Women’s issues

I have a whole long post that was nearly completed about Isak and Anja’s well child checks yesterday. With only a few more minutes of typing to go, I had to save it and close it so I could attend mandatory training.

Anyone who has been in or is currently in the military recently knows all about mandatory training. One word: Yawn. The same safety briefs over and over again. The content is usually good and to be valued, but the presentation usually leaves something to be desired…and it’s usually repeated annually.

Today’s training was on family violence. It was mandatory, in a way that mandatory usually isn’t pushed (this was for all commands on base, not just the Naval Station, and was videotaped for anyone who was on duty and unable to attend.) I wasn’t entirely too enthusiastic about it because I had other things to do (you know, like finish my blog post about Isak and Anja ;)), and we had to stand around and wait in a humongous crowd in a small area and it just put me in a bad mood.

We sat and the speaker was introduced. He was the first man at the University of Massachusetts - Amherst to earn a minor in women’s studies and he travels the country lecturing on men’s violence, most often in colleges and universities. Of course, when they said he has appeared on Oprah, my ears were peeled. His name is Jackson Katz, and he founded a program called “MVP Strategies”, which is the acronym for Mentors in Violence Prevention.

His lecture was one of the best I’ve ever attended. He made it clear that not all men are abusive, and that not all abusers are men. He also said that while not all men are abusive, the vast majority of physical and sexual perpetrators are men, and that is what his lecture was going to discuss.

He talked about how we, as a society, tend to turn a blind eye to men who commit sexual and physical abuse. And, as he pointed out, if we do not do something to STOP a behavior, we are thus enabling it. The example he pointed out was racism: If you see a person treating someone of a different color differently based on their skin, but you choose not to speak up about it, you are basically an accomplice.

We were given a believable, hypothetical situation: You’re at a party and see a man putting the moves on a very obviously drunk woman. It’s clear that she does not appreciate his advances - what do you do?

So many people believe in “it’s none of my business”. But is that the right way to think? What obligation do we have to the intoxicated woman? What obligation do we have to the man? My thought after sitting through his lecture is that we have an obligation not to the individual man and woman, but to society as a whole: If we turn a blind eye to a situation that we know has the tendency to turn ugly (perhaps behind closed doors), what message are we sending? Similarly, if we have the courage to stand up in the situation and let it be known that it is unacceptable to take advantage of someone, no matter what their situation, what kind of message does that send?

Another really powerful point he made was that we refer to domestic violence as “women’s issues”. We teach women and girls how to defend themselves. We teach women and girls what they should do to prevent these sorts of things from happening to them. But what are we doing to prevent these behaviors from men and boys?! Why are these women’s issues? It made me think - I can recall plenty of times being taught in school and in the military how to defend myself, but I have never in my life seen anything teaching men not only not to hurt women but also to not accept other men hurting women. And yes, it is a family’s responsibility to teach a child their morals and to teach them that this type of behavior is unacceptable, but if a family fails to teach their children, should we merely accept that “that’s just the way it is”??

The final part of his presentation was from a brief clip from a production he’s involved in that discusses how the idea of what is manly and what is womanly has changed since the last generation or two. I’ve tried to find as similar pictures as I could to show his point.

Intimidating
ca. 1941 : ca. 2003

“Tough”
ca. 1960s/70s
ca. 2000s

“Sexy” women
ca. 1955

ca. 2000s

Action figures (the caption and picture explains it all)

With a comparison of how the toy sizes compare to the sizes of a real man:

**ETA: It is important to add the significance in this observation. The size of the “ideal man” based on media portrayal of what is “masculine” with the increasing stature of these toy man-figures and celebrity figures has become proportionate to the decreasing stature of the woman by the portrayal of what is “feminine” by the media’s standards.

So men get bigger and women get smaller. Men’s appearances become more threatening and powerful and women’s appearances become more vulnerable and waif-like.

Interesting observation.

All in all, an extremely fascinating and very, very much-needed lecture on “women’s” issues, from a man’s perspective.

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