by Jackson Katz
‘Are you saying women are never violent? Because I read about this one woman who …’
‘I guess her crime would be one of the 15 percent …’
‘Some of us don’t think men are that bad, you know.’”
Anyone who has ever conducted a gender violence prevention training or given a talk about the subject to college or high school students knows that this sort of defensive distortion from some boys and men is quite predictable. In the late 1990s I was conducting a one-day training for thirty educators in the Detroit area. About a half-hour into the training, a man in his late twenties who was seated toward the back of the room interrupted me mid-sentence by vigorously waving his hand. He was clearly upset about something. “Earlier you said that 99 percent of men are rapists,” he said, exasperated. “I cannot sit here and listen to you any longer until you clarify what you meant. I am not a rapist. My friends are not rapists. How can you make such an outrageous claim? And how can I take anything you say seriously until you explain yourself?” Trying not to sound defensive myself, I explained to him that what I had actually said was that 99 percent of rape is perpetrated by men—which is a far cry from saying that 99 percent of men are rapists. He nodded his head, seeming to accept my explanation.
For the past generation, women who have tried to organize public forums in academic or community settings on the topic of men’s violence against women have been forced to respond to the same set of predictable questions. Will men feel welcome in this discussion, or is this going to be just another “male-bashing” session? What can we do to assure them that they will not be treated unfairly? How can we get men to participate unless we give them this assurance? Some young men display a curious need to deny their own criminality the moment someone raises the subject of men’s violence against women. Gender-violence educators hear this in the classroom all the time. Guys will say, “I’m not a rapist,” or “I don’t beat women,” when no one has accused them personally of violent acts.
Over the past few decades, there have been numerous controversies on college campuses related to instances of rape and attempted rape. Many of these incidents involved the college administration’s handling of such cases. Administrators face some sticky legal and ethical conundrums: Should rape prosecutions be handled in-house, through the campus judiciary system? Are they strictly criminal matters? Do defendants who are students have the right to stay enrolled during the months, or years, while the case proceeds to trial? How do you balance the rights of the alleged victim with the rights of the accused—especially when they are both students? In some instances, alleged rapes on college campuses serve to highlight questions of shared guilt or responsibility on the part of male students. One famous case of this type happened at Brown University in 1990, when women students—upset at the university’s handling of sexual-assault cases—wrote the names of alleged rapists on the walls in women’s bathrooms. They claimed it was necessary to warn women about undetected rapists in their midst. Civil libertarians and others were troubled by the lack of due process for the men, whose reputations could be slandered by an anonymous author of bathroom graffiti.
One poignant incident at another New England university highlighted even more specifically some of the issues I have taken up in this chapter. In the fall of 1999 at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, two reported rapes of women in the same vicinity on consecutive Tuesdays, caused a paroxysm of fear and anger among the students, faculty, and staff—especially women. But unlike most college rapes, which are “date rapes” and are rarely reported, these seemingly random rapes gripped the public consciousness. Not only did they feature the politically non-controversial type of rape—the male stranger springing out from the bushes and attacking women passersby—these rapes were alleged to have taken place not at night in a remote parking lot, but in the middle of the day in a grassy area near a pond in the middle of campus.
Published descriptions of the alleged assailants heightened tensions, because based solely on superficial physical characteristics, hundreds of male students instantly qualified as potential suspects. One of them wore a black ski mask. The other was described as “blond, six feet tall, and muscular.” The campus reaction was swift and frantic. Women’s groups organized rallies. A few parents withdrew their daughters. The administration scrambled to reassure everyone with enhanced security measures, including the distribution of thousands of “shriek” whistles. Naturally, the rapes and the community response to them became a hot topic of conversation both on campus and off. The New York Times ran a story. National TV news crews descended on the school, asking questions. Was it the work of a serial rapist? Was he a student? A local resident? How could women students concentrate on their studies when it wasn’t even safe to walk across campus in broad daylight? Were the authorities doing all they could to prevent further attacks?
Because UMass has a strong women’s center, an established women’s studies program, and is located in a region known for feminist activism, the assaults catalyzed a community discussion about men’s violence against women that at times moved beyond immediate concerns about public safety. Fear can have the effect of focusing the mind, and in this case there is no doubt that many women students for the first time were forced to think about rape as a political act affecting an entire community, and not just an expression of individual male pathology or female victimization.
But women weren’t the only ones whose lives and psyches were changed. The experience politicized many men, too. For a period of several weeks, the alleged rapes and the fear they induced on campus were the topic of countless conversations. Everyday social interactions between the sexes were newly invested with nervous tension, as women were even less likely than usual to make eye contact or otherwise acknowledge the presence of men they didn’t know. One positive outcome of this unfortunate situation was that male students got a chance to see, first-hand, how women’s daily lives are controlled by the threat of men’s violence. And through speeches at rallies, newspaper op-eds, letters to the editor, and other impassioned statements in support of their female peers, hundreds of men denounced the rapist(s). Many of them publicly identified themselves—for the first time—as allies of women in the fight against sexist violence.
Nonetheless, as days went by and no suspects were arrested, some men began to resent the fact that their maleness alone placed them under a cloud of suspicion. Of course men of color, especially African American men, are perpetually under that same cloud; but this was different, because the alleged perpetrators had been described as white. So white guys got a taste of what black men have to live with day-to-day: women crossing the street as they approach, locking their car doors when they stop at a red light, not getting on elevators when they see a single guy already aboard.
“I’m not a rapist!”—the emblematic slogan of male defensiveness in reaction to feminist anti-rape activism since the 1970s—became in this case a rallying cry. The dominant public posture of men was one of condemnation of the perpetrator(s) and solidarity with their female peers. But according to numerous observers, growing numbers of white men at UMass felt impatient and angry that even in casual interactions with women on campus they were being unjustly stigmatized. One of the few male students who dared to publicly express this anger was a first-year student who, prudently, insisted on maintaining his anonymity. He succinctly expressed his frustration—and articulated a widely held sentiment—in an interview with the student newspaper, the Daily Collegian. “I don’t like the fact that when I’m walking behind a girl [sic], she will get scared and give me a dirty look or a bad look,” he said. “I scare girls now. I know it’s not their fault, but I just feel that I should be walking around on campus with a bright orange shirt that says ‘I’m not a rapist!’ . . . I don’t like to be looked at like this, just because I’m a guy.”
It would be easy to dismiss this young man’s complaint, and others like it, as evidence of whiney self-absorption or unearned (white) male privilege. With th
e campus on red alert status because one or more men had allegedly raped at least two women, it must have been tempting to ridicule or ignore men who were framing themselves as the victims. It must have been even harder as the absurdity of some males’ self-absorption reached dizzying new heights. In a certifiably Orwellian inversion of reality, Men’s Health magazine ran a feature in September 2000 where they named UMass one of the ten most “anti-male schools in America,” in part due to feminist response to the attacks on women. Women could not even walk to class in the afternoon without escorts, and yet the school was unfriendly to males? It is certainly unfair that because some men rape women, all men can be looked at as potential rapists. But who should men be mad at? Women for not trusting them? How about being angry at men who rape women, who give the rest of the male sex a bad name?
This reality first struck me in college when I did a lot of hitchhiking. It was not the sixties when there was a “counterculture” to provide a sense of imagined community—and real rides—for white middle-class kids with long hair and bell bottoms. I was in college at the beginning of the Reagan era, and by then there were few college students out there on the side of the road, waiting for some generous soul to defy conventional paranoia and pull over to pick them up. Sometimes I would stand there with my thumb out and watch literally thousands of cars go by. That can be very frustrating when you need a ride home and it’s getting dark. But I understood why people would not stop. How could they be sure I was not a sociopathic murderer, recently paroled, waiting to lure a naïve motorist into some fiendish plot with a gruesome ending? The threat of violence was ever-present in those split-second assessments made by people passing. Especially the women. I would watch women drive by and look straight ahead, studiously avoiding even a furtive glance my way. I felt frustrated and powerless. How could I let them know that I was safe, that there was no chance in the world that I would harm them? In fact, I used to console myself that they would be safer if they gave me a ride. For example, I could defend them from other men if their car happened to break down in some isolated spot.
I tried not to take it personally that women almost never stopped. How could I blame them? They did not know anything about me, except what I looked like and how I was dressed. It would have been wrong to get angry at them for fearing me. Instead, I would stand on the side of the road and curse rapists for depriving me of half of my possible rides. Of course most men never stopped, either. But almost always one man would decide that doing a stranger a favor—and having someone to talk to on a lonely drive—was worth the risk. For women, it was just too dangerous. I was a bit stunned once when a woman actually did pull over to give me a ride, on the side of a rural highway running through a forest in western Massachusetts. I remember thinking: if I ask her where she got the nerve to pick up a male hitchhiker, she might start worrying about me. I did not bring it up.
Why some women defend men
Over the years I have heard more than a handful of men recount stories of their attempts to intervene in incidents where a man was assaulting a woman, only to be turned on and attacked by the woman. The men usually explain—sometimes in impassioned voices—that this greatly surprised them; they expected the woman to be grateful. On reflection their initial surprise typically turns into bewilderment, frustration, and sometimes anger. She defended that punk who was abusing her, and attacked me? That’s crazy. Couldn’t she see that I was there to help her? Sometimes the men grumpily insist that they will never again intervene when they see a man abusing a woman. Better to mind their own business. Why take the risk? It is tempting to dismiss these guys as frustrated would-be superheroes, but their reaction speaks to how a lot of men feel about women in emotionally or physically abusive relationships. They don’t want our help. They are attracted to losers. They’re masochists. It is easy to see how men might feel that way. Not having ever been a woman in an abusive relationship, many men simply do not comprehend the practical—much less the emotional—complexities of a victim’s situation. And it is not just men who are in the dark. The same is often true for other women. Many of them are baffled by the seeming irrationality of abused women’s behavior.
But while a woman fighting off a man who is trying to help her might appear to be displaying crazy or at best counterintuitive behavior, it often turns out that she is quite rational. As I have learned over the years from domestic-violence victim advocates, battered women are often making the best choices for themselves in undeniably difficult circumstances. A woman who is being slapped around by her boyfriend or husband might turn on a man who is trying to intervene for a number of reasons, not necessarily motivated by a desire to protect the abuser. Perhaps the woman has already succeeded in minimizing the impact of her partner’s blows, and she knows that now—once the interloper inevitably leaves—she alone will have to face his full wrath. He might later take out on her his anger and shame at having been confronted by another man. It’s your fault. You shouldn’t have screamed and called attention to us! This is between you and me; it’s our personal business. Why are you trying to get me in trouble?
It may be that she does genuinely care for him, and in that moment when a stranger steps in, her loyalty to him trumps her concern for her own immediate well-being. However distraught she might be about his abuse, her first impulse when he comes under attack from an outside party may be to protect him. Ethnic or racial factors could well play a role. For example, if the abusive man is a man of color, and the intervening man is white, the white man might be perceived as an agent of state authority or a lackey of the white power structure, which has historically been much quicker to punish abusive men of color than it has white men. Regardless of his race, the woman may be afraid that this incident will result in her husband/boyfriend’s arrest, and he might be the primary source of income for her and her children. When they hear these explanations, most guys get it—regardless of how they might have felt at the outset.
In the fall of 2004 I was resting inconspicuously in a chair in the sparsely populated lobby of a large hall on a major university campus in the Midwest about an hour before I was scheduled to give a guest lecture on “American manhood and violence against women.” A white woman in her late twenties or early thirties, dressed in black Lycra and a heavy sweatshirt, came through the main doors of the building, wheeled a bicycle through the main doors and into the lobby, and walked over to a friend or colleague she recognized. I overheard her ask him if he knew why a crowd was gathering, and what he was doing there. He replied that he was there to do audio tech support for a talk by a man about violence against women. She stood up straight. “I hope he is going to talk about the ways that women abuse men,” she said. “I’m a Camille Paglia feminist. Women can be just as violent as men, you know, only they don’t do it in a physical way.”
In recent years women who claim that “violence against women” is not as big a problem as some feminists maintain have garnered a massive amount of uncritical coverage in the media. Some of these women—most notably the conservative scholar Christina Hoff Sommers and the academic provocateur Camille Paglia—have since the early 1990s been putting forth the view that the problem of violence against women has been radically overstated by ideological feminists with an anti-male agenda. There is no crisis, they say, just a steady onslaught of distorted statistics and scare tactics intended to recruit young women to the feminist cause, and justify budgets for women’s programs. As Hoff Sommers stated in her 1994 book Who Stole Feminism?, “To view rape as a crime of gender bias . . . is perversely to miss its true nature . . . gender feminist ideologues bemuse and alarm the public . . . they have made no case for the claim that violence against women is symptomatic of a deeply misogynist culture.”
It should come as no surprise that some people stubbornly refuse to acknowledge that violence against women is a pervasive social problem in this country, and around the world. Free debate and divergent views are important. But it is notable how much neutral or favorable media coverage th
ese women have gotten, considering the controversial nature of their claims and the fact that the vast majority of researchers and activists in the field—women and men—strongly dispute them. For example, the work of Hoff Sommers, Paglia, and Katie Roiphe, whose 1993 book The Morning After: Sex, Fear, and Feminism argued that the problem of date rape on college campuses was overstated, has been featured everywhere from the New York Times Magazine to the Rush Limbaugh radio program. A number of other conservative women, including Ann Coulter and Laura Schlesinger, have attacked feminists for anti-male bias and for exaggerating claims about men’s violence against women. Although their particular perspectives differ slightly from one another, all of these women appear to represent a conservative answer to “male-bashing” women. In fact, they would seem to be standing up for men. This, of course, wins them a lot of male allies, especially men who are sick and tired of hearing about how bad men are, and conservatives—women and men—who are eager to find any way to discredit the feminist analysis of men’s violence as rooted in the structures of patriarchal culture.
Conservative or libertarian women who criticize women in the battered women’s and rape crisis movements are valuable assets to critics of those movements because they are willing to say things in print and in public that most men would be widely attacked for saying, such as when Camille Paglia writes that a lot of battered women stay in abusive relationships because “the sex is hot.” If a man had written that, he would undoubtedly be decried as a sexist and an apologist for batterers and rapists. But because Paglia is a woman, she is merely “controversial,” and as we all know, controversy sells—in bookstores and campus lecture halls. It will be interesting to see how these anti-feminist women and others—including organizations such as Concerned Women for America, which opposes the Violence Against Women Act because it is supposedly “anti-family”—respond to the growing numbers of men who write and speak in support of feminists’ basic arguments about men’s violence against women. Much of these conservative women’s criticism is aimed at feminist women, and their supposedly divisive indictment of sexism and men’s violence. Christina Hoff Sommers’s book, Who Stole Feminism? is subtitled How Women Have Betrayed Women. It would not be surprising if they claim that these anti-sexist men are neutered wimps who feminists have bullied into betraying their fellow men. They would almost have to take that view in order to defend their reckless assertion that feminists have overstated or even manufactured a crisis of violence against women in order to bash men. There seems to be little room in these conservative women’s arguments for men who—using their free will—have come to many of the same conclusions as feminist women about “rape culture” and the connection between gender inequality and gender violence. After all, Phyllis Schlafly, one of the female icons of the far right, praised Hoff Sommers’s 2000 screed against feminists entitled The War on Boys by saying that “We just have to recognize that the feminist movement is an attack on everything that is masculine.”