Men and violence

In this post I mentioned a book I was interested in reading, The Macho Paradox by Jackson Katz. I have started it and it has quickly supplanted all other books around as my top read. Katz points out that violence is fundamentally a male problem: virtually all rapes are committed by men, most violence in general is committed by men. He also points out how we are so accumstomed to this violent society that we don't think about it much. In one exercise he does with groups, he asks the men in the room how they protect themselves from being sexually assaulted on a daily basis. Generally, the men do not know what to say and usually someone finally says that they don't do anything. Then he asks the women, and answers come flying (don't go out alone after dark, hold your keys as a weapon, don't leave a drink unattended, don't park in an isolated garage, etc., etc.) We ALL do this, but most of us don't take a second to think of the reasons behind why 1/2 of the human population is scared of the other 1/2.

Rather than examine this, we generally tend to subscribe the acts to a few degenerate men, while other men say that they are not like that. Yet the high number of women and children that are sexually assaulted tells a different story. For that many people to be hurt, there are a lot of people doing the hurting. And generally, it's men that probably a lot of people consider normal, maybe even heroes (Kobe Bryant).

Our society turns out a huge number of violent men. But we rarely ask why or stop to think about what needs to be different so we turn out men who are not violent. Katz (and I) believe the answer is that more men need to step up to the plate in acting on the issue of male violence.

While there are many men who are not violent and are respectful to women, even those men do things such as:

• ignore other men's comments and actions that are demeaning to women


• belittle women in very subtle ways - such as listening to a man's opinion in a group discussion but not to a woman's. Often men (and sometimes women) don't even realize that they are doing this (I've experienced this -guys who sideline women in conversations seem totally unaware that they do this)


• get annoyed when a woman does not defer to them.

As I tend to look at these issues through the eyes of one who was spent years in the church, I find myself thinking about how this all applies in the realm of Christianity. I don't know how statistics would stack up, but I've certainly known of more violent men outside the church than within it. Following Christ for most people seems to exclude much of the cruelty we read about in the papers. But even in churches where lip service is given to women's inclusion, exclusion is often normative and often seems to be below the radar of even some women, never mind the vast majority of men. I've also overheard guys working at a Bible camp, of all places, rate the bodies of girls they know on a scale of 1-10 (that this was in earshot of me indicates either that they were entirely clueless about it's effects or had very little respect for me as a person). Incidently, one of those guys went on to be elected president of his Bible College's student body.

Katz points out, however, and spends a lot of time trying to diffuse, the inevitable defensive reaction of many men to the idea that their words and actions contribute to a violent society. "I'm not violent. I don't beat my wife. I've never raped anyone." We tend to want to pathologize the individual rather than look at systemic influences. Pathologizing individuals, however, will do nothing to bring down rates of violence. If we truly want to have a less violent society, men will need to own up to their responsibility, not for their own violence, but for how their attitudes and actions contribute in subtle but important ways to the idea that women are second class citizens who should be under men's control and serve men's pleasures.