by Jackson Katz
In the field of gender-violence prevention, the idea of working with bystanders has gathered considerable momentum over the past decade. In this educational context, a bystander refers to someone who is not directly involved as a perpetrator or victim of an act of sexual harassment or violence, but is indirectly involved as a friend or family member. A bystander can also be a member of a group, team, workplace, or any other social unit. The aim in focusing on bystanders is to empower them to speak up—and not to be silent and complicit—in the face of abusive behavior. This can be a daunting challenge, because there are many deep-seated cultural factors that discourage people from getting involved in the affairs of others. For many decades in the U.S. there has been widespread residential mobility and a resultant breakdown in the bonds of community. In many cities and suburbs, neighbors do not even know each other’s names, and are presumably less likely to intervene in each other’s lives. Also, in our litigious society many potential Good Samaritans hesitate to get involved because they are afraid of being held liable for their actions.
However, in addition to these broader cultural factors, many men and women have been socialized to be passive bystanders specifically when it comes to sexual abuse and violence. This conditioning is reflected in commonly heard statements like: “A situation between a man and a woman is none of my business,” or “What goes on within a marriage is a private matter.” A historical antecedent of this belief is the English common law doctrine that an assault outside the family is a public matter, but conflicts between family members should remain confined to the domestic sphere. In other words, a man’s home is his castle, and no one tells the king how to treat his subjects. One of the long-term projects of feminist jurisprudence and social activism is to erode this private-public dichotomy, because the domestic sphere has been one of the key sites of women’s subordination. Women’s rights advocates have made dramatic progress in this area over the past quarter-century. For example, marital rape used to be considered an oxymoron, but today it can be prosecuted as a crime in all fifty states. Nonetheless, to a disturbing extent, men are still permitted to mistreat women in the privacy of their homes and relationships and suffer only limited consequences.
Feminists have long argued that we live in a “rape culture” and a “battering culture.” In other words, individual acts of gender violence emanate from an unequal and sexist cultural context, within which heterosexual men are conditioned to objectify and dominate women in the sexual sphere, and exert power and control over them in intimate relationships. If we accept this, then primary prevention efforts need to move beyond short-term safety precautions for women (e.g., women being advised not to put their drinks down at parties, to park in well-lit areas, to recognize the warning signs of abusive relational behaviors, etc.).
Instead, educators need to address the attitudes in male culture that encourage or legitimize some men’s abusive behavior. One way to address these attitudes is to examine and work toward changing group dynamics in male-peer culture, where rape and battering supportive attitudes are nurtured and reinforced. If more men spoke up before, during, or after incidents of verbal, physical, or sexual abuse by their peers, they would help to create a climate where the abuse of women—emotional, physical, sexual—would be stigmatized and seen as incompatible with male group norms. That is, a man who engaged in such behavior would lose status among his male peers and forfeit the approval of older males.
Ultimately, this would cause a shift in male culture such that some men’s sexist abuse of women and girls would be regarded—by other men—not only as distasteful but as utterly unacceptable. In this new climate, individuals would be strongly discouraged from acting out in abusive ways because of the anticipated negative consequences: loss of respect, friends, and status, and greater likelihood of facing both legal and non-legal sanctions. In fact, if men’s violence against women truly carried a significant stigma in male culture, it is possible that most incidents of sexist abuse would never happen. This is because contrary to popular myth, the vast majority of boys and men who assault, harass, and bully girls and women are not sociopaths. They are average guys. Many of them see the sexist treatment of women as normal. They behave toward women the way they think men are supposed to. If the example and the expectations of the men around them changed, they would be likely to adjust their behavior accordingly.
In a climate where men do not tolerate other men’s mistreatment of women, female (and male) victims would also undoubtedly gain more support. This would set in motion a powerful chain of events. When victims feel supported, they are more likely to come forward. As a result there would be a significant increase in the number of rape, domestic-violence, and sexualharassment reports. With an uptick in reports, authorities would face increased pressure to hold perpetrators accountable: they would be more likely to discipline employees, suspend students from school, remove student athletes from teams, and prosecute alleged abusers in criminal court. While an increase in accountability is a positive development, it is important to acknowledge that the criminal justice system historically has not been fair to all men who are charged with or convicted of assaulting women (or men). Men of color are more likely than white men to be held accountable for their crimes, especially if their victims are white. For example, in the early decades of the twentieth century, thousands of African American men were lynched by vigilante mobs of white men, predominantly in the South, based on trumped up charges that they had raped white women. This racist legacy cannot be overlooked or wished away. But the solution to this disparity is not to ease the pressure on perpetrators; it is to seek fair treatment in the application of justice. If fewer men who assault women got away with it—including wealthy white men—the anticipation of negative consequences would reinforce the need to prevent it from happening in the first place.
ONE OF THE GUYS
Boys and men of every class, race, ethnicity, and nationality face enormous pressure to be “one of the guys.” This pressure begins early in life and continues across the life span. Every man who has boyhood memories of desperately waiting to be picked when the group chooses sides for playground games knows how important it is to be accepted by one’s peers, but peer pressure does not end with childhood and adolescence. The anxious feelings associated with the desire to fit in or be accepted might diminish with age and maturity, but they also might not. Many middle-aged men are more comfortable talking about the pressures on young guys to fit in than they are acknowledging the conformist pressures in their own lives. I see this frequently in my work with male officers in the U.S. military. They readily agree that young male troops are highly impressionable and need guidance about how to conduct themselves as men. The officers, however, are less apt to see themselves as subject to similar influences from men of their own age and rank. Of course the specific aspects of peer group expectations vary by age. A twenty-year-old man might feel pressure from his buddies to drink copious amounts of alcohol and shout obscenities at women out of car windows. A forty-year-old’s friends might instead tease him about “who wears the pants” in his marriage if he makes less money or has less professional success than his wife; and their disapproval—even if it is presented in a light-hearted manner—might feed his resentment of her. This would not in any way cause him to abuse her. But the goading of friends can encourage a man to believe that he needs to exercise more control over his wife in order to maintain or regain his standing in the male group. At some point this could contribute to his decision to use physical force.
These are just some of the ways that peer groups impose rigid standards for masculine behavior, including expectations for when violence is an acceptable response to a real or perceived threat. These expectations carry significant weight. As the sociologist Michael Kimmel notes in his indispensable cultural history Manhood in America, men care a great deal about what other men think of them. In fact, he says, “In large part, it’s other men who are important to American men; [they] define their masculini
ty, not as much in relation to women, but in relation to each other. Masculinity is largely a homosocial enactment.”
Part of the developmental challenge men face—especially adolescent boys and young men who are trying to establish successful adult identities—is to figure out how to “act like a man” and thus earn other men’s respect and approval. This is not genetically hard-wired. Some boys learn their most powerful lessons about “manhood” from their fathers—for good or ill. Some boys do not have fathers, or their fathers are so emotionally or physically distant that their influence is diminished. But regardless of whether a father is present, boys and men constantly look to each other for cues about where in the male hierarchy they fit in: how they should dress, carry themselves, and interact with others, what they should say (and not say) in various social situations, and how “real men” treat women. Guys learn many of these codes of male behavior at a young age in groups, cliques, and other associative structures.
There are many different styles of masculinity that boys and men across the ethno-cultural spectrum adopt, ranging from the self-conscious and paramilitary conformity of the Boy Scouts to the ostensibly rebel masculinity of gang bangers. The peer culture dynamic on athletic teams—from youth sports through “over-fifty” leagues—is particularly influential in shaping notions of what constitutes a “real man.” For some college men, fraternities play an analogously powerful role. Regular or even daily interaction in male social groups—from motorcycle gangs to golf foursomes—provides a rich source of information to group members about what their fellow men value, and what they consider wimpy and unworthy of respect. Boys and men also absorb volumes of information from popular culture. For the past generation, pornography has been by far the most important source of sex miseducation for millions of American boys and men. Over the last decade, the rise of “lad” magazines like Maxim, Stuff, and FHM, which feature scantily clad starlets on the cover, can actually be understood as instructional manuals for a certain type of upwardly mobile white, middle, and upper-class manhood.
Another critical but less-acknowledged source of information about male group norms and how “real men” act comes from fictional portrayals, especially television and movies. Over the past few decades, cultural theorists such as Raymond Williams have argued that while it is people who produce the images that bombard us daily on TV, on billboards, in videogames, and in film, it is equally true to say that this virtual landscape of images in some sense produces us. This means we are not just consumers of these images. We do not simply make our way through the thousands of images we see daily and pick and choose what we like and don’t like. These images have a profound effect on who we are, on our tastes, attitudes, and the kinds of choices we make. Millions of young men (and women) take cues from television programs and movies about what is masculine and feminine and how “cool” members of their generation are supposed to act. As cultural studies scholar Douglas Kellner puts it in his book Media Culture, the media provide “symbolic environments” in which people live that strongly influence their thought, behavior, and style. “When a media sensation appears,” he says, “it becomes part of that environment, and in turn becomes a new resource for pleasures, identities, and contestation.” Consider, for example, the wildly popular American Pie movie series. A large percentage of white Americans in their twenties have seen one or all of the three movies. One of the signature characteristics of these movies is the glamorization of a certain type of male-centered partying culture, where men drink large quantities of alcohol to overcome their social inhibitions and to fit in, and girls are little more than caricatured objects of heterosexual male desire. The beersoaked partying culture in American Pie, with its celebration of male “hijinks” and blatant objectification of women, is precisely the social backdrop to the pandemic of acquaintance rape, especially on college campuses. Does this mean that movies like American Pie can be said to cause rape? Of course not. But if there is such a thing as a rape culture, they are surely part of it. This is not a self-righteous statement. When I saw American Pie—in my late thirties in a theater filled with teens and twenty-somethings—I immediately recognized the party scenes, because when I was in high school and college I was immersed in similar ones. And I know for certain that millions of white men in my generation self-consciously patterned our speech, mannerisms, and sexual expectations after groups of men in movies like Animal House and Saturday Night Fever.
One explanation for the enduring popularity of gangster films like The Godfather, Goodfellas, and the HBO series The Sopranos is that they provide an up-close glimpse—from a safe distance—into the tensions in male culture, between loyalty to the group and the reality of cutthroat competition between its members. It is not just the violence that attracts millions of viewers, or the great storytelling and acting; these movies and programs also provide an opportunity to peer behind the curtain, to gain insight about how “real men” are supposed to act when there are no women around. Part of the appeal of these pop cultural mainstays is how the writers unmask the anxiety at the heart of male performance, including the realistic fear of violence that can simmer just beneath the surface. Journalist Nathan McCall explains in his essay collection What’s Going On that he and some of his African American male cohorts in the 1960s and 1970s learned a lot about “manhood” from watching gangster films which featured ruthless Italian men who regularly assaulted each other and treated women as little more than property. Gangsta rap in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century borrowed a lot from these cinematic portrayals. Ironically, many young suburban white men today are powerfully influenced by black urban gangsta rappers, who in turn learned about how “real men” are supposed to act from white actors in movies that were written and directed by white men.
As always there is a fine line between the best of realist fiction and actual events. Several documentary accounts of “groupthink” in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, for example, include anecdotes of highly accomplished male presidential advisers who remained silent in White House discussions about Vietnam policy rather than risk appearing “wimpy” by advocating less militaristic options. Carol Cohn, in a fascinating article about language and group dynamics among defense intellectuals entitled “Wars, Wimps, and Women: Talking Gender and Thinking War,” maintains that narrow group norms of masculine language and behavior materially influenced the group process—and ultimately, perhaps, public policy—on issues of potentially dire consequence, such as nuclear war. Numerous insider accounts of the George W. Bush administration’s push for “preventive” war in Iraq have described a clique of hypermasculine hawks—led by vice president Dick Cheney and secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld—who effectively silenced dissenting voices inside the White House and bullied opposition voices in the media.
The dynamics of particular peer cultures can determine the reactions of individual bystanders to events around them. Because I do a lot of work with male athletes, people often ask me if there is something about sports—especially contact sports—that fosters aggression toward women. Do these guys have a hard time compartmentalizing the aggression they learn on the fields and courts, and carry it over into their personal relationships? They ask the same thing about men in the military. People wonder how you can be taught to kill the enemy and not have that affect the way you interact with people in your family.
There have been some interesting psychological and anthropological studies of male subcultures that seek answers to these sorts of questions. One fascinating study by James McBride, War, Battering, and Other Sports, attempts to explore the psychic terrain that links male aggression in the sports arena and the realm of the personal. This study and others lend credibility to the popular belief that certain aspects of the training for sports or the military fuel men’s aggression toward women. But in addition to the violent characteristics of the various activities in which men are engaged (e.g., contact sports, military), it is important to examine how specific social dynamics in me
n’s peer groups support and even encourage controlling or sexually aggressive behaviors. For example, an all-white men’s college hockey team in New England and a Latino street gang in Los Angeles have starkly different day-to-day experiences, and they occupy very different social positions. But key elements of their respective group dynamics can nonetheless be strikingly similar, especially the way the masculine status hierarchy rewards violence, the way individual members self-consciously jockey for social position, and the way anxieties about their friends’ perceptions shape the way they treat and talk about women.
The vast majority of men are profoundly influenced by both the example and the expectations of the people around them. In fact, the rugged individualist man, the solitary soul who answers to no one but himself, is a myth and a prototype; he is not a real person. The influence of peers is felt both in immediate environments and in quiet moments of reflection, and it is of course both positive and negative. Peer pressure is often characterized in negative terms, but peer influence can also be positive. In fact, some cutting-edge, gender violence prevention initiatives with boys and men, in the U.S. and other parts of the world, focus on creating and rewarding young men who respect girls and who refuse to participate in sexist rituals. This is part of the rationale behind “strength” clubs in high schools and colleges developed by the D.C.-based group Men Can Stop Rape. At the University of Maine in 2005, a group called Male Athletes Against Violence produced a series of posters that feature uniformed football players and slogans like “Join the huddle. Work together to end violence.” It is unfair to always accentuate the negatives in male-peer culture without recognizing the bonding and brotherhood that takes place that is not harmful to women. Many men support and look out for each other—rather than simply cover up for each other. Some men feel obliged to intervene when they see a friend mistreat his girlfriend or wife, even when they know the conversation is bound to get awkward.