In his TED Talk, “Violence Against Women—It’s a Men’s Issue,” Jackson Katz talks about the how there has been an awful lot of silence” from men surrounding the issue of sexual abuse. He quotes Dr. Martin Luther King, who pointed out that “in the end we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.” Katz proposes that when bystanders—those who are neither perpetrators nor victims of male violence—act against violence, not by simply intervening at the point of the violent action, but by calling out misogyny as it occurs in daily interactions, then the bystanders will help curb the violence that men commit against women.
I am thinking about this today because of the events that have transpired at my alma mater, the progressive bastion, Swarthmore College. At my old school, documents surfaced (and were published in the student newspapers) that called into question the nature of that culture. Young men wrote of a “rape attic” in one of the fraternities, and bragged about efforts to abuse women. Fortunately, when the documents came to light, action was swift. Unfortunately, as it must seem, knowledge of what had gone on must have existed in the community well before the documents were published in the student newspapers.
I know several women who men have sexually assaulted. Too many. I have seen how the assaults have shaped their lives. And strangely, I know no men who have sexually assaulted women. And that cannot be true. I know this. Because we must know that it isn’t just one man, or a few men committing these acts of violence—one or a handful of perpetrators and many victims. I would surmise that there are nearly as many perpetrators as there are victims.
The easy thing is to see men who commit violence as somehow uneducated, or unenlightened. The chants of “No means yes! Yes means anal!” at Yale, or the actions revealed in the documents at Swarthmore show that violence permeates all corners—high and low. You can be brilliant and assault women. I would hazard that one could be called or thought of as a “good man” by many, and assault women.
A friend posits that it is testosterone—she calls it “the most dangerous thing in the world”—that is at the root of male violence. And perhaps, but that seems like a broad stroke. There is a positive power in masculinity. However, a masculinity that seeks to control, denigrate, degrade, and rape, is foreign to me. These are not values that resonate or connect with anything eternal. My friends who point to the evolutionary roots of male violence—as if distant biology superseded any moral imperative—also seem to be making an excuse.
And yet, “we know better” is belied by the behavior of too many men in too many places. It is time to look in the mirror, as men, and to hold each other accountable. Because, if we all know a victim of sexual violence, we also know a perpetrator.
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