Question for those who say that language like “men are responsible for violence against women” or “men need to do more to stop violence against women” is hurtful and unhelpful because you are included in the group “men” and you feel unfairly stigmatised:
How would you feel about “people are responsible for violence against women” or “people need to do more to stop violence against women”?
Thank you @Stanislaus - I find very much to agree with in your reply
Although in the same way all white people are racist, all men are misogynist - its simply built into our society. And its built in for both men and women. Men expect that their feelings will be catered to. Women are raised to cater to those feelings. Its women’s societal role to make life easier for men - from your mom making sure you have clean laundry to your wife sticking your stuff in her purse.
And its certainly built into the theory that a woman’s appearance is responsible for a man’s behavior - which is in everything from “if she didn’t want attention, she shouldn’t dress that way” to “girls shouldn’t wear a top with straps to school because boys will be distracted by SHOULDERS.”
Here is the thing…I’m not responsible for protecting your feelings. If you are so delicate that facing the simple fact that the majority of violence women experience is perpetrated by men upsets you, and that I need to be very careful not to hurt your specific feelings while stating that, that’s sort of a you problem, not a me problem. If you want to turn every one of these conversations into a discussion about how much it hurts YOU that men kill and rape women, you are part of the problem. You are taking space up to turn what is a real actual problem that kills women into a issue about your own ego.
“All lives matter.”
I’d say that an unqualified reference to “men” would tend to be about you, if you are a man. I mean, that’s at the root of this topic - a proposal for a curfew for ‘men’ - when it’s not specific, it’s general.
I don’t have a problem with people (including me) getting their feelings bruised as a side effect, following the pursuit of action on a goal that prevents a greater harm, but I’m not sure that’s what I’m seeing here.
I know exactly what you mean: I’m not suggesting this would be a good change in how we speak of these things, just trying to explore why the “men are responsible” language provokes such feelings.
To some extent, for women, its because we’ve borne so much of the responsibility for violence to ourselves already - and feel done. We are the ones not walking to our cars alone after dark, screening our dates and making sure they don’t know where we live for the first few meetings, dressing conservatively if we don’t want to be verbally assaulted (and these things don’t always work). We are the ones trying to keep ahead of an abusive boyfriend, to learn his triggers and not trigger him. We’ve been taking responsibility for the violence done to us. And - done.
And it isn’t just violence. We are told we should restrict abortions, because being pregnant is just an “inconvenience” and after all, a life is at stake. We’ve left the workforce in huge numbers because someone needs to take care of children while they go to virtual school and its usually us - but even just suggest as a thought experiment that men should be inconvenienced by their gender to protect other human beings, and this happens.
How do you feel about an unqualified reference to “people”? You are after all a person. But I’ll bet you don’t, no pun intended, take it as personally as an unqualified reference to “men”. If that’s right, what’s the difference?
I guess it just appears to me like it’s misattribution of the problem, and that seems a bad place to begin in solving any problem.
It may well be that the phenomenon being discussed here (specifically males attacking females outdoors at night) is sufficiently distinct that it requires different considerations and actions to the more general phenomenon of people hurting people but there’s just something wrong about the attribution of the actions of a relatively small subset of a group to the whole group. It’s not as wrong as attribution of the blame to the victims, but it’s still not right.
I don’t know - that’s an interesting question, because I think it illustrates that the larger and more inappropriate a group you attribute a property of a small subset of that group, the less relevant it becomes, but ‘men’ is divisive in a way that ‘people’ is not.
I guess, to put it another way, if it was the case that there was something inherent in the ownership of a Y chromosome that meant, quite randomly and against any possible care or precaution I could take, I might wake up tomorrow and be compelled to commit an act of violence upon someone with two X chromosomes, I would be content to be labelled as part of ‘that group that hurts women’. It would be a fully appropriate definition of the group. it would be the correct diagnosis of the problem.
But I don’t believe it is. Of course it’s not easy to identify what the actual grouping is in advance of the symptom, but it’s not ‘men’.
It might just make a few* of those men stop and think why their fee-fees are more important than true allyship, and maybe work to change that absolutely unnecessary knee-jerk reaction?
Atwood was ever so right when she said “ Men are afraid that women will laugh at them . Women are afraid that men will kill them .”
* it will, alas, only ever be a few, that’s screamingly obvious just from this thread alone.
The reason for the pushback seems pretty understandable to me.
Take the statement “The majority of crime X is perpetrated by identifiable group Y” This can be demonstrated to be true for a variety of X and Y.
Now take the follow up statements that “group Y are the problem” or “group Y have to change their behaviour”
How comfortable would any of us be with applying such simplistic broad-brush statements for various “Y” groups. Have a go, insert a group and crime of your choice and see how it sounds to you.
There is nothing wrong in acknowledging the fact that most violent crime is perpetrated by men. That’s undeniable. But it takes no extra effort to avoid a blanket “guilt by association” accusation against fully half the population.
A suitable question would be “what is it about society that produces a higher rate of violence in males?”. It is a less emotive way of phrasing an important question and I think it should be phrased that way not simply to spare anyone’s feelings, but to make it easier to have the important conversations.
Bald, broad statements that are easily interpreted as painting all men as actual perpetrators, perpetrators in waiting or sharing some collective guilt seem far more likely to provoke a defensive reaction and shut down conversation.
It is possible to talk about this in a way that acknowledges the realities of the situation whilst not alienating a fair chunk of those you need to reach.
We seem fully capable and willing of moderating what we say in other circumstances for exactly those reasons and see no reason to avoid doing so on this topic.
Indeed - in most other contexts, we would identify it as a hasty generalisation.
Indeed.
Nobody’s making that a serious suggestion. Everybody who’s suggested it is indeed doing it as a provocative thought experiment.
And, as a woman, I don’t want to be subject to curfews, even unofficial curfews, imposed or recommended to try to control people who are not me.
You’re reading that into statements that don’t contain it. Nobody (well, possibly not nobody, see Internet, but no significant number of people) is saying that you’re personally responsible for violence that you neither committed nor encouraged, simply because you share a gender with people who do. What people are saying is that if we’re going to shut up at home an entire category of people solely because of their gender, it would make more sense to shut up the group that contains the people causing most of the specific problem that’s given as the reason for shutting up the group that causes less of the specific problem.
It’s the phrasing of that thread title which does that.
WTH??
That’s a really strange set of choices you’re claiming are the only ones on offer. It’s like saying you can only get a job as a hit man or as a trafficked unwilling sex worker catering to customers who like genuine rape, and there are no other choices out there.
I’m not at all sure that it is.
Because it seems to me that there’s a fair chunk of those we need to reach who react negatively to any discussion of the situation that amounts to anything other than ‘yes, it’s terrible that women get raped, here are a list of things (which don’t work and are restrictive) that women should do to avoid that.’
OK, change my statement to
I agree some are a lost cause and no amount of careful language will reach them but there still remains a non-negligible amount who will be amenable.
Are there, though? Because it’s also possible all the amenable men, the ones not #notallmen-ing threads about violence against women, have already been won over, and only the recalcitrant are left.
And that’s a terrible thing. I’m not sure anyone said otherwise.
No, but I also don’t believe there are easy solutions for solving violent crime. I think most of them start with early intervention in troubled homes and better efforts to make sure children are properly socialized. I think we probably need a “finer tuned” social services arm of our governments (and that will require more money), right now the broad principle is “keep children with their parents except as a last resort”, but I think we need a better standard. It should be “keep children with troubled parents who have problems that we can manage while keeping their children with them, but keep children away from parents that we know are doing things that put the children at risk of violence and learning improper norms about violence, until such time as those parents can reach a point where they do not behave that way any longer.” The reality is of course many more parents would more quickly and permanently lose custody of their children.
I think everyone gets it was only intended as a thought experiment, but for thought experiments to be useful they should have some logical consistency, which this one does not. Women feel unsafe going out on their own because of societal issues, so as a thought experiment imagine if the government said men couldn’t go out after a certain hour or face arrest…what?
Three times from memory in which I have contributed to the problem of women feeling unsafe to be out in public:
2001: Late night on a Jubilee line Tube between St John’s Wood and Kilburn. There are only 3 people in the carriage - me, another guy, a woman. He is harassing her by not taking no for an answer. “Why won’t you go for a drink with me?” “Where do you live?” “I’ll come home with you”. He’s getting in her personal space. She is monosyllabic, defensive body language, no eye contact. I try making eye contact with her and asking if she’s alright, mouthing it behind her back. She doesn’t respond to me - I suppose because she’s got no reason to trust me. Regardless, she’s obviously not alright. I should tell the guy to leave her alone, that she’s clearly not interested. But I don’t. Because I’m scared of provoking him too. Because I don’t feel he’ll accept that I have the moral authority to tell him he’s wrong. Because I know I should but I don’t feel I have to. It gets to my stop and I get off, leaving her with him. No idea what happened after that.
2004 - After work drinks on a summer Friday evening. I’m stuck at a table with my manager and a few other more senior men. The talk turns to the new intern intake and which of the women you would invite to your notional hot tub. (The rule is 5 max). Some women can overhear this conversation among the men they have to work late with and go on business trips with. I don’t join in the conversation because eeww but I don’t tell them to grow the fuck up either, or suggest changing the subject, or anything else.
I’m not the perpetrator in these cases but it’s also obvious that I’m letting it carry on. There’s no neutrality between the oppressor and the oppressed. It doesn’t matter that I might feel bad about not doing anything - it’s functionally no different from if I were silently cheering these arseholes on.
Now, maybe I’m the only man in this thread whose ever been in this kind of position - where a man or men were making a woman feel uncomfortable and not saying or doing anything. Maybe you’re all moral paragons who have spoken up each and every time at whatever cost in which case, in all seriousness, bravo. But I’m not the only man who has ever stood silently by. Do I not have a responsibility to speak up? Can I really look back at these incidents and say “nothing to do with me guv”?
Where’s the public campaign telling men to speak up against harassment? Where’s the social pressure to not laugh off your mate who annoys the waitress when he gets pissed? Where’s the backing for men to tell other men when they’re crossing the line? If a female friend told you that one of your male friends who you otherwise had no negative vibes from at all had made her feel really uncomfortable when they shared a cab, what would you feel obliged to do? What if it were two female friends, or 5, or 10? Would you quietly drop him from your social circle without saying why? Would you have a word with him about his behaviour round women? Would you tell other women not to be alone with him? Would you tell your male friends to steer clear?
I don’t harass or assault women. But do I do everything I can to help women feel safe about being out in public? Can’t honestly say I do. Don’t think it’s just me.
That’s not the argument at all. The argument is that women are constantly “advised” not to go out on their own or do other normal activities because of the likelihood of male violence against them. So as a thought experiment, imagine if instead it was men who were constantly being “advised”, or even forced, not to go out on their own, in order to address this problem.
Yes, that’s a logically consistent argument.
There’s difference types of advice given, some is hog wash but not all of it is. There is a difference between teaching people (not just women, but all people) about being situationally aware of their surroundings, of being familiar with the nature of the neighborhood they are in, and how it varies at different times. I don’t see anywhere where I posted that women shouldn’t go outside at night, or shouldn’t dress in a certain way, so if you want to attack those sort of things go ahead, they have nothing to do with me or anything I’ve ever said.
Conflating domestic violence with public, stranger on stranger violence is also not germane. Police authorities are expected to respond to both sorts of things, and there’s all kinds of specific advice given to women facing domestic violence by experts, police etc. Lots of that advice doesn’t work well, because just like prevent stranger on stranger crime, preventing domestic violence isn’t easy or simple. That doesn’t mean broad concepts like: go to a shelter, get away from your abuser, don’t stay with him because he pays the rent or because you’re worried about losing a caretaker for your children, aren’t good bits of advice. It’s just that no magical advice is going to fix violence, advice like this is only able to mitigate to some small degree.