by Jackson Katz
76 Orwellian quality of the term “male-basher”: See George Orwell’s famous 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language.”
76 I Am the Central Park Jogger: A Story of Hope and Possibility: Trisha Meili, New York: Scribners, 2003.
76 Amber’s Frey’s memoir: Witness: For the Prosecution of Scott Peterson, by Amber Frey, New York: Regan Books, 2005.
76 They would betray their fellow men in an effort to be “politically correct”: The term “politically incorrect” has been used by the right and some liberals to ridicule men, white people, and heterosexuals who struggle to be fair and egalitarian and not exercise illegitimate privilege through language—or any other way. For an illuminating discussion of the linguistic politics of the term “politically correct,” see Lakoff, 2000.
78 In almost every category they are its primary victims: A prime example of how men and boys are both the victims and perpetrators of most violent crime is prison rape. The subject of prison rape has only recently emerged from the shadows and entered the public discourse, however tentatively. Dostoevsky wrote that the degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons. If so, our civilization in many respects is terribly callous and cruel; one measure of this is the routine incidence of sexual violence in prison that is tolerated by the authorities and continues to fly under the radar of public outrage. For some chilling insights into the pervasiveness of prison rape see the website of the organization Stop Prisoner Rape: www.spr.org.
79 The feminist newsjournal Off Our Backs: Volume XXXIV, nos. 9, 10, September–October, 2004.
82 Men’s Health magazine ran a feature: The September 2000 article was entitled “The Best and Worst Campuses for Men.” Men’s Health was widely criticized for this article; not long after it was published the editor in chief was replaced.
85 Who Stole Feminism?: Christina Hoff Sommers, New York: Touchstone Books, 1994.
85 A number of other conservative women, including Ann Coulter and Laura Schlesinger: It is hard to know whether Coulter truly believes many of the silly things she says and writes. But it is undeniable that she is popular with many conservative men, who enjoy hearing a putatively educated, assertive woman verbally assault feminists, like when she wrote in Slander: Liberal Lies about the American Right, that Gloria Steinem is a “deeply ridiculous figure.”
86 Camille Paglia writes that a lot of battered women stay in abusive relationships: Here is more of what she wrote in an essay entitled “The Rape Debate, Continued,” in her 1992 book Sex, Art, and American Culture: “Feminists have no idea that some women like to flirt with danger because there is a sizzle in it. You know what gets me sick and tired? The battered-woman motif. It’s so misinterpreted, the way we have to constantly look at it in terms of male oppression and tyranny, and female victimization. When, in fact, everyone knows throughout the world that many of these workingclass relationships where women get beat up have hot sex. They ask why won’t she leave him? Maybe she won’t leave him because the sex is very hot. I say we should start looking at the battered-wife motif in terms of sex. If gay men go down to bars and like to get tied up, beaten up, and have their asses whipped, how come we can’t allow that a lot of wives like the kind of sex they are getting in these battered-wife relationships? We can’t consider that women might have kinky tastes, can we?” p. 65.
86 The War Against Boys: See Sommers, 2000.
CHAPTER 6: STUCK IN (GENDER) NEUTRAL
91 “The young Jonesboro suspect’s stated motive: Christian Science Monitor, April 2, 1998. Dr. Yllo is a sociologist and prominent domestic violence researcher.
93 In the late 1970s, the pioneering legal theorist Catherine MacKinno: See MacKinnon, 1979.
93 Against Our Will: See Brownmiller, 1975.
93 The Politics of Rape: See Russell, 1975.
95 Reagan’s first budget included plans to dramatically cut federal funds: For background on the rise of Reaganism and the New Right and how the conservative movement regarded the early domestic violence movement, see Pleck, 1987, pp.196–198.
99 Raising Cain: See Kindlon, Dan and Thompson, Michael, 1999.
102 The Puerto Rican Day Central Park rampage: Portions of this section were previously published in the Los Angeles Times on June 25, 2005 in an op-ed article I co-authored with Sut Jhally entitled “Put the Blame Where it Belongs: On Men.”
108 Rape in the Military: Female Troops Deserve Much Better: USA Today, February 5, 2004.
109 Take the infamous Janet Jackson-Justin Timberlake performance: For a detailed discussion of this major pop-culture event, see Wenner, 2004.
110 The novelist Andrew Vachss makes a related point: See Vachss, 2005.
CHAPTER 7: BYSTANDERS
113 John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men: Thanks to Michael Kimmel for this quote, from Manhood in America.
115 The movie was loosely based on an infamous real-life incident: The gang-rape victim in the Big Dan’s case was a twenty-one-year-old single mother of two. According to several eyewitnesses, she ran into the middle of the street—naked from the waist down—with a look that one man described as“the most scared he had ever seen a human being ever.” Four men—Portuguese immigrants—were convicted of raping her in a highly publicized case that according to some accounts exacerbated tensions in the Portuguese community between recent immigrants and longstanding members of the community. Even more tragically, the victim was ostracized from the community and moved to Florida, where a few years later she was killed in a car accident.
119 Men care a great deal about what other men think of them: See Kimmel, 1996, p. 7.
120 Media Culture: See Kellner, 1995.
121 What’s Going On: See McCall,1997.
122 War, Battering, and Other Sports: See McBride, 1995.
123 D.C.-based group Men Can Stop Rape: MCSR can be contacted through their website at www.mencanstoprape.org.
123 Male Athletes Against Violence: For more information about MAAV, go to www.umaine.edu/maav.
123 Emotional detachment, competitiveness, and the sexual objectification of women are often the criteria: See Bird, Sharon R. “Welcome to the Men’s Club: Homosociality and the Maintenance of Hegemonic Masculinity.” Gender & Society, 10(2), pp. 120–132. April, 1996.
123 Makes Me Wanna Holler: See McCall, 1994.
124 In 1993, I conceived and cocreated the Mentors in Violence Prevention program: For more information about the MVP program at Northeastern University’s Center for the Study of Sport in Society, go to www.sportinsociety.org. For narrative about the origins of the MVP model, go to www.jacksonkatz.com.
126 What William Pollack termed the “boy code”: See Pollack, 1998.
129 At the time, battered women’s programs in Massachusetts: The shelter space crisis has eased in recent years, but women and children are still turned away due to lack of available beds.
CHAPTER 8: RACE AND CULTURE
131 “Racism turns our attention away from real exploitation”: See Kivel, 1996, p. 52.
131 “The sexist, misogynist, patriarchal ways of thinking”: See hooks, 1994.
140 Dr. Richard Lapchick, a pioneer in the area: The article “Race, Athletes, and Crime,” special to the Sports Business Journal, is available at www.sportinsociety.org.
145 For many white, middle-class male teenagers: See Kelley, R. cited in Keathley, E., 2002.
147 In mainstream European American culture: The entire article is available from the Melissa Institute. See Mederos.
147 Girlfest Hawaii, a racially and ethnically diverse arts/film/cultural happening: For more information about Girlfest, go to www.girlfesthawaii.org.
148 It would be important for me to have at least some brief background: An important event that focuses intense attention on Hawaiian race, class, and sexual politics is the 1932 Massie case, which some people say remains the most notorious criminal incident in modern Hawaii in history. Thalia Massie, the twenty-year-old white wife of a Pearl Harbor Navy officer, falsely
accused five working-class and impoverished men of Asian descent with raping her. From the start, based on little or no evidence, the men were described in local newspaper accounts as “thugs” and “degenerates.” After a three-week trail, a jury failed to reach a verdict, and a mistrial was declared. Before a decision could be made about retrying the men, one of the defendants was beaten by a carload of sailors, and another was kidnapped and murdered by Massie’s husband and mother. The vigilantes—who were represented by the famous attorney Clarence Darrow toward the end of his career—were eventually convicted of manslaughter after a highly publicized trial, but their sentences were commuted to one hour by the territorial governor. For more information about the Massie case, see the Honolulu Advertiser article by David Stannard.
CHAPTER 9: IT TAKES A VILLAGE TO RAPE A WOMAN
149 “A culture in which sexualized violence, sexual violence, and violence by sex are so common”: The full article by Robert Jensen which contains this quote is entitled “Rape Is Normal,” on the Counterpunch website: www.counterpunch.com/jensen0904.html.
150 As Katharine Baker explains in a Harvard Law Review article: See Baker, 1997.
151 But according to Lisak, research over the past twenty years: See Lisak and Miller, 2002.
151 In discussions about the normalization of sexual violence: I am indebted to Sut Jhally for some of the key points in this section, as some of it is drawn from a piece that we coauthored that was originally published in the University of Massachusetts Magazine in the winter issue, 2001, entitled “Big Trouble, Little Pond: Reflections on the Meaning of the Campus Pond Rapes,” pp. 26–31.
152 Friends with benefits: The full title of the New York Times Magazine article is “Friends, Friends With Benefits and the Benefits of the Local Mall,” by Benoit Denizet-Lewis, May 30, 2004.
152 In one study published in the journal Adolescence: See Cassidy L., 1995.
153 As objects of sexual bullying on the Howard Stern Show: Stern is typically described in mainstream commentary—as well as in some liberal and progressive publications—as a “shock jock,” a “raunchy” radio personality, a “potty-mouthed” provocateur, etc. These descriptions, while not complimentary, obfuscate the deeply misogynous character of his personality and his radio program. Calling him a sexual bully shifts the conversation away from his childish and adolescent fixations on body functions or “sex” and onto his abuses of power.
154 There is nothing like the rape trial of a famous athlete: For more discussion of the Kobe Bryant case, see my 2003 article “When You’re Asked about the Kobe Bryant Case,” at www.jacksonkatz.com/bryant.html.
159 As the recording artist and feminist Tori Amos explains: The full text of Amos’s remarks about Eminem can be found at www.mtv.com in an article entitled “Eminem’s Fictional Dead Wife Spoke to Her.” September 28, 2001.
159 A sober reading of his lyrics: For people who want to study Eminem’s lyrics, there are countless websites that provide all of the lyrics to his songs at no charge. Just type in “Eminem lyrics” to any major search engine.
160 Critics who defend or excuse Eminem’s misogyny often claim: One talented and prominent music critic who repeatedly lavishes praise on Eminem and—to this reader—seems only slightly bothered by the white rapper’s relentlessly misogynous lyrics is Robert Hilburn of the Los Angeles Times. For example, in a glowing concert review of a show on the 2002 Anger Management tour in southern California, Hilburn writes that “the ugly portrayal of women in such songs as the macho-minded ‘Superman’ is disheartening,” and in a review of Eminem’s 2004 release “Encore,” he writes that if Eminem had “restrained himself to fifty minutes (instead of a bloated seventy-seven minute record), he could have left out moments of juvenile silliness and the further put-down of women that undercut some of the poignant reflection of ‘Yellow Brick Road’ and ‘Mockingbird.’” Is it conceivable that a prominent music critic writing in a major metropolitan daily would describe as “disheartening” a white rapper who attacked people of color in his lyrics?
160 Richard Goldstein argued in a brilliant piece in 2002: To locate the full text of Goldstein’s article, see the bibliography. Here is one crucial paragraph:“There is a relationship between Eminem and his time. His bigotry isn’t incidental or stupid, as his progressive champions claim. It’s central and knowing—and unless it’s examined, it will be free to operate. Not that this music makes men rape any more than the Klan-lionizing imagery in Birth of a Nation creates racists. The real effect is less personal than systematic. Why is it considered proper to speak out against racism and anti-Semitism but not against sexism and homophobia? To me, this disparity means we haven’t reached a true consensus about these last two biases. We aren’t ready to let go of male supremacy. We still think something central to the universe will be lost if this arrangement changes.”
161 The love in hip-hop is over men, over love, crew love, brotherly love: To locate the full text of the article, see Wiltz, 2004.
161 Richard Goldstein pointed out the evolution: To locate the full article, see Goldstein, November 2002.
163 A twenty-one-year-old Eminem impersonator: Here is a summary of a Reuters news report by Michael Holden on December 5, 2005: A British man, who was so obsessed with rapper Eminem that he dressed like him, had the same tattoos, and used to perform the same dance routines, was jailed for life on Monday for battering a woman to death.
Christopher Duncan, twenty-one, forced his victim to undergo a torrid sexual ordeal before he beat her round the head with a metal baseball bat and, although she was still alive, crammed her into a suitcase where she died up to ninety minutes later.
On the night of he murder, Duncan had met his victim in a London karaoke bar where the manager said he had been “aggressively” performing songs by Eminem, notorious for his violent and misogynistic lyrics.
“You treat women as sexual objects and have a sadistic sexual fantasy life,” Judge David Paget said as he ordered that Duncan should serve a minimum term of twenty-five years. “It may well be you pose such a danger to women it will never be safe to release you.”
Prosecuting lawyer Jonathan Laidlaw said Duncan’s victim, twenty-six-year-old law student Jagdip Najran, a promising singer herself, had fallen for Duncan.
“One of the tragic features of this case is the terrible misjudgment she made of him,” Laidlaw told the Old Baily criminal court.
165 What are men to make of New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd: See Dowd, 2002.
168 A fascinating music journal essay: See Keathley, Elizabeth, 2002.
169 Wrestling With Manhood: I am indebted to Sut Jhally for many of the ideas in this section. Much of it is drawn from the Media Education Foundation video Wrestling With Manhood that he directs and in which I am featured, and from a Boston Globe article in February 13, 2000 that I cowrote with him, entitled “Manhood on the Mat: The Problem Is Not That Pro Wrestling Makes Boys Violent. The Real Lesson of the Wildly Popular Pseudo-Sport Is More Insidious.”
169 Professional wrestling has escaped serious cultural analysis: For a short article about World Wrestling Entertainment that explores some of the political economy of this entertainment phenomenon, see www.jacksonkatz.com/manhood.html.
171 WWE’s Torrie Wilson explains: From a video clip on Wrestling With Manhood, Media Education Foundation, Northampton, Massachusetts, 2002.
173 One infamous example is what he said on the air: For a discussion of Stern’s comments and media commentary about them, see Jennifer L. Pozner’s article “Journalists Trivialize Howard Stern’s Advocacy of Rape as ‘Insensitivity,’” in the July/August 1999 issue of Extra!, the publication of the progressive media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR).
177 One of the lowest moments in the history of talk radio: The transcript from Leykis’s show of 12–27–99 was circulated on the Internet in early 2000.
179 “Good old American pornography”: Limbaugh claims that he said this somewhat sarcast
ically in the context of pointing out the hypocrisy of “liberals,” whom he accuses of defending pornography in the U.S. while condemning it in the case of Abu Ghraib. Of course, in spite of whatever harms pornography might cause in the lives of women or men, there is no moral equivalence between pornography that presumably documents sex between consenting adults and the way some U.S. servicemembers sexually abused prisoners in their custody.
CHAPTER 10: GUILTY PLEASURES
181 “Pornography hates men”: From personal conversation with Gail Dines.
181 “Who are the ‘johns,’ those people who buy and sell women in prostitution?”: This quote is from the article “The Demand for Prostitution,” by Melissa Farley, PhD. It is available on the website of the organization Captive Daughters: dedicated to ending sex trafficking, at www.captivedaughters.org/demanddynamics/demandforprostitution.htm.