, be it physical or sexual in nature. This is the natural evolution of the ‘99 percent of men aren’t’ argument. It begins as a convenient statistic to whip out of the same collective butthole from which other, similarly unfounded statistics are pulled and then doubles down on it by pretending to offer some kind of proof.
Listen, it’s not outside the realm of possibility that an individual’s circle of friends is absent of any men guilty of assault, rape or just garden-variety misogyny. We all want to believe that we direct our love and attention to good people. But the thing is, you can’t know. You just can’t. Maybe your friends have never sexually assaulted someone, but if they had, do you think they’d tell you? Is it the kind of thing you expect them to do in front of you? (I mean, maybe. Let’s not forget that some men don’t just boast about sexual assault, they actually engage in it regularly as a bonding exercise and a bit of weekend revelry.) When you say your friend has never acted like a misogynist, are you thinking of the real kind of misogynist who stones women for committing adultery or murders his wife or abducts women in alleyways or keeps women as sex slaves in his cellar? Or do you mean that other kind of misogyny, the ‘fake’ misogyny that feminists keep going on about, the one that’s actually just light-hearted jokes about stoning women or murdering them or kidnapping and raping them?
The other reason why this ‘99 percent’ response is just unmitigated bullshit is that it disrespects the expertise and skills of the people doing the work to heal male aggression and prevent violence. It isn’t a surprise to us that you think your friends are faultless when it comes to the treatment of women (or at least faultless enough that they should get a pass). What surprises us is that men think their responsibility to challenge what is clearly a widespread problem only extends so far as vaguely trusting the people they choose to spend their time with.
A friend and I once had an argument with her then boyfriend about his view that women should take responsibility for protecting themselves against assault. He cited the usual nonsense about it being ‘common sense’ to dress appropriately so as not to ‘provoke’ anyone. To make ‘good decisions’ about who they chose to spend time with, particularly when they were alone.
‘So you’re saying women should feel wary around you?’ I asked.
He immediately grew angry.
‘No!’ he exclaimed. ‘What an offensive thing to say!’ He was deeply insulted by my suggestion that women should feel anything other than safe in his presence.
‘But you just said women needed to modify their dress and behaviour around men to minimise their risk of being assaulted,’ I reminded him.
‘Yes, but I’m not a threat to them,’ he retorted.
‘They don’t know that,’ my friend pointed out.
We explained that if he insisted it was up to women to prevent rape, he had better be prepared to find himself included in the cohort of people they should consider dangerous. And not just him, but all the men he knew and respected.
Oh no, he protested, he and his friends weren’t the kind of men he was talking about. None of his friends had ever hurt anyone at all, let alone raped a woman!
‘How would you know?’ I a
sked, which seemed to throw him for a moment. ‘Most women are raped or sexually assaulted by someone they know, so it stands to reason the people assaulting them are also known to others.’
‘But I don’t know anyone who’s been raped,’ he replied.
‘Yes, you do,’ I said. ‘They just haven’t told you about it.’ (And it’s not hard to see why, I thought to myself.)
Only moments before, this man had stood there and listed all the things women ought to do to stop men from attacking them. That he did it in such an authoritative manner, as though he was imparting frightfully clever new information, wasn’t the most astonishing thing about the whole sorry interaction. No, the most astonishing thing was the unwavering confidence with which he declared that he knew no women who were survivors of rape or sexual assault. The thought that this might be something they chose not to share (‘Thanks for meeting me for lunch; I thought we could share a pizza and talk casually about one of the worst moments of my life!’) had clearly never occurred to him.
Later, when my friend and I were alone, we rehashed the conversation, appalled.
‘I can’t believe he said that thing about not knowing any victims!’ I screamed.
‘I know,’ she replied. ‘I mean, I’ve been sexually assaulted.’
Needless to say, they are no longer together.
4. THE ‘WOMEN DO IT TOO’ EQUAL OPPORTUNITY OFFICER
This is an interesting one, because it doesn’t actually deny the problem of abuse and violence. Instead, it tries to create an equal and opposite problem of women perpetrating the same kind of abuse and violence against men, and in the same numbers. I’m going to look more critically at how this argument harms boys too in a moment, but it’s important to address briefly the reality of ‘equal and opposite abuse’ (particularly in terms of family and intimate partner violence, which is where this argument is so often used).
It’s true that men can be victimised by family and intimate partner violence. But it’s also true that the majority of victimisation occurs either at the hands of other men or as part of a reciprocally violent relationship (i.e. women responding to violence perpetrated against them), a fact that is curiously omitted when men’s rights organisations advocate on behalf of male victims.
Australia’s One in Three campaign is a good example of how stats and figures are manipulated to create propaganda that actively works to discredit the reality of family violence while undermining the efforts of service providers and healthcare workers. Because of the murky way One in Three reports its (dubious) findings, some of the organisation’s followers repeatedly claim that one in three men (as opposed to one-third of the affected demographic) are victims or survivors of domestic violence. Additionally, it is blithely assumed that it is women who are responsible for this violence—because if men are the ones killing women at a rate of at least one per week in this country, then it must be women who are lashing out when the victim is a man.
In fact, men face a far greater risk of violence from other men, most often in public spaces or entertainment venues and to occasionally devastating conclusions. The growing awareness of one-punch attacks (formerly known as ‘king hits’ and then rechristened ‘coward punches’ in an attempt to associate them with weakness—a linguistic rebranding as yet not applied to men’s violence against women) seems to indicate that society is prepared to get serious on the issue of male violence, yet concern for its impact seems curiously absent whenever family violence is on the table. Who cares about sons, brothers, husbands and friends murdered or maimed on the street or left with comprehensive brain injuries when there are some points to be scored against the drastically underfunded women’s health sector?
But, then, this is what these kinds of not-all-menners are ultimately more interested in—point scoring and deflection. All this swagger and bravado masks an incredible fear of change. Masculinity has not been kind to them, nor has it been ultimately liberating beyond a sort of superficial privilege granted in order to keep patriarchy flourishing. Still, it’s a superficial privilege they understand and one that’s designed to make it easy to ignore the less enriching aspects of pledging devotion to such a detrimental system. If these men acknowledge the reality of male violence and its impact not just on women and girls but also on men and boys, they’ll have to accept responsibility for doing the hard work to change it—hard work that will involve confronting some of the lies they’ve been told about what it means to be a man.
This leads to another example of how the ‘women do it too’ brigade work against their own interests so as to justify their refusal to change. Think of the response to child sexual exploitation and abuse. As incredible as it seems that discussing, say, a news article detailing the systematic sexual abuse of a child at the hands of their father or a man known to them could prompt someone to respond with nothing more than a link to a story of a female predator, I can assure you this is a common response. Apparently the most important thing to remember in circumstances like this is not that devastating harm can be (and indeed is) inflicted against children on a regular basis—it’s that this devastating harm is not always a man’s fault. Because when we’re talking about one very specific case that involves a man abusing a child, it must be countered by the acknowledgment that he could have easily been a woman. This is child abuse, for crying out loud—won’t someone think of men’s feelings about it?
Again, of course women are capable of committing monstrous acts of violence. And yes, the women who do so should be roundly condemned by their communities and treated exactly the same way men are (which, let’s face it, more often than not means a light slap on the wrist and almost all of their immediate friends rallying around them while calling their victim a liar). But there’s a certain element of convenience to these arguments, and it becomes all the more obvious when you look at how abuse meted out by women is measured differently based on the context of the abuse itself. It’s interesting, for example, that the spectre of the female sex predator is often thrown around as a rejoinder to reports of men preying on children. In my experience there are only certain circumstances in which the predatory behaviour of women is considered repulsive. The choices people make in differentiating between the abuse inflicted by men and women go to the heart of patriarchy and the sexual harm it causes. It’s feminists rather than men’s rights activists who are far more likely to speak out against adult women abusing teenage boys, and they do so against a cultural backdrop where this particular kind of predation is treated in a nudge-nudge-wink-wink fashion. I wish I’d had a teacher like that when I was at school! What man wouldn’t want to be initiated into sex by an older woman?!
The assumed universality implied in the phrase ‘what man wouldn’t?’ is harmful in and of itself. Men are not a homogenous group of people, and their experience of (and desire for) sexual contact is not operated by a remote satellite circling the earth. Linking masculine strength and identity to how vigorously you rut your way around town not only places fundamental restrictions on male expression, it can also lead to boys and men participating in behaviour they would otherwise avoid or speak out against, because to do otherwise is to wilfully emasculate oneself. The belief that teenage boys must always be willing players in sexually coercive situations (such as an adult teacher grooming their student, or a babysitter building trust in order to abuse) is an insidious one, and it’s a key part of why it’s so difficult for boys and men to speak out against assault.
Think about the stereotypes of masculinity, and burgeoning adolescent masculinity especially. One of the most fiercely defended foundations of the ‘boys will be boys’ trope is the idea that male sexuality is a majestic beast that can’t be contained. Teenage boys in particular are treated like a herd of wild rhinos, their dangerous tusks constantly poised to spear any hapless antelope that crosses their path as they charge around the plains of adolescence.
Well, listen, I’m not saying it’s not bad, but girls should know what to expect with that kind of thing. I me
an . . . boys will be boys, after all.
According to this definition, being A Boy means having sexual impulses that are stronger than your moral ones. It means being so base in your desires that criminality will always win out over doing the right thing. It means viewing the incapacitation or vulnerability of the girls and women around you not as a responsibility, but as an opportunity.
This is a terrifying prospect. But if you can’t bring yourself to care about the fact that supporting these ideals causes quantifiable and direct harm to girls, at least consider the potential harm to boys. It becomes infinitely more difficult for a boy to speak out against the behaviour of an older, wiser, more sexually liberated ‘Mrs Robinson’ when masculinity is framed in such a way that boys feel compelled to receive sex willingly or else hand in their Man Card.
Yes, women abuse boys too. And we should want to protect boys from abuse by women as much as we do from abuse by men. But if men respond to reports of such abuse by whistling in admiration and regretting the lack of similar opportunities in their own youth, then we are doing a pretty bloody terrible job of offering boys a way out.
It’s scandalous that the best argument offered against the demonstrable rates of male violence and its impact on women and children so often amounts to this form of childish finger-pointing. But it’s also incredibly sad. Instead of working towards change that will benefit all people, including men, we are forced to squabble in the gutter about who’s meaner and who has it worse.
What a wasted opportunity.
5. THE ‘YOU LOSE CREDIBILITY WITH YOUR MISANDRY’ MAN
If the men’s rights movement is skilled at anything, it’s the ability to figure out new and wackier ways to fight back against equality and the angry witches trying to sweep it in with their broomsticks. Manufacturing false claims of ‘misandry’ (which isn’t even remotely a source of threat to men given that women as a class lack the political, social and financial power to truly weaponise any hatred of men we may harbour) is just a clever way to play superiority politics. It’s often accompanied by claims of support, but it’s a support that always turns out to be conditional. You might hear it phrased in the following ways:
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