Ending Male Violence Against Women, a workshop with Jackson Katz

Yesterday, the West Michigan based Center for Women in Transition hosted a workshop at the GVSU campus in Allendale with long-time anti-sexist activist Jackson Katz. The workshop brought together students, social workers and people who work in sexual assault and rape prevention work.

Katz began the workshop by framing the issue of gender violence as problematic because it usually gets referred to as an issue of particular concern for women. The problem with this is that it means that men and masculinity will often be ignored.

This is what is called the absent referent, where the dominant group continues to go unacknowledged and unexamined. When we think about race, we tend to ignore White people. When we think of sexual orientation, we usually ignore heterosexuals. Katz believes that until gender issues become issues of primary concern for men, the levels of sexual assault and domestic violence will not change in this country.

Katz next addresses the issue of rape and to further illustrate the idea of how rape is framed as a women’s issue, he asks everyone what percentage of rape are committed by women. Of course, that number is less than 1%, which means the overwhelming percentage of rape committed in the US is done by men. Therefore, Katz said rape should primarily be a men’s issue.

Katz continues with this line of thinking by talking about how women and girls are taught what to do to reduce the risks of rape. Again, the culture doesn’t talk about the perpetrators and what we need to do to prevent men from committing rape.

The issue is further complicated when one thinks about how personal the issue of sexual assault and rape is. Katz said since rape and sexual assault is so prevalent that virtually everyone is affected at a personal level. We all have family members who have been victims, friends, neighbors and co-workers who have been directly impacted by sexual assault. Therefore, it is important for all of us to confront these issues on a personal level as well as a systemic level.

Next Katz talked about language and sexual assault and has the group do an exercise by reading a short article called Violence Against Women. The issue that Katz wanted to raise here is that when we talk about rape and sexual assault the language for perpetrators is usually de-gendered, such as truck drivers, businessmen or co-worker. When news coverage reports on this issue we never read, “Male students rapes woman on campus.” What we usually see is “female student raped on campus.” Therefore, male behavior is minimized or ignored and women are made the focus. This idea of how women become the focus after a sexual assault is committed by looking at how we culturally scrutinize female behavior. What kind of clothing was she wearing, why did she go there alone, what did she do to provoke this guy, etc.? So, we put our focus on the female victims of sexual assault instead of putting the focus on male perpetrators and their behavior.

Bystanders

After the first break Katz then shifted the discussion to what are role is as bystanders, which he refers to as friends, co-workers, neighbors, relatives, etc. The reason he thinks that looking a bystanders is an important focus for preventing male violence is that if we can get bystanders to take action, where men can hold other men accountable, then there will be a reduction of male perpetrated sexual violence.

In the Bystander approach to preventing male violence against women, Katz then talked about the work he has done in developing and using what he calls Mentoring for Violence Prevention or the MVP program.

Katz then leads the group through a couple of scenarios. The first deals with a situation in a typical high school hall way where a guy pushes his girlfriend into the lockers and how bystanders respond. The group talks first about what are the reasons why people might not respond or challenge the behavior. We also talk about what kinds of messages are sent to the girlfriend when we don’t act or intervene and what kinds of messages are being sent to the guy who is hurting his girlfriend when we don’t act?

A second scenario is where a guy is showing male friends pictures on his cell phone of his ex-girlfriend, explicit photos. If you are one of the guys what do you do? People discussed how this is an increasingly common reality where particularly young people are using social media sources to use and abuse women and girls by posting words and pictures that demean them.

What Katz tries to impress upon those in the workshop is the importance of having these kinds of discussions about what we can do and what our options are when we encounter these dynamics. Katz believes that when we discuss these issues people will not only come up with concrete ideas for action, but they will realize that there are more people who also object to these kinds of abusive male behaviors and therefore do not feel as isolated.

Media and Masculinity

The last session of the workshop dealt with a topic that most people know Katz for – how media portrays men and masculinity. Katz shows examples from some of his own work, particularly the documentary film Tough Guise.  One point that Katz makes about how media portrays men and boys was to rephrase the idea that the violence men and boys engage in is “learned behavior.” He says that this phrase is somewhat misleading in that it removes our focus from who is teaching this behavior, meaning the media. The media, which produce these images and messages about male behavior, are the entities that teach destructive male behavior.

The next clip he shows is from the documentary Hip Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes, which looks at misogyny, masculinity, and homophobia in rap & Hip Hop music. The first part was with the producer of the film who talked about his own journey with the normalization of female objectification in music videos. The second clip dealt with the hyper-sexual representation of women in music videos and how women at Spellman College confronted the rapper Nellie about his music video Tip Drill.

A third clip that Katz showed was from Jeanne Kilbourne’s film Killing Us Softly 4. In this clip Kilbourne takes to task how advertising perpetuates male stereotypes particularly how violent male behavior is normalized in ads. Kilbourne also makes the point that even though increasingly advertising is objectifying men and men’s bodies as well, the social cost of this media objectification is not the same for men as it is for women. Objectification of men in media does not contribute to or normalize violence against men like it does with the objectification of and male violence towards women.

The last clip that Katz shows is from the documentary Mickey Mouse Monopoly, a clip that looks at how girls are represented in Disney films. These images show how Disney has for decades been representing women and girls as highly sexualized and seductive characters that often need to be rescued. There is a particularly interesting critique of the film Beauty and the Beast.

Katz finished the workshop by offering up a variety of resources that people could use if they wanted to explore these issues in more details. Many of these resources can be accessed from both the websites of Jackson Katz and Jeanne Kilbourne, but if people are looking for books and documentary films they could find these resources locally at the Bloom Collective.