As readers would know, I’m always encouraged when men decide to speak out against the objectification of women, sexualisation of girls and violence against women. On Wednesday I published a piece by Simon Kennedy on how City Beach acclimatises boys to porn, and his plea for something better. (It was originally sent in as a blog comment, I thought it deserved more attention). Today I run the second piece in a row by a man.
Danny Blay is Executive Officer at the ‘No To Violence Male Family Violence Prevention Association (NTV) Inc’ Incorporating the Men’s Referral Service in Melbourne, Victoria. Danny was heavily involved in ‘16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence’, which began on International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women and ended last Saturday, International Human Right’s Day. I asked Danny to write a piece for the MTR blog on what led him to be involved in addressing violence against women.
Men: We Need to Change
Danny Blay
‘If there’s war between the sexes then there’ll be no people left’.
This phrase from Joe Jackson’s 1982 hit ‘Real Men’ has stayed with me since then. At the time I was only a young bloke, but in amongst the turmoil of the Falklands War, fighting in Lebanon, Ethiopia and Somalia, the launch of the then strange but intimidating and short-lived National Action party in Australia and the inner mayhem that is early teenage years, I not only became aware of the young women around me (where were they before?), but also how many young men had begun sprouting muscles, height, pimples and troubling attitudes and language towards and about girls.
From the end of primary school, gender became a reference point to everything. Relationships, sporting prowess, politics, authority, social status – especially through male commentary. Girls were rated on the basis of looks, and boys muttered what they would do to (not with) them if given half the chance. Relationships started forming and breaking, sex was spoken about relentlessly, and boys came to school on Mondays bragging about the number of impossibly pneumatic and athletic older women they bedded over the previous couple of days. All of this of course was bullshit.
Not that I thought there was anything wrong with it. Indeed, I participated. That’s what you did. That’s how you fitted in, in a dire attempt to not be classified as a nerd, gay or both. Boys had to be loud, obnoxious, resistant to authority, and defined by their sexual observations, desires and lies. Of course, not all boys were, or are, but the attention and oxygen such boys demanded seem to prevent other ways of relating into the space.
I never really thought objectively about gender until much later when re-evaluating my career options and found myself volunteering for the Men’s Referral Service.
The training program to become a telephone counsellor was one part counselling skills and two parts being confronted with the realities of the everyday lives of so many women and girls on the receiving end of violence and abuse. Until then I didn’t really consider the realities of the lives of the women around me – the people you associate with are often part of the furniture, until some realities are exposed.
I had initially thought becoming a volunteer telephone counsellor with the Men’s Referral Service was a means to an end – perhaps some further study, a job in a local community service that would do slightly more good for the world than my then soul-destroying corporate gigs. Little did I know that I was on a journey to bigger things.
Family – or domestic – violence was a term I was aware of but in the abstract. I didn’t think I saw it, nor did I think it affected anyone I knew. It was like considering major disability or some exotic disease – it affected others, but nobody in my world.
But the realities started becoming difficult to ignore. One in three women experience violence in a relationship. It is hard not to immediately reflect on the women in our lives when confronted with this statistic. Partners, daughters, relatives, friends, mothers of friends, work colleagues, shopkeepers, bus drivers, politicians, someone pushing her pram through the park when you take the dog for a walk, another doing the shopping and comparing the prices of mince. Counting one in three became overwhelming – almost threatening. All these people. Why?
Volunteering at the Men’s Referral Service, by its very nature, got me and my colleagues thinking not only about the people who overwhelmingly experience violence within relationships and families, but the people using the violence. The people doing the damage. Almost entirely men.
That meant me.
I can confidently say I have not used violence or abuse towards women, but I became aware that for many of us, our gender identity is our identity. I started thinking about my every day. Dressing, walking, driving, speaking, observing, thinking, assuming, accusing, judging. Why this way and not some other way? What is it about my gender – and that of my fellow blokes – that informs how we engage with the world?
I didn’t know it then, but am much more aware now. The vast bulk of prisoners, users of violent crime, the dead and injured on our roads, sexual offenders, those suspended and expelled from school… are all male. Call it standard male behaviour (simplistic), oversupply of testosterone (erroneous), biologically determined (naïve) or a misguided sense of entitlement (now we’re getting somewhere), but I began to realise that so many men make poor decisions that end up having massive consequences.
In my current role at No To Violence Male Family Violence Prevention Association and the Men’s Referral Service I sometimes think about what life would be like if there was no gender difference in behaving badly – and dangerously. But that’s like wondering what the world would be like without any gender bias – that is, a world where men don’t overwhelmingly hold the power, cash and means to exert control over others – often women and girls. It’s a nice thought, but distant from much of our reality today.
We have made huge gains in becoming aware of the realities of many women’s and girl’s lives, and have a greater understanding of what can be done to call men to account and invite them to change. But it’s slow going.
I think that my career in male family violence prevention over the last fourteen years or so has influenced me as a man, and in particular how I relate to my partner, my children and the people around me. Yet it worries me that this might be because of the impact of my work on my personal life. What of the other men? How are we trying to invite them to consider things differently?
This year NTV distributed ‘16 Actions, 16 Days’ – real, tangible things men can do over the 16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence. It was borne out of a frustration that most men believe that violence against women is wrong, but they struggle to conceptualise what that means in their daily lives, and consider what small things they can do to affect change.
Ultimately, we’re inviting men to think about sexism and patriarchy as reality, not in the abstract. We can think that we aren’t part of the problem, but there are things all around us that suggest otherwise. And we can stop it.
Many would consider ‘war between the sexes’ as a glib and poetic fictionalised perception, but it’s the reality for many women and girls. Actually, ‘war’ implies two sides fighting, whereas with violence against women, it’s mostly one way.
Until we immerse ourselves in their world and their experiences, violence and abuse will continue to be used against the one in three women in our lives – partners, daughters, relatives, friends, mothers of friends, work colleagues, shopkeepers, bus drivers, politicians, someone pushing her pram through the park when you take the dog for a walk, another doing the shopping and comparing the prices of mince.
See also: Violence against women is endemic to our sick culture , MTR.
7 Responses
Danny, thanks for your sharing your journey and insights – very much appreciated.
The notion that all men are violent has been the most egregious feminist lie told in the last 50 years. Thank you, Danny Blay and your Reistmeister, for keeping this false narrative going. The only defence one need offer against this abomination of an article is that the overwhelming majority of men will never abuse women.
One need not remind the readers that just as all men are not abusers, men are not women, so masculinity ought to be separated from femininity and both from the sexual politics that keep them in healthy tension. An indictment of all men as potential abusers must automatically be eliminated from the discourse because it can only be held in tension with the equally absurd notion that women are not also potential abusers.
What, then, is the status quo when it comes to men and abuse? What is it that makes most men avoid abuse? What makes most men not potential abusers? What things in our culture restrain men from misusing their strength for violence against innocent females? How does this culture of restraint manifest, especially in those who might have thought about abusing someone?
In seeking answers, one thing is certain – we can’t look to feminists. Third-wave feminists, in particular, are ill-equipped to increase our understanding because they’re only interested in advancing the Victim Culture – a perversion of the truth that is little more than a jurisprudential rationalisation of female narcissism, and which has nothing at all to do with men. Looking to third-wavers for answers is therefore as productive as looking for teats on a bull.
Even second–wave feminists tend to focus on the few men who abuse women and project ever more derivative rationalizations of their behaviour onto all men. They look for vaguely similar outliers in data sets of vaguely similar outliers and exalt any grouping they find as evidence of a primary correlation. The truth is, we’re unlikely to learn the real reasons most men don’t abuse by listening to feminists at all. We should examine men for this.
What does the masculine narrative tell us about why men don’t abuse? What are the fundamental attitudes towards gender, sexuality and masculinity that prevent most men from becoming abusers? I offer this summary of the masculine narrative:
From early boyhood, males learn that to be a man is something very different to being a woman. Boys learn that masculinity – exemplified by strong, righteous men – is to be valued above all else. Males learn that boys who grow into their masculinity become men who are treated with honour and respect by both men and women. Boys are also taught that masculinity is solid and enduring, and that once they have it, chances are they’ll keep it. Even if they stumble from time to time masculinity is safe once it has been established. Occasional slips may catapult them from the most popular boy in the room to the butt of everyone’s jokes but authentic masculinity will always find its way back.
When boys become youths, they’re defined by the potent mixture of masculinity, power and emerging sexuality. This is a fragile time for male and female alike as there’s tremendous pressure internally and externally to express these traits safely in a world that has a remarkably confusing array of value systems. Yet, there are still many more ways in which young men can be made to feel like respectable men as there are to entice them into misusing their strength for sexual dominance. Undergirding all of this is the fact that post-pubescent youths are entitled to feel like what they are – young, strong, sexual men.
This sense of entitlement is what feminists have tried to distort. Many feminists wantonly dismiss masculine strength as little more than savagery while delving deeply into femininity as though it were the blessed fount of life. The message they attempt to convey is that women carry a miracle elixir, too sophisticated for men to appreciate and that men, from puberty, should feel privileged to partake of it. They use an astonishing array of ridiculously shallow stereotypes to peddle this – men are ungrateful wretches, men are beasts, women are smarter, women care more, men are pigs throw rocks at them etc. In keeping their study of men and masculinity obtuse, feminists are able to assert that men are not entitled to feel masculine whilst asserting the exact opposite for women and femininity.
Yet a man with masculinity is a respectable man. Most people accept that even a boy with a low degree of masculinity will be respected in society, and since respectable men define their masculinity not by overpowering the weak but by their capacity to protect them, it’s the odd man out who abuses. Respectable men are responsible for the very society in which women are able to grow and flourish in safety. We cannot ignore the elephant in the room here: without respectable men being in the overwhelming majority in our society women would most likely suffer a quick and brutal death.
For this reason, masculinity cannot be truly understood by feminists, and it cannot be defined by femininity. Some say that masculinity and femininity are complementary, not opposites. Others say they’re just words that describe different parts of the sexual continuum. What is patently obvious, however, is that femininity is not ‘better masculinity’. Both men and women can be virtuous and both can be evil. Empathy, wisdom, grace, mercy, compassion and love are all as masculine as they are feminine and all are valid reasons why men don’t abuse. Women who think otherwise invaginate our boys by shaming or medicating the masculinity out of them before it matures, then impregnate them with the cancerous idea that being a woman is like being a man only better.
Alarmingly, this abominable idea is now being treated as a fact in many government institutions – thanks to the White Ribbon organisation. It is public policy in many schools, for example, to assume all males are potential abusers despite how easily this logical fallacy is debunked. Namely, if we agree that looking out for the safety and well-being of another (as in not wanting to rape them) is not a line that divides feminine from masculine but one that divides human from animal, it follows that male sexuality is not a demon to be exorcised but a pearl to be cultured. Thus, men and boys who are viewed otherwise are treated as less than human and institutions that adopt such an attitude are themselves abusive.
The feminist narrative has covered up the naked truth that masculinity is powerful not because of the potential for abuse, but because it couples strength with restraint. The very idea that these two seemingly opposites can be coupled is itself powerful, so it behoves us to look at the inherent goodness in men and what they do for society. Simply put, women have freedom in the world because men wield their power wisely. Sadly, the feminised culture has written this unassailable fact out of public discourse. It is time to change the narrative; to wrest it away from the feminist ideologues and the hapless, soul-less men who serve and idolise them.
Repeat after me, Danny Blay:
“Masculinity is the possession of strength for the purpose of protection rather than its exertion for the purpose of coercion”.
This is the truth. Go now and tell it.
Danny Blay says ‘ the people you associate with are often part of the furniture, until some realities are exposed.’ This is precisely what most men think -that women and girls are ‘part of the furniture’ because men’s and boys’ focus and attention are firmly fixed on other males. Male supremacist systems ensure males learn from the minute they are born their needs; their demands; their rights always supercede those supposedly inferior beings females. Men learn as boys to view the world through a male myopic lens and they do not see females as humans instead we are ‘part of the furniture’ things to be used and exploited, because we supposedly had the misfortune to be born female (sic).
Viewing the world through the male myopic lens ensures that men individually and as a group refuse to accept the world does not comprise one sex only but rather females are the majority and males are the minority. However, this has not prevented the male supremacist system from claiming the male view of the world is the default one and that biological males because they are male not female automatically accords them greater power and rights than any mere (sic) female person.
This is why boys swiftly learn that girls are not human but things who can be dismissed because they are not as important as males. It is also why boys boast to other boys their pseudo male sexual prowess because it is essential no male shows any evidence of supposed ‘feminine traits or interests.’ After all a male is diametrically opposite to females and given females are the inferior beings a male has to constantly prove to his fellow males he has no ‘feminine attributes whatsoever.’ Proving to other males the male has sexually conquered a female earns the male kudos with his fellow male peers and ensures he is not ‘feminised.’ Boys do not believe they are mistreating a human because she is female and hence is not human – she exists to serve his sexual demands and rights (sic).
Gender was created by male supremacist system to maintain and justify male domination over all women because it is essential males do not show any evidence of supposedly ‘feminine attributes or interests.’ It is also a very succinct way of keeping women out of positions of power because male supremacist system has to justify its lies that man (sic) is the default human and therefore his views and his ideas are the default ones.
Most men do not view women as human instead they view us as ‘sex’ and because women are the supposedly inferior species why should men even idly consider that
women’s lives and experiences are as important as men’s lives and experiences. After all our role is to massage men’s egos and reflect back to men their inflated views of themselves. We see this all the time whenever a woman engages in conversation with a man, because within a very short time he either loses interest in what she is saying or he ensures the conversation remains fixed on his interests and his views. The woman concurs because she has been socialised to massage the male ego and to maintain the myth that his views and interests are far more interesting than hers. Men do not talk to women they talk at women whereas men engage in conversation and dialogue with other men.
This is why so many men view women as ‘part of the furniture’ we are useful as furniture is useful but we have no independent thoughts or ideas because our lives are supposedly solely fixed on ‘meeting male approval.’
Danny Blay says ‘that many men make poor choices’ but that is another common excuse which ignores men’s choice and agency in deciding to act in a certain way; deciding to commit violence against a woman or women because she or they supposedly disrespected the male. Men justify their violence against women by claiming she denied him his pseudo male sex right to her body; she did not accord him sufficient respect; she challenged him; she refused to submit to his demands; she became pregnant when he did not want to become a father; she demanded he contribute financially towards her chidlren’s welfare because he is their biological father. She treated him as her equal not her superior. She behaved as an autonomous human being not as a man’s door mat.
So it is not surprising so many men commit violence against women because men still refuse to accept women are autonomous humans not men’s disposable sexual service stations. Remember one cannot harm an object which is not human and that is how majority of men view women – as dehumanised objects or part of the furniture; always there and available for men’s use/exploitation but never accorded human dignity and respect.
Jennifer Drew says (in quotes):
This may be true for 10% of the male population (the ‘alphas’) but the rest of men seem to firmly focus their attention on women. With the million ways women, the media and society makes it impossible not to, it should be no surprise that most men do.
Respectable men simply do not do this. Society is filled with fathers, grandfathers, uncles, brothers, sons who love and cherish the women and girls in their lives. To claim otherwise is a perfect example of feminist distortion.
This is another feminist distortion. Women have had greater rights (read: privileges) than men for nearly a century, and the gap is widening. Unlike feminism, which is defined by the advancement of the needs and wants of a single class of people, the male world view has never upheld such self-interest as virtue.
Below is what feminists THINK the male world view is all about:
*Men once had the right to earn income and own property. Women did not generally have these rights, therefore they were oppressed.
*Men once had a right to be in authority over women (and children) and money in marriage, therefore women were oppressed.
*Men were free to engage in sexual activity all they wanted before (and during) marriage without social outcry while women had to be virgins until marriage, and faithful within marriage, therefore women were sexually oppressed.
*Men had a right to sex within marriage, therefore women were sexually objectified, and oppressed.
*Men had a right to a clean house and dinner on the table. Women were seen as domestic slaves while men had freedom of movement, and so were oppressed.
Below is what the male world view ACTUALLY was:
*A man had an obligation to earn income (a woman had no such obligation).
*A man had an obligation to provide for his wife and any children of the marriage (a woman was entitled to a man’s financial provision).
*A man had an obligation (social and legal) to provide for his wife and children, and for maintaining family finances (if all the money was spent on drink or women, he was the one working extra shifts to compensate). A man therefore was entitled to authority over his wife, children and marital finances, including property.
*A woman had no such obligation (if all the money was spent on spa treatments and subscriptions to fashion magazines, her husband was stuck working extra shifts to compensate). A woman, therefore, had no entitlement to authority over finances and was obligated to defer to her husband in such matters.
*A woman had an obligation to provide her husband with children if she could (sex). A man had an obligation to provide his wife with children if he could.
*A man had no biological entitlement to know that the children of the marriage belonged to him, yet had a legal obligation to provide for children born into the marriage (whosever they were). A woman therefore had an obligation to remain faithful, so her husband would know he wasn’t paying to put the milkman’s babies through private school.
*A man was entitled to freedom of movement. A woman was entitled to the protection of her husband. A man had no such entitlement from his wife, but was obligated to die to protect her if necessary. A woman had an obligation to abide by her husband’s restrictions on her movement, so that his safety would not be needlessly put at risk.
*A woman had an entitlement to share her husband’s income. A woman had an obligation to perform domestic labor in return. A man had an obligation to provide his wife with a living until her death, if he could.
What is the world view NOW?
*Women have no real obligations – neither to society nor to men. They have no obligation to remain faithful in marriage, no obligation to remain married if they don’t want to, no obligation to provide a man with sex or children within marriage, no obligation to bear any children conceived therein, no obligation to become fully self-supporting afterward. No obligation to maintain their children’s relationship with their fathers if it becomes inconvenient or annoying.
*Women have only entitlements. The entitlement to share in a husband’s social and financial status, and to a share in his income – even after a marriage ends, the entitlement to not have to earn income if she chooses.
*Women have NEW entitlements that never existed under ‘patriarchy’. The entitlement to not be a virgin on her wedding day. The entitlement to stray without penalty, the entitlement to divorce without penalty, the entitlement to abort a fetus without even informing her husband or partner, the entitlement to child support and alimony, and the entitlement to move with the kids if the new boyfriend wants to live elsewhere. The entitlement of an unmarried woman to a man’s financial support for an illegitimate child. An entitlement to demand her husband help with domestic labor and child care, even if she doesn’t work outside the home.
And what about MEN?
*Still socially obligated to be the primary breadwinner, still socially obligated to share his social and financial status and any assets with his wife, still obligated to share those assets and provide for a woman even after she’s no longer his wife, in many jurisdictions still obligated to provide for children even when DNA testing proves they were conceived through his wife’s infidelity, still obligated to earn income or be called a deadbeat, and apparently still obligated to provide sex to his wife – or pay.
*In some countries a man is still obligated to serve in the military if his government sees fit, and still obligated to be self-sufficient or end up in the gutter. He still has a socially enforced obligation to generate more income and economic activity than he requires to meet his basic needs.
And what do WOMEN owe society?
*No obligation to serve in the military, no obligation to put more (or even as much) into the economy than she takes out. No obligation to the taxpayer who subsidises her career as a doctor or lawyer by remaining in the workforce full time over the long haul to help pay back the cost of her training. No obligation to earn a self-supporting income if she’s unable, or if she finds a man who’ll do it for her.
*Yet she is still entitled to society’s provision (through a multitude of women-targeted income and social assistance programs), and still entitled to society’s protection no matter how foolishly she behaves (Family Law Legislation Amendment (Family Violence and Other Measures) Bill 2011) or how badly she behaves (Google any female offender and you’ll find criminal accountability is almost zero).
*Women have a “right” to serve in the military (while for men it often remains an obligation that hangs over their heads the moment they turn 18), a right to earn income and spend it as they see fit (and then become burdens on the system in their old age), an entitlement to an education whether they’re going to do anything with it or not, an entitlement to disproportionate government assistance with their health care needs.
Women now have no obligation to do anything that is not in their own interest. You do what’s right for YOU, sister! And yet all of society–including any men they’ve been more than tangentially involved with–has an obligation to them. An obligation of protection, provision, acceptance and tolerance, no matter how poor women’s choices might be, no matter how badly they mess up, no matter how selfish they are, no matter how much they harm others. The good women and the bad, the productive and the burdensome, all enjoy these entitlements if they so choose. Feminism has done nothing more than free women from any obligation, while simultaneously expanding their tally of entitlements.
And yet feminism seems to have no interest in freeing men from their obligations. Financial abortion for men is pooh-poohed the moment anyone mentions it, even though this option is fully open to women through unilateral abortion, adoption or abandonment. There are giant, free, government agencies whose only purpose is to extract men’s (patriarchal) financial obligations to the mother/child unit, while no similar agencies exist to enforce any obligation on the part of women to maintain a father/child relationship.
200 years ago, we could not grant women an entitlement to earn income without removing the income-earning role as a male obligation–and without that male obligation, perhaps 2% of wealthy, educated women would have found work in a barrister’s office, while the other 98% would have been mining coal with babies strapped to their backs. But now? The world has changed just enough to free women from any obligation toward anyone but themselves, while keeping their entitlements virtually untouched and actually increasing them.
And who PAYS?
ALL of us. If these entitlements were equally available to anyone, regardless of their gender, this would be the ‘equality’ feminists claim they seek. But they aren’t. And those to whom none of these patriarchal and more modern entitlements apply are now paying for them through a disproportionate cost of obligation.
The more one looks at it, the more it is clear women have never had it as bad as feminists claim they did, and no one has EVER had it as good as women in the west do today. They receive left right and center, from society, from government, from men. And the only person they owe any obligation to is themselves.
That’s feminist “human dignity and respect”, right there. How can we believe anything a feminist (male or female) says about men and violence when this is the status quo?
Great Scott, Men Are Not Abusers and Jennifer Drew, you are both driving me INSANE. You’re both making these wild, inaccurate generalisations that make me want to pull my hair out.
M.A.N.A, you’re absolutely correct when you say both men and women are capable of abuse and evil, but you’re relying on these gendered ideas of masculinity and femininity like crutches. And Jennifer, as always, you INSIST on perpetuating this myth that all men are abusers and all women are victims. I’m curious, are you immune from this victimhood, or is it that you’re the one in the room smart enough to see the bigger picture, and everyone else has wool over their eyes? Or is it both?
Yikes, such vitriol. I guess its much easier to look at the world in black and white and make generalisations e.g. men are bastards, women are inferior, muslims are terrorists, the disabled and the elderly are a burden to society, religion fosters war and division etc etc. Perhaps it would be better to first define the human attributes that should be promoted and nurtured regardless or gender, colour, creed – honour, courage, care, respect, dignity, freedom, love, kindness, empathy and let these represent the normative framework for societal change. Wishful thinking perhaps in an uncompromising world. In the end however, the so-called wars between men and women, between men and men, between christian and muslim, between black and white and so on are really all wars against our own humanity, and therefore instrinsically self-destructive..
I’m not surprised in the slightest “gendered ideas” drive some feminists insane. Those gender “studies” textbooks they read, based as they are on the female tendency to rationalise event he most outlandish supposition until it ‘feels’ right must, I suspect, cause mental illness at some point. Ten thousand feminists sitting in a circle, chanting “gender is a social construct” doesn’t automatically make it so. It’s enough to drive anyone insane.