by Jackson Katz
On the other hand, sometimes men feel as if they have to participate in sexist and even violent practices in order to be accepted into the brotherhood. These practices run the spectrum from laughing at sexist jokes to participating in gang rapes. Thus some men acquiesce even when their heart is not in it, like when a high school student remains silent in the back seat of his friend’s car as his buddies shout out sexual comments to girls walking down the street, or a thirty-something professional reluctantly goes out to Hooters after work with a group of his coworkers. Many men simply learn to keep their discomfort to themselves. As the sociologist Sharon Bird argues in a 1996 article in the journal Gender and Society, emotional detachment, competitiveness, and the sexual objectification of women are often the criteria by which men judge each other. When men do not “measure up” in those terms—and many do not—they often keep their objections to themselves so as not to threaten their standing in the group.
There is a clear and disturbing illustration of this phenomenon in Nathan McCall’s gutsy memoir, Makes Me Wanna Holler (1994), where he tells an unusually self-implicating and chilling story of his participation in a gang rape when he was a teenager in the 1960s.
“Vanessa was thirteen years old and very naïve. She thought she had gone to [an older male friend’s house] just to talk with somebody she had a crush on. A bunch of the fellas hid in closets and under beds. When she stepped inside and sat down, they sprang from their hiding places and blocked the door so that she couldn’t leave. When I got there, two or three dudes were in the back room, trying to persuade her to give it up . . . Some had never even had sex before, yet they were trying to act like they knew what to do. I fronted, too. I acted like I was eager to get on Vanessa, because that’s how everyone else was acting . . . She seemed in a daze, like she couldn’t believe what was happening to her. . . . She looked so sad that I started to feel sorry for her. Something in me wanted to reach out and do what I knew was right . . . But it was too late. This was our first train together as a group. All the fellas were there and everybody was eager to show everybody else how cool and worldly he was . . . If I jumped in on Vanessa’s behalf, they would accuse me of falling in love . . . Everybody would be talking at the basketball court about how I’d caved in and got soft for a bitch. There was no way I was going to put that pressure on myself . . . After a few miserable minutes, I got up and signaled for the next man to take his turn.”
Toward the end of the book, the middle-aged McCall recounts a conversation he had in the early 1990s with his teenage son about girls, sex, and consent. He could see that his son was heavily influenced by the macho pulls of his peer culture, and he wrestled with the question of how he could tell him not to do the things he had done. “I told him about the things we did to girls while growing up,” he wrote, “and explained to him how much I regretted it now.”
I have never been a party to an overt act of violence against a woman, either alone or in a group of men. But I have played various bystander roles in sexist male culture. In fact, much of what I know about male-peer cultures—good and bad—I have learned from personal experience. I grew up in a predominantly white, blue-collar and middle-class suburban community in the late 1970s with a firmly entrenched male jockocracy in which I played a central role. Football ruled in my hometown, then as now, and I was an accomplished high school football player and three-sport varsity athlete. In college and over the past couple of decades I have put in many thousands of hours as a participant-observer doing informal research on intra-male interaction on basketball courts, in locker rooms, in bars of (nearly) every stripe, and in countless workplaces and social organizations. Thus my own intimate knowledge of the power of peer cultures in masculine socialization informs my work as an educator. In 1993, I conceived and cocreated the Mentors in Violence Prevention (MVP) program at Northeastern University’s Center for the Study of Sport in Society. The initial purpose of the program was to encourage high-status high school and college male student athletes to speak out on issues like rape, battering, teen-relationship violence, and sexual harassment. The idea was for their example to make it more socially acceptable for less popular men to speak out. The eventual goal was to foster a climate in male-peer culture whereby some men’s abusive behavior toward women would be seen by other men as socially unacceptable. While the main focus was on gender violence, MVP also addressed gay-bashing and the harassment of lesbians with the same goal: to create a climate among men where such abusive behavior was seen as intolerable. The MVP model has been well-received in the male athletic subculture and the military because, while the stated goal is to reduce gender violence, the all-male, or nearly allmale, MVP sessions also give men an opportunity to talk about some of the dynamics of their interpersonal and group interaction in a safe space. These are subjects that most men in hypermasculine, hypercompetitive environments would otherwise never dare discuss. In MVP sessions, many men share personal anecdotes about women close to them who have been assaulted. Some talk about their experiences dealing with men they know who have abused women. But a significant portion of the discussion focuses on the roles and responsibilities of men as they are positioned in groups. One of the questions that arises frequently involves the nature of men’s responsibilities to their friends, teammates, classmates, and coworkers. Why do some men interrupt other men’s sexist behaviors, while others join in or maintain a detached stance?
POLICING MECHANISMS IN MALE-PEER CULTURE
One of the key reasons that few men have been a part of the movements to end domestic and sexual violence is rooted in the concrete dynamics of male-peer culture. Men are silent about these issues because other men keep them silent. They do not want other men to challenge their sexism, so they send off a clear message to “stay out of my business.” There are also a number of internal “policing mechanisms” in male culture that are enacted by men, whether or not their conscious intent is to silence each other. The two most important of these policing mechanisms are: (1) Challenges to the manhood of men who speak out about sexism; and (2) Hostile questioning of their heterosexuality. When I ask men to recount terms they have heard—or used themselves—to describe men who vocally support gender justice or challenge other men’s sexism, they typically rattle off a number of insults: wimp, wuss, pussy-whipped, mama’s boy, soft, liberal. The implication is clear: A man who speaks out on these subjects is not a real man. He is weak. He is feminine. It also implies that since he’s like a woman he is therefore “less than” a man. (Which is also an insult to women.) In addition to these characteristics, the group nearly always comments about this man’s sexual orientation. He’s “probably gay.” “A fag.” “A homosexual.” Occasionally they will say he’s “an ally,” or a “strong man,” but these are the exceptions. For substantial numbers of men, men who challenge other men’s sexism are not “real men,” and they are consequently quite possibly gay. Neither of these assumptions stands up to logical scrutiny. But this hardly matters, because relatively few men ever discuss these tenets of traditional masculine doctrine in rational terms. I will try to do that here.
Real men don’t speak out about sexism
There is a widespread if unexamined assumption in the dominant male culture that men who publicly take the “women’s side” in the “battle between the sexes” must not be particularly strong men. But upon close inspection this assumption falls on its face. Consider this: If you are a guy, being “one of the guys” is easy. It does not take anything special. You simply go along to get along. You try your best to fit in with the group. You learn early in life to make it your business to understand the dominant gender ideology of the group, and you conform to it. This process starts in kindergarten and elementary school, when you first learn what William Pollack termed the “boy code.” As you progress through adolescence and young adulthood, you continue to pick up cues about what your fellow men expect. If men around you objectify women, tell sexist jokes, frequent strip clubs, and talk about women as if they are on
the earth to serve men in the kitchen and the bedroom, if you agree you might join in, and if you disagree you might keep your views to yourself. Either way, it takes nothing special to be “one of the guys.” On the other hand, if you are uncomfortable with the sexist attitudes or behaviors of your fellow boys or men, you have to be fairly secure and self-confident to express your opinion. It can be very difficult to challenge other men’s sexism, especially in group situations in school, on teams, in fraternities, or in maledominated workplaces. You have to be willing to risk awkward interactions and even social ostracism.
One thirty-something man I know was faced with a typical dilemma at a bachelor party for one of his friends. The party was held at someone’s apartment. There were about twenty men there, all middle-class professionals of one type or another. At some point in the night, a couple of the men arranged to have a stripper come to the apartment. As stripping culture has gone increasingly mainstream, it has become routine practice for men to hire strippers to entertain at private bachelor parties. In large portions of the country this is practically a pre-wedding ritual. Nonetheless, some men are uncomfortable with stripping due to their traditionalist sexual morality or conservative religious beliefs. Other men know that their wives or girlfriends disapprove of the practice and don’t want to risk their anger. There are also men who do not frequent strip clubs or welcome strippers at bachelor parties because they find the practice itself to be sexist and degrading—for the men as much as for the woman who is taking her clothes off.
That was the particular nature of this man’s dilemma at his friend’s party. Unlike some self-described “sex-positive” advocates—both men and women—who see strip culture as innocuous and even sexually liberating for women, he was under no illusions about the deep sexism at work. He is far from a prude, but he knew that many of his fellow party goers had condescending and even contemptuous feelings toward a woman who would show up at a party to strip naked in front of them, and give blow-jobs to guys in the back room. They might enjoy the show and get off on the oral sex, but they had no respect for her. In a perfect world, perhaps men would regard a stripper or a prostitute as a woman with a good body who had chosen a simple way to make some quick money. But in this world, a lot of guys believe that strippers and prostitutes are “skanky hoes who don’t respect themselves, so why should we respect them?”
Some of the men were drunk. Would the woman be safe? this man wondered. Private party strippers are often accompanied by male “bodyguards,” who are more than likely to be their pimps, but in this case her companion was another woman. They were Latinas; neither of them appeared to speak English. The situation was potentially dangerous. My friend wasn’t sure what to do. Should he approach the best man and the other organizers and object to the plan? Should he make it clear to his friends why he did not approve and then leave as a form of protest? How could he balance his desire to be with the guys to celebrate his friend’s upcoming wedding with his concern for the women and his own need to dissociate himself from this type of sexist ritual? In the end, he left the party shortly after the stripper arrived; but he did not make any sort of public scene. He just slipped out the door in a kind of silent protest. When he told me this story he was apologetic, as if he had somehow failed to live up to his image of himself as a man who had the courage of his convictions.
Let’s return to the popular assumption that men who are uncomfortable with sexism are less than fully masculine. This assumption is in conflict with the long-standing belief in patriarchal culture that it is more “manly” to take a stand for what is right than to blindly follow the majority. Is my friend a wimp because he refused to take part in a sexist event? Because in a sense he refused to be a follower? It is sadly ironic that men who decline to participate in sexist practices—or who muster the courage to confront other men—are called wimps, when they actually have to be stronger than the men who belittle them.
He must be gay
Men who challenge other men’s sexism are sure to face questions about their heterosexuality. I hear those questions all the time. Just recently I was told by a man that when he informed a colleague that he was planning to attend one of my trainings, the first thing she said was “Is he gay?” After a speech I gave about men’s violence against women at a college in the Midwest, a man raised his hand and said sheepishly, “Please don’t take this the wrong way, but I notice you speak with a slight lisp. Do you think people might get the impression that you’re gay?” The question caught me a little off guard. Was he trying to mask his own curiosity by referencing other people’s impressions? Rather than come right out and say I was heterosexual, I decided to evade the question and at the same time question his premise. As I had been thinking about how to respond, I had noticed that the man’s legs were crossed knee to knee. “I noticed that you cross your legs like a woman,” I said with no hint (I think) of the sarcasm I was feeling. “Do you think people might get the impression that you are gay?” He did not respond.
An incident one night in 1990 provided me with an entirely new perspective on the stereotype that anti-sexist men must be gay. It was during a protest that I helped organize about an appearance by the misogynist comedian Andrew “Dice” Clay at the Centrum in Worcester, Massachusetts. Dice Clay at the time was a phenomenally successful comic at the height of his popularity. Verbally abusive talk radio “shock jocks” have proliferated since the early 1990s, along with misogynistic rappers like Eminem and Snoop Dogg, so Dice Clay’s brand of attack humor has lost some of its shock value. But at the time he made quite a splash with his comic persona as a tough, blue-collar white guy from Brooklyn, who wears a black leather jacket, smokes cigarettes, and verbally attacks women in the angriest and crudest sexual language imaginable. His comedy CDs are still available in most record stores and online, and to this day he regularly performs in Las Vegas casinos. For people who are unfamiliar with his work, Dice Clay draws laughs from his largely (but not exclusively) male audience not so much because of the depth of his comedic insights, but because he dares to express some of men’s basest misogynistic impulses. His routines are filled with references to “sluts” and “dish-rag whores” who he regularly “bangs” and tells to “shut the fuck up.” In one of his signature comedic bits he takes classic nursery rhymes and changes the words:
Hickory dickory dock
Your wife was sucking my cock
The clock struck two
I dropped my goo
I kicked the bitch down the fucking block.
The purpose of the peaceful protest was not to deny Dice Clay his First Amendment right to commit offensive speech; it was to call attention to the connection between attitudes shaped in popular culture and the ongoing crisis of domestic and sexual violence. Men are not born genetically programmed to assault women; most abusive behavior is learned. If it is learned, it is also taught, and one key area where abusive masculinity is taught is the popular culture. As activists, we wanted to turn the media spotlight away from the entertainment focus (“Shock comedian pushes the envelope”) and expose the political nature of an Andrew “Dice” Clay show. What was political about this comedy show? Consider this: At the time, battered women’s programs in Massachusetts had to turn away thousands of women and children each year due to a shortage of shelter space. And yet here was a comedian who was set to make hundreds of thousands of dollars for an act where he verbally assaulted and sexually degraded women in front of thousands of cheering men at the sold-out Centrum two nights in a row. At the very least the protest would call attention to the skewed value system in our “free” society.
As we carried our homemade picket signs outside the arena, some of the young men on their way into the show shouted and taunted us. Some were clearly drunk. “Fucking fags!” “Fucking homos!” are among the more articulate epithets I can recall. After I heard that screamed for the umpteenth time, I finally realized its significance. Those guys were saying, in essence, that because we care about women, we must want
to have sex with men. At one point I was holding a sign that read, “Love women, don’t hate them.” It was a rather prosaic slogan. A man walking into the concert saw my sign and stopped about ten steps away. He made a contemptuous face at me and shouted, “I hate women, you faggot!” It was an unintentionally revealing pronouncement. What does it mean that large numbers of people—men and women—question a man’s heterosexuality if he is overly concerned about men’s violence against women? Most importantly, what does it say about their expectations of heterosexual men? If a man has to be gay to care about women, then heterosexual men must not care about women. At the very least, this sends a powerful message to homophobic heterosexual men that they better not publicly admit their concern. Homophobia thus plays a powerful role in keeping heterosexual men from challenging male power and privilege. This will continue as long as homosexuality is stigmatized, and as long as being gay puts men at risk of violence from other men. Many insecure men will predictably conclude that it is better to suffer other men’s sexist treatment of women in silence than to run the risk of having someone think they might be gay.