“My father was a violent man. His physical and verbal abuse terrorized my mother and all five of his kids. I was in my fifties before I truly realized how much this experience has impacted my personality and relationships. But the cycle can be broken.”
—New York Yankees manager Joe Torre
Many years ago I was in a theater watching a movie with a girlfriend when she abruptly got up out of her seat and, without saying a word, ran out the door. I didn’t know what to do. Follow her out into the lobby? Keep watching the movie and wait for her to come back? I was not sure how to react because I did not know why she had left. Was it something she had eaten? Was it something I had done? I shifted anxiously in my seat. Was she angry with me?
Later, when we discussed what had happened, I was both relieved to find out I was not responsible and amazed at my own lack of awareness. Her response had been triggered by a scene of violence. She was a rape survivor, and something about that scene brought back intense fear and pain; she had to flee. I knew about the rape, which had happened when she was a teenager. At that point we had not discussed the details of her assault, or the trauma symptoms she still experienced. I spent some time agonizing over how I could have anticipated and prevented the entire incident. But she picked out the movie; didn’t she know it would have violent scenes? Eventually, as I moved through some initial—and reflexive—defensiveness, I realized there probably wasn’t anything I could have done. This was not about me, after all; it was about her.
But I was not a disinterested third party; I was her boyfriend. I cared about her. How could we even hope to get closer if I had no clue about what she had been through? If she retreated rather than reached out when feeling overwhelmed, how could I possibly help? There were practical concerns. How could I know when to touch her? How could I feel confident that I would not inadvertently trigger another traumatic flashback?
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 in 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.
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.
What can the average man do about this? Many say that if they are not themselves violent, it is not really their problem. But if they care deeply about women, and this is a major concern to women, then shouldn’t they do something? Are they in fact obligated to act—especially if their actions can help?
By way of analogy, imagine that you were a white, middle-class South African during the apartheid era. In spite of pervasive residential and social segregation, you managed to make some black friends and acquaintances. You did not vote for the ruling party or support its apartheid policies. You did not directly exploit black labor in your home or workplace. You did not consider yourself racist.
Nonetheless, did you have a moral obligation to work against apartheid? If you did not actively behave in a racist manner, but as a privileged white person simply went about your life in the midst of this system, weren’t you manifestly part of the problem? Isn’t it fair to hold you accountable—morally if not legally—for failing to act more decisively to bring about racial equality? Were you being a responsible friend to black people if you chose not to get involved?
Likewise, is a man a responsible father/son/partner/friend to women if he chooses not to get involved in speaking out about men’s violence? Can a man who does not personally abuse women persuasively maintain that rape, battering, sexual abuse, and sexual harassment are “not his problem”?
How about men who have been disrespectful toward women in the past, even emotionally, physically, or sexually abusive? Perhaps it was in their teens or early twenties. Or maybe in a first marriage. What if they are better men now, having since matured, or been in therapy, or had an epiphany of one kind or another? Do their earlier transgressions confer on them any added responsibility to the women in their lives—and women in general?
One of the many reasons why some men do not feel comfortable holding other men accountable for sexist behaviors is their feeling that—considering their personal histories—they are in no position to lecture other men about how to treat women. It is a valid concern. There are a lot of compromised men out there. This was one of the striking aspects of the 1992 Senate Judiciary Committee hearings into Anita Hill’s sexual-harassment allegations against Clarence Thomas. Many of the Democrats on the committee were noticeably silent or gentle with Thomas, who was alleged to have had a history of sexist and boorish behavior, but was being considered for placement on the highest court in the land. At the time, numerous commentators speculated that several Democratic senators were passive precisely because to go after Thomas would mean risking their exposure as self-righteous hypocrites. Feminists argued that if there were more (any!) women on the committee, these sorts of conflicts would be avoided—and men like Clarence Thomas would have little chance of confirmation.
In 2000, the Family Violence Prevention Fund commissioned a study to determine what sorts of messages would be most likely to attract men to anti-domestic-violence efforts. The study found that men were much more comfortable talking with children about the problem than they were with any of the other approaches—including confronting peers or participating in a collective action.
When adult men take a stand against violence against women, they not only model positive behavior for the next generation, they help children today—including boys. Practically speaking, men who care about boys—and feel both a personal and a political responsibility for their physical well-being and emotional health—need to think about gender-violence prevention as a primary need of theirs. In the domestic-violence and sexual-assault fields over the past decade, there has been an increased emphasis on the effects of these crimes on children. National and statewide conferences are frequently devoted to the subject of “children who witness,” not to mention dozens of books and countless articles. It is worth noting that the category of “children” includes both girls and boys. Hundreds of thousands of boys are routinely terrorized in their own homes as they stand by, helplessly watching as a father or stepfather abuses their mother.
This is not taking place in some abstract universe. Thousands of five-, six, and seven-year-old boys in the United States tonight will cower in the closet and scream as their mother is beaten—and this is not just a problem in poor or low-income communities.
One repercussion for boys who grow up in abusive homes is the damage this does to their relationships with their fathers. This is one of the many complexities of father-son relationships in our violent culture, and one of the hidden costs of men’s violence. Many adult men have conflicted feelings about their fathers due to the way their mothers were treated. They might love them but harbor intense anger toward them. In some cases, these feelings can last for decades after the actual abuse has stopped. I have known men who can never forgive their fathers, and have no wish to ever speak with them again.
There was a case in Massachusetts in the mid-1990s where a man, Daniel Holland, shot his wife eight times as their son Patrick, then eight years old, slept in the next room. Daniel Holland was arrested and eventually sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Several years later, in a case that generated national news coverage, the boy initiated a “parental divorce” in order to force his incarcerated father out of his life completely. Patrick Holland, by then fourteen years old, filed suit to terminate his father’s parental rights. After the father agreed to a settlement, the boy said, “It’s like a big weight’s been lifted from my shoulders, knowing that I don’t have to worry about him being in my life.”
Consider as well the experience of boys whose mothers are sexual-assault survivors. There are no conclusive national statistics on this subject, but when you figure that female rape survivors number in the millions, you have to assume that millions of boys and men in our society have mothers who have been raped. Suffering a rape need not be a defining life experience for a woman, or in any way prevent her from being a good mother, but its ramifications can linger in the lives of her sons (and daughters).
For example, the percentage of rape survivors who develop alcohol problems is much greater than it is in the general population. There is also evidence to suggest that rape survivors are more prone to develop addictions to antidepressants, methamphetamine, or other drugs, in part as a way to medicate the effects of their trauma. Their addiction, in turn, can then lead to all manner of destructive and self-destructive behaviors, which inevitably affect the kids. Sons (and daughters) are thus often the secondary victims of the original assault by a man against their mother.
Juvenile detention centers across the country are filled with boys whose mothers are survivors—or current victims—of men’s violence. How many of these boys are in the system for acting out their family traumas in antisocial ways? The poignancy of this was brought home for me when I was working as a counselor in a staff-secure detention facility in the Boston area for boys aged nine to seventeen. Staff-secure means there are alarms on the doors but no locks. One night, one of the kids in my section, a sixteen-year-old African American who lived in Boston, was on the phone in the common area, talking with his mother. It was a half-hour after lights out. I was standing quietly near the doorway, making sure the five other kids in my dorm had settled down and stopped talking to each other across the room. I was keeping one eye on Darryl (not his real name), trying not to eavesdrop too noticeably on one of the few semi-private conversations he was allowed to have. Quite abruptly he slammed the phone down and ran by me to his cubby, where he plopped down onto his uncomfortable twin-sized bed and buried his head in the pillow. I could hear his muffled sobbing. I subsequently learned that right in the middle of the phone conversation, Darryl’s mother’s boyfriend started to scream and beat her while her son was on the line. This sixteenyear-old—who just a few hours before had been acting the part of the nothin’-fazes-me, street-savvy tough guy—was locked up and utterly powerless to protect his own mother.
Advocates and researchers in the battered women’s movement have increasingly drawn attention to this sort of trauma. Their focus has been not just on whether girls in abusive situations are more likely to grow up and become abused, or boys to become abusers. Their goal is to understand how “delinquent” and self-destructive behavior—by girls and boys—is related to the traumatic experience of growing up in a home with an abused mother. How does the violence done to a mother affect her children? How do they cope? What are some of the gender differences in the ways that children of battered women handle the abuse?
At the time, I wondered what it must have felt like to be in Darryl’s position. How would I feel if I were powerless to stop a man from assaulting my mother? Would I be able to focus on anything else—the daily routine of a juvenile facility, going to class, doing chores, playing cards? I knew Darryl was feeling guilty—if not outright responsible—for his mother’s suffering. He had no one to blame but himself for doing the things he had done to get arrested; but when he ran away from the facility a week later, foolishly, impulsively, who was surprised? I never learned what happened to him.
Some men who are hesitant to talk about violence against women are eager to talk about the victimization of boys and men. “Guys are victims, too,” they will say, as if anyone ever implied otherwise. Yes, they are. For one thing, they are most certainly the secondary victims of other men’s crimes against the women in their families. But some men (or women) who say “men are victims, too” really mean that men are frequent victims of women’s violence.
Female-on-male violence is a serious issue, especially mother-to-son child abuse. But the frequency and severity of violence by adult women against adult men is often wildly overstated by “men’s rights” activists. Women do assault men, and unless it is in self-defense it is indefensible. But the incidence and severity of this violence pales in comparison to male-onfemale violence. It is important to emphasize that in the vast majority of cases where boys and men are the victims of violent crime, they are the victims of other men’s violence. For example, the rape of men in prison is a shamefully common event in this country. But prisoner rape is largely a phenomenon of men raping other men (as male authorities avert their eyes). To reduce men’s violence, then, is to reduce it against other men as well as against women.
When I first began giving speeches on college campuses about men’s violence against women, the first person to raise a hand during the Q&A period— almost always a woman—would comment on how unusual it was to hear a man talk about this subject with such passion. “I’m not sure if this is too personal,” she would say, “but how did you get into this?”
A friend once advised me that I shouldn’t respond to predictable questions about my personal motivation, because the answers are irrelevant. “This isn’t about you,” she argued, “or any of the other men who speak out against gender violence. It’s about the millions of female victims and survivors. It’s about their lives. Women’s lives. It’s not about men. It shouldn’t matter what drives a small number of you to speak out. You’re just doing what decent men should be doing.” While there is truth in this, there is another truth as well: not enough men are doing it.
In every decade since the beginning of the feminist-led anti-rape and anti-battering movements in the 1970s, there has been a steady stream of young men who have been politicized in college or graduate school who have subsequently volunteered in campus or community-based women’s centers, gone to work in batterer-intervention programs, or have done other gender violence related work in social service agencies and educational institutions. But it is not enough. Untold millions of other men, guys who love and care about women and are upset by harm done to them, are not yet ready or willing to think critically about violence against women as a men’s issue, or to actively do something about it. Why not? Why are so few men willing to talk straight about this subject? Why are relatively few of us willing to engage in critical dialogue—with women as well as with other men— about cultural constructs of masculinity and their relationship to the violence some men do to women?
I have had countless conversations over the years with women and men in the field—in community settings and on college campuses—who struggle daily for men to be visible allies in their gender violence prevention work, to participate in public events, serve on committees, attend meetings and other programs. Some domestic and sexual violence programs have significant male support in their communities; others have a history of tense relations with men in law enforcement, the courts, and the school system.
On college campuses in every part of the country, women’s center directors and sexual-assault educators tell me repeatedly that they only have a handful of vocal male allies in the administration or the faculty. They constantly seek suggestions about how to get more. The questions are always the same: How can we get more men with power to prioritize these issues? How can we broaden our base of male supporters? How can we get more young men involved? How can we connect with the Average Joes, the young men on college campuses who “sit in the back row with their caps pulled down,” as the college professor and educational filmmaker Sut Jhally refers to them—young men who would not dream of intentionally signing up for a course on gender, volunteering at their campus women’s center, or engaging feminism as something more complicated than a PC attack on their manhood? How do we get these guys to think “outside the box” and to understand these issues as their own?
I have learned that the surest way to grab men’s attention is to get personal. To make this about the women they know and love. It is one thing for guys to agree in principle that violence against women is a serious problem, but quite another to talk about their mothers, daughters, or wives. In order to dramatically expand the number of men who make these issues a priority, there is no better motivating force than the power of men’s intimate connection to women.
I have heard countless testimonies from men about the pain gender violence caused in their lives, from the time they were boys right up to the present. Consider a handful:
• At a gender-violence prevention training on a United States Marine Corps base in Hawaii, a forty-something first sergeant with still-taut muscles bulging out of his shirt and a ruddy, freckled complexion stands up to speak. He quietly recounts the time his father pulled a gun on him when he tried to defend his mother from a drunken beating. His eyes moisten as he speaks. I wonder if this is the first time in his life that he has ever talked publicly about this.
• The top cadet at a U.S. military service academy approaches me backstage after a speech I have just delivered to the entire corps of cadets. He shakes my hand and thanks me. He apologizes for the immature behavior of some of his fellow cadets, who had done some heckling and ill-timed laughing during my speech. He assures me that there will be consequences for the rude behavior. Then he leans over, and his voice cracks as he tells me that his fiancée was raped as a teenager, and that they sat up together and cried many nights.
• A middle-aged white man who is a powerful law enforcement official in a big city government in the Pacific Northwest states plainly, in a workshop with many of his colleagues, that he has long been motivated by his abusive, alcoholic father’s negative example. “From the time I was a kid,” he says, “I vowed never to be like him.”
• A college classmate approaches me at a reunion in Massachusetts, after a few beers, and takes me aside. He tells me that his wife sometimes wakes up in the middle of the night, flailing about and punching the pillow. She has nightmare flashbacks to the night many years ago when she was raped. He asks me, “What am I supposed to do?”
• In a workshop with ten National Football League rookies, three of the men disclose that they grew up in homes where their mother was battered. The men—all former college football stars on the cusp of achieving their professional football dreams—struggle to maintain composure as their fellow rookie sobs openly, recounting his traumatic childhood when he was forced to watch helplessly as his mother was beaten.
• A wiry, fifty-ish white man in a black leather jacket, with a limp that suggests a nasty motorcycle accident and a weathered face that hints at years of hard drinking and drugging, approaches me after a speech in eastern Washington. He tells me softly that his mother, a domestic-violence victim, committed suicide when he was fourteen. “Keep speaking out,” he says, as he firmly shakes my hand and pulls me close.
It is no secret that many women in the domestic and sexual violence fields are survivors of men’s violence. These women often talk publicly about their personal experiences, both to counteract the popular caricature of battering and rape victims as weak women who wallow in victimhood, and to model for other women (and men) a way to integrate personal experience with professional commitment. You can find these women on the national stage and in every community. They run shelters, youth outreach initiatives, and even batterer-intervention programs. They work as advocates, educators, and therapists.
Many men who are drawn to the gender violence prevention field have their own relevant personal and family histories. The journey for some begins when they are called on to provide emotional support for a girlfriend or wife experiencing the symptoms of trauma from a past relationship. Others are politicized when a girl or woman close to them is sexually assaulted. Regardless of where their consciousness was before this experience, supportive men who love and care about their female partners often come to see the world through their eyes, an often unsettling experience. The novelist and poet Marge Piercy offers some insight as to why in her deeply moving “Rape Poem”:
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?
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.”
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.