by Jackson Katz
It is clear to me that many high school and college students are eager to understand not only how media contributes to our society’s violence pandemic but how they can be part of the effort to counteract it. Many sexual-assault and teen-relationship-abuse educators use Tough Guise in their trainings. They use it to provide insight and spark dialogue among young women and men about the relationship between cultural definitions of manhood and the way some men treat women. Many of these programs use other educational videos, such as Jean Kilbourne’s Killing Us Softly 3, to study images of women in advertising and to examine questions about cultural definitions of womanhood and how they influence girls and women. One of the first educational videos to look explicitly at the relationship between media images and sexual violence is Sut Jhally’s Dreamworlds, which is about the sexual objectification of women on MTV. Jhally, a professor of communication at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, initially produced Dreamworlds with a tiny budget to educate his students. But the response was so overwhelming that he decided to create the Media Education Foundation, a Northampton, Massachusetts-based non-profit organization that produces dozens of educational videos—many on gender and media-related themes—that are used in college and high school classes across this country, and other parts of the world.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
More Than a Few Good Men
“As long as we take the view that these are problems for women alone to solve, we cannot expect to reverse the high incidence of rape and child abuse . . . and domestic violence. We do know that many men do not abuse women and children; and that they strive always to live with respect and dignity. But until today the collective voice of these men has never been heard, because the issue has not been regarded as one for the whole nation. From today those who inflict violence on others will know they are being isolated and cannot count on other men to protect them. From now on all men will hear the call to assume their responsibility for solving this problem.”
—President Nelson Mandela, 1997, National Men’s March, Pretoria, South Africa
Since the very beginning of the women-led movements against domestic and sexual violence in the 1970s, there have been men who personally, professionally, and politically supported the work of those women. In addition, over the past several decades there have been repeated attempts by men to create organizations and targeted initiatives to address men’s roles in ending men’s violence against women. Some of the early efforts were undertaken by groups of concerned men who responded to the challenge from women’s organizations to educate, politicize, and organize other men. Some of these men chose to volunteer in supportive roles with local rape crisis centers or battered women’s programs. Others contributed to the development of the fledgling batterer intervention movement in the late 1970s and 1980s. Some of the better known programs for batterers were Emerge in Cambridge, Massachusetts; RAVEN (Rape and Violence End Now) in St. Louis, Missouri; and Men Stopping Violence in Atlanta, Georgia. Still other men created political and activist educational organizations, like the National Organization for Men Against Sexism (NOMAS), which has held “Men and Masculinity” conferences annually since 1975; the Oakland Men’s Project in the San Francisco Bay Area; Men Stopping Rape in Madison, Wisconsin; DC Men Against Rape; and Real Men, an anti-sexist men’s organization I co-founded in Boston in 1988.
The rapidly growing field of “men’s work” also produced community centers that combine batterer-intervention and counseling services for men with educational outreach and social activism. One of the groundbreaking programs in this field is the Men’s Resource Center of Western Massachusetts, founded in Amherst in 1982. In the 1990s anti-sexist men’s initiatives in the U.S. and around the world increased dramatically. One of the most visible has been the White Ribbon Campaign, an activist educational campaign founded by a group of men in Canada in 1991. They started the WRC in response to a horrific incident on December 6, 1989, at the University of Montreal, where an armed twenty-five-year-old man walked into a classroom, separated the women from the men and proceeded to shoot the women. Before he finished his rampage, he had murdered fourteen women in cold blood—and shaken up an entire country. The significance of the white ribbon—which has been adopted on hundreds of college campuses and communities in the U.S. as well as a number of other countries—is that men wear it to make a visible and public pledge “never to commit, condone, nor remain silent about violence against women.”
Despite these notable efforts over the past thirty years, the movement of men committed to ending men’s violence against women has only recently picked up significant momentum. There are more men doing this work in the United States and around the world than ever before. Halfway through the first decade of the twenty-first century there is reason for optimism, especially about the emergence of a new generation of anti-sexist men. But there are nowhere near enough men yet involved to make a serious dent in this enormous problem. Several key challenges lie ahead:
• How to increase dramatically the number of men who make these issues a priority in their personal and professional lives
• How to expand the existing infrastructure of men’s anti-rape and domestic violence prevention groups, and other campus and community-based initiatives
• How to institutionalize gender violence prevention education at every level of the educational system
• How to build multiracial and multiethnic coalitions that unite men across differences around their shared concerns about sexist violence and the sexual exploitation of children
• How to insure that federal, state, and local funding for efforts to reduce gender violence are maintained and expanded in the coming years
• And finally, how to make it socially acceptable—even cool—for men to become vocal and public allies of women in the struggle against all forms of men’s violence against women and children
A “BIG TENT” APPROACH
As I have made clear in this book, there is much that we can do to prevent men’s violence against women—if we find the collective will in male culture to make it a priority. I am convinced that millions of men in our society are deeply concerned about the abuse, harassment, and violence we see—and fear—in the lives of our daughters, mothers, sisters, and lovers. In fact, a recent poll conducted for Lifetime Television found that 57 percent of men aged sixteen to twenty-four believe gender violence is an “extremely serious” problem. A 2000 poll conducted by the Family Violence Prevention Fund found that one-quarter of men would do more about the issue if they were asked. And some compelling social norms research on college campuses suggests that one of the most significant factors in a man’s decision to intervene in an incident is his perception of how other men would act in a similar situation. Clearly, a lot of men are uncomfortable with other men’s abusive behaviors, but they have not figured out what to do about it—or have not yet mustered the courage to act on their own. So there is great potential to increase dramatically the number of men who commit personal time, money, and institutional clout to the effort to reduce men’s violence against women. But in order to achieve this we need to think outside the box about how to reach into the mainstream of male culture and social power.
One promising approach employs elements of what might be called “big tent” movement building. The big tent concept comes from politics, where it has been used most famously to describe efforts to unite various constituencies and single-issue special-interest groups under the Republican Party label. A number of questions arise when this concept is applied to gender violence prevention: How do we attract individuals and organizations not known for their advocacy of the issues of men’s violence? What are some of the necessary compromises required in order to broaden the coalition of participating individuals and groups? What are some of the costs and benefits of engaging new partners, who might not have the depth of experience or the ideological affinities of the majority of women and men currently in the movement?
Growing pains always accomp
any growth. A bigger movement will inevitably create new conflicts. One way to think about the question of broadening the base of the movement is to consider the concept embodied in the geometric model of the Venn diagram. The Venn diagram captures the idea that coalition building involves identifying shared objectives between groups with different interests, not creating a perfect union between fully compatible partners. The diagram consists of two overlapping circles. In this case we might say that one circle represents the needs and interests of the battered women’s and rape crisis movements. The other circle represents any men’s organization that has not historically been part of these movements. Clearly, there are large areas where the circles do not overlap. But the big tent approach does not dwell on the areas of disconnection. It focuses on the center area, where there are points of agreement and shared objectives. If individuals and groups of men and women can agree that reducing men’s violence against women is an urgent objective, then perhaps they can agree for the moment to table their other differences.
CHALLENGES
There are obvious downsides to incautiously expanding the big tent. Take, for example, the costs and benefits of working with men in the sports culture. Many women in domestic and sexual violence advocacy have long seen the benefit to partnering with athletic teams or utilizing high-profile male athletes in public service campaigns. But some of these same women worry about the potential risks inherent in such collaboration. They fear that a male athlete who speaks out publicly against men’s violence could undermine the integrity of the movement if his private behavior does not match his public rhetoric. Happily, in recent years this fear has begun to dissipate as more male athletes speak out, in part because with increased men’s participation there is less pressure on any one man to be the “perfect” poster child for anti-violence efforts. We can also never lose sight of the fact that professional sports teams are not social justice organizations. They are businesses that sometimes have huge investments in players. Say a team takes a public stand against men’s violence, and then at some point one of its star players is arrested for domestic violence or sexual assault. Is the team likely to respond based on what they think is best for the community, or for their own bottom line?
The participation of faith-based organizations in the big tent presents significant opportunities, but comes with its own unique set of challenges. As the Rev. Dr. Marie Fortune, a pioneer in the movements against domestic and sexual violence and founder of the FaithTrust Institute in Seattle, Washington, points out, “Millions of men participate in faith-based communities whose leaders, often male, typically enjoy significant moral authority and shape in important ways the values and behaviors of men in their congregations.” There are male clergy in every denomination who are strong allies of women in the domestic and sexual violence prevention movements. But many clergy and religious leaders have received no training on the issue of men’s violence against women. To this day many male clergy are reluctant to take strong public stands on issues of sexual and domestic violence. What further complicates matters is that many religious traditions have “reflected and reinforced,” in the words of Rev. Fortune, “patriarchal values that have been at the core of violence against women.” But perhaps even more troubling are the clergy sex abuse scandals that have become routine in recent years. It is plain to see that even men with impeccable religious credentials can be private hypocrites.
The participation of faith-based organizations in gender violence prevention also raises the question of how much ideological incompatibility is tolerable in the quest for big tent inclusiveness. Can feminist religious and secular leaders work in coalition with religious leaders who have resisted the advancement of women in the family and the pulpit? Can progressive religious and secular leaders who support full sexual equality work side by side with religious leaders who oppose gay civil rights?
Similar questions arise about an organization like the Boy Scouts. Scouting plays an important role in the lives of millions of boys and adolescent males. Many local Boy Scout chapters have participated in events of domestic violence and sexual assault awareness month. But if the Scouts went a step further and made participation in gender violence prevention a major nationwide organizational goal, they could have a tremendous impact, especially since the Scouts have a presence in many communities where there is currently little male participation in domestic and sexual violence programs. But many progressive organizations refuse to work with the Boy Scouts because their official policy discriminates against openly gay scouts and scoutmasters. Does their anti-gay stance make the Boy Scouts an unacceptable coalition partner in the struggle against teen-relationship abuse and sexual assault?
Until now most men in the movement to end men’s violence against women have been pro-feminist and politically liberal or progressive. But this does not preclude them from framing one aspect of the gender-violence issue in language about crime and punishment that resonates with conservatives. In fact, many politically conservative men have played an important role in this fight—particularly men in law enforcement, the military, and government. After all, domestic and sexual violence are more than social problems; they are crimes. Nonetheless, millions of abusive men continue to receive suspended sentences, probation, and other light penalties, which signals that their crimes are not taken seriously. In order to be effective, decisive action is required by police, prosecutors, and judges. The goal of punishment is to send the message to would-be perps that the price for transgression is steep. Conservative as well as progressive men who take the idea of personal responsibility seriously should support policies that hold lawbreakers accountable, and advocacy that strengthens the community’s desire to do so. But a criminal justice approach is also fraught with potential problems. For one thing, there are not enough jail cells to house all the men who could be prosecuted for domestic and sexual violence. As I have discussed, class bias and racism are factors in any discussion about the criminal justice system. Efforts to attract conservative men’s support by emphasizing a law enforcement approach might exact too high a cost—and jeopardize the increased participation of people of color who are concerned about both gender violence and the over-representation of men in color in the “prison industrial complex.” In addition, since most gender violence—including the vast majority of rape—is currently not reported, it is questionable how effective a criminal justice approach can be.
MEN AND WOMEN
The special challenge of gender violence prevention politics is that women’s trust of men is not a given. Some women are understandably wary of men’s motivations and skeptical about their commitment to gender justice. As increasing numbers of men get involved, they worry that men might try to “take over” the movement, or take it in a direction that suits men’s needs rather than women’s. Women are always eager to see whether men “walk their talk.” For example, an administrator in a domestic-violence agency recently told me about a talented young man who had applied for a youth outreach position. He seemed to know the issues really well, she explained, and he grasped some of the subtle racial and ethnic issues involved in this work. He also had an engaging personal style. But he had not yet mastered the “micro-politics” of how to interact with women in positions of leadership. He often cut off women co-presenters, or talked over them in an effort to prove his knowledge. Was it worth the risk of hiring him?
For their part, some men are well-meaning but oblivious to the sensitivities required for effective inter-gender collaboration on an issue where women have historically been the leaders. For example, I have heard stories too many times about earnest young men on college campuses who were inspired to start anti-rape groups, but neglected first to check in with women who were already engaged in rape prevention work, like the director of the campus women’s center. These sorts of political missteps can cause unnecessary tension and discord at the earliest stages and can undermine successful coalition-building.
Even so, there are numerous examples acro
ss the country of men and women working together to create and sustain sexual and domestic violence prevention initiatives. In fact, many successful college men’s antiviolence programs have actually been started by women. Among the more well-known are Men Against Violence at Louisiana State University, begun by Dr. Luoluo Hong, and the Fraternity Anti-Violence Education Project at West Chester University in Pennsylvania, led by Dr. Deborah Mahlstedt.
WHAT CAN MEN DO?
At a small state college in the Northeast, a controversy erupted in early 2005 when the editors of the student newspaper distributed a sex survey across campus that included a question about which professor on campus they would most like to “get it on with.” The person chosen was the coordinator of the women’s studies program, who responded with a lengthy letter to the editor in which she wrote that it was “offensive and hurtful” to be disrespected by students in this way, and as a professional it undermined her ability to do her job. In her letter she posed a number of questions for an alternative survey, including one to men which asked, “What are you willing to do to help reduce rape and sexual assault among college students?” In response, a male columnist for the student newspaper wrote dismissively: “I will not rape anyone. Is there anything more I should add to this?” The student’s response might have been glib and a bit obnoxious, but he spoke for a lot of men. Many of them have never even considered the wide range of choices men have to reduce rape and sexual assault, and every other type of gender violence. What follows is a brief discussion about how men can be effective anti-sexist agents, both as individuals and in their various public and private leadership roles within institutions.