by Jackson Katz
People who love pro wrestling defend all of this by claiming that it is fantasy and harmless entertainment—and if you don’t like it, don’t watch. But what does it mean when stadiums around the country are filled with young men cheering and laughing at the staged humiliation and abuse of women? What does it mean that millions of boys and men are entertained by scenes of bullying and ritualized sexual degradation? How realistic is it that boys who are immersed in pro wrestling’s cartoonish world of brutish male thugs and compliant female sex objects can switch all of that off and relate to their female (and male) peers in a spirit of equality and mutual respect? It is clear that the WWE sets up girls and women to be little more than compliant victims. But it also sets up boys and men either to be abusers and rapists—or to think like them.
BULLIES WITH A MICROPHONE: HOWARD STERN, TOM LEYKIS, AND RUSH LIMBAUGH
Howard Stern
I understand why Howard Stern is such a popular radio talk show host, especially with his core demographic of eighteen- to forty-nine-year-old white men. He is an undeniably talented radio personality with a fertile creative mind and a great voice. He is a gifted conversationalist. And he is more willing than perhaps anyone in the history of mainstream media to puncture the pretensions of pompous celebrity culture. He talks about sex all the time. He surrounds himself with beautiful young women who are eager to take their clothes off for him and his cohorts. He can also be charming, likable, decent, and funny. One of his winning personality characteristics is his selfdeprecation, combined with refreshing bluntness. He constantly refers to his own geeky looks, and does not hesitate to say that he has a small penis. He scores points for his honesty, especially because there is not nearly enough public honesty in modern public discourse—especially from men.
And he is also a first-rate bully. His relentless verbal aggression does far more than just expose the numerous hypocrisies of the rich and famous. Stern seeks out and destroys a variety of human targets, but his specialty—and a good part of the reason for his popularity with men—is his sexual bullying of women. He constantly belittles, ridicules, and provokes women—often young, surgically enhanced, and desperate to please men—to degrade themselves sexually for their moment of fame. He regularly makes jokes about people’s pain. One of the most well-known aspects of his popularity—at least according to many of his fans—is his eagerness to say things other men might think but would never dare say out loud. Many of these involve deeply misogynistic feelings. One infamous example is what he said on air shortly after the Columbine massacre in 1999. Talking about the murderers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, he expressed his disapproval that they did not rape some girls before they killed them. “There were some really good-looking girls running out with their hands over their heads. Did those kids try to have sex with any of the good-looking girls? They didn’t even do that? At least if you’re gonna kill yourself and kill all the kids, why wouldn’t you have some sex? If I was going to kill some people, I’d take them out with sex.”
But if Stern is such an abusive person, why is he so popular? We know from research on schoolyard bullies over the past twenty years that they are often popular, talented kids. This does not excuse their abusive behavior; it merely complicates the traditional image of the bully as an unattractive, unloved brute. Just as many people like Eminem, not in spite of his bullying personality but in part because of it, Stern draws legions of male fans that are attracted to his aggressive style and his callous disregard for people’s feelings.
Sometimes when I tune in to Stern’s radio program, my mind flashes to a moment in the late 1970s when I was a junior in high school and witnessed an incident that is etched in my memory. It was in the school cafeteria. A group of senior boys had secured a table next to the end of the food line. As girls took their trays and headed out to find a table, the boys held up placards numbered one through ten. They hooted and laughed as they rated the girls on their bodies and looks. I did not speak to any of the girls, but I imagine many of them must have felt humiliated and angry at being judged this way. My guess is that some of the boys who participated did not even pause to think how the girls might feel. At the time of this incident I was hardly a feminist thinker; I was a product of the same social environment that produced those boys. But while this event had an impact on me, and I still remember it vividly several decades later, girls and women have to live with boys’ and men’s often cruel judgments about how attractive they are every single day.
Despite the women’s movement and the enormous changes in women’s lives over the past several decades—especially middle-class women’s lives—this sort of abusive ritual is still enacted by boys in middle schools and high schools across the country. Only now, the boys are more likely to get in trouble for it, due in large measure to the passage of sexual-harassment laws that deem such behavior as constituting a “hostile environment” that denies girls equal educational access. But while the laws have changed, other parts of the culture are actually worse than before. In fact, due to the power and reach of mass media, millions of boys and men are in a sense brought into that cafeteria to witness such spectacles on a regular basis.
For example, one of the regular bits on the Howard Stern Show features women in skimpy outfits who line up in front of a panel of male judges and prepare to disrobe. They are often strippers, prostitutes, and porn stars, or young women in their late teens or early twenties who aspire to those professions. Either individually or sometimes in a group, the women strip off their clothes as the men comment on their weight, face, and breast size and shape. It is as if the women are African slaves on the auction block, and the men are plantation owners who have to decide which one has the right body for the work they will be forced to do. The judges are typically average-looking Stern sidekicks, but sometimes include oddball characters like an openly drunk and physically disabled alcoholic in his late thirties who angrily calls the women “bitches,” or developmentally disabled adult men who are there presumably to be laughed at when they say unpredictable things.
Fans of Stern would no doubt maintain that unlike the cafeteria incident, no one forces the women on his show to subject themselves to this humiliation. They are typically young women who are eager for the exposure on national radio and TV (the cable television channel E! carries Stern’s radio program daily). But regardless of the motivation of the women, one has to wonder about the effect on boys and men of watching repeated displays of men making critical and sometimes cruel comments about women’s bodies—and everybody laughing it off. Men who make openly sexual comments to women who walk by on the streets—and in other public spaces like sports arenas, bars, and clubs—often insist that “women like that sort of attention.” Is it possible that some men believe this because in the pornographic era, they are constantly presented with images of women who willingly participate in their own subordination?
In addition, one effect of Stern’s ubiquitous media presence is that he has become an iconic figure in certain parts of male culture. In a sense he is the focal point and preeminent role model for millions of boys and men who listen to his show and are drawn into the electronic community it creates. Like other radio programs such as the Don Imus Show, and television programs like Fox Sports’s the Best Damn Sports Show Period, Stern’s program includes several men (and one woman) who are nearly always with him in studio, “shooting the shit,” and helping to give the listener the impression that he (or she) is part of an extended “in” group of friends. As such, the norms that are established in that studio have wide influence in male culture. How wide? In 2004 Stern signed a five-year contract for $500 million with the satellite radio service Sirius, where Stern’s misogyny and pornographic imagination will not be bound by the strictures of FCC regulation.
Tom Leykis
If “incitement to rape” is ever made into a crime, the Los Angeles-based talk radio host Tom Leykis would make a great candidate for the first man to be prosecuted. The Tom Leykis program makes the Howard St
ern Show sound like a feminist seminar. Leykis, who is number one in his time slot with males in LA, routinely calls women “bitches,” “whores,” and “sluts.” The overweight “shock jock” routinely makes demeaning statements like “Fat chicks serve a purpose—poor guys need love,” and instructs young men to stay away from women over thirty because they are dried up, needy, and desperate for attention. He has told countless women callers over the age of thirty that they have passed their “expiration date.” As a man approaching fifty who has been married and divorced four times, he brags about dating very young women, using them, and dumping them the minute they place any sort of demand on him. He got a burst of national attention during the Kobe Bryant rape trial, when he was the first prominent media person to unapologetically mention on air the name of Bryant’s alleged victim—whom he angrily denounced as a “lying slut.” (Most media outlets withhold the names of alleged sexual-assault victims out of respect for their privacy and concern that unwanted publicity could further traumatize them.) And he got tons of free media coverage in Canada in 2003 when he offered to donate $50,000 to charity if a woman newscaster in Vancouver agreed to bare her breasts and let him autograph them (she declined).
Leykis’s misogyny is so extreme and over the top that an unsuspecting listener who comes across his program on their radio dial might believe that he is a satirist who parodies the worst aspects of traditional masculinity. But he always stays in character, and his listeners generally accept his pronouncements as authentic. One promotion for his show referred to the sexual-harassment allegations against the TV game show host Bob Barker. “He’s seventy years old and sexually harassing twenty-year-olds,” he said. “He’s my hero!” It is important to remember that this sort of talk is not on some restricted access porn channel. The Tom Leykis Show is distributed by Westwood One radio network and is syndicated in sixty markets that include San Francisco, Dallas, Seattle, and Detroit. And as Ann Simonton, the founder of Media Watch, points out, it is often broadcast in afternoon time slots when children are listening.
One of the most popular features on his show is a recurring segment entitled “Leykis 101,” where “Professor Leykis” dispenses advice to young men about their relationships with women. It is really a how-to for young, horny men about how they can get laid, because in the “relationships” that Leykis promotes, women are basically there to service a man’s sexual needs and little else. He tells men never to spend more than forty dollars on a date, to dump a “chick” if she hasn’t “put out” by the third date, and to resist any sort of emotional attachment, which can only end badly. It gets worse. On the air he has repeatedly called women “sperm depositories” and “human urinals.” In Leykis’s universe, women are “scheming bitches” who only want a man’s money and maybe a father for their children, and men are perpetual adolescents who only want sex without commitment, and maybe someone to cook dinner for them. He says all of this with calm certitude, as if he is merely stating the truth. When women call to challenge him, he typically tries to discredit them by stating outright that they must be unattractive or “over thirty.” If they persist in their position that his show promotes harmful and demeaning stereotypes of women, he simply tells them that he speaks for men and his show’s popularity speaks for itself. On the rare occasion when a male caller takes issue with him, he attempts to discredit him with the charge that he has been “pussified,” or allowed a woman too much influence on his life.
One of the most disturbing aspects of his show is the steady stream of female callers who not only excuse his woman-hating rants but actually affirm them. On one show in 2005, a number of women called to say they like it when guys “throw them up against walls,” tell them to shut up, and don’t ask what they want sexually but just do what the men want. It is sad to think that young male listeners might actually take all of this to heart and treat women sexually with contempt because “that’s what girls want.”
On one representative show in 2005, Leykis asked his callers for stories about “dialing while drunk.” One young man recounted a story about a time when he was drunk and called his ex-girlfriend. It is possible that she already had a restraining order against him, because according to the guy, his ex recorded the conversation, and he was subsequently convicted of threatening her, for which he spent a year in jail. The spirit of his call was to warn that guys have to be careful when they are drunk and pick up a phone, because they can get themselves in serious trouble. Leykis did not chastise the man for his threatening behavior. He betrayed no hint of empathy for women who are on the receiving end of harassing phone calls from men, no acknowledgment that men stalking women is a big problem in the U.S., or that alcohol is correlated with all sorts of violent behaviors.
But this is positively benign compared to what he did on a show in 2000. In what has to be counted as one of the lowest moments in the history of talk radio, Leykis devoted an extended segment to a discussion of how men could use women’s sexual abuse histories as a manipulative trick to get them into bed. The segment started with Leykis reading letters from male listeners who say women who have been sexually molested “put out” more. He used that as a stepping-off point to talk about the ethics of men doing whatever it takes to get laid. At one point, he had a female caller on the line who tried to argue that using a woman’s weakness in order to get laid is like playing on a child’s innocence in order to molest them. Leykis disagreed, arguing that:
“All men do it . . . we find different weaknesses. Sometimes, we find out you have a weakness to, uh, have a couple of drinks and then you get, uh, kind of loose. Sometimes, we find out that you like to smoke pot and we get you stoned. Sometimes, we find out that you have a weakness for money so we take you out and we spend a lot of money on you and then, uh, you’ll bend over for us . . . We find out all kinds of weaknesses you have and that’s how we get in.”
The female caller asked if he thought this was a little cruel. He denied it. “I mean, men want to get laid,” he said. “We’re not here to . . . to . . . to get to know you.” If a man finds out a woman has been molested, Leykis continued, “You’re more likely to put out. You’re more likely to be good in bed. That’s what guys are saying.” When the woman continued to insist that it is cruel to exploit a woman’s problems in this way, Leykis did not budge from his position. “It seems horrible but I don’t think it’s as horrible as it seems.”
Before he became an unapologetic sexist and sexual bully on the airwaves, Tom Leykis used to host a political talk show from a liberal perspective. But in the mid 1990s when his career fortunes were sagging, he made the decision to copy the lucrative formula pioneered by Howard Stern, which combined sexually explicit talk with ugly and aggressive advocacy from the so-called “men’s perspective.” Like the Howard Stern Show, the Tom Leykis Show derives much of its influence from the claims of its host and fans that it speaks for all men. That leaves men who love and respect women and believe in equality between the sexes with a clear choice. Unless these men make their voices heard in public and private, the Sterns and Leykises of the world will continue to speak for men, and thus do a major disservice to countless women who have learned not to expect more from the other sex. They will also continue to do a disservice to countless men who, I am convinced, want intimacy and connection—along with sexual pleasure—from women as well as other men; but they will never find it by following the advice of cynical manipulators like Stern and Leykis.
Rush Limbaugh
I would suspect that most of Rush Limbaugh’s fans would not be pleased to see his name on a list of radio personalities who contribute to rape culture—especially when the list includes the likes of Howard Stern and Tom Leykis. Limbaugh is certainly not as crude and openly misogynistic as those two. But he merits inclusion on a list of talk-radio personalities who support a rape culture on the sole basis of his relentless attacks on feminists. People can legitimately differ with positions feminists take on various issues. In fact, there is often healthy debate
and disagreement between feminists. But Limbaugh does not simply express disagreement with feminists; he routinely ridicules and personally insults them. That is, he routinely demeans the very people who created and sustain the anti-rape movement. Let’s be clear. There would be no rape crisis centers—or battered women’s programs—without them. Millions of women and children would not be protected by the laws feminists helped write and enact over the past generation. Rape within marriage would still be legal. Without feminists there would be virtually no anti-rape education in the schools. So when Limbaugh stigmatizes feminists by calling them names like “feminazi,” he is attacking those women who have been most successful in the fight against rape. This indirectly helps foster a rape culture to the extent that it weakens its most effective opponents.
But in addition to his attacks on the leaders of the anti-rape movement, Limbaugh’s comments about the Abu Ghraib prison torture scandal that broke in 2004 were textbook examples of “rape-supportive” attitudes. When news reports confirmed that United States Army personnel had abused Iraqi prisoners with torture techniques that included sexual humiliation, threats of rape, forcing male detainees to masturbate while being photographed and videotaped, forcing naked male detainees to wear women’s underwear, and arranging naked male detainees in a pile and then jumping on them, Limbaugh used his highly influential radio forum to minimize the abuse and undermine the legitimacy of Americans who were outraged that such abuses took place in their name. In fact, Limbaugh made a series of statements that “downplayed, dismissed, and even endorsed” Iraqi prisoner abuse, according to the liberal watchdog website Media Matters for America. For example, Limbaugh said that Pfc. Lynndie England and other accused soldiers were engaging in acts that he compared to hazing and fraternity pranks, “Sort of that kind of fun.” He compared the chilling pictures of naked Iraqi men stacked on top of each other to “good old American pornography,” and claimed that the soldiers had just been “blowing off steam.” Furthermore, he asserted that the reaction to the “stupid torture” is an example of the “feminization of this country.”