Craig Hildebrand-Burke’s piece on male violence frustrated me. Not because I am in opposition to his views – reading an article you vehemently disagree with is far less frustrating than reading one with which you have enormous sympathy, but which misses its mark so blatantly, and proves so essentially unhelpful.
The field of op-ed pieces about male violence in general is a deafening clamour of chest-swelling ego-puffery that provides precious few interesting ideas as to how the problem might be addressed, but plenty of room for the writer, and by extension the wise nodding heads of the readers, to feel good about themselves.
A factual discussion of male violence is important. But where is it to be found? Certainly not, as Hildebrand-Burke writes, in the apologists who grow defensive and resentful at the mention of the subject, trying to excuse or explain away the issue. But equally, it’s not to be found in articles that claim that if only men would admit to their violence, we’d solve it in a jiffy.
It is also true that: “Assault, sexual assault, homicide, kidnapping – in every single case men are more likely to be the perpetrator than women. Men are more prone to attack, to invade, to wage war and go on homicidal rampages.” But this is not something that’s sprung up in the last few years. Try the last few millennia.
Hildebrand-Burke would have it that we haven’t accepted this – that, “we, as men seem to struggle to accept the truth about ourselves”. Well, maybe we have, and maybe we haven’t. What I do know is that when I’m told that we are excusing Charles Saatchi’s behaviour as “understandable, even logical”; I’m not taking your word for it. All I’ve seen in regard to Saatchi is fierce opprobrium. Maybe these attitudes are extremely widespread and have just completely passed me by, but in that case, show your work – if you’re calling for a factual discussion, how a few facts?
Of course the call isn’t for a factual discussion at all: it’s for men to “accept that we have a choice in our behaviour, that we are in control of our actions”. A sort of loyalty oath. Which, as far as it goes, is fine: such vows, and events like White Ribbon Day are important for us to remind ourselves of the importance of keeping up the fight, to remind ourselves what’s important.
But let’s be honest – White Ribbon Day is for the men who wouldn’t hurt women in the first place. And that’s the way we like it, isn’t it? If Chris Brown came out in public tomorrow and took the White Ribbon pledge, swore never to hurt another woman as long as he lived, would he be applauded, or decried as a liar and a hypocrite, scorned for his pathetic attempt at image management?
It is, of course, stupid to respond to a discussion of male violence with the cry, “not all men are violent”, as if not committing the crime absolves us of responsibility for addressing it. But it’s no more stupid than trying to initiate a discussion of male violence with the cry, “We need to accept that we are all men”, as if every man is violent, unless and until no man is.
Fact is, some men are violent, and some aren’t, and in all the talk, all the hand-wringing and breast-beating and demands of “enough” and “no more!” what never seems to be spoken is the most dangerous question: why?
Why are men so violent? Why do men lose control, beat each other to a pulp, attack and violate women, use their physical strength to terrorise those weaker than them? Why do men have such violence within them, and why do they succumb to it so easily and so often?
These are the questions we need to ask, and start taking slow, halting steps towards answering. Is it genetics? Alcohol? Social conditions? We’ve got to look at it all.
But more than anything, we’ve got to look at the men. The bad men. The men who do horrible things. We’ve got to drop the slogans, drop the condemnation, and try to approach them and find out what’s in their minds. We have to actually engage with them, if we want to find solutions to the problem of male violence, and not simply go writing off every perpetrator as an unsalvageable brute fit only for banishment.
This isn’t easy. This isn’t pleasant. It won’t make us feel good. What makes us feel good is telling the world that we will never be like the bad people. It makes us feel good to condemn evil and rejoice in our own moral fibre. It makes us feel good to stand on the side of right and draw a thick line between us and the other side. It won’t make us feel good to recognise the humanity of monsters. It won’t make us feel good to have conversations with people we hate. Most of all, it won’t make us feel good to say, “I don’t know”, to honestly search for answers with an open mind.
But it’s the only way we can actually find those answers. We won’t find out why men are violent, or how to stop them, by constantly shouting that we, personally, are not violent, and demanding everyone else shout it too. In Hildebrand-Burke’s words, I can say that I “need not live up to some misguided expectation of masculinity”. And he can say it, and all our friends can say it, and we can mean it with all our hearts.
And as we’re saying it, somewhere far away from our cosy little progressive think-piece enclave, another drunk will lose his head and send a stranger’s skull crashing to the pavement. Another man filled with incomprehensible rage will knock his girlfriend’s teeth out, and our vows will count for nothing, because the only men making them were the ones who didn’t need to, and the only men who know why it happened were the ones we refuse to talk to.
Do we think those men did those things because they never accepted that they were in control of their actions? Do we think they did those things because the last time someone raised the issue of male violence, somebody else whined about tarring all men with the same brush?
You can’t understand bad men by making exhortations to good ones. If we want to know why people do terrible things, we need to ask the people doing them, not join choruses of people who never would. Until we do, all our protests and declarations and grand statements are exposed as nothing more than attempts to convince the world of our own superior virtue.
Ben Pobjie is a writer, comedian and poet.
