by Jackson Katz
Boys will be boys?
People often defend young men’s abusive or violent behavior by reciting that tired line, “boys will be boys.” They usually mean this as a defense of the boys. Don’t be so hard on them. What do you expect? But the argument that “boys will be boys” actually carries the profoundly anti-male implication that we should expect bad behavior from boys and men. The assumption is that they are somehow not capable of acting appropriately, or treating girls and women with respect. Especially when their hormones kick in, because we all know how guys get when “the little head does the thinking for the big head.” This entire line of thinking does a profound disservice not only to the victims and potential victims of boys’ abuses, but to boys and men themselves. I am often asked if I believe there is a genetic or biological component to men’s abusive behaviors. In past decades conservatives and others who did not want to validate the feminist argument that men’s violence against women has deep structural roots in gender inequality would invoke various sociobiological explanations for criminal behaviors. Today some of the more popular anti-feminist academic theories can be found in the writings of evolutionary psychologists, such as the 2001 book by Randy Thornhill and Craig T. Palmer called A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion, which argued that rape was part of a procreative strategy for males. I do not think it is intellectually honest or prudent to blithely discount any genetic or biological factors that might contribute to men’s abusive behaviors toward women. But I am convinced that if it were ever possible to prove a hierarchy of causes, genetic or biological factors—other than size differentials between men and women—would not even come close to being the most significant. Moreover, I have too much respect for boys and men to believe they are beasts whose predatory or abusive nature is hard-wired. Let us not forget that this is the argument white racists have made for centuries about men of color—an argument that was used to justify not only slavery but brutally racist methods of social control long after the end of legal slavery. “Boys will be boys” also has a self-fulfilling quality, because boys possess not only the potential to rise to people’s expectations, but also the potential to sink to them. Thus the more that abusive behavior is rationalized as normal and expected, the more likely it is to occur.
One of the great insights of the battered women’s movement is that most abuse in heterosexual relationships is due not to a man’s inherent biological makeup, but to his learned need for power and control. The typical scenario is not that he loses control and then strikes her, but rather that he uses force, or the threat of force, to establish or maintain control in the relationship. In other words, the problem is not his anger, it is his attitude. He believes that he should be in control, and if he needs to slap her around a bit to bring her back in line, then so be it. Not surprisingly, men who batter women tend to subscribe to hyper-traditional patriarchal gender ideologies.
People who are unfamiliar with this perspective often do not automatically comprehend it. They assume that a person is likely to get violent when he (or she) has blown a fuse, or run out of measured and reasonable alternatives to getting his point across, especially when alcohol is involved. Men will often describe their abusive behavior this way: “I was so pissed off,” they’ll say. “She wasn’t listening. I got frustrated, and after everything else that had happened that day, I just lost it.” This can seem like a reasonable explanation—although never an excuse—for a violent incident. That is, it can seem reasonable to someone who has no experience working with men who batter, and who does not know the right sorts of questions to ask. I once heard a batterer-intervention counselor explain that you can not take at face value a man’s statement that he “lost control” and struck his wife. You have to probe deeper. The exchange might go something like this:
“Were you in or near the kitchen at the time when you hit and kicked her?”
“Yes.”
“Do you have knives in your kitchen?”
“Yes.”
“Did you stab your wife?”
“Of course not!”
“Okay, did you hit her in the face?”
“No.”
“Were there kids around at the time?”
“No, I wouldn’t do anything like that in front of the kids.”
As this typical interview demonstrates, many men will initially say they acted violently because they could not control their raging emotions, but under questioning will admit that even in their heightened state of anger, they were able to make a series of rational decisions. For example, some men will hit a woman in the face, but others will not because she might get a bruise or a black eye. If she has to go to work tomorrow, someone might find out what is going on. Better to hit her in places where the bruises are not visible. Can we say that a man who literally picks his spots on a woman’s body is truly out of control? Some men will hit a woman in front of the kids, but others will not. They will only do it when the two of them are alone. If they were truly out of control, could they make those distinctions?
A recent event in the sports world provides a powerful illustration of this dynamic, although it was not specifically about domestic-violence. Late in the 2004 baseball season, during a close pennant race, the big money freeagent pitcher Kevin Brown of the New York Yankees had a bad outing on the mound. Steaming, he walked off the field and went into the clubhouse where he punched a wall and broke his hand. This upset many people, not surprisingly, because it left his team short-handed at a crucial point in the season. After the game, Brown offered no excuses. “I reacted to frustration . . . I let it boil over and I did something stupid. I owe my teammates an apology for letting my emotions take over like that,” he said. A few days later Brown apologized to his teammates, Yankees management, and the fans. At a press conference, however, Brown was asked to explain why he broke his left hand, since he was a right-handed pitcher. “Years of experience,” he said. Even though he was upset, Brown, a thirty-nine-year-old professional, had the presence of mind to avoid taking a risk with his pitching hand. In other words, his emotions did not really “take over.” Right up through the moment when he punched the wall, he was thinking rationally and consequentially.
It is important to make the distinction between men’s supposed loss of control and their use of violence for the purpose of control, because this goes right to a root cause of their violence against women. If the problem is that men simply cannot control their tempers, then the solution is to start building anger management skills into school curricula, starting in kindergarten. But if the problem is men’s learned need to exercise power and control over women, then the solution is much more difficult. It requires that all of us take a look in the mirror and ask: Why do so many men in our society feel the need to control and dominate women? At what age do boys begin to learn that having power over women is part of being a man? What steps can we take in order to change that, both on an individual and an institutional level?
CHAPTER SIX
Stuck in (Gender) Neutral
“The young Jonesboro suspect’s stated motive that he wanted to kill girls who had broken up with him is reported without comment. Is it so thoroughly taken for granted that males are perpetrators of violence and females their appropriate victims that we need not discuss the matter further?”
—Dr. Kersti Yllo, on the murder of four girls and one woman in the infamous Arkansas school shooting in 1998
NAMING THE PROBLEM
We cannot achieve dramatic reductions in men’s violence against women until we can at least name the problem correctly. At present, few people view this violence the way I’ve described it in these pages: as a men’s problem or a men’s issue. One consequence of this failure is that there is little discussion in media—or anywhere else—about why so many American men and boys rape, batter, sexually abuse, and sexually harass women and girls. Mainstream commentary about gender violence—and other forms of interpersonal violence—is remarkably degendered. It is almost as if jour
nalists, educators, and even activists make a conscious effort not to bring up the fact that men and boys commit the vast majority of interpersonal and sexual violence. So we hear regular reports about the “people” who commit these crimes, and we wring our hands about yet another tragic incident of “kids killing kids.”
It is easy to see why mainstream language about gender violence is typically gender neutral. If we talked about it as a men’s problem, if we asked, “Why do men commit these awful crimes?” the language itself would force a critical spotlight on men, and this would make a lot of people—men and women—uncomfortable. It would reinvigorate a long-dormant conversation that began in the 1970s, and point us toward a series of probing and unsettling questions: Why do so many men assault women? What is the process by which millions of loving little boys grow up and turn into controlling, violent men? Why do so many grown men sexually abuse little girls—and boys? Why do so many men sexually assault and harass women and girls? Why have relatively few men spoken out about men’s violence against women?
It has been in vogue in recent years to seek explanations for human behavior not in social structures but in biology or evolutionary psychology. But how do those theories account for the wide variation in different cultures in rates of rape, domestic violence, and other controlling and abusive behaviors? Ours is by far the most violent among the wealthy industrial countries. Why? Is there some genetic deficiency in American men? Or if the problem is not on the “nature” but rather on the “nurture” side of the equation, what are we doing wrong? How can we help shape the socialization of boys to counteract whatever forces in our culture help to produce so many abusive men? For now, the absence of clear, direct language about men’s perpetration practically guarantees that outside of a small group of academics, we do not ask—much less answer—these critical questions.
The ultimate responsibility for the perpetration of violence lies not with the victims but with the perpetrators. Stated another way: domestic and sexual violence are serious problems not because so many women experience them but because so many men perpetrate or tolerate them. This is a subtle yet deep distinction that has enormous implications for how we confront these issues. The goal is to establish this distinction as common sense. But in a culture where people are conditioned to blame women—indeed all subordinated groups—for their own predicament, it does not come naturally to focus on the harms caused by men.
In fact, it is an uphill fight to establish in popular consciousness the idea that violence against women is a men’s issue, because to shift responsibility for abusive and criminal behavior away from the victims/women (a group with less social power) requires that we shift it toward perpetrators/men (a group with more). I have no illusions about the difficulty of this undertaking.
The shift needs to begin with language. Language structures thought, which means that for us to change our thinking about gender violence, we have to change the language we use to think about it. And in order for us to make room for new language, we have to critically reexamine the old language; the words, phrases, and usages that serve to maintain and perpetuate the status quo.
In this chapter I am going to highlight some of the ways that current language about gender violence hides men’s responsibility and keeps many people stuck in the old paradigm: the passive and gender-neutral language that dominates the national conversation about rape, domestic violence, sexual harassment, and related problems.
But first, because language that describes social reality is ever-changing and subject to cultural and political pressures, I want to offer a Cliff Notes version of the recent history of mainstream dialogue about gender violence to provide some perspective on how it arrived at its current state of gender neutrality.
HOW DID WE GET STUCK IN (GENDER) NEUTRAL?
When the so-called “second wave” of the modern women’s movement rocked the social landscape in the 1970s, one of the many cultural norms it challenged was the silent acceptance of widespread violence against women. A series of new slogans entered the cultural lexicon. “Rape is a crime of power, not of sex.” “No means no.” “No one deserves to be beaten.” “Never another battered woman.” Across the country, tens of thousands of newly aware, politicized women from across the socioeconomic, racial, and ethnic spectrum pressured local, state, and federal governments for funding to set up rape crisis centers and battered women’s shelters. The first rape crisis center opened its doors in 1972; the first battered women’s shelter was founded in 1976. In the late 1970s, the pioneering legal theorist Catherine MacKinnon introduced the new concept of “sexual harassment” law, and gave a name to—and legal remedies for—the mistreatment that working women had experienced for centuries. On college campuses, young feminists, taking their cue from the civil rights and student anti-war movements, insisted that administrators provide services for rape and sexual-assault victims, institute academic women’s studies programs, create “safe space” women’s centers, and otherwise accommodate the special needs of women students.
The brave women who successfully pushed for these reforms were guided in their thinking by two ideas: 1. That gender—along with class and race—is one of the primary axes around which human societies are organized; and 2. That gender inequality is one of the fundamental human inequalities. They were invigorated by these ideas and their implications for understanding—and improving—the lives of women and children. They were feminists.
A raft of groundbreaking books like Against Our Will by Susan Brownmiller and The Politics of Rape by Diana Russell, as well as countless leaflets, pamphlets, and newspaper and magazine articles, helped make the intellectual argument that violence against women, while personal in that it was experienced by individual women, and perpetrated (in a majority of cases) by individual men, was in fact a political crime arising out of women’s subordinate social position. The original grassroots activists and national leaders of the battered women’s and rape crisis movements were clear that they were advocating not simply for individual women in trouble, but for transforming the sexist system that gave rise to the violence in the first place.
These women-led, multicultural movements withstood political attacks and bureaucratic inertia to become more established into the 1980s and 1990s. But the establishment exacted a price. With increased budgets from state legislatures and other public sources came increased demands for the professionalization of services along the lines of the mainstream social services model. This meant that the women who worked in the previously grass roots, politically oriented “movement”—many of whom were survivors of men’s violence and had been activists in the civil rights and anti-war movements—were now replaced by committed young professionals with social work credentials, but without “movement” experience.
Predictably, throughout the 1980s and 1990s, this had the effect of blunting the explicitly feminist politics of the 1970s anti-rape and anti-battering movements. This depoliticization was part of a larger backlash against the women’s movement that prompted much distorted media coverage of feminism in those decades. To the casual observer, a feminist was not an advocate for social justice and non-violence who demanded respect and equal treatment for everyone—especially women. She was a hysterical, angry, ugly man-hater with hairy arms and legs and no sense of humor. Susan Faludi’s bestselling book Backlash: The Undeclared War against American Women (1991) chronicled some of the absurdities of this sort of propaganda (although Faludi devoted scant space to a discussion of violence against women).
There were specific reasons why the battered women’s and rape crisis movements increasingly downplayed their explicit focus on gender inequality—and men’s behavior—as the root cause of violence against women. As these movements began to make progress toward breaking through centuries of silence and denial in the Western democracies about domestic and sexual violence, more and more women came forward to report crimes against them. Program directors had to lobby state and local governments for evergreater levels of
funding to meet the increased demand for victim services. In the late 1970s through the 1980s, there were very few women in political office at the state or national level. In other words, women’s advocates had to convince men in power to give them money. And some of the men were real knuckle-draggers.
The early battered women’s movement faced a number of formidable obstacles, not the least of which was that just as political support and funding for battered women’s programs was on the increase across the country, in 1980 Ronald Reagan was elected president. Reagan had long been a leading right-wing opponent of the women’s liberation movement, and his election was sure to deal an enormous blow to federal support for shelters and other victim services. Sure enough, Reagan’s first budget included plans to dramatically cut federal funds for battered women’s shelters.