7. Not me, not my organization!
• Most men, (including myself for many years) most
sporting clubs or work organizations do not think this applies
to them -- that domestic violence, rape and sexism are issues
belonging to others. For example when the Australian Sports
Commission established its Harassment Free Sports policies
and programs, many sporting clubs did not believe they had
any harassment related issues. As the programs became established
it was evident that there were significant harassment problems.
The issues had been underground because there were no safe
mechanisms for members to turn to. When the situation is named,
there is permission to “see” the truth.
• Attitudes towards women, out of which violence and
inequity arise, are sustained by the tacit agreement of
good men and boys to the hegemonic male myth which is
still all too prevalent in most societies. (Flood, Berkowitz)
• Thus unless we are actively involved in changing
the dominant male paradigm we supporting it. For example why
(some) men rape is connected to the question of why sexual
violence is tolerated at all and that includes the way men
talk and especially joke about women. This is where the violence
begins. It can be part of a continuum with wolf whistles on
one end and rape at the other. (Katz)
• And we may all be much more involved than we imagine.
For example rapists are not born, they are made. And the culture
which makes 'them' also makes 'us'. Jackson
Katz says sexual assault and domestic violence are men’s
issues and encourages all men to become proactive
in this work.
• Many of the sexist jokes I’ve heard have not
seemed harmful to the men or boys telling them. However if
we put look at the jokes in the context of the fear most women
have of harm from men they begin to see the seriousness of
what seemed harmless.
• Like racist language which many of us heard and used
in the playground, sexist language has the potential to cause
not only emotional hurt but much more than that. Thus men
in violence transformation groups for perpetrators learn to
say, “I hit Susan because she was late,” rather
than “I hit the bitch because she was late.” There
is an age old sexist conversation that many men carry somewhere
inside them, which says, “Bitches deserve it.”
This is not dissimilar to the racist conversation I heard
in as a boy in Australia which said, “Wogs are pathetic.”
(‘Wogs’ is a derogatory terms for migrants from
Italy or Greece or anywhere ‘else’ actually)
• Using a frame of thoughts, words and deeds, we can
see the connection between sexist thinking, sexist language
and sexism behavior. The young man who killed 14 female students
and wounded 13 others at the École Polytechnique, the
School of Engineering at the University of Montréal
in Canada, felt unfairly treated and his thoughts, constructed
over the years, became the rageful words, “Feminists
ruined my life.” His words became actions as he killed
innocent women (sparing men) whom his thinking had identified
as the source of his pain. This has come to be known as the
Montreal Massacre and has been
a catalyst for the extensive White
Ribbon Movement in 1991, to remember the victims of the
massacre and protest against violence against women. Eight
years later the cause has spread to a dozen countries around
the world. Its comprehensive curriculum
on gender violence -- taught at public, junior high and
senior high school levels -- is used in 100 schools across
Canada, 1,000 in the U.S (White Ribbon Campaign website)
• There are strong connections between attitudes and
actions, between violence and notions of masculinity. We are
all connected to these because this is where we have grown
up as men. (Berkowitz)
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