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Translator: Joseph Geni Reviewer: Morton Bast
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I'm going to share with you a paradigm-shifting perspective
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on the issues of gender violence: sexual assault, domestic violence,
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relationship abuse, sexual harassment, sexual abuse of children.
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That whole range of issues
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that I'll refer to in shorthand as "gender violence issues,"
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they've been seen as women's issues that some good men help out with,
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but I have a problem with that frame and I don't accept it.
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I don't see these as women's issues that some good men help out with.
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In fact, I'm going to argue that these are men's issues,
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first and foremost.
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Now obviously --
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(Applause)
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Obviously, they're also women's issues, so I appreciate that,
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but calling gender violence a women's issue is part of the problem,
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for a number of reasons.
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The first is that it gives men an excuse not to pay attention, right?
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A lot of men hear the term "women's issues"
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and we tend to tune it out, and we think,
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"I'm a guy; that's for the girls," or "that's for the women."
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And a lot of men literally don't get beyond the first sentence as a result.
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It's almost like a chip in our brain is activated,
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and the neural pathways take our attention in a different direction
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when we hear the term "women's issues."
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This is also true, by the way, of the word "gender,"
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because a lot of people hear the word "gender"
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and they think it means "women."
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So they think that gender issues is synonymous with women's issues.
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There's some confusion about the term gender.
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And let me illustrate that confusion by way of analogy.
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So let's talk for a moment about race.
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In the US, when we hear the word "race,"
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a lot of people think that means African-American,
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Latino, Asian-American, Native American,
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South Asian, Pacific Islander, on and on.
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A lot of people, when they hear the word "sexual orientation"
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think it means gay, lesbian, bisexual.
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And a lot of people, when they hear the word "gender,"
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think it means women.
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In each case, the dominant group doesn't get paid attention to.
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As if white people don't have some sort of racial identity
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or belong to some racial category or construct,
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as if heterosexual people don't have a sexual orientation,
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as if men don't have a gender.
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This is one of the ways that dominant systems maintain and reproduce themselves,
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which is to say the dominant group is rarely challenged
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to even think about its dominance,
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because that's one of the key characteristics of power and privilege,
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the ability to go unexamined,
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lacking introspection, in fact being rendered invisible, in large measure,
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in the discourse about issues that are primarily about us.
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And this is amazing how this works in domestic and sexual violence,
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how men have been largely erased from so much of the conversation
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about a subject that is centrally about men.
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And I'm going to illustrate what I'm talking about
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by using the old tech.
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I'm old school on some fundamental regards.
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I make films and I work with high tech,
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but I'm still old school as an educator,
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and I want to share with you this exercise
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that illustrates on the sentence-structure level
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how the way that we think, literally the way that we use language,
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conspires to keep our attention off of men.
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This is about domestic violence in particular,
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but you can plug in other analogues.
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This comes from the work of the feminist linguist Julia Penelope.
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It starts with a very basic English sentence:
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"John beat Mary."
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That's a good English sentence.
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John is the subject, beat is the verb, Mary is the object, good sentence.
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Now we're going to move to the second sentence,
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which says the same thing in the passive voice.
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"Mary was beaten by John."
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And now a whole lot has happened in one sentence.
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We've gone from "John beat Mary"
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to "Mary was beaten by John."
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We've shifted our focus in one sentence from John to Mary,
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and you can see John is very close to the end of the sentence,
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well, close to dropping off the map of our psychic plain.
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The third sentence, John is dropped,
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and we have, "Mary was beaten,"
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and now it's all about Mary.
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We're not even thinking about John, it's totally focused on Mary.
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Over the past generation,
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the term we've used synonymous with "beaten" is "battered,"
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so we have "Mary was battered."
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And the final sentence in this sequence, flowing from the others, is,
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"Mary is a battered woman."
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So now Mary's very identity -- Mary is a battered woman --
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is what was done to her by John in the first instance.
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But we've demonstrated that John has long ago left the conversation.
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Those of us who work in the domestic and sexual violence field
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know that victim-blaming is pervasive in this realm,
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which is to say, blaming the person to whom something was done
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rather than the person who did it.
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And we say: why do they go out with these men?
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Why are they attracted to them? Why do they keep going back?
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What was she wearing at that party? What a stupid thing to do.
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Why was she drinking with those guys in that hotel room?
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This is victim blaming, and there are many reasons for it,
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but one is that our cognitive structure is set up to blame victims.
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This is all unconscious.
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Our whole cognitive structure is set up to ask questions
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about women and women's choices and what they're doing, thinking, wearing.
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And I'm not going to shout down people who ask questions about women.
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It's a legitimate thing to ask.
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But's let's be clear: Asking questions about Mary
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is not going to get us anywhere in terms of preventing violence.
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We have to ask a different set of questions.
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The questions are not about Mary, they're about John.
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They include things like, why does John beat Mary?
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Why is domestic violence still a big problem in the US and all over the world?
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What's going on? Why do so many men abuse physically,
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emotionally, verbally, and other ways,
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the women and girls, and the men and boys, that they claim to love?
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What's going on with men?
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Why do so many adult men sexually abuse little girls and boys?
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Why is that a common problem in our society
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and all over the world today?
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Why do we hear over and over again
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about new scandals erupting in major institutions
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like the Catholic Church or the Penn State football program
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or the Boy Scouts of America, on and on and on?
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And then local communities all over the country
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and all over the world.
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We hear about it all the time.
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The sexual abuse of children.
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What's going on with men? Why do so many men rape women
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in our society and around the world?
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Why do so many men rape other men?
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What is going on with men?
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And then what is the role of the various institutions in our society
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that are helping to produce abusive men at pandemic rates?
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Because this isn't about individual perpetrators.
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That's a naive way to understanding what is a much deeper
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and more systematic social problem.
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The perpetrators aren't these monsters who crawl out of the swamp
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and come into town and do their nasty business
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and then retreat into the darkness.
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That's a very naive notion, right?
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Perpetrators are much more normal than that, and everyday than that.
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So the question is, what are we doing here in our society and in the world?
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What are the roles of various institutions
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in helping to produce abusive men?
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What's the role of religious belief systems,
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the sports culture, the pornography culture,
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the family structure, economics, and how that intersects,
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and race and ethnicity and how that intersects?
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How does all this work?
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And then, once we start making those kinds of connections
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and asking those important and big questions,
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then we can talk about how we can be transformative,
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in other words, how can we do something differently?
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How can we change the practices?
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How can we change the socialization of boys
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and the definitions of manhood that lead to these current outcomes?
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These are the kind of questions that we need to be asking
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and the kind of work that we need to be doing,
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but if we're endlessly focused on what women are doing and thinking
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in relationships or elsewhere,
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we're not going to get to that piece.
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I understand that a lot of women
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who have been trying to speak out about these issues,
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today and yesterday and for years and years,
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often get shouted down for their efforts.
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They get called nasty names like "male-basher" and "man-hater,"
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and the disgusting and offensive "feminazi", right?
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And you know what all this is about?
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It's called kill the messenger.
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It's because the women who are standing up
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and speaking out for themselves and for other women
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as well as for men and boys,
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it's a statement to them to sit down and shut up,
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keep the current system in place,
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because we don't like it when people rock the boat.
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We don't like it when people challenge our power.
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You'd better sit down and shut up, basically.
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And thank goodness that women haven't done that.
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Thank goodness that we live in a world
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where there's so much women's leadership that can counteract that.
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But one of the powerful roles that men can play in this work
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is that we can say some things that sometimes women can't say,
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or, better yet, we can be heard saying some things
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that women often can't be heard saying.
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Now, I appreciate that that's a problem, it's sexism, but it's the truth.
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So one of the things that I say to men,
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and my colleagues and I always say this,
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is we need more men who have the courage and the strength
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to start standing up and saying some of this stuff,
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and standing with women and not against them
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and pretending that somehow this is a battle between the sexes
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and other kinds of nonsense.
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We live in the world together.
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And by the way, one of the things that really bothers me
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about some of the rhetoric against feminists and others
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who have built the battered women's and rape crisis movements around the world
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is that somehow, like I said, that they're anti-male.
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What about all the boys who are profoundly affected in a negative way
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by what some adult man is doing against their mother, themselves, their sisters?
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What about all those boys?
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What about all the young men and boys
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who have been traumatized by adult men's violence?
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You know what?
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The same system that produces men who abuse women,
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produces men who abuse other men.
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And if we want to talk about male victims, let's talk about male victims.
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Most male victims of violence are the victims of other men's violence.
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So that's something that both women and men have in common.
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We are both victims of men's violence.
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So we have it in our direct self-interest,
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not to mention the fact that most men that I know
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have women and girls that we care deeply about,
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in our families and our friendship circles and every other way.
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So there's so many reasons why we need men to speak out.
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It seems obvious saying it out loud, doesn't it?
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Now, the nature of the work that I do and my colleagues do
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in the sports culture and the US military, in schools,
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we pioneered this approach called the bystander approach
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to gender-violence prevention.
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And I just want to give you the highlights of the bystander approach,
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because it's a big thematic shift,
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although there's lots of particulars,
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but the heart of it is, instead of seeing men as perpetrators
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and women as victims,
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or women as perpetrators, men as victims,
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or any combination in there.
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I'm using the gender binary.
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I know there's more than men and women, there's more than male and female.
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And there are women who are perpetrators,
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and of course there are men who are victims.
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There's a whole spectrum.
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But instead of seeing it in the binary fashion,
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we focus on all of us as what we call bystanders,
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and a bystander is defined as anybody who is not a perpetrator or a victim
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in a given situation,
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so in other words friends, teammates, colleagues, coworkers, family members,
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those of us who are not directly involved in a dyad of abuse,
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but we are embedded in social, family, work, school,
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and other peer culture relationships
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with people who might be in that situation.
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What do we do? How do we speak up? How do we challenge our friends?
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How do we support our friends?
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But how do we not remain silent in the face of abuse?
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Now, when it comes to men and male culture,
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the goal is to get men who are not abusive to challenge men who are.
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And when I say abusive, I don't mean just men who are beating women.
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We're not just saying a man whose friend is abusing his girlfriend
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needs to stop the guy at the moment of attack.
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That's a naive way of creating a social change.
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It's along a continuum, we're trying to get men to interrupt each other.
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So, for example, if you're a guy and you're in a group of guys
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playing poker, talking, hanging out, no women present,
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and another guy says something sexist or degrading or harassing about women,
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instead of laughing along or pretending you didn't hear it,
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we need men to say, "Hey, that's not funny.
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that could be my sister you're talking about,
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and could you joke about something else?
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Or could you talk about something else?
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I don't appreciate that kind of talk."
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Just like if you're a white person
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and another white person makes a racist comment, you'd hope, I hope,
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that white people would interrupt that racist enactment
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by a fellow white person.
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Just like with heterosexism, if you're a heterosexual person
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and you yourself don't enact harassing or abusive behaviors
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towards people of varying sexual orientations,
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if you don't say something in the face of other heterosexual people doing that,
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then, in a sense, isn't your silence a form of consent and complicity?
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Well, the bystander approach is trying to give people tools
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to interrupt that process and to speak up and to create a peer culture climate
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where the abusive behavior will be seen as unacceptable,
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not just because it's illegal, but because it's wrong
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and unacceptable in the peer culture.
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And if we can get to the place where men
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who act out in sexist ways will lose status,
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young men and boys who act out in sexist
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and harassing ways towards girls and women,
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as well as towards other boys and men,
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will lose status as a result of it, guess what?
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We'll see a radical diminution of the abuse.
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Because the typical perpetrator is not sick and twisted.
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He's a normal guy in every other way, isn't he?
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Now, among the many great things that Martin Luther King
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said in his short life was,
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"In the end, what will hurt the most is not the words of our enemies
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but the silence of our friends."
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In the end, what will hurt the most is not the words of our enemies
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but the silence of our friends.
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There's been an awful lot of silence in male culture
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about this ongoing tragedy of men's violence
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against women and children, hasn't there?
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There's been an awful lot of silence.
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And all I'm saying is that we need to break that silence,
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and we need more men to do that.
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Now, it's easier said than done,
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because I'm saying it now,
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but I'm telling you it's not easy in male culture
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for guys to challenge each other,
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which is one of the reasons
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why part of the paradigm shift that has to happen
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is not just understanding these issues as men's issues,
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but they're also leadership issues for men.
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Because ultimately, the responsibility for taking a stand on these issues
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should not fall on the shoulders of little boys
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or teenage boys in high school or college men.
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It should be on adult men with power.
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Adult men with power are the ones we need to be holding accountable
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for being leaders on these issues,
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because when somebody speaks up in a peer culture
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and challenges and interrupts,
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he or she is being a leader, really.
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But on a big scale, we need more adult men with power
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to start prioritizing these issues,
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and we haven't seen that yet, have we?
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Now, I was at a dinner a number of years ago,
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and I work extensively with the US military, all the services.
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And I was at this dinner and this woman said to me --
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I think she thought she was a little clever --
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she said, "So how long have you been doing sensitivity training with the Marines?"
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And I said, "With all due respect,
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I don't do sensitivity training with the Marines.
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I run a leadership program in the Marine Corps."
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Now, I know it's a bit pompous, my response,
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but it's an important distinction,
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because I don't believe that what we need is sensitivity training.
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We need leadership training, because, for example,
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when a professional coach or a manager of a baseball team or a football team --
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and I work extensively in that realm as well --
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makes a sexist comment, makes a homophobic statement,
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makes a racist comment,
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there will be discussions on the sports blogs and in sports talk radio.
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And some people will say, "He needs sensitivity training."
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Other people will say, "Well, get off it.
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That's political correctness run amok,
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he made a stupid statement, move on."
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My argument is, he doesn't need sensitivity training.
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He needs leadership training,
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because he's being a bad leader,
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because in a society with gender diversity and sexual diversity --
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(Applause)
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and racial and ethnic diversity,
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you make those kind of comments, you're failing at your leadership.
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If we can make this point that I'm making
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to powerful men and women in our society
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at all levels of institutional authority and power,
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it's going to change the paradigm of people's thinking.
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You know, for example,
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I work a lot in college and university athletics
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throughout North America.
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We know so much about how to prevent domestic and sexual violence, right?
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There's no excuse for a college or university
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to not have domestic and sexual violence prevention training
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mandated for all student athletes, coaches, administrators,
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as part of their educational process.
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We know enough to know that we can easily do that.
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But you know what's missing? The leadership.
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But it's not the leadership of student athletes.
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It's the leadership of the athletic director,
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the president of the university, the people in charge
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who make decisions about resources
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and who make decisions about priorities in the institutional settings.
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That's a failure, in most cases, of men's leadership.
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Look at Penn State.
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Penn State is the mother of all teachable moments for the bystander approach.
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You had so many situations in that realm
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where men in powerful positions failed to act
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to protect children, in this case, boys.
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It's unbelievable, really.
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But when you get into it, you realize there are pressures on men.
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There are constraints within peer cultures on men,
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which is why we need to encourage men to break through those pressures.
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And one of the ways to do that is to say
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there's an awful lot of men who care deeply about these issues.
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I know this, I work with men,
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and I've been working with tens of thousands,
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hundreds of thousands of men for many decades now.
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It's scary, when you think about it, how many years.
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But there's so many men who care deeply about these issues,
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but caring deeply is not enough.
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We need more men with the guts,
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with the courage, with the strength, with the moral integrity
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to break our complicit silence and challenge each other
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and stand with women and not against them.
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By the way, we owe it to women.
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There's no question about it.
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But we also owe it to our sons.
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We also owe it to young men who are growing up all over the world
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in situations where they didn't make the choice
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to be a man in a culture that tells them that manhood is a certain way.
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They didn't make the choice.
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We that have a choice, have an opportunity and a responsibility to them as well.
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I hope that, going forward, men and women,
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working together, can begin the change
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and the transformation that will happen
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so that future generations won't have the level of tragedy
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that we deal with on a daily basis.
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I know we can do it, we can do better.
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Thank you very much.
