by Jackson Katz
Here are just a few of the rarely-asked questions in the aftermath of Woodstock: How could so many men have raped and sexually assaulted their female peers at a rock concert? Why would any man—assuming he has never before raped anyone—commit such a violent act at a concert? Or anywhere else for that matter? Is there a relationship between the hypermasculine aggression of the music and the types of men who are attracted to it? Would this have happened at a folk festival, given the exact same uncomfortable circumstances? Are men with a propensity toward violence overrepresented in certain parts of (white) youth culture? What masculine characteristics are exaggerated in a crowd setting? What role does peer pressure play in catalyzing some men’s aggressive behavior in crowds? What role do alcohol and other drugs play in disinhibiting some men’s violent behavior? How does the pervasive influence of porn culture contribute to the depersonalization and dehumanization of women required for men to rape them? What about the Girls Gone Wild-style breast flashing now common in public gatherings of young men and women? Do some men interpret this exhibitionism as an invitation? Is it possible for women to be flirtatious and safe in these sorts of settings?
Few of these questions were even asked, much less thoroughly discussed in any public way in the ensuing weeks and months. As a result, Woodstock ’99 became yet another in a steady stream of potentially teachable moments that came and went without advancing one iota our understanding of the causes or solutions to gender violence.
The Puerto Rican Day Central Park Rampage, 2000
An event with similar characteristics took place one year later in New York’s Central Park. On June 11, 2000, a crowd of men in New York’s Central Park sexually assaulted more than fifty women on a hot and humid day during festivities for Puerto Rican Day. The news spread at the speed of light, as words and pictures went out on the Internet and the cable news networks. The incident stunned and horrified New Yorkers, and others across the country and the world.
It began with a group of men flirtatiously spraying women with water on a steamy Sunday afternoon, but quickly degenerated into a violent frenzy where dozens of men—mostly in their twenties—aggressively and gleefully grabbed and groped women’s breasts and genitals, and tore off their clothes. After-the-fact accounts of the incident would no doubt have provoked a public outcry—especially from women’s groups. But the “Central Park Rampage” became a much bigger Zeitgeist moment because several men in the crowd had video cameras, which they used to record the unfolding melee. The videotapes—taken from different angles by amateur videographers—aired repeatedly on cable and broadcast news for weeks. The story had all the elements of a ratings winner: visuals of women’s partially clad and sexualized bodies, a crowd of excited young men of color, scenes of violence and humiliation. It looked something like a rumble on the WWE, only real.
In the wake of this mass sexual assault, media personalities and politicians rushed to find an explanation, once again focusing their attention on “crowd” or “mob” psychology and the lack of a timely police response. Some politicians decried the assaults as a hate crime against women. But just like Woodstock ’99, the national media frame was largely deceiving. Outraged commentators decried the “young thugs” who did this, not the young men.
Race and ethnicity were clearly factors in the media coverage. At Woodstock most of the rapists and assaulters were white, and as a result, race hardly ever came up as an issue in the discussion ex post facto. But in Central Park most of the men were African American and Latino. This no doubt caused some politicians and members of the media to denounce them as “lowlifes” and “thugs”—terms not heard about the alleged (white) perpetrators at Woodstock. This did not become the main story, but it was undoubtedly an unspoken subtext—driven by racist stereotypes—in the national media. Men of all races and ethnicities assault women. But typically race and ethnicity are mentioned—in hushed tones or shouted from the rooftops—only when it involves men of color.
Once again, not discussed explicitly was the fact that it wasn’t a “crowd,” but a crowd of men, that attacked all of these women. We later learned that the guilty men were not a collection of career criminals, but mostly “normal” men with no prior records. In fact, perhaps the most alarming aspect of the Central Park assaults was the very normality of the group of men. That should have been a big part of the story: how “normal” men could be disinhibited enough to sexually assault women in an incredibly callous and aggressive fashion—and laugh as they did it. This ugly incident should have prompted a long overdue national conversation about the way our culture teaches boys and men—across class, race, and ethnic distinctions—to think about and act toward women. It rightly shocked and angered a lot of people, and caused women, particularly in New York, to be even more vigilant about their personal safety. But for people who pay attention to the broader cultural environment in which we socialize young men, the most shocking thing is how often such outrageous incidents occur with so little public response.
Can anyone seriously maintain this group assault to be an anomalous event? For the past several decades, we have raised boys in a society that in many ways glorifies sexually aggressive masculinity, and considers as normal the degradation and objectification of women. Whether it is misogynistic music and video, the sexual bullying of entertainment icons such as Eminem or Howard Stern, the omnipresence of pornography and female stripping in mainstream culture, or the crude displays of male dominance and female submissiveness that characterize the wildly popular phenomenon of professional wrestling, the images and messages routinely directed at young males make the actions of the Central Park men perfectly logical and consistent with broader societal attitudes.
To demonstrate how deeply imbued our society is with those attitudes, how “normal” were the Central Park perpetrators, consider the following thought exercise. Imagine the public response if the June 11 assault consisted of a group of white people who targeted and attacked people of color. In that case, media discussion would inevitably focus on racism as the proximate cause of the attacks. Rather than “mob mentality” or sociobiological explanations for antisocial behavior, discussion would focus, quite rightly, on the persistent problem of racism and the need to teach our (white) children to respect and embrace racial and ethnic diversity. Although that dialogue might result in few immediate solutions, at least the problem would clearly be identified.
Consider if the gender roles in the Central Park attack were reversed—that a group of women had attacked men. In such a scenario, media discussion would focus obsessively on what could have been going on with women that caused them to act out in this way. But when a group of men target and attack women, the “experts” typically opine on crowd psychology, leaving discussion of male socialization—and the societal sexism that fuels sex crimes—to feminist list serves, magazines, or women’s studies classes.
The Child Abduction Summer of 2002
The summer of 2002 included a seemingly endless stream of sex crimes that dominated the infotainment world. To summarize, using the standard language: seven-year-old Danielle van Dam was abducted out of her home in San Diego in the evening, sexually assaulted, and murdered. (Her murderer was later sentenced to death.) Little girls were kidnapped in Utah and Philadelphia, and their parents pleaded for their safe return in what became an oddly voyeuristic nightly television ritual. The badly decomposed body of college student and Washington intern Chaundra Levy was found by joggers in a wooded area. A five-year-old girl named Samantha Runnion was snatched from in front of her home in Orange County, California, kicking and screaming, and then later found dead, her nude little body showing evidence of sexual violation. Accompanied by their boyfriends, two teenage girls in a rural area east of Los Angeles were forcefully abducted out of their cars and then sexually assaulted before authorities, acting on citizen tips, were able to confront and kill the suspect. In Massachusetts, a woman on her way to Cape Cod was brutally murdered when she stopped to use a restroom in the early mor
ning hours at a highway Burger King. In Oregon, the remains of two teenage girls were found buried in the backyard of a suspect. Four women were the victims of domestic homicide in the course of a few weeks at Ft. Bragg, North Carolina. Kennedy relative Michael Skakel was convicted in the murder of his neighbor, Martha Moxley, when they were both teenagers in the 1970s.
The summer of 2002 also gave us a number of disturbing stories from the world of men’s professional sports: Superstar basketball player Allen Iverson faced charges of criminal misconduct (eventually dismissed) stemming from a “domestic dispute” where he allegedly threw his naked wife out of their house. The race-car superstar Al Unser Jr. was arrested for assaulting his girlfriend, as were the baseball pitcher Scott Erickson, and the pro-basketball star Glenn Robinson.
As many of these descriptions exemplify, the sex of the victims was usually stated clearly (“girl abducted”), while the sex of the alleged perpetrators was downplayed (“authorities questioned the suspect”). As we have seen, this is the norm in news coverage about gender violence. It is so normal that most people do not even realize what is obscured. In reality, the one common characteristic of the perpetrators in the string of nationally publicized cases that experts assured us was “not indicative of a larger trend” was that they were all MEN. Nearly every case involved murderous, sexually violent men who aggressed against adolescent and prepubescent girls, and famous, successful men who physically and emotionally abused their wives and girlfriends.
Admittedly, the cases took place in a cluster, and had newsworthy elements that produced far more national coverage than usually afforded incidents of gender and sexual violence, millions of which occur around the country annually to little public notice. Still, few leading commentators saw fit to explore the implications of the gendered nature of this wave of violent crime. Instead, mainstream media debate about “the summer of child abductions” focused largely on parents’ understandable concerns for the safety of their children, moral quandaries about the nature of evil, or afterthe-fact issues like the breakdown of the criminal justice system. Mainstream debate about domestic violence by athletes and entertainers focused—as it often does—largely on the relationship between substance abuse and abusive behavior, or whether or not famous men, or black or brown men, are singled out because of their prominence or their race.
Why does the focus remain on these interesting but arguably secondary factors, and largely avoid the central and revealing fact that the vast majority of perpetrators are male, the vast majority of victims female? Consider the racial analogy. If all of the assaults that summer—or any other summer—had been perpetrated by white people, and all the victims had been people of color, would so much airtime and ink have been devoted to discussions about individuals’ family experiences and psychological problems? Or would we as a culture—quite rightly—have been talking about racism?
Why, in the face of a rash of sexual and gender crimes perpetrated by men against women and girls, did influential opinion-makers tend to ignore or overlook the role played in these crimes by sexism and male dominance? Why didn’t the so-called experts start out nearly every conversation about these crimes by asking: “what is going on with American men?”
There are several possible explanations:
Everybody knows men and boys are the primary perps. Why belabor the obvious? Not only do we have to face up to the fact that our culture produces abusive, misogynistic boys and men at pandemic rates, we have to do something about it. The key to this is the common-sense notion that in order to deal with a problem, first you have to name it. If violence is not understood as the overwhelmingly male phenomenon that it is, then subsequent discussions about its causes are destined to ignore one of the key elements.
It would be an exercise in “male-bashing.” In the earlier chapter on malebashing, I discussed how this term is used to silence feminist critiques of men’s violence. As such, “male-bashing” is a classic Orwellian phrase, like “freedom is slavery” or “war is peace.” To bash someone is to assault them. It follows that “male-bashers” are violent people. But wait. Aren’t “male-bashers” women—and men—who have the temerity to speak out against men’s violence? How did they get stuck with a violent label? This would seem to be less of an accurate description of who they are and more of a conscious or unconscious attempt to intimidate them into complicit silence.
Boys and men are victims, too. Most boys and men who are victims of violence are victims of other men’s violence. Consider the sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic Church; both boys and girls are the victims of this abuse. But virtually all of the perpetrators are male. When was the last time you heard about nuns sexually attacking children? There is of course mother-son child abuse, and as the Mary Kay Letourneau case in Washington State reminds us, some older women sexually abuse boys. In fact, recent media stories about sexual abuse perpetrated by women against boys suggest that this crime might be more common than many people think. This type of abuse is criminal and inexcusable. Still, let us not lose sight of the much larger problem: Whether the victims are female or male, the perpetrators of violence are overwhelmingly male. The FBI—which can hardly be accused of anti-male bias—estimates that boys and men commit between 80 to 90 percent of violent crime in the U.S. each year.
Women do horrible things, too. Women are capable of horrific violence. But when women perpetrate violence, their gender—unlike men’s—is almost always highlighted and discussed. Virtually every day across this country we hear about another man who murdered his wife and kids in a gruesome fashion. But these stories come and go in the daily news cycle. When women murder their children they are likely to become household names.
For example, consider how many Americans followed the sad and tragic cases of Susan Smith, a South Carolina woman who murdered her two sons, and Andrea Yates, a woman in Texas who murdered her five children. Those stories were so hot that people talked about them with complete strangers in supermarket checkout lines. Men murder their children (along with their wives) in far greater numbers. Does anyone outside the local community remember their names?
Consider as well the controversy that ensued with the release of the female buddy movie Thelma and Louise in 1991. Social critics across the country—under headlines like “Toxic feminism?”—wondered whether this portended a disturbing new cinematic trend. Would we soon see a new generation of films where women were the violent protagonists? Worse still, would they be revenge-seeking women who had the chutzpah to kill men who tried to assault them? Is it possible that this might legitimize this behavior in the real world? All it took to spark this debate was one film where women had usurped the male prerogative for violence, even as the cineplexes continued to fill up with non-controversial movies, many of which featured unimaginably violent men.
Feminist perspectives have been demonized and marginalized in mainstream media. Some writers and academics have argued for years that a number of our cultural practices set up girls to be victims and boys to be perpetrators. But in part because feminist insights like this make a lot of people—men and women—uneasy, feminists are largely ignored in the mainstream conversation about (men’s) violence. It is presumably a lot safer—and better for ratings—for the networks and newspapers to feature one FBI profiler after another who dispassionately describes the characteristics of deranged criminals than it is to provide a platform for actual experts on gender violence.
The exclusion from mainstream debate of those courageous enough to tell the truth about our culture’s disturbing propensity to produce sexually violent boys and men hurts us all. How can we prevent violence if we do not properly understand its causes? In the absence of a more sophisticated national conversation about the deformed masculinity that lies at the heart of these ongoing tragedies, the culture that gave rise to these crimes will continue to put women and children at risk, and those of us who care about them in a state of constant fear.
The U.S. military rape scandal of 2003–2004
Many people were stunned and outraged when the Denver Post ran a story in January of 2004 about dozens of U.S. servicewomen who had reported to a civilian group that they had been raped by fellow troops in Iraq and Kuwait. Countless editorials were published that condemned the rapes and called for justice for the victims, who served their country in a war zone but who had more to worry about from “friendly fire” than from the official enemy.
Many of the media accounts of the military rape scandal, while condemning the rapes, nonetheless helped perpetuate the myth that rapes in the military were a women’s problem. In a long and passionate editorial in USA Today, headlined “Rape in the military: Female troops deserve much better,” there was only one passing reference to the fact that all of the perpetrators were men. Every other reference was to “fellow troops,” “superiors,” or “attackers in their own ranks.” In other editorials, op-ed commentaries, and news stories, readers learned about a female officer who had been assaulted by a “subordinate.” Because she was married, she faced charges for fraternization and adultery, while her “alleged assailant” had not been charged.
The language in these articles fit the general pattern of reportage about gender violence. We were constantly reminded of the gender of the victims: “ . . . women felt they had been doubly victimized,” “recent allegations fit a pattern of female troops who have been sexually assaulted.” At the same time, descriptions of the perpetrators were conspicuously gender-neutral.