[“After making a speech about stereotypes in media to a roomful of older teenage students in 2016, I was invited to stay for lunch. As we ate, the conversation turned to how difficult it was to confront classmates about difficult topics such as racism, heteronormativity, gender identity, and sexism. “What do I do,” asked one girl, “when boys I’ve known since kindergarten are standing next to me in the hallway laughing at a rape joke? Worse, when they do it standing next to a girl who they know has been assaulted?”
We went over some strategies: for example, cultivating a network of boys who understood the importance of bystander intervention and could use the fact that they were boys to speak to their peers in a way that girls could not. There was, in the group of more than three dozen students, only one boy. He raised his hand. “I think you would convince more boys if you said things in a nicer way,” he suggested. “I just think that you sound too angry.” His was a typical rerouting from discussing the cause of our anger, which he undoubtedly felt uncomfortably implicated in, to condemning our expression as counterproductive.
In 2016, researchers Octavia Calder-Dawe and Nicola Gavey from New Zealand’s University of Auckland worked closely with a group of teenage students to learn what they thought about everyday sexism. They concluded that the adolescents lived in a general environment in which “gender equality is taken for granted and the possibility of enduring sexism is firmly rejected.” If asked directly, students described sexism as affecting men and women equally. The students they surveyed went out of their way, regardless of gender, to stress symmetry in sexism’s effects. But despite the drive to make things equal, boys and girls parted ways when asked to describe actual incidents of sexism or violence.
Sexism against boys and men was discussed primarily in rhetorical, theoretical, and speculative ways, whereas sexism against girls and women was shared in painful individual or witnessed incidents. When students were asked “Where, if anywhere, does sexism come up in your everyday life?” girls told personal stories of sexual harassment or violence, denigrating humor, and demeaning stereotyping. The boys, however, provided mainly hypotheticals. All of the students reported witnessing acts of sexism against girls and women. There were virtually no actual examples of antimale sexism. Instead, students focused, for instance, on stereotypes in advertising.
People who deny sexism will always be more hostile to your anger than to what is actually causing your anger. A lot of the difficulty of denial is that women’s inequality is woven into men’s identities in early childhood. Teenage boys are heavily invested in masculinity and achieving it. They can and do suffer real penalties when they don’t.
Earning money and keeping people safe are basic responsibilities of manhood. Women’s equality—in the form of work, sexual liberation, public power—generates gender-role stress. Four in nine men say that because of greater gender equality and labor competition, it’s harder to be a man today. Men whose wives threaten to earn as much or more than they do, work more hours. When women make more money, they do less housework. Men with higher-earning wives are more likely to have erectile dysfunction and depression.
It’s not only money, though, but the idea that men are supposed to protect. Hearing about street and sexual harassment and threats of assault directly challenge a man’s ability to keep “his” woman safe. This triggers not only confusion, doubt, or anger but also stress and feelings of inadequacy. When women are honest about these issues, their honesty can be experienced as a threat to masculine identity. The core issue is that, no matter where you may live in the world, dominant norms of masculinity are actively constructed out of women’s vulnerabilities. What are “real men” if they can’t protect women? What are “real men” if women can provide financially for themselves and their families?
In addition, talking about sexual harassment and violence means that men have to face their own vulnerability—and, sometimes, their own sexual assaults as boys. Most assaults that men experience happen in childhood, and they are smothered in shame and trauma, not in the least because being violated is considered feminizing.
Much of the denial we encounter is constructed to protect these masculine ideals. Even when men overcome these threats to their identity, masculinity and male centrality reassert themselves. Fathers are often particularly surprised when they learn that their daughters will face sexism and that their own privileges or attempts to protect them will not be sufficient to offset the impacts. A common response is to empathize by defining women, the ultimate in unhelpful patriarchal thinking, relationally: “My daughter, my wife, my sister, my mother.” This defines women not by their rights or as individuals but as extensions of men and their rights. Women have a right to walk, go to school, look nice, and work unmolested by entitled bores, independent of their relationship to a man.
This frame of reference is also apparent in denials that almost always begin with “Women over there . . .” That might mean across town or in another state or country. Instead of listening to what is being said to them, people who have probably rarely before expressed concern about “women over there” respond by pointing out that there are women who are poorer and sicker. Who have acid thrown on them. Who are more likely to be abused, raped, and beaten. Without fail, when women and girls point to forms of oppression in their lives, someone has this response—a polite way of saying, effectively, “Shut up, and be grateful we treat you as well as we do.” This line of thought is, at its foundation, an argument about men, not women. It asserts the superiority of some men over others who treat “their” women less well, as in, “Consider yourself lucky that we are not selling you on Amazon.”
Women are not in competition with other women for their human rights. My rights are not relative to another woman’s pain and vulnerability. They should not be contingent on affiliative male status.”]
soraya chemaly, from rage becomes her: the power of women’s anger, 2018
