All In All

You probably saw that this weekend, a young man murdered several people in Santa Barbara, California, apparently motivated by anger over his failure with women. That lead to a lot of events on the internet. If you're confused, here's how it happened:

• Violence against women is an obviously emotional issue to begin with, but it's a particularly raw nerve on the Internet, where a number of women have received rape threats as part of online discussions.
• At the same time, there's been a number of men taking up the mantle of Men's Rights Activists (MRA). That's quite a vaguely-defined cause, but it's mostly been men who see their interests as opposed to women's rights, that their rights suffer from the actions of feminists. So there's been a great deal of animosity between women online and MRAs.
• A number of women in online discussions have grown tired of the "not all men" phenomena. That's the situation where they write about some bad experience they've had with men (such as the aforementioned online threats) only to be inundated with men trying to point out that not all men do the thing being complained about. Of course, not many women do believe all men perpetrate violence against women, but it's annoying when that's the first reaction people have to your difficult revelations of personal hardship.
• So in the aftermath of the events in Santa Barbara, there were plenty of women talking about violence against women, which lead to plenty of "not all men" replies. A popular response to the not-all-men response was to point out that not all men mistreat women, but all women are affected by it.
• At some point, someone, somewhere must have said, "surely not all women." And thus was born a hashtag on Twitter, #YesAllWomen. This was full of heart-rending personal examples from women of ways they've suffered from sexism or sexual violence (or its threat.) It also lead to some beyond-tasteless jokes, which provided perhaps the most obvious ever example of Lewis's Law.

I just looked at the tweets with that hashtag, and the bad news is that after four days there are still tweets coming in. But the good news is that they seem to have outlasted the trolls.

So I - like a lot of men - am left wondering, what can I do?  Obviously, don't participate in violence and threats.  But not being part of the problem seems a little weak now.

I've read from some men who have put forward the idea that all men are indeed part of the problem.  The explanation being that no one is perfect, we all - possibly accidentally - perpetuate stereotypes and roles and the status quo.  But I don't buy that.  Although I have a standard of behaviour that some have considered unreasonably high, even I wouldn't claim that a person contributes to rape culture by forgetting to say "salesperson" instead of "salesman."  I suspect this self-blame is done out of the frustration of being powerless over the true perpetrators.

So what can men do? The best points that I have seen are to listen to women's experiences.  Incorporate this perspective into your world view; that is, be conscious that these frustrations and fears are part of the world you live in.  And don't be complacent: Challenge men who disrespect women instead of letting it slide.  Remember women's concerns, and stand up for them when you get the opportunity.  I'll also add the words of Holocaust historian Yehuda Bauer:

Thou shall not be a perpetrator; thou shall not be a victim; and thou shall never, but never, be a bystander.