Submission to The Social Lens: A Social Work Action blog by Honorary Professor Bob Pease, Deakin University, Geelong, Australia.
Can you tell me about the anti-sexist men’s group you founded in the 1970s?
During the 1970s, I was in a relationship with a feminist woman who was involved in a feminist consciousness-raising group. I was studying social work at the time and I was involved in various forms of social justice politics. She would come home from CR meetings and would challenge me about my privilege as a man, including my limited participation in housework and my not being as emotionally available as she wanted me to be. I was always supportive of feminism as a social movement but of course when it came to me being confronted about my own behaviour and demanding that I needed to change I was unsettled and threatened by it. So long before there was any notion of a men’s movement and before there were any significant books or discussions about men and masculinity, I formed a men’s group primarily of men who were partners of feminist women to try and make sense at a personal level about what feminism meant for us as men. We tried to mirror the consciousness-raising process that we understood the women were doing. We chose topics like sexuality, violence, housework, fathering, friendship and other aspects of our lives and talked about them over dinner and wine. The difficulty was that we were exploring our privilege and entitlement rather than our oppression and this created tensions in the group. Some men wanted to focus more on the pain in their own lives. Other men wanted to avoid the personal and focus on men’s power and dominance. I always thought that pain and power in men’s lives were two sides of the same coin. So the group split up. Some of us then decided to set up a reading group on feminist theory and we read the key feminist texts of the time and related them to our lives and the women in our lives.
I’d like to talk about your activism throughout the 1980s and 1990s, and how tricky it was to be a pro-feminist man at that time.
Being pro-feminist as a man has always been ‘tricky.’ Many women were understandably skeptical about our motives. Could we be trusted? Were we simply looking for more sophisticated ways of controlling women? Were we simply trying to sexually attract feminist women? We realised that we needed to ‘walk the walk’ and that sitting around in lounge rooms talking about gender privilege wasn’t enough. So some of us got involved in various types of activism. We produced a Men Against Sexism Newsletter and organised public forums on men’s violence against women. For me this intensified when I moved to Melbourne in the 1980s and co-founded a group called Men Against Sexual Assault (MASA). As well as organising public forums of violence against women, we started engaging with the media doing interviews for radio, tv and print media, writing letters to the editor, and supporting Reclaim the Night marches by handing out leaflets to men in the sidewalk as the women marched through the streets. We also organised our own marches by men against violence and spoke at rallies. Feminist women had mixed responses to our work. Some applauded us and gave us far more accolades than we deserved. Some were suspicious of us and some were actively hostile towards us. Our marches received more media attention than the women’s marches and that understandably generated some resentment.
What did you teach in your patriarchy awareness workshops? What got you that ‘a-ha’ moment?
We modelled the Patriarchy Awareness Workshop on Racism Awareness Workshops. I’d been involved in some anti-racism workshops and I found them very emotionally powerful. Although we presented information to the men about patriarchy, men’s privilege and entitlement and men’s violence against women, the workshops were largely experiential rather than didactic. We adapted some of the exercises from the workshops challenging racism to those challenging patriarchy. To give just one example, we used a timeline exercise were I would ask men to form a circle and I would roll out a long sheet of butcher’s paper which has timeline on it from 5000 years BC to the present day. I would scatter some felt-tip pens across the paper and say to the men: “I would like you to think about what you know about ways in which men have used power over women. This may be in the form of violence, discrimination or unequal treatment. It can include something that impacts all women or just some women. It can include an event that you remember from history or a recent event that you remember being reported in the media. It can also include something that impacted a woman in your life. You may want to consider whether you witnessed an event and allowed it to happen or even whether there is something you yourself perpetrate. You may choose not to disclose but I want you to think about it as we do this exercise.”
I gave the participants a few minutes to think about this and then I invited them to come forward and name the event they wanted to record on the timeline and the approximate date on which it occurred. After speaking out about it and recording a few words about it on the timeline, they returned to their seats. The men came forward as many times as they wanted until there was nothing more they wanted to record. I did not allow for any discussion during the exercise. At the end of the exercise, the timeline was covered with numerous incidents of violence and abuse against women, including personal disclosures about women in their own lives who have been affected by violence. It also sometimes included the men disclosing their own complicity in the abuse of women.
When the timeline was completed, we all sat silently to reflect on the events that the men recorded. From my experience in facilitating this exercise over a number of years, it always evokes emotional responses in many of the men ranging from sadness and distress to anger as they reflect on the extent of the processes of victimisation and violence against women throughout history and in the current time.
There is also a flipside to the timeline where I ask the men to reflect on women’s resistance to the violence and abuse throughout history and also the lesser-known role that men have played as allies to women against this violence and abuse.
It‘s also important to add that this educational work with men should be done in presence of women to ensure transparency and accountability.
How do you define patriarchy?
I define it as the institutionalisation of men’s dominance of women in the family and in the wider society. I say that it is evidenced in:
- men’s control of social institutions like government and corporations
- men’s greater opportunity to accumulate resources (like prestige and income in employment)
- patterns of men’s violence and abuse against women
- the allocation of privileges and entitlements in heterosexual marriages
I also argue that we can think of it in terms of five levels or what I call five pillars. They are:
- structures of inequality that operate globally and are interested with other systems of inequality like capitalism, colonialism and white supremacy
- patriarchal ideology and dominant beliefs about gender and gender roles
- patriarchal peer support among men and male bonding between men
- familial patriarchy and coercive control and male entitlement in families
- patriarchal masculinities and subjectivities of men
So we have to think about it operating on these multiple levels.
We talk about ‘gendered violence’ when perhaps we should talk about ‘patriarchal violence.’ Can you explain why it’s so important to look at men’s violence against women through the framework of patriarchy?
Men’s violence against women is connected to men’s sense of entitlement and men’s privilege and control of institutions. If we don’t challenge male privilege, male entitlement and men’s dominance generally, we will not eliminate men’s violence against women. We stopped talking about patriarchy largely because men objected to the term and became defensive about it. So we talk more now about gender inequality but that doesn’t capture the complexity of the multiple levels of patriarchy. And gender equality is often framed as women being treated equally to men in patriarchal institutions, where women have to become like men to survive.
Tell me about how male bonding perpetuates patriarchy and how Australian mateship particularly exemplifies this?
Dominant forms of masculinity that drive men’s violence against women are connected to men’s relations with other men. Men largely bond with each other at the expense of women. When men get together without women they often foster in themselves and other men a tolerance for violence against women. We see this in the ways that men refer to women and the jokes they tell about women. There is research that demonstrates there is a close link between abusive peer relations among men and men’s violence towards women. We see this in sports, in college fraternities, in the military and in male-dominated workplaces, including our parliament. Men express a loyalty to other men. Research shows that most men would not challenge their best male friend if they knew he was being violent to his intimate partner.
All patriarchal societies foster abusive homosocial bonds among men. But in Australia, mateship is a particular cultural expression of those bonds. Mateship is celebrated in Australia. It’s connected to the early colonisation of Australia and the ANZAC tradition. Mateship is largely exclusively male, white and heterosexual. Mates are always supposed to support you, no matter what you have done. There is a dark side to mateship that is often not acknowledged. It reinforces misogyny, racism and homophobia. It’s associated with communal drinking and gang rape. It’s also associated with a particular stoical and unemotional expression of masculinity.
What do you think is the problem with using a public health model to address violence against women?
The public health approach is premised upon the idea that men’s violence against women can be prevented in the same way in which we aim to prevent a disease. They even use disease analogies by talking about violence as an epidemic and a social virus. So it’s like violence is something you ‘catch’ like the flu or COVID. So primary prevention strategies largely focus on changing community attitudes towards violence against women rather than addressing structural gendered inequalities, patriarchal culture and the deeply embedded sense of entitlement and privilege that many men exhibit. They are also premised upon notions that once we have the evidence to show what works, we can implement strategies to prevent it without acknowledging the powerful vested interests at stake that stop any significant structural and cultural changes.
If we are going to treat men’s violence against women as if it were a disease, perhaps we would have a male lockdown and curfew and isolation where men don’t have access to women either in the private sphere or the public sphere until it can be demonstrated that women are safe in the presence of men. Women are told not to go out alone at night and not to visit certain violence hot spots. But men’s movement is not restricted.
The expectation is that as gender inequality decreases, so will men’s violence against women. But what proof do we have for this? What do you think about this approach?
The evidence suggests that greater gender equality at the formal public level does not in itself lead to a decrease in men’s violence against women. In fact, it can lead to an increase in violence if other dimensions of patriarchy are not addressed. Of course, we need to achieve higher levels of gender equality, irrespective of violence perpetration but gender equality in the neoliberal framing of it as equal status and pay in male-dominated institutions will not in itself address it. Firstly, many men will escalate violence against women if they resent women’s increased status in the public realm. Evan Stark suggests that coercive control by men in the family increases if women achieve more status in the public realm. Also, we see in the Nordic Countries (Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland) — where there is greater gender equality in the public realm — that there are higher levels of violence than in many other countries that are less gender equal in the public realm. Some of this is due to greater acceptance of reporting but some of it is also due to the unchallenged misogyny and sexism of many Nordic men, notwithstanding greater gender equality. That’s why we have to address patriarchy at all levels and not just gender inequality in the public realm.
How should violence prevention take backlash into account?
We have to expect backlash and resistance by men and then we have to develop strategies to deal with it. There is a tendency in violence prevention and violence intervention more generally not to be seen as blaming men or patriarchy so that men won’t get too defensive. So that means we often don’t name the problem or get to the heart of the problem. Even when we gender women as victims by talking about violence against women, we don’t explicitly talk about men’s violence against women, even though men perpetrate almost all of the violence against women.
Some forms of backlash by men comes out of men who are not themselves violent, not wanting to be tarred with the same brush when we talk about men’s violence. They need to be encouraged to see how even men who are not physically violent towards women are often controlling of women and even men who don’t exercise control over women are often complicit in the face of other men who do and the culture that perpetuates the violence. It’s hard to imagine growing up as a boy and a man in a patriarchal society and not internalising a sense of male entitlement and privilege. So we need to educate men about their complicity in reproducing patriarchy.
What can we do to challenge, or undo, patriarchy?
I think that women and men have different roles to play. It’s not appropriate for me to tell women how to fight patriarchy. They know how to do it. They do it every day at the micro level in their lives by challenging men about their behaviour in both private and public settings. They do it by challenging the expectations that men have about women. They do it by organising collectively in social movements to express their rage and anger and demanding change. We know from research that those countries that have the strongest autonomous women’s movements do best at achieving the best government policies against violence.
I think that men can be allies with women. But they should follow the leadership of women and their work should be accountable to women.
At the personal level, I don’t think that we challenge patriarchy by developing another form of masculinity. We often hear talk about moving beyond ‘toxic masculinity’ by developing healthy positive caring masculinity. However, I would argue that rather than developing a new model of masculinity, we as men need to loosen our connections to masculinity and manhood. This is because all forms of masculinity will always be exalted and valued above femininity and so won’t escape the gender hierarchy. So we have to move beyond the gender binary and foster in men the capacity for greater empathy, compassion, emotionality, embodiment, interdependence, caring and solidarity with women. But we should not frame these qualities as a new form of masculinity.
Before we can undo or challenge patriarchy, we have to acknowledge that patriarchy exists and then we as men have to understand our place within it and our complicity with it. Only then can we start to work out how to untangle ourselves from it.
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