Domestic Violence is Gendered Violence

"If you are interested in working to end gender-based violence," the woman said to the room of students seeking their masters in criminal justice, "come see me."

Photo by Ben Pollard

Wow! I thought, I am interested in working to end gender-based violence. According to several studies available on the American Bar Association's webpage, the perpetrators of domestic violence and rape are overwhelmingly male. The teacher at the criminal justice school called these acts gender-based because she was looking at the gender of the victims. I am worried that 85-95% of the perpetrators are men.

Gender's Victimization

It isn't just that traditional gender has something to do with the victimization of women. Traditional masculinity causes the victimization of women. The old-school feminist movement of the 60's spoke a lot about the bribes, the carrots of masculinity, because women wanted a piece of that action. However, little has been said about the punishments, the sticks of masculinity.

This unattributed painting is a great metaphor for how a boy may manage to be feminine but not feminized; wield violence.

In an earlier blog, I described the cycle of masculanization, but I can summarize it here. A properly masculanized man must not be feminized. On the playground, when a boy refuses to fight back, he is girl-like, and he will often be subject to a beating, or at very least a tongue lashing/ostracizing. Masculanization is a relational activity. In order to be a "man/boy," all you have to do is point to something that is not you and say that's a "woman/girl." According to traditional masculinity, anything that is victimized is feminine, so if you victimize somebody, you are proving your masculinization. Too often, the thing feminized is another male who must then prove his masculinity. It is a desperate and impossible cycle that can only lead to more and more violence. This violence is often directed at our loved ones or even strangers in a movie theater.

That it is men who usually commit the mass stranger homicides at places like an Aurora movie theater, Virginia Tech, and Columbine is not simply a product of masculinity's influence on them. These are scared and violent people who are acting out on mental sickness. However, women are just as often unhealthy as men. Women should be committing crimes of violence just as often as men do, but they don't. It is the process of masculanization that brings unhealthy men to hurt others (even as it is the process of feminization that brings unhealthy women to hurt themselves in the cases of cutters and anorexia). So, it is indeed true that domestic violence, rape, and stalking are not just gender based, they are gender caused.

Ending the Cycle of Gender

When the professor at the school of criminal justice spoke about working to end gender based violence, she spoke about important and meaningful work. She was talking about stopping the perpetrators in their tracks by designing effective enforcement mechanisms that are sadly lacking. She was talking about making sure that women know there are places for them to turn so that they do not have to become one of the majority of women murdered by their intimate partner who had already left him. All of this is crucial work, but she was probably not talking about liberating men from masculanization so that gender caused crime will never happen again.

It may be too late for the perpetrators of gender caused crime. It may be that locking them up and restraining them is all that can be done. We cannot shame a masculanized man into feeling okay with being feminized. That only leads to more desperation in his need to masculanize himself by finding a victim. Similarly, punishing these men can't work. According to a study at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania 41% of domestic violence perpetrators reassault within 18 months of their first assault. We will never convince masculinzation to be okay with being feminized. Feminization is the thing that masculinzed men seek most to avoid. But for future generations, we can stop the gender cycle in its tracks.

In order to end gender-caused violence, we must truly value traditionally feminine skills. We must no longer denigrate housekeeping and childcare as something that liberated women seek to avoid. We must rather convince men that they are rewarding important and meaningful skills to be cultivated. In order to do that, the feminist movement needs to step up and start talking about liberating men. Because the appropriate response for a man who is recognized for being feminized is not, "who cares because women are equal," but "I appreciate you noticed because men are free."

Dancer in the Park

A grand jete. Photo by Franny Schertzer

Yesterday, I took my son to the zoo. We found a park in between the giraffes and the camels and started doing our game I call "Jetes." If you have any dance training at all, you'll recognize a jete as a leap. From ballet it has been adopted by almost every other form of dance because, hey, dancers love to leap. As we play jetes, my son and I leap around going as high in the air as we can and shouting, "jete, jete" at the top of our lungs, regardless of the company we are keeping.

It is an unusual game, but it is a game that has inspired a great deal of other children (and some teenagers) to replicate us. Dance is the purest embodiment of joy in the universe. There is no barrier, no limb or appendage, no part of your consciousness between yourself and an expression of energy and exuberance when you are allowing yourself to give way to dance. And watching my son reflecting my amateur park dancing, I felt pride that my son was so uninhibited and expressive. In liberating myself from masculanization, I discovered a fulfilling emotional life, and I have given my son the chance to free himself.

Another family was nearby, and our lyrical steps soon led us into their midst. A five-year-old boy in a soccer shirt and pair of shiny sport shorts approached me to ask, "What are you doing?"

Kensington Park by Jospephson.

I answered, "We're doing jetes. It's a dance move."

From behind his gender drag, he asked me, "Can I see it again?"

So I did a couple of straight jetes and a ballet move that I enjoy a great deal called a grand allegro. Of course, I am terrible at these. At 6'4" and 185 pounds, my allegros are more floppy fish than soaring swan. Pretty soon, a passel of kids was chasing me around the little enclosure of grass, surrounded by the braying of animals at the zoo, the humphing of camels, a caw from a peahen, an occasional spurt of laughter from a distant hyena, and we were all leaping for the sky with our arms held suborbital over our heads.

Five children and myself leaped about on the grass as their dads watched, with expressions on their faces like I was turning leading their children out of Ireland with a pan-pipe of homosexual deviancy. However, it was not long before one of the dads pulled himself out of his bewilderment and did what men so often do when they are uncomfortable. He turned to violence.

He pulled aside the boy in gender drag and introduced him to a karate chop, then encouraged the boy to practice on him. The dancers in the park were soon ninjas on the attack. Even my own son, seeing that all of the other boys had been transitioned to acts of violence on one another, started to practice making Bruce Lee sounds while his joyful facial expression crumpled into the closest approximation of hate and intimidation that his chubby cheeks could muster.

The dad who had turned away from the deviant behavior of dance to the socially acceptable simulated violence was scowling himself, which is apparently the appropriate facial expression for men at play. I redirected my son and the girl back to peaceful and joyful dance, but my heart wasn't in it. The little boys knew their place. They had been successfully trained to know that "dance" involved pink tutus and girly slippers. Their momentary confusion that dance was something fun and powerful was just a lapse in judgment, promptly cured by Dad's reminder that they should be pretending to hurt one another.

I was reminded of one of the most instructive gender-training moments of my childhood. My own first ballet class ended in crying as I realized that I was the only boy. My fear of what it meant to be feminized drove me to wander the hallways with tears streaming down my face. If I was doing something that was for girls, did that mean that my friends, who refused to play with girls, wouldn't play with me anymore? What about all the finery that I saw on the dance floor? The tutus and leotards that I didn't own only served to show me how foreign ballet was from the life for which I was being trained. 10 years later, I started taking ballet again, this time in the early stages of a teenage rebellion that would form my belief in the necessity of men's liberation.

Virtual image by Jie Loon.

Still, for a brief moment, on the plain between the giraffes and the camels at the Denver Zoo, I was able to imagine a world where small boys were not introduced to violence as a matter of course. In this world, it is acceptable and encouraged for boys to spend their afternoons learning about jetes and grand allegros. In the world to come, perhaps even my future grandson's generation, the default game of choice with a dad will not be pretend to beat each other up, but express yourself through clumsy, but powerful, leaps.

Slut Walks: Marching Against Shame

“Slut Walk” started in Toronto when, as reported in the Washington Post, a stupid cop told a women’s forum at a college that, "women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimized." Some of those women decided that they wanted to dress like “sluts” and not be victimized anyway, so they took to the streets. Many of the women marched in little more than their underwear, some in their pajamas, and some

in sweatpants. So how do these marches impact men’s liberation? Here are my thoughts.

Male Helplessness

Part of what Slut Walk is saying is that men should control themselves. The implication is that men CAN control themselves. Too often people say that men are pigs, dogs, animals, beasts, some-other-automaton. When they say that men are pigs, people imply that men are unable to control their base urges to hurt people. Men sometimes think they sound feminist by saying it. They think that deriding themselves puts them in league with the anti-man feminists, but they are mistaken. The premise at the heart of most feminism is that men are better than they historically were. They can be great fathers, great homemakers, and great people.

That is what Slut Walk implies, and that is a powerful statement. Men are able to control themselves, and they should.

Hyper-Gender

At the same time that the marchers are telling men to control themselves, they are also saying that they should be able to wear, in the words of one blogger, clothes that make them “look and feel good”. But who says that they look good? A society that has been dominated by men for tens-of-thousands of years tells them that they feel attractive when they look sexually available. Pushing the feminist movement

further into femininity is no better than pushing the men’s liberation movement into the church and onto the football field.

Before we fight for our rights to feel good about ourselves, we should ask why those things make us feel good. All too often, what feels good is the exact same thing that makes us feel bad other times. Shame and sexual attractiveness are tied together by the fact that they are both different sides of the same coin of gender oppression. Each time we say that we feel good looking and acting feminine, we are making it easier to feel bad when we do not look

and act appropriately gendered.

For almost all women, it is painfully impossible to be appropriately feminine. The Slut Walkers should be thoughtful about dress or risk being thoughtless about sexism.

Shame

Rupert Murdoch’s, "The New York Post" could be trusted to respond to any such movement by using their own buxom blonde to cast shame on the marchers. Kirsten Powers’ editorial says that reclaiming the word “slut” is immature and misguided. But is that what the Slut Walks are really attempting to do? Some women may be attempting to reclaim the word, but the much more powerful claim is that the marchers are attempting to undermine shame. The word slut is only valuable as a tool of oppression so long as it is tied to shame. To paraphrase Bob Marley’s, “no woman, no cry;” no shame, no oppression.

And men are learning from these movements. They are starting to recognize the shame men feel for being too un-masculine is not something that is natural or fixed. It is trained into us since the moment that someone says, “it’s a boy,” and the training continues until the day we die. If women are successful at reclaiming the word “slut,” they prove that this kind of shame is only a society-wide gender-induced mass hallucination.

There is a good deal to be said for shaming rapists and wife beaters. They deserve to be shamed, and society should continue to do so. However, this movement will be less powerful if it focuses on that shame. If this movement can stay focused on liberation from shame, it can be an inclusive movement. There will always be people like me who will march alongside women attempting to shame men for aggressive sexual behavior, but the majority of men (and women) is not interested in finger pointing even when it is legitimate. I’m not saying to stop shaming wife-beaters, pedophiles, and rapists. They are the worst kind of hyper-genderized men, and should not feel anything but regret for what they have done. What I am saying is that the movement can continue to focus on finding the bad guys, or it can take this moment and focus on doing better, and thereby deny shame as a tool to the forces of sexism.

Meninists?

A blog called Meninist envisions a supportive role of men in feminism, but it neglects the basic facts about masculanization. It is not enough that men simply sit on the side lines like cheerleaders for women to catch up to men. Men must recognize how they too are oppressed and fight back.

Women will not attain equality until men too are liberated. Why?

1. Some schools of feminism have focused on equalizing pay and working conditions by getting women out of the home and into the work place.
2. At the same time, they have not made any effort to get men out of the workplace and into the home. If you don't believe me, see my last blog where I talk about how ill equipped men are to raise infants.
3. But when we say that women make too little, instead of saying that maybe men work too much (and therefore make too much), we are saying that domestic labor is not meaningful work because it is not "paid" work.
4. We degrade women by saying that the traditional realm of women is not as important as getting paid. We also oppress men by telling them that domestic labor was exactly what they thought it always was; thankless.

What we should be doing is not supporting women, but coming to the awareness that men and women should support each other in our scramble for equality and progress. After all, if we legitimately believe that the world will improve with more women in positions of so-called "power," should it not be equally true that the world would be better off with more men in positions of care-givers? Until we tell ourselves that power and money are not truly important, but a sideshow keeping us from equality, we will never actually recognize the important things in life.

Protectiveness

Men often use their urge to protect those around them as a tool for controlling those persons. We tell our loved ones that they cannot do dangerous things and deny our loved ones the ability to make their own mistakes and get hurt. We have to realize that our children have to be able to fail and get hurt or they will never become adults. However, there are times when all parents need to stand up and be a straight up papa or mama bear. Through questionable methods, men are given the tools at a young age to be forcefully protective and keep our children from harm. By harnessing this talent effectively, and channeling to healthy protectiveness, men can use it to make our children feel safe enough that they are willing to try, fail, get hurt, and then try again.

Manifesto Part III: Fraternal Groups

Men in groups are remarkably trustworthy and loyal. They often act against their self-interests to aid a friend. The power of the bonds between men is a great and compelling attribute. However, these relationships often become abusive. Sometimes, fraternal groups bond through masculinization that becomes more and more extreme as members of the group feel more and more disempowered by their lives. The bonds they form are filled with boasts and bravado. Some men boast about their athletic abilities, their cars, their grade, their salaries or their property. Eventually, however, the boasts ring hollow because these limited measurements of success do not in fact prove maleness, and the groups are faced with the choice of becoming vulnerable or continuing their boasts into impossibility, desperation, and panic. Those fraternal groups that do not allow themselves to become vulnerable and admit their weaknesses express their panic with one another in ever more cowardly and abusive ways that often lead to violence, crime or abusive name calling (the word “pussy” is used a lot). Men need to relate with one another, and they should, but vulnerability is not masculine, so how can they do so?
Because conversations about feelings and priorities are often considered feminine, men often relate indirectly through some form of entertainment. These media are too often ways of reinforcing masculinity. Men talk about sports, action films, (often violent) video games, women’s bodies, and hunting among other things. In talking about these things men are reified in their masculinity at the same time that they teach masculinity to others listening. As men become more secure in their ability to present masculinity, and their bonds with one another become stronger, they will explore more feminine forms of entertainment, or even talk about emotions, feelings, and family life, but even then they regularly revert to masculine media as ice breakers. In this way our bonds to one another become bonds to the tyrannical fear mongering masculinity of our childhood.
Even with the safety mechanism of masculine entertainment casting its shadow over men’s friendships, occasionally they grow to love other men in meaningful ways. However, they are afraid to express their love for fear of being feminized by being associated with homosexuals. They cannot even tell another man that they love him without adding the word “man” to the end of the phrase in order to reassert the masculine nature of their love. Even more frightening is the possibility of touching these men in any kind of caring or loving manner. Because team sports replicate the masculinizing influence of physical violence, they are allowed to embrace each other in a scrum, hug one another in a game of tackle football, and grope each other in a half nelson. However, without the protection of simulated violence, even a hug can be uncomfortable and kissing has been made repulsive. Of course, repulsion is a kind of fear, in this case of physical contact that, if enjoyed, will be a force for feminization that will leave them under threat of violence.
Friendship brings with it great satisfaction and happiness. These relationships also bring stability, as most men know that there a some other men on whom we can trust with our lives. But these relationships are hijacked when they are allowed to become tied to masculinization.