I have been wanting to write about male violence within activist scenes for a number of weeks. I haven’t known where to start. So I thought I’d talk a little bit about my personal experience
I feel very hesitant about these snapshots. This blog is semi-anonymous, but I am not – most people in my life know about this blog. There would be few left-wing activists in the country who couldn’t find out who I was if really they wanted to. If I wrote seriously about my experience of male violence against women within the activist scenes then a lot of other people would be identifiable as well.
I’m anonyminising this up as best as I can.
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New Zealand is small – travel is easy – you can have a national weekend or conference for almost anything – and we do. This weekend was one of many that I’ve spent in similar circumstances, speeches, workshops, and all the most interesting conversations happening in their corridors.
I was hosting a whole bunch of people in my house, because I had some space. I was working on my thesis at the time, so I didn’t go out with them on the Saturday night.
I knew before I woke up that something was wrong – the house had been noisy at the wrong times and quiet at the wrong times. A man had told one of the women who was staying with me that he had no place to stay. He did have a place to stay, and he’d deliberately not been billeted with any women – but I didn’t know that, and neither did the woman who invited him back. When back at my house he had tried to rape a woman who had already gone to bed.
One man heard her, got up and beat the shit out of the rapist – I’ve never felt more grateful to anyone in my entire life.
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A friend wanted me to come to a feminist meeting, I didn’t really know the people so I didn’t want to come, but I did. It was being held in a woman’s house – I couldn’t put a face to the woman’s name, but when I met her I knew that I’d seen her around.
She had two black eyes – her boyfriend had hit her. She said that they’d been play fighting and he didn’t know his own strength. She said he felt terrible.
She hadn’t left the house since it happened. She wanted to spend the meeting talking about the abuse we’d suffered at the hands of men.
Whenver I think of this story, often when I think of him, I feel my failure like a weight. We did what she asked that night, we talked about male violence against women. But I didn’t offer her anything more. It’s a kind of arrogance, to think it would have made a difference – that something I said could changed her reality.
Still I wonder what else I could have done.
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Right at the time I met that woman, her boyfriend was busy using his position within the political scene to defend a rapist.
I wish I could say the two stories I have told are the only times I have had to deal with a male violence and abuse within activist scenes, but they’re not. I have known too many men who claim to be fighting oppression, but exclude the women they’re abusing from that fight.
I think it’s fantastic whenever a woman can talk about the abuse she has experienced. But whenever it does happen a bit inside of my sinks, and feels a lot like a bowl of petunias. Because I’ve seen too much to expect anything, but to be disappointed by the reactions of men.
It’s not the rapists, abusers, or violent men, that make you despair of men as a group. I know that violent men exist, and they’re not all cops, or other unsavory types. I’ve learned, I guess every woman learns, that they may be people I know.
What leads me to despair, is the men who support, cover up, minimise and defend abusive and violent men. I’ve known so many men who have choosen an abusive man over the woman he abused.
I’m left with this deep sense of disease and distrust. Because too many men hear tales of abuse and rape and automatically put themselves in the place of the abuser. Everytime a man does that I feel a little bit less safe around him, I wonder a little more about his past.
Our standards are so ridiculously low, but men fail again and again. If a man who has been abusive acknowledged what he did was wrong (ideally before he was outted, but I’m beyond hoping for that), took action to change that, and didn’t talk trash about the woman involved, then I’d be so shocked I’d probably stop being angry.
From men who have never abused a woman all I want right now is that they will choose a woman who has been abused over a man who abused her.
It doesn’t seem like asking much, but it seems impossible to get, and what little we do get needs to be constantly fought for. So while hate is too strong, I do distrust men. I wish I didn’t have to, but there’s only so many times you can be surprised.
I am probably going to try and write more posts inspired by my recent experiences. It’s difficult to do so without being too vague to be useful, but I’ve got some things to say.
Comment Moderating: This post is only open to feminists and pro-feminists.
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your post reminds me a lot of the idea of homosocialism (used like sociologists use the word, rather than literary scholars): that for many men, their primary relationship is with other men, and that the women in their lives are a major currency with show solidarity with other men.
according to this theory, that’s why you get men bragging about their “conquests”, that’s why men ask their friends if it’s “okay” to ask out the friend’s former girlfriend, that’s why men often defend abusers as you describe, that’s why straight men are so intimidated by gay men (since the usual currency doesn’t work, the gay men can’t be controlled by usual social means, making them too unpredictable, hence gay-bashing).
it shows that for many men, unfortunately, the opinion that women hold of them isn’t as important as the opinion men hold of them. the only way to stop the cycle is for men to surprise you in the way you say: by standing up to other men for the dignity of women, whether that means choosing the abused woman, disavowing a sexist joke, or not wanting to hear about someone’s latest “conquest”, or whatever.
once i read about this notion (which struck me as extremely obviously right), it was very easy to recognize the behavior in others and myself, and making the change in my relationship to men really wasn’t such a big deal.
thanks for the post…i apologize for the brutes among my gender.
thanks for this awesome post Maia
Great post! I’ve been waiting for a good discussion on this. I’ve personally witnessed many “progressive” activist, vegetarian sensitive-boys-with-guitars act in ways that are shockingly misogynist, including thinking certain rape situations are ok, or just them being subversive.
ew.
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Long-time reader, first-time poster…
Thank you for writing this. It put into words many things I have been thinking about/struggling with lately.
I have no doubt that over identifying with someone can blur the reality of that person’s violence. The clearest example from my own life wasn’t violence on a woman, but a poor man. In my husband’s country, a well to do man, a man my husband’s family knew casually and who had extensive family and historical ties to his community and social class beat a security guard to death. His house had been robbed and he blamed the guard. It was Christmas and after the shock wore off, I heard people rationalizing it. My cousin in law said something like “well, you can understand with all these robberies, and he lost control…”. No one could face the awful truth: one of their own had done an unspeakably cruel thing. They minimized it, and it was easy because his victim was of a lower social class and everyone knew security guards DID sometimes collude to rob homes.
We women are not immune to overidentification. Sometimes it’s easier to believe that another woman is a victim rather than evil. When we marvel at the more commonplace occurence of men doing this we may forget that there really are women who murder their spouses or who are cruel to their children or ex husbands, who aren’t really misunderstood victims.
Comment Deleted – Sailorman I have previously asked you not to post on my posts about rape that I mark feminist only – Maia
It’s sad how often men respond to discussions of male violence against women by accusing feminists of being prejudiced against men. Maia gives several examples of male violence against women, and I’m sure these stories are a small piece of the misogynist violence that Maia has encountered over the years. I am also mistrustful of men because of the violence that I have personally experienced, as well as the fact that most of the women I know have encountered male violence.
I still spend time with men. I am friends with men. Sometimes I even have romantic relationships with men. I firmly believe that men are not inherently violent. And yet, men commit the overwhelming majority of violent crimes, including violent crimes against women. After experiencing this violence repeatedly and watching women I care about experience this violence, I think it’s entirely reasonable to be mistrustful of men. Especially since they almost always get away with it, and women who come forward are accused of being liars, sluts, and man-haters.
Given an opportunity to sympathize with abused women in general or demand that women and society bend to male violence, Sailorman chose the latter. And Maia’s point was proven for her. Sailorman, if you weren’t so obviously the sort to side with a rapist or abuser instead of the victim, you might have a point. We need feminist men who are actual feminists.
Yeah, Sailorman, that’d work if she were trying to have men locked up based on being men, or went around verbally and/or physically and/or sexually assaulting men for being men, or even if, you know, women committed nearly as much violence against men or left men out of their movements just as much as men do to women.
But she’s not doing any of that. For a lot of us, being distrustful of men – whether slightly or entirely – is a defense mechanism. It’s a way to survive. I’m not thrilled at the fact that I’m afraid of, for example, being alone in a room with a man or getting a car ride home from one, but I have to be. I know what will happen if I lose that defensiveness, if I don’t stay on guard, if I don’t avoid such situations as often as possible – if he does anything at all to me, I will be blamed for it. I don’t actually think all or most men have any desire to rape or assault me, but if I have to choose between their feelings and my life, I’m choosing my life.
And I’m not thrilled at the fact that in most relationships (of any nature) I’ve had with men, even progressive men, they’ll inevitably say or do something sexist that makes me lose hope that they see me as an actual person. But if I’m ready for it, it doesn’t hurt as much: yay defensiveness. And you know, when the time comes that I meet a progressive guy who isn’t sexist, that’ll just make it all the better!
And really, I’m only taking the time to write this because I admire that you attempt to approach many subjects with logic, but this one? Not so much.
I agree with debbie. Every time it’s brought up that women have a distrust for men, a distrust often earned over many years of seeing abuse and hatred towards us, “progressive” men suddenly claim WE are oppressing THEM!!! please.
Sailorman, it is rational to distrust a group that has a recorded history of negative actions towards your gender. It is rational for women to distrust men; heck, it’s rational for men to distrust women. Distrust is usually a pretty intelligent starting point. (It’s what you do from your starting point that is important.)
When I was on the left, I noticed plenty of misogyny and even violence from liberal men. One of the most liberal men I knew, a good friend of mine up to that point, once threatened to throw his long-time partner out a window, and did throw her against a wall. (Her crime: being in the apartment when he came home drunk and angry at the failure of his life.) Maia’s stories aren’t outliers, they are the daily experience of many women.
The issues that many (most?) men have with women aren’t correlated to political beliefs. Liberal men who abuse women do so in contradiction to their beliefs about equality and respect. Conservative men who abuse women do so in contradiction to their beliefs about leadership and protection. Belief, unfortunately, seems a poor inoculator against violence against women.
In a perfect, equal, nonsexist society, I’d agree with you, Sailorman. But a more sophisticated feminism has to take account of the fact that we’re not in such a society. We’re in a sexist society in which women have good reason to think that a lot of men are carrying around buttloads of hidden (or, in some cases, not-so-hidden) misogyny. Expecting women to operate in reality as if they already lived in a nonsexist ideal world is not reasonable.
As Nerdlet points out, there are unreasonable extremes this sort of thinking can be taken to (“if she were trying to have men locked up based on being men, or went around verbally and/or physically and/or sexually assaulting men for being men…”). But clearly, Maia is not going to those extremes, or advocating those extremes. She just has a problem trusting men as a group.
If you want women to trust men as a group, then we have to build a world in which men as a group are trustworthy. We’re not there yet.
Robert, I have no objections to your specific post (except for the parallelism between women and men, which could be read as implying a symmetry of abuse that doesn’t exist in real life – indeed, it’s my experience as a man that I have much more to fear from other men than from women, generally speaking), but I think you missed the bottom line of Maia’s post, limiting comments to feminist and pro-feminist posters.
Sailerman, I’m not sure if you self-identify as a feminist or a pro-feminist. But if you don’t, then you shouldn’t post on this thread again without Maia’s specific permission.
Either of you is, of course, free to respond on an open thread, or on your own blogs.
i’m a man, and i don’t trust men either. i’ve got my own anecdotal reasons i won’t bore you with here, but suffice it to say: a “real man” doesn’t expect or demand trust, but is willing to earn it. and if you’re not willing to earn trust, i’m afraid you don’t deserve it.
trust is such an ephemeral and elusive thing, after all. it’s really a matter of the often blurred boundaries that stand between us as human beings. we usually trust too much or too little, pushed and pulled by the naivete of our wishful thinking and the prejudice that comes from painful experience. however, women have been told too often and too long not to trust their intuitive, primal, animal survival instincts. i worship those instincts.
Whoops, sorry. You should write a plugin to enforce the rule for those of us who regularly miss that line. My bad.
Deleted
I think polymath is right on the mark on this. I think of my own experience, before I knew to analyze this stuff, where I’d instinctively identify with an abuser or rapist in such a situation. Now, looking back, with an analytic lens, I realize that I was conditioned from an early age to believe that there was something wrong with identifying with women, in whatever circumstance. Now that I realize this, I have taken steps to undo it, but still often an initial reaction will be to identify with men over women.
This is one of the many reasons I believe in full deconstructionism, it is only when we as a society stop viewing men and women as fundamentally different beings that violence like this will end. Otherwise good and decent men will still rape women, and the only reason that they can do that is because they’ve been taught that women are not like them, so they do not empathize with their victims. Treating a group of people as “other” leads to violence every time it is done.
And yes, it hurts as a man to read Maia write that she intrinsically distrusts men. But for her, and I would say for most if not all women, that distrust is rational.
Also, Maia I think it’s great that you’re speaking out about violence against women in activist/radical communities. I know from personal experience that a lot of people think that our communities are free of this level of misogyny, but it’s far from true. And because these communities are often small and quite close-knit, when women do come forward about their experiences, things can get really nasty. Of course this is part of the general culture as well, but I find that it adds an extra layer of betrayal when the people who are accusing you of being a liar claim to be feminist or pro-feminist.
I also think these situations tend to be complicated because most activist women that I know have not and would not go to the police or seek other forms of legal recourse. Partially because they know they are likely to be treated badly by the police (especially if they are known to the police), they know how awful the court process can be for survivors and how unlikely it is that the process will result in a conviction, and they don’t believe that sending perpetrators to jail results in justice or rehabilitation.
All of you are so articulate and spontaneous, and this site is SO interesting. Someone just mentioned an “open thread” and blog? I’ve got a lot to learn!
However, I did figure out how to post a comment yesterday. Unfortunately my comment was a year late :-
Just adding my thanks to the group, Maia. A good post.
It looks as if Sailorman made a good effort to derail the thread with a complaint about reverse ‘sexism’ (the posts have been deleted now). It should be obvious that women have much more to fear from men, than men do from women.
I do try to live as if the ideal world were in existence, but in the industry I’ve chosen to work in, that’s not much of a choice. I blogged about it here in response to the same issue being brought up on another blog.
Men, and society, have a long way to go before there can be any reasonable level of trust between the sexes. I chose not to buy in to what my mother taught me about men but I know she had good reason for warning me they were dangerous, owing to her own experiences. We don’t have to experience violence to distrust men – our mothers teach us the first steps, then observation and life carries on with the training.
Thanks for all the comments – I had to try and write this for days before I found a way to get down some of the stuff I’ve been thinking. It was really nice to see a lot of people post for the first time.
I would love to hear from other people who have attempted to deal with male violence and abuse within progressive circles. Particularly anything that you thought was useful.
I’ve dealt with male violence and abuse. Within “progressive circles”? I don’t know what that means.
I mean within a left-wing group of people. Although that’s a good point, anyone who has any experience of dealing with male violence and abuse outside the legal system would probably face the same set of problems.
I once organized CR slumber parties as a way of dealing wiht an incident of my own and what I saw as a larger problem. At the time, it wasnt very successfu, but since then, some participants have told me that they were glad moths or years later when something happened that made them see things my way.
I’ve posted a comment over on this post at Maia’s own blog, but I’d like to add here that I’ve tried to address this stuff twice, in two different organisations, through setting up structures like harassment networks. In neither institution has it come to fruition, because the people who were ultimately responsible for actually setting up the networks, in one case after it had been voted through unanimously by the organisation (after almost a year of correct process), just never did it. They were men who had previously protected abusers, and it was not practical to work around them. I feel that I failed.
Speaking as a man, my understanding of the female of the species did not begin at an early age, and has not fully matured yet. It has, thankfully, matured to the point that my own conduct startles me, and I’ve begun to perceive how much farther I could go.
As a boy I thought of girls very little, not out of any dislike of them but they appeared a class apart from me; different interests, different games, different rules, different lives, so their absense was invisible to me.
As a teenager I discovered sexual interest, but women had changed in no other way. Sports, work, play, we were in different worlds and except for sex I was content to stay in mine and leave them in theirs. I assumed they thought as I thought, that sex was the only reason we were together. My sexual relationships weren’t very deep or emotionally satisfying, and were filled with the typical male complaints of ‘I’m not hungry, I’m not horny, you don’t want to play rugby and I don’t want to go shopping for dresses, so why are you clinging?’
Women were so foreign I felt you needed a dictionary or an interpreter to talk to them, and I couldn’t understand how we kept getting mixed signals that desire for sex = desire for conversation afterwards. I didn’t think I was being unclear, didn’t get why it should be upsetting, and I fell into the typical male attitude: women are just crazy.
All that time I imagined ‘the girl’s world’ whatever it was, was more or less as fulfilling for them as my world was to me. If I ever imagined it wasn’t, I would have supposed they dealt with it the same way I would: kicking someone’s ass, but however they handled it, it was their responsibility.
I didn’t ‘get it’ until I realized that you didn’t need to pick your words and phrases out of a man-woman dictionary to talk to them, and that there was such a thing as having mutual interests outside of sex.
Then I realized that they they didn’t have a ‘girl’s world’, that their world should have been my world, that they were part of my world that was unseen, that it’s been that way all along, and a lot of crime was going on right before my eyes, abetted by my ignorance.
This awareness has been so enlightening and so rewarding to me that I would never want to go back to the man I was, but I’ve been having trouble figuring out the right thing to do about it, or knowing what could have been done to open my eyes about it earlier.
I hadn’t had a clue what sex and relationships were really all about, and . I thought ‘My God, millions of men acting like jerks, for decades! No wonder everything is so fucked up.’ I’ve wondered if the old-timers and religious teachings were right: I wondered if they were right to keep sex out of the hands of the young. Lately I’ve been trying to promote family values, thinking that if I could guarantee you two parents who won’t abandon you, that’ll add up to a lot, and it’ll be easier to focus on gender equality if we’re not also dealing with broken families, but that’s been ruffling a lot of feathers. I’ve been exploring it for about a year on various forums but turns out not as many people are sympathetic to the idea as I hoped, that or I express myself like a twonk.
I’m writing this to tell you why I understand man-hating and distrust. I’ll always strive to have men and women move forward together from now on.
CJ, thanks for your comment.
However, this post is marked “feminists and pro-feminists” only. Since you’re not a feminist or a pro-feminist, as I understand the terms, please do not post on this thread again.
If you want to disagree with or discuss this moderation policy, please do so here, on the thread about moderation.
I think one reason other than homosociality that men may defend abusers is that it’s easier to accept that one of your friend’s is a liar than to accept that one of your friends hates women and is violent to them. Lying is a far lesser sin than abusiveness.
Also, I think many men–more so than women–assume that because something is shocking and horrible, it must therefore be rare. Rape and other forms of violence against women are shocking; therefore, according to many people, they must both be rare. Many people don’t seem to be aware that something can be brutal and yet commonplace. So they assume that a rapist or a wife-beater or a child molester is a freak of nature, probably someone who stands out in a crowd, rather than someone who blends in.
This is far from a hopeless cause. Most people who think like this will change their minds when they speak to some people for whom brutality is a basic fact of life.
Bean – I know exactly what you mean about paternalistic men. I have known a small handful of men who condemned rapists and supported women from a feminist perspective. But as many of the men who have been useful when someone has talked about a rape experience have come from a position that was much more along the lines of “no-one hurts my friend’s, it’s my job as a man to protect women.” Whereas the majority of the men who pay lip service to a feminist analysis of rape tend to be compeltely useless, or worse choose rapists over survivors when it comes down to it.