Yes, all men
All men are influenced by misogyny, and we need to stop pretending violent men exist in a vacuum.
Content warning: This post discusses sexual assault and rape.
A note: Because there’s so much whataboutery and wilful obfuscation on this topic, I want to say a few things. I’m talking specifically about male violence against women here. Abuse in LGBTQ relationships, and male violence towards other men and trans/non binary people is of course an equally important issue, but I don’t think that’s quite the same conversation, although of course there are crossovers. It goes without saying that male victims of domestic abuse also deserve to be believed and supported.
You can’t argue with facts. Data trends show that the perpetrators of violence against women are far, far more likely to be men. This is not a value judgement on individual men, it’s simple numbers. This is an endemic societal issue.
Over the course of a single day this week, the headlines included a man thought to have murdered his wife and daughter then turned the gun on himself, a serial rapist policeman whose crimes went unnoticed for two decades, and a man who lured a mother and daughter to her death through a dating app. I’m not mentioning their names because they’re already everywhere and I don’t want to talk about these individual men. I want to talk about how, as a society, we still have so far to go in calling male violence what it is: an epidemic, a pattern, a culture.
This tweet sums up the state of play succinctly.
Of course, nobody is actually sitting at home thinking these heinous, devastating crimes are just ‘boys being boys’. Men will read the news and feel as appalled as women. They will feel revulsion, a sense that these murderous and predatory men might as well be another species. Normal, decent men would never do that.
A ton of feathers and a ton of lead are at once the same, and nothing alike. A man who inserts his penis into his sleeping partner, and a man who violently rapes and attacks someone he lured to him through a dating app, are at once the same and nothing alike. One uses force in a premeditated attack. The other simply loves and desires his partner – or so he thinks. He assumes previous consensual sex implies consent to future sex. He thinks nothing of having sex with a sleeping human who is unable to decide if they want sex at that moment.
They are both rapists.
I genuinely believe that a proportion of men who commit sexual assault don’t believe that that’s what they’re doing. They are the gentle sleep rapists, the boundary-pushers, the ones who blur the line between flirting and coercion. There is no violence or force, but there is entitlement. There is a perception of a woman’s hesitance or refusal as a challenge rather than a barrier, and it’s all done with a smile and a twinkle in the eye.
These same men would likely feel appalled at the rape and murder in the headlines, without realising that their own subtle and well-meaning violations are the other side of the same coin.
I had a rude awakening to the realities of misogyny when I was 22, and thought it would be fun to date a man nearly twice my age. For brevity’s sake, I’ll just say that before this relationship, I had a combination of internalised misogyny and ignorance to the pervasive, insidious ways sexism permeates society. So, this guy. I might as well have stuffed a puppet with the personalities of Dapper Laughs and Jim Davidson.
He told me casually that he saw short skirts on women in nightclubs as an invitation to grope them; that he’d fuck women who wore short skirts but wouldn’t consider actually dating one; that he hoped the promiscuity of my university days was behind me because he wouldn’t date a slag; that the only women who have casual sex are ones with low self esteem or a history of abuse. When I pointed out the double standard here – that him having casual sex with short-skirted women he wouldn’t date because they were “slags” was fine, but women behaving the same way was not – he simply said “it’s different for men”.
Obviously, I dumped him. I also used to purposely wind him up by wearing clothes I knew he hated, and laughing at him when he came out with this abject nonsense. If I’d have been less outspoken, I could’ve found myself crumbling under the vicious contempt he had for women.
Describing only his bad points makes him sound like an absolute monster, and while I think he’s an ignorant sexist bigot who’s sexually assaulted several women in nightclubs, I don’t think the guy’s evil. I don’t even think his beliefs are held maliciously. He was also funny, and incredibly supportive of the mental health issues I was struggling with at the time. He could be generous and interesting and he loved to travel. His beliefs didn’t come from nowhere; they came from the world around him, from his father, from his friends, from the books he read and the films he watched and from confirmation bias due to hanging out with other misogynists–in–denial.
This is the problem with “not all men”. Men cannot be split neatly into two groups of “dangerous misogynists” and “nice guys”. As I sometimes say to people when we argue about this – I’ve had several “but there ARE good guys! My dad/boyfriend/brother/pet lizard is one!” rebuttals – I’m sure people exist who thought Harold Shipman was a great doctor.
“You can read feminist literature as much as you like, but you can’t think yourself out of being part of a demographic that has enjoyed centuries’ worth of socially constructed advantage”
I have absolutely no issue with saying that all men, every single one, are influenced by misogyny. Does that mean every individual man holds actively hateful beliefs? No, of course it doesn’t. But misogyny doesn’t have to be performed with intent. Nobody grows up in a vacuum. Every single man has been raised in a society that favours them, teaches them they are entitled to women’s bodies and women’s labour, that they are better at jobs and politics and public speaking and driving and everything else. You can read feminist literature as much as you like, but you can’t think yourself out of being part of a demographic that has enjoyed centuries’ worth of socially constructed advantage. (Another caveat: yes, the patriarchy does negatively affect men too, but that’s another discussion for another time).
Of course, there are many men who have made the effort to understand the effect societal misogyny and the patriarchy has had on them. The effect will of course vary according to many factors – their socioeconomic status, their background and upbringing, location, role models, to name a few. That’s intersectionality, baby! Many men do the legwork to understand this, and that’s great… but it doesn’t exempt them from residing under the umbrella of men as a social class. Of course, there are also men who think they’re doing the work but are blind, either wilfully or not, to their own failings: the outspoken feminist musician who put his hand up my skirt at an industry afterparty comes to mind. I actually called out that guy and got a seemingly sincere apology, so I can only hope he genuinely was reflective. He probably didn’t think what he was doing at the time was wrong, though. We had been talking vaguely flirtatiously.
But wait. Isn’t that the same principle of the guy who starts having sex with a sleeping partner?
YES! Bingo! You can be abusive, predatory or coercive without malicious intent. If popular media and society at large doesn’t actively encourage it, it enables it at the least. How many romcoms feature a man employing tactics that amount to stalking and harassment to win over the object of their affection? And if we want to get historical, marital rape was legal until 1991, but a survey in 2018 suggested people were still confused about what rape actually was. Think of it like a sliding scale. On the one end, you have the placard guy from Love Actually and a guy who pushed flirting a bit too far. On the other, you have a murderer. We need to stop saying ‘isolated incidents’. The Venn diagram of societal misogyny and men influenced by it is a circle.