Why do men attack women and what can #allmen do about it?
Like many, I want to respond and engage with the outpouring of grief and anger around the tragic death of Sarah Everard. With so much pent-up fury and a very complex set of issues, my instinct has been to listen hard and stay quiet. But that doesn’t in itself change anything and it seems inadequate to let the intensity of the moment go by. In this, as in the BLM protests last year, people have been rightly pointing out that it is a perpetrator’s issue, not a victim’s issue; it is not women who need to change in response to feeling vulnerable. It is men. Friends online have expressed their frustration that more of their male friends haven’t spoken up, so here goes.
Some things need saying upfront and I will allow myself to generalise from my own experience: women make society, companies and families work. They are strong, fierce and brave. They are smart, intentional and kind. They bring people together, they create and they sustain. And yet women have, throughout history, been undervalued, objectified, discriminated against and used as tools of war. They have been treated as property, controlled, used, abused and made to feel unsafe, predominantly by men. This is the tragic and inescapable truth.
And the stats are brutal. 2075 women were killed in the UK in the last decade; 3.4 million women have been victims of sexual assault; last year alone, an estimated 144,000 were victims of rape or attempted rape. Lockdown and this last year have been terrible for women in abusive households, with 1.6 million victims of domestic abuse. And yes, men were behind the vast majority of these. Stats are powerful, but they are also abstract. They don’t convey the trauma experienced by the victims or the all-pervasive fear which cascades out over all women as they walk home at night.
I want to talk about this and try to offer some practical actions that men can take. Not to mansplain or make the story about men but, as I said earlier, because the story is about men.
Phrases like “not all men”, just like “all lives matter” are trite and act to diffuse issues and avoid conversations. But what do we mean when we cry “#allmen”? Do we mean that men have a collective responsibility to deal with the issue because of association (“sort out your own”) or that all men ARE the issue? We need to be specific about the problems and specific about the actions that need taking. It looks to me that there are a range behaviours and man-types:
A. Misogynists who think they are better than women
B. Men who think women are objects
C. Men who mug women
D. Men who are violent towards women they know
E. Men who derive pleasure by harming women
One of the ideas being presented is that this is one big sliding scale. E.g. misogynistic views (A) are the thin end of a wedge that ultimately leads to acts of horror to strangers (E). Put another way, as a man, my failure to deal with toxic culture in masculine environments makes me part-culpable for domestic violence, abuse and rape. My instinct is to fight this, but if this painful season is for anything then it must be to reflect and engage.
To me, the simple sliding scale doesn’t feel right. These look like five different problems that need addressing with different actions.
A. Misogynists
This comes down to education, pure and simple. A builder in our house once described my wife as “a proper woman” when she delivered him a cup of tea. He wasn’t trying to hurt or make a point, and it was a good cup of tea. I think he was attempting a compliment! But he had a desperately narrow view of women, presumably from what he had been taught and seen growing up. My kids, I hope, will have seen their Mum juggling and succeeding as a solicitor, charity trustee, home-builder, friend, wife and mother and will take a broader view of what makes someone a proper woman.
ACTIONS FOR MEN:
· help girls to dream big and find role models for them
· commend them for their determination not their looks
· encourage more women into senior roles in businesses
· venerate the role of mother and homebuilder for those who choose it
· call-out misogynism when you hear it
In other words, be feminists. This should be table-stakes for engaging with the rest of the debate.
B: Objectifiers
This is where it gets more complex. I’m going to start at the place where the objectification of women is most in focus. Porn. It presents objects of raw sexuality without the incumbrance of a real human with feelings, dreams and vulnerabilities. The depiction and treatment of women is degrading and dehumanising but, depressingly, it still “works” for the men and increasingly women who watch it. More worryingly, it’s where most kids today will learn about “sex”. It’s hard to imagine a more effective training-ground for the objectification of women than millions of short videos, available anywhere for free, depicting a fantasy world of girls desperate for men they don’t really know to use them for their pleasure. And the viewer even gets a little reinforcing endorphin rush at the end. All in secret and alone. So, what of it, “all men”? Are we really OK with this? If not, what’s the plan?
The reality, though, is that porn is symptomatic of an entire society which objectifies women. Whether it’s a night out in town, films, TV or beauty magazines it’s all about youthful, sexualised women. Everywhere we look there is a desensitizing wall of images and messages of a femininity which is a shadow of reality. Men, on a base level, no doubt enjoy this system and, ultimately, have to own that they are the cause of it; but it’s not clear to me that men alone have engineered it. It feels to me like the whole of society is caught up in a dance of paradoxical narratives where a woman broadcasting her sexuality is both the right of an empowered modern woman and simultaneously evidence that women are being objectified and used by men. Girls choosing to wear Playboy branded clothes was the epitome of that contradiction for me. Or a pole-dancing lesson for a girl’s night out.
Here I must stop and be absolutely clear that there is a chasm between a discussion about the sexualisation of women and any implication that women invite sexual violence by who they are or what they wear. They don’t. Ever. Women should be able to go out stark naked without anyone interpreting that as consent for anything. It’s not complicated. Back to the discussion.
The question is how, as men, we help to dismantle this pervasive system that cheapens women. Any attempt by men to lead this endeavour would correctly be seen as patronising, controlling and/or self-serving because it has to build towards an alternative vision of femininity. Men cannot and must never try to own this vision. You end up with the Taleban or whatever the extreme the other way looks like. Perhaps men should commit to getting behind women-led initiatives but this cuts across the earlier assertion that the problem lies with men and it shouldn’t be for women to fix it. I don’t know the answer.
In all this, I am assuming that there is a causal link between objectification and sexual violence. That’s the point of talking about all this here. A link seems inevitable — the less that women are seen as people, the easier it must be for rapists or abusers to convince themselves that what they are doing can be justified somehow. But is it really the case that objectification is enough to break down the basic human restraints that should prevent someone from violating another person? In some cases, shockingly, it seems that it is. More often, it is objectification mixed with repressed anger or frustration; maybe washed down with alcohol. It doesn’t really matter how strong the link is — we all lose out if women are seen as less than they are and some women will get violently hurt.
This whole theme is where I believe most men can and must make the most personal change. Simultaneously it is the space where I feel most unsure as to how to act to change the underlying system.
ACTIONS FOR MEN:
· If you can’t accept that clothing choices can never mean consent then stay at home
· If you can’t keep your hands off people when you’re drunk then don’t drink
· Don’t watch porn
· Talk about porn with your kids even if you’re worried that it will be toe-curlingly awkward. Trust me, it isn’t, but 11 is a better age for this than 15!
· Call-out leering, whistling and other crass behaviour from men as though they were speaking about women in your family
· Read about amazing women
· If you have influence in film and media then use it
· Raise daughters who know that their value is innate
C. Muggers
Personal attacks by strangers for financial gain and/or harassment are a feature of city life, as hateful as that is. I have been mugged twice; I am very aware of those around me when I walk home at night; I have had “youths” run alongside me give me chat on two occasions while out jogging; I have been groped by a stranger while crossing a street as a teenager. I say this simply to make the point that city life has an underbelly which affects everyone. But let’s be clear. A woman’s experience is different and more acute. Despite the above, I do not generally worry about walking out at night. A lot of women really do. Sometimes aggression is rooted in objectification and misogyny — i.e. it is an attack on women. But, if I understand the stats, in this type of aggression women are not disproportionally attacked. Victim selection by someone looking to rob looks to be opportunistic rather than specifically anti-women. This is of precisely zero comfort to women afraid for their safety, but it does point us towards a different set of potential actions.
ACTION FOR MEN:
· Don’t walk behind women at night or surprise them
· Offer to walk or drive women home, teach young men to do the same
· Campaign for safer streets
D. Violent men
The most prevalent cause of harm to women is violence from men known to them, more often than not in the home. The physical power imbalance between the average man and woman, combined with the machismo and emotional dysfunction drilled into so many men, makes for a dreadful mix. All couples get properly angry with each other at times. If the only way a man knows how to express that anger is physically, and he is stronger than the woman, then a sad and familiar story will play out. Over 90% of assaults on women are by people they know; there were 1.6 million cases of domestic abuse last year. This is such a complex and sensitive subject that I know I will do it no justice at all.
My reason for opening it up is simply to point towards a whole other set of actions to help men find other outlets for their anger and pain. This is not only about the way they relate to women but also about how they relate to their own flaws, upbringing and buried hurt.
ACTION FOR MEN:
· Learn to breathe and walk away
· Help men to talk and seek help when they need it
· Invest in your relationships and support others with theirs
· Keep short accounts with your partner. Learn to spot your anger and deal with it that day
· Learn how to forgive and learn how to say sorry
· Teach boys that emotions are good
E: Psychopaths and sociopaths
I have no idea what to do with this category. People like this are, by definition, immune to social pressure; they have little or no conscience. Rightly or wrongly, I do not believe that these are “extreme cat-callers” or that a deeper understanding of the intrinsic value and dignity of women would help. Psychopaths attack women, they attack children, they attack other men. I sadly don’t have the faintest idea how I can make these people less numerous or less dangerous. Mercifully, they are rare and I can only hope that they are identified by those that know how to and either given treatment or kept away from people.
Conclusion
What started as a desire to write a post has turned into an essay. It turns out there is a lot to say and more importantly a lot to do. If I have missed the mark, please help me see things more clearly.
Before I finish, I must acknowledge that I have addressed a simplified reality with “men” and “women” and where “men” are attracted to “women” and vice versa. This is not intended as any kind of exclusion of the LGBTQ+ community and I hope it doesn’t read as such. It is simply a reflection of the way the discussion has been framed (“why do men attack women?”), the binary way that stats are collected and my own gender and sexuality, from which I will inevitably draw my personal response to this issue.
I have tried to be honest and to identify specific actions. I still struggle instinctively with the current backlash against “men” and therefore me, but I know that this creates an opportunity to reflect on settings and systems where, as men, we have a collective responsibility to do better; to change the narrative. I am still not totally clear if “all men” have the capacity or even propensity to be abusers and not all manage to tame it. Or if some have had abuse driven into them by their upbringing, experiences and their own traumas. Perhaps it doesn’t matter — we can only start from where we are, and must all do what we can.
