Discussion List for campus-based and allied personnel working to end gender-based violence on campus.

["Christopher Kilmartin" <>]

While I'm in that "posting" mood, you might be interested in reading this 
article I wrote as an editorial for the American Psych. Assn's Division on 
men on men's involvement in the movement and the language we use to talk 
about the issue.  It's long-ish:

Men's Violence Against Women
Christopher Kilmartin

April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month, and too often we see domestic 
violence and rape defined as "women's issues."  Since men do the vast 
majority of the damage, I think it's a men's issue.  I'll begin with a story, 
not a very happy one, to set the tone.  

A little while back, The Washington Post ran a story about a Northern VA 
country club that held an event called the "Vodka challenge."  It was a 
men-only event, a standard country club golf tournament.  What made it 
newsworthy was the mode of celebration in the men's locker room.  The day 
before the tournament, one of the club managers purchased an ice sculpture of 
a nude woman, sitting down with her legs spread.  The vodka was served in the 
locker room from a fountain stream that came out from between her legs.

                When some of the women members found out about this ice 
sculpture, they were outraged.  Most of the men seemed puzzled by this 
reaction.  After all, this was a sculpture, not a real woman, and it was in 
the men's locker room, where none of the women would even see it.  Quite 
predictably, there were a lot of statements about angry feminists who have no 
sense of humor, and the overly rigid atmosphere of political correctness.  
After all, any one with an open mind would see this as harmless.  I think 
it's good to have an open mind, but it's not good to have a mind so open that 
your brain falls out.  

                What does this vodka challenge story have to do with violence 
against women?  There was nothing in the story to suggest that any of these 
men had ever beaten their wives.  But, although I'm sure they didn't realize 
it, every one of them made it just a little more possible for any one of them 
to commit an act of violence against a woman.

                In order for violence to occur, several things have to be 
present.  First, there has to be a lack of identification with the victim.  
Second, there has to be a perception of the situation as one that calls for 
violence.  Third, there has to be a decision to act violently, and fourth, 
there has to be a means of doing harm to the other person.

All-male social groups that are disrespectful towards women provide the first 
part of this formula: a willingness to view women as being different from and 
less valued than men.  Symbolically, the ice sculpture provided an atmosphere 
that says women are here for men's pleasure, and we will bond around our 
shared masculinity in this place where we don't have to deal with women as 
human beings.  Seeing them as lower status others allows us to justify 
mistreating them in many ways, including violence.  There is an attitudinal 
undercurrent of women as enemies, in spite of the fact that most of these men 
were married to and raising children with the enemy.

Unfortunately, this vodka challenge was most likely not some isolated 
incident of insensitivity.  In fact, country clubs have a history of the 
exclusion and disrespect of women, from men-only eating areas and tee times 
to the outright banning of women members.  Many clubs also have a history of 
excluding Jews and people of color.  The controversy over the exclusion of 
women from Augusta National is a case in point * Martha Burk has been called 
every bad name in the book just because she has pointed out the bigotry of 
this incredibly wealthy group of men and suggested that we all do something 
to ensure that they don't become wealthier from the Master's tournament.

                I am only using country clubs as an example of all-male 
enclaves that implicitly and subtly condone violence against women.  Other 
institutions, like many fraternities and corporations, also have these 
histories.  And, of course, all-male social groups do not have to be 
organized and institutional to provide this violence-condoning atmosphere.  
We can find informal men's groups in workplaces, college dorms, athletic 
teams, and corner bars, telling demeaning jokes about women, calling them by 
animal names or the names of their genitals, and these men rarely confront 
each other for fear of being attacked or ostracized.  There is an 
unconscious, implicit conspiracy in many men's groups to keep women in their 
place.  What better way to do it than by causing them to feel perpetually 
fearful of being physically attacked?. 

Men's violence is the single most serious health problem for women in the 
United States.  It causes more harm than accidents, muggings, and cancer 
combined.  For women aged 15-44, an estimated 50% of emergency room visits 
are the result of violence at the hands of their husbands, boyfriends, 
ex-husbands, or ex-boyfriends.  Every year male partners or ex-partners 
murder more than 1000 women * that's about 3 per day.  It happens so often 
that people don't even pay attention to it.  When a stranger murders someone, 
the story is on the front page of the metro section.  If it's an intimate, 
it's at the bottom of page 4.  A stranger rape always makes the papers; an 
acquaintance rape never does unless the rapist is somebody famous.  The two 
most frequent crimes against women are largely invisible to the media.  We 
expect it so much that we don't even notice it.  

I want to point out that I chose my words very carefully there I very 
intentionally did not say "when a person is murdered by a stranger."  Maybe 
it's just because I'm a college professor, but I am an absolute believer in 
the power of language, and there is some everyday language that smuggles in 
prejudices against women and contributes to the cultural atmosphere that 
enables gender-based violence.  I have 5 examples.

The first is the one I just pointed out * passive voice * 1000 women are 
murdered.  The victim, not the perpetrator, is the subject of the sentence.  
When you see this language often enough, the perpetrator becomes a kind of 
afterthought.  Imagine if sportscasters talked like this: "The score was tied 
when a three-point basket was scored."  "Many dollars were earned."  Wouldn't 
everyone ask, "Who did it?  Who is responsible?"

Example #2: the use of the term "opposite sex" and the phrase "battle of the 
sexes".  I challenge you to tell me one way in which the sexes are opposite.  
Calling men and women opposites is like calling an IBM computer the opposite 
of an Apple.  And "battle of the sexes" implies that men and women are at 
war.  We will never solve this problem until we work together and emphasize 
our commonalities rather than our differences. 

I see research studies reported in the popular press * "a recent study proves 
what we have suspected all along * that men's and women's brains are 
different."  And what they do is find some infinitesimally small portion of 
the brain that has some minor difference that accounts for 5% of the variance 
in a population with wide variability, completely ignoring the fact that 
men's and women's brains both have frontal cortex, amygdalas, thalmuses, 
hypothalamuses, and on and on.  And at the end of the story, the anchorman on 
the news says, "Well, that explains why I can't understand my wife at all."  
(If you can't understand your wife, I recommend the much-overlooked method of 
listening to her).

Example #3, when I tell people I'm a psychologist specializing in 
gender-based violence, people always ask, when a man is beating his wife, why 
does she stay with him?  That's question #2; they never ask question #1: Why 
would a man hit his wife?  Men's violence is considered to be a given, and 
women's responses to that violence are seen as choices.  This subtly makes 
women responsible for the violence.

Example #4: self-defense classes for women that are advertised as "rape 
prevention."  Is it women's job to prevent rape?  Don't get me wrong * I'm 
all for women learning self-defense if they want to, but let's call it what 
it really is * risk reduction.  It is men's responsibility to prevent rape.

Example #5 comes from the recent scandal over sexual assaults at the Air 
Force Academy.  It turns out that there numerous male cadets who have 
sexually assaulted female cadets, and the men who run the Academy intimidated 
survivors into keeping silent about it.  The newspaper stories said something 
like, 54 rapes occurred between male and female cadets.  I'm sorry * rapes do 
not occur between people.  Does a bank robbery occur between a robber and a 
teller?  Does vandalism occur between a kid with a can of spray paint and 
somebody's property?  And here's another flash of brilliance * in reaction to 
the scandal, the head of the academy said that the problem was that men and 
women live in the same residence hall and that men would see women walking 
down the hall in their bathrobes, and that he was going to now have the men 
and women living in separate residence halls.  So, let's get this straight: 
the problem is that men are raping women and so the solution is to get rid of 
the women?!  It's a new height in victim-blaming.  I know I get out of 
control when I see a woman in a bathrobe.  How does that work, 
physiologically?  Prostate exerts pressure on the spinal cord, cutting off 
oxygen to the brain?  And, newspapers reported the Air Force problem as a 
"sex scandal."  I would submit that the victims were not having sex, and we 
could also argue that the perpetrators were not either.

When we see gender-based violence, women-hating is just around the corner.  
Therefore, if we can turn this attitude around, we can go a long way toward 
solving this problem.  And, the people who are in the best position to do so 
are men -- we have the social status, power, and privilege.  We can speak out 
and affect the attitudes of our fellow men.  Just as white people have a 
special role to play in ending racism, rich people have a special role to 
play in ending economic inequality, and heterosexuals have a special role to 
play in ending homophobia, it is vitally important that we, as men of 
conscience, take seriously our role in ending sexual violence.

                In the locker room at the vodka challenge that day, I'm 
betting that there was at least one man who was uncomfortable with this ice 
sculpture, just as there is when someone hires a stripper for a bachelor 
party or makes a woman the butt of a joke.  It's not unlikely that more than 
one man felt this way.  But nobody spoke up because each man feels that he 
may be the only one, and taking on the collective opinion of the rest of the 
group can leave him out in the cold.  There is tremendous pressure to laugh 
along with the boys or at least not say anything. It would have taken 
tremendous courage for a man to stand up and say, even matter-of-factly, 
"That ice sculpture is really offensive; what could you have been thinking?  
Why don't we just get rid of it before we're all embarassed?  We can have 
just as much fun without it."  And it's ironic to me that courage is supposed 
to be a hallmark of masculinity, but there are so many men who find it 
impossible to display this kind of courage.  They would sooner run into a 
burning building or have a fist fight.  Men are also supposed to be 
independent, but there is tremendous conformity in most all-male peer groups, 
whether they are adults or younger men.  

                Social psychologists have known for a long time that one of 
the biggest barriers to being able to disagree with a group is unanimity.  
When the group opinion is unanimous and you don't have an ally, the pressure 
to conform is tremendous.  But if even one person voices a disagreement with 
the rest of the group, others are much more likely to follow suit.  There 
were probably several uncomfortable men in that locker room that day.  If one 
of them had spoken out, he might have found that there was more support in 
the room than he had imagined.  But somebody has got to go first.  Somebody 
has got to take a risk.  Someone has to be the leader.  It's masculine to 
take a risk, to be a leader; why are so few of us doing it?  The research 
indicates that 75% of college men are uncomfortable when their male peers 
display these kinds of attitudes.  Most men don't like it; we need to let 
other men know that we don't.

                Along with changing our attitudes toward women, we've also 
got to change our attitudes toward ourselves. For several years, I have been 
involved in efforts to fight the alarming prevalence of sexual assault on 
college campuses.  When this problem was first identified in the 1970s, 
colleges began to provide self-defense training, teach women how to avoid 
dangerous situations, and provide better lighting and emergency phones across 
the campus.  Obviously, these are very important measures.  But, these kinds 
of strategies constituted the basic extent of campus programming for about 
twenty years, and all of these measures have one thing in common: they only 
address potential victims.  It is only been the last few years that people 
have begun to try to do something about the potential perpetrators?  Why did 
it take us so long to come to this obviously important strategy?  I think it 
is the pervasive perception boys will be boys and the only thing we can do is 
to wait until they commit a crime, and then put them in jail.   Some still 
consider rape an act of male sexuality gone awry, rather than an act of 
violence.  But we know different, just as we know that if a person hits 
another person over the head with a frying pan, we don't call that cooking.
 
If men's violent behavior is perceived as an unchangeable constant, then 
violence toward women is a women's issue, never a men's issue.  "Boys will be 
boys" not only provides a measure of excuse for violence against women, it is 
a very disrespectable attitude toward men, as if we are animals, with 
absolutely no control over ourselves.  And again, there's an irony here.  
Self-control is another hallmark of traditional masculinity, but aggression 
and sexuality are considered to be completely out of control -- a man's gotta 
do what a man's gotta do.  I want men to have more dignity than that.  I saw 
this book title recently, "All men are jerks until proven otherwise."  It 
made me sad * and I also realized, how am I ever going to prove what I'm not? 
 Maybe I was a nice guy today, but who knows what's going to happen tomorrow. 
 It's a sad state of affairs when so many men have behaved so irresponsibly 
that the rest of us have to carry the burden of understandable suspicion from 
women.

So, besides becoming more respectful toward women, we have to regain our 
self-respect.  We are human beings who are capable of caring for others.  We 
are not animals who lash out instinctively, poisoned by testosterone.  
        Violence against women is a men's issue, and men have to take a 
leadership role in building a more positive male community.   A man's gotta 
do what a man's gotta do.  Thanks to those of you who have been doing this 
work.  



Christopher Kilmartin, Ph.D.
Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Gender Studies
Klagenfurt, Austria, 2006-07
Professor of Psychology
University of Mary Washington
Fredericksburg, VA 22401
(540) 654-1562  FAX 540-654-1836