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There are millions of compassionate and loving people in the United States who have
been given erroneous information about domestic violence. Over the years the media and
academia have offered a steady stream of information that indicates that women are the
only victims of domestic violence and men the only perpetrators. We have all been
deceived. What most don’t know is that a part of that deception has been intentional and
has come from the scientific community. As hard as it is to believe it is indisputable.
Most of us had no idea of this deception until recently. More and more is now coming
out about the symmetry of victimization in domestic violence between men and women.
One of the breakthroughs that have helped us identify this deception was the journal
response of Murray Straus Ph.D. Straus has been an acclaimed researcher of family and
interpersonal violence for many years. In his article he unveils the ways that this
misinformation has been intentionally spread via “research.” He shows the seven ways
that the truth has been distorted. It is a fascinating yet sobering article that shows how,
without actually lying, the researchers were able to distort things and make it appear that
it was something that is was not. We all know that once a research study is published the
media will latch on and print the results as gospel truth so the media became the
megaphone to spread the misinformation once it was inked in the scientific journal. I
would highly recommend your reading the full report by Straus which can be found here: http://pubpages.unh.edu/~mas2/V70-Gender-symmetry-PV-Chap-11-09.pdf
Let’s go through the seven ways one by one.
1. Suppress evidence.
The first type of deceit that Straus describes is suppressing evidence. The researchers
would ask questions about both men and women but only report on the answers from
women. The half-story would leave readers with the impression that it was only
women who were victims even though the researcher had the surveys of male victims
on hand they simply didn’t report it. The data on male victims was simply buried
while the data on female victims was reported. Straus discusses the Status on Women
report from Kentucky in the late 1970’s that was the first to use this strategy. They
collected data on both male and female victims but only the female victims were
discussed in the publications. Scientific method is dependent upon creating a
hypothesis and testing it. If you get data from your test that is contrary to your original
hypothesis this is just as important as getting data that affirms the hypothesis and can be used to adjust your original hypothesis. To ignore ones own data that contradicts the hypothesis is the epitome of disregard to the foundations of scientific inquiry. It leaves the realms of research and enters the realms of propaganda and shaping the
outcome to mislead.
2. Avoid Obtaining Data Inconsistent With the Patriarchal Dominance Theory.
The second method described by Straus was that of simply not asking the questions
when you didn’t want to hear the answers. The surveys would ask the women about
their victimhood and ask men about their perpetration but failed to inquire about
women’s violence or men’s victimhood. If you ask questions that address only half the
problem you are certain to conclude with only half the answers. Straus highlights a
talk he gave in Canada where he evaluated 12 studies on domestic violence. Ten out of
the twelve only asked questions about female victims and male perpetrators. If you
don’t ask the questions you will never get the answers. Publishing half the truth is
intentionally misleading.
3. Cite Only Studies That Show Male Perpetration
Straus reveals a number of situations where studies or official documents would cite
only other studies that showed female victims and male perpetrators. He uses the
Department of Justice press release as just one example where they only cite the “lifetime prevalence” data because it showed primarily male perpetration. They omitted referencing the “past-year” data even though it was more accurate since it showed
females perpetrated 40% of the partner assaults. Straus shows journal articles and
names organizations such as the United Nations, World Health Organization, the US
Department of Justice and others who used this tactic to make it appear that women
were the primary victims of domestic violence and men the primary perpetrators.
4. Conclude That Results Support Feminist Beliefs When They Do Not
Straus showed an example of a study by Kernsmith (2005) where the author claimed
that women’s violence was more likely to be in self defense but data to support the
claim didn’t exist. Apparently he had made the claim even without any supporting
evidence. Straus shows that the self defense category was primarily about anger and
coercion and not about self-defense at all but this didn’t stop the researcher from
claiming the erroneous results which of course could be quoted by later studies as
proof that such data does indeed exist.
5. Create “Evidence” By Citation
The “woozle” effect is described by Straus as when “frequent citation of previous
publications that lack evidence mislead us into thinking there is evidence.” He lists the
Kernsmaith study and a report from the World Health Organization as examples. Both
made claims (without evidence to back it up) that women’s violence was largely in
self-defense. The claims were quoted repeatedly and people eventually started to
believe that the claims were correct.
6. Obstruct Publication of Articles and Obstruct Funding Research that Might
Contradict the Idea that Male Dominance is the Cause of Personal Violence
Straus mentions two incidents that illustrate this claim. One was a call for papers on
the topic of partner violence in December of 2005 from the National Institute of Justice
where it was stated that “proposals to investigate male victimization would not be
eligible.” Another was an objection raised by a reviewer of one of his proposals due to
its having said that “violence in relationships was a human problem.” He also stated
that the “more frequent pattern is self-censorship by authors fearing that it will happen
or that publication of such a study will undermine their reputation, and, in the case of
graduate students, the ability to obtain a job.”
7. Harrass, Threaten, and Penalize Researchers who Produce Evidence That
Contradicts Feminist Beliefs
Straus provides details of a number of incidents where researchers who found evidence
of gender symmetry in domestic violence were harassed or threatened. He described a
number of instances such as bomb scares at personal events, being denied tenure and
promotions, or “shouts and stomping” meant to drown out an oral presentation. He
relates being called a “wife-beater” as a means to denigrate both himself and his
previous research findings.
Straus concludes that a “climate of fear has inhibited research and publication on
gender symmetry in personal violence.” His words help us to understand the reasons
that our public is so convinced that women are the sole victims of domestic violence
and men the only perpetrators. It has been years and years of researchers telling only
half the story and when we get only half the story and consider it the whole truth we
are likely to defend our limited version of the truth and ostracize those who may offer
differing explanations. The matter is further complicated due to the media having acted as a megaphone for the half story that has emerged so the “common knowledge” that has emerged from the media for many years has been half the story and due to its not telling both sides of the story, it is basically misinformation.What this tells us is that we need to stay on our toes when it comes to social science research. Straus’s paper has helped us immensely in seeing how research can be set up to appear to tell the truth but fail miserably in doing so. While the researchers are not technically lying, the end product is similar since it produces only a partial image of the reality of domestic violence and leaves people without the details to fill in the reality of the situation. It is likely a good idea to have a look at the way each study gets its data, the exact nature of the people being used as subjects, and the conclusion drawn and if they are congruous with the data that was gathered. Next we will look at a study that uses Straus’s first example, ignoring ones own data.
This is the introduction to a five-part series of articles about the bias against men and boys in psychological research. There is a short youtube that goes over the very tip of the iceberg of the contents of these articles. I will paste that in at the end of this post.
INTRO
Most of us are familiar with the male bashing we see on television. Men are portrayed as buffoons and helpless ne’er do wells who consistently need others (women and sometimes children) to problem solve and do the right thing. Most people are tired of this ridiculous bias yet it continues unabated. What most don’t realize is that a very similar male bashing exists in mental health research. The past 40 years has brought us a powerful respect and admiration of women and girls. This is a good thing. The problem is that we seem unable to hold both men and women in the highest esteem. As we hold our women up we seem to tear our men down. It’s as if we can only see women as “good” and men as considerably less than good. This binary vision of the sexes gets played out in the male bashing we see on television but it also gets played out in numerous other venues including mental health research.
This collection of articles will offer you an inside glimpse into the workings of several studies and show how the anti-male bias plays out in the research. We have all grown to trust “research” and when we hear that a study shows that “X is correct“ we tend to automatically believe that “X” is correct. Research has taken on an almost divine ethos that carries the seal of approval of correctness. If science says it, it must be so. The problem of course is that science, especially social science, is less than concrete and is much more slippery than measuring a distance or the tensile strength of a bar of steel. Mental health research is much more vulnerable to values and ideologies of the researchers. If a scientist believes a certain thing it usually has little impact on his measurements of the tensile strength of the bar of steel. No matter what he believes the measurement will likely be the same. But what about issues in social sciences where researchers come to the table with a large amount of preconceived ideas, allegiances to ideologies that espouse strong opinions about those being studied or have traumatic life histories that bias them against certain groups? Can those sorts of things influence the “findings” of a social science study? You bet they can. Gone is the impartial judge weighing the evidence and sifting through the data to find the truth. In today’s world of social science research the opposite is happening: researchers are starting at their pre- conceived bias’s and then designing research to prove that bias. As bizarre as that sounds it is demonstrably true in some social science research. You will see some of that within this paper.
We start off with a short summary of a very important paper by Murray Straus titled “Processes explaining the Concealment and Distortion of Evidence on Gender Symmetry in Partner Violence.” Straus leads us through seven ways that feminist researchers hid or distorted the data of their studies in order to insure their results would reflect the pre-
Male Bashing in Mental Health Research
conceived ideology of females being the victims of domestic violence and men being the perpetrators. Straus’s explanations make very clear how an ideological bias can impact the results of social science research. He describes in detail exactly how they accomplished this. One technique he describes is simply ignoring your own data that contradicts your ideology. Another is to simply not ask questions that might risk obtaining answers that would contradict your thesis. After reading this piece you will have a better understanding of the ways this subterfuge has been accomplished.
The next section describes a 2009 study from Great Britain on teen violence. You will see how the researchers follow Straus’s descriptions by ignoring their own data. The original survey showed that boys were about 40% of the victims of violence but by the time the research was done and the recommendations made the ad campaign that followed was designed to help only girls and to teach the boys how to better treat the girls.
The following section features a study on “reproductive coercion.” It will show how the omission of the details about the sample of those surveyed had huge repercussions down stream. In a nutshell the study was done on impoverished African American and Hispanic females. This fact was not reported in the research article, nor reported in the press release, and never showed up in any of the national media articles that followed. It is well known that interpersonal violence is about three times as likely in an impoverished population. By omitting that little bit of data, that the sample was largely impoverished women of color, the ramifications of their study changed drastically from one that applied only to a poor population of women of color to a study that applied to the population at large. This shift resulted in millions of people reading about the study in the national media and being led to believe a message that simply wasn’t justified by the study itself.
The last section looks at the Conformity to Masculine Norms Inventory (CMNI). This inventory claims to measure men’s degree of conforming to what it calls “masculine norms.” There are multiple problems with this inventory but the most obvious is its choice of very negative descriptions for what masculine norms are in this culture. The norms include such descriptors as “Violence” ”Disdain for homosexuality” ”power over women” and ”playboy.” Simply by choosing these words to describe men in this country is misandry. This is male bashing. There’s more.
It’s important to see the ways these studies try to influence the public and promote their own ideological biases. Each of these studies was done by researchers who appeared to have strong ideas about men and women and their research conveniently harmonized with their pre-conceived notions. With “science” holding so much power and ability to sway opinions it is critical that we watch carefully how the social sciences use their studies to proliferate their own ideological viewpoints.
The spreading of misinformation has a very negative effect on the population at large but there is no place in more danger of this than in the halls of congress. Our legislators are easily influenced by studies such as those described herein and the likelihood of laws being written based on one sided viewpoints becomes alarmingly high. To make matters even worse our legislators are largely unaware of their own unconscious chivalry and combine that with hysterical research that claims damsels in distress need funding and what you see is billions of taxpayers dollars being spent in a very questionable manner. Combine these studies with the media, and then the blogs and you get a system that is fed by erroneous data that accepts it as fact and acts on it. One needs to only notice the fact that great majority of people in the US are convinced that women are the sole victims of domestic violence to understand the power of the media and particularly the media in combination with “studies” that are used more for propaganda than for gaining an understanding of the truth.
The US population today can be divided into two camps. The first camp, and by far the largest camp is the “Men Should” camp. This group believes that men “Should” adhere to the age old male sex role of provide and protect and to sacrifice when needed. Men should protect women and children, men should serve others before themselves, men should focus on being of service whether it is dying in wars or working full time to support a family. We all know this group very well. Most of us are either a part of that group or have been a part at some time.
Lately there is a new group that has hit the scene. Rather than thinking men “should” they are instead focused on men “Deserve.” This group basically feels that men deserve the same rights as anyone else and that they deserve to be treated as human and to have the places where they face hardship or discrimination be brought to light and changed for the better.
These groups don’t mix well. The men deserve group is a big threat to the men should group.
When a men “deserve” proponent (we can call them “new” men) voices his or her ideas to the men “should” group (we can call them traditional men) you get fireworks. The same people who will tell you without question that they are for equality in all ways are quick to deny men these same opportunities. They do it automatically and without thought. They are like automatons who have bought the party line and will defend it vigorously even if it goes against their own values. Ask them about this and they simply don’t see it. They are under the spell of the cultural mandate that men provide and protect. It’s as if they really don’t see men as people deserving of rights and compassion.
One obvious example of this is reproductive rights. We are all familiar with the phrase “my body, my choice.” Indeed women are able to choose if they will have the baby, have an abortion, put the child up for adoption or even, in some states, drop the child off at the police station shortly after birth. Her body, her choice. But the man has no say whatsoever. He has no choice even though his body was a part of the equation. He is handcuffed to her choice no matter what he does or thinks. While the woman actually carries the fetus the endeavor obviously involves both bodies but only hers is allowed the power to decide. His body, her choice. Think of the men who want the child to be born but must endure their son or daughter being aborted. He has no choice.
This, or a similar scenario will usually bring a myriad of responses from the traditionalist “men should” group. Usually they miss the point and go on and on in shaming him about how he should have kept it in his pants thus side-stepping the issue completely. Another knee jerk response is to accuse the new man of hating women and not being a “real” man. How could he hurt women and expect something for himself? This side-step is designed to make the new men proponent defend their innocence and need to prove himself and his masculinity rather than deal with the issues at hand. The traditionalist “should” folks fail to realize that by ignoring men’s situations and hardships they are a party to a bigotry that allows women choices while denying the same to men. This is not equality in any way, shape or form. Allowing either party total power to decide in such a delicate and important decision is counterproductive. We need to find new ways to serve all involved.
But it is more than just choice the New men want for men. They also want compassion. They again see how women are treated with compassion and concern and then contrast this with the fact that men’s emotional pain is treated very differently. Not only is it ignored, it is taboo. No one wants to touch it. He is on a cultural island when it comes to his emotional pain.
How did we get this way? Why would it be that men’s pain is taboo? You see, when traditional men and women (almost everyone) expect men to provide and protect they also expect men to sacrifice for the common good. This sort of thing has been going on for centuries. Things like dying in wars, self-sacrifice on the Titanic or taking the most dangerous jobs have always gone to men because the extreme of their role is to give up their own lives for others. But guess what happens when men sacrifice? When men are slated to be those who sacrifice they are, as a consequence, seen as disposable. When a person is seen as disposable the likelihood of anyone showing them compassion goes down. Way down.
Have you ever known anyone who owned a large snake as a pet? The owners get attached to their snakes, they give them endearing names and spend time with them and make sure to care for their needs. A part of this caring is feeding them. Many of the large snakes have a diet consisting of small white mice. The snake owners go to the pet store and buy white mice to feed their pet. Do the snake owners get attached to the white mice? Do they call them endearing names and like to spend time with them. No. They know they are there to be sacrificed for their beloved pet and are simply fodder. There is little concern for their welfare and surely no compassion for them. They are just fuel. This exaggerated example gives us a glimpse of the plight of men. As men have sacrificed for centuries their emotional pain has been ignored and pathologized. Men are not viewed as having needs, they are seen as problem solvers. If and when they complain you get strong reactions. How dare that white mouse ask for compassion? Shut up and be eaten! There is a strong resistance to being attached or close to the ones who are to be sacrificed. You just never know when they will be fed to the snake.
There are plenty of reasons for anyone to be under this spell. Probably the biggest one is that our entire way of life is based on men sacrificing and ignoring the things that they “deserve.” We have gotten to this place in history because millions of men have sacrificed their lives for the good of our culture for many hundreds of years. It is one thing to offer women relief from their rigid sex roles as we have done now for 50 years. Their shift in roles is major but it does not threaten the fabric of our culture. Men ceasing to sacrifice themselves for the good of others does indeed threaten the fabric of our culture. This gets people upset without thinking.
This leaves us with a problem. A big problem.
For the last fifty years we have encouraged women to expand their original role and branch out to new avenues. Women are encouraged to enter the work force, to seek extended education, to work full time, work part time, to have children, to not have children, etc. Women’s roles have been opened up to include almost any sort of opportunity. She will usually get a “You go girl!” for whatever choice she makes. This is actually fine and this writer is happy to see his daughter get every opportunity possible. The problem starts when we see that my son gets a very different treatment. Rather than giving him accolades for any choice he makes what we see instead is consistent shaming and blaming of him unless he sticks with the provide and protect mode of his old sex role. The women get freed from their binds but the men are still chained.
These two concerns, compassion for men and choice for men fly in the face of the traditionalist standards. If men are given choice and compassion for being who they are the fear is that they will likely stop wanting to sacrifice for women, children and the culture and therefore be much less likely to jump in the icy waters. The results of that choice are obviously a threat to our culture and frighten both traditional men and women. If you give choice to the white mice they will likely choose to not be eaten, right? The very thought of choice and compassion for men gets the traditionalists upset because it silently rocks their world. If there are no more men to sacrifice what will we do? Their immediate response to their fear is to do what they have been doing for centuries, trying to control men through shame and by telling them they are simply not “good enough” men. If only these men were good enough we wouldn’t have the problems we have today. If they were “real” men they wouldn’t whine and complain like that. The successful pattern that we have seen for centuries is to just place public blame on men and most men will strive to prove they are not like those who have failed. They are good men. Translated means they are men who will be willing to sacrifice.
It is this very shaming of men as a group by telling them they are not good enough that is used so effectively by all parts of our culture to keep men in line and providing, protecting and sacrificing. When most men get the shaming message that they need to be better men they will usually ignore their own needs and try harder to be “real men.” It usually starts with the idea that there is something wrong with them and they need to improve in order to be a real man.
This leaves us in a bind. As a culture we have needed men to sacrifice in order to survive. Due to this necessity we have developed many ways to insure that men will indeed continue sacrificing. These ways are essential to our survival and are performed by almost everyone without thinking. The men will usually respond by falling in line and sacrificing without thinking. Lately more light is being shined on this process and it is becoming more and more clear that we are willing to allow women choice and compassion and great role flexibility but are unable to do the same for men. We continue to use the same shaming techniques on our men to keep them in line and in role. Let’s have a look at the ways that the culture pressures men to tow the line of their duty to sacrifice.
The Shaming of Men
A very severe example of this was in WWI in Great Britain when some young men didn’t volunteer to go to war and stayed home while their brothers were out being killed on the battlefield. There was a strategy devised to encourage them to get in the trenches. A White Feather Campaign was started that used white feathers as a symbol of cowardice and unfulfilled civic duty. A powerful shaming. Women would offer the white feather to the man who had failed to sign up to go to war in order to symbolize their contempt for him and to let them know that this was seen as his failure to be a “real” man. Thus using shame and telling men they need to be real and better men. Needless to say it was a very effective campaign.
The popular phrase of the US Marines that they are looking for a “few good men” is a another example. This is not unlike the other armed forces who have similar slogans. Whether it is “Be all you can be” or the older “Be a man and Join the Navy” we see from the armed forces a common theme of seeking out men to protect and in the process turn them into “better men.” Of course we all know that once a man joins any of the armed forces he loses all semblance of choice and you can forget about getting any compassion. He is now a white mouse that is trained to serve, and die serving if need be. The “better” man turns out to be a white mouse. This is not a new idea nor is it uncommon. We see this sort of thing around the world and it has been going on for centuries. Men are called to protect others and are asked to sacrifice their own needs and desires and even their lives and be their best as they join hierarchical organizations that are mandated to protect the rest of us. This is an excellent example of what we know as gynocentrism.(the world centers around the needs of women and the sacrifice of men) The males sacrifice for the female and the culture at large.
The shaming of men to be protectors comes in many forms both macro and micro. Imagine a husband and wife being awakened at 3:00 am by a window breaking downstairs in their home. Now imagine the husband tells her that since they are equal it is her turn to go investigate, he did it the last time. Hard to imagine? Yes. The expectation of men to be protectors is firmly in place and if they refuse they will find abundant shame coming their way. If she were to refuse to investigate she would face nothing of the sort. Who is the white mouse here?
Just as men are expected to protect, men are also expected to provide resources. When men fail to provide resources they are seen as failures. The first level is to be able to provide for your own needs. Then in order to be seen as a “successful” man he will need to supply for the needs of others. The more people he is providing for the more he is seen as successful. Being dependent is forbidden. If a man is seen as dependent he is a potent failure. How many women would choose a dependent man as their mate for life? Not very many. Women expect men to be able to provide for them, homeless men need not apply. Successful men are held in high esteem while those who are dependent are seen both as failures and also as not worthy of help. Here’s quote from Peter Marin that explains this dynamic as it impacts men:
To put it simply: men are neither supposed nor allowed to be dependent. They are expected to take care of others and themselves. And when they cannot or will not do it, then the assumption at the heart of the culture is that they are somehow less than men and therefore unworthy of help. An irony asserts itself: by being in need of help, men forfeit the right to it.
So a dependent man is not only seen as a failure he is seen as not deserving of help. This is potent shaming. Men are expected to provide and protect and when they don’t there is a large price to pay. They are seen as a white mouse, unworthy and useless.
You can contrast this with the female path to become a woman. As soon as girls get through puberty and are able to have children they are considered women. The physical change is seen as the marker for womanhood. This is very different from the path of our young men who must pass behavioral tests in order to be considered a man.
There are many other less dramatic ways that men have been kept in line. Better men of course means sacrificing your own desires while being able to serve women and children and the culture. Think of the traditional men’s clubs. What did they do? They were service organizations that focused on serving others. The Lions Club motto is “We Serve” and the Rotary Club is “Service Above Self.” These mottos help us in seeing how males have been socialized and have evolved for eons to place service above self with the goal of providing for others who are in need. In other words, “die on the battlefield, it’s your job” or “work full time, it’s your obligation.”
One place one might hope to be populated with a new way of thinking about masculinity and less likely to shame men into being providers and protectors might be our psychological professionals. Surely they would have an awareness beyond the men “should” mentality. They would encourage men to be allowed choice and compassion. Sadly, this is not the case. I spent a year and a half on the mailing list of the American Psychological Association’s Division 51 for the study of Men and Masculinity and got quite a surprise. You might expect this group to be at the forefront of knowing men’s uniqueness, men’s needs, men’s wants and their many differences from women that make men unique. However, what you find is a group that sees masculinity as a problem, in fact they see it as the very cause of our culture’s difficulties and rather than see men’s uniqueness they instead blame masculinity and hold men responsible for the state of our culture. The prevailing assumption is that men need to change in order for things to improve. Much of what they pursue is related to men “Should” ideas like men should stop violence against women, men should stop rape, men should stop sexual assault, etc. All of these are fine but notice that they all have a common theme. Rather than being about the uniqueness of men it is instead about men needing to take action in order to protect women. Rather than be about men’s uniqueness it is about what men “should” be doing. Clearly Division 51 is aligned with the traditional “men should” group. The obvious irony here is that as they push for men to protect women they are simply proliferating the traditional male sex role of provide and protect. (a role they publicly abhor) Their actions are no different than the old alpha male who kept other males in line and demanded they sacrifice for women. These academes are simply another expression of the old alpha demanding men to provide and protect and shaming those who won’t or don’t.
Our male legislators have a similar focus. Their focus is also gynocentric and is readily seen in the legislation they have produced that focuses on the needs of women and ignores the needs of men. So yes, more men are in power but the real question is who do those in power serve? The answer is that when it comes to mental health and victim services they obviously serve women and children and see other men as needing to fend for themselves. We have an abundance of government programs for women and almost none for men. Once again, the needs of men are ignored while the need of women are the focus. Women have needs, men are white mice. Misandry and gynocentrism are flooding our cultural landscape and no one notices.
You can see the white mouse theory clearly if you observe the actions of our legislators over the last 50 years. There has been a clamboring of effort to focus on how women are left out of the top 1% of this and that. Not enough women in the boardroom, not enough women in the CEO’s of Fortune 500 compainies, not enough women in higher education etc etc. You are surely familar with all of these efforts. But think for just a moment about the opposite. While it is surely true that women are not equally represented at the corporate leadership levels it is also equally true that they are not represented at the other extreme. The white mouse realm. They are acutely under-represented in the homeless, the trash collectors, acutely under-represented in death at war, acutely under-represented in the ranks of the retarded and also under-represented in the victims of violence. But these are the homes of our white mice. There is almost no focus on these mice at the bottom. Very few people care and resources and legislation for those difficulties are few and far between. If we are going to help women get into the boardroom it is only fair that we help men escape from homelessness. If we are going to help women get jobs as CEO’s of furturne 500 compainies then we need to help men who are at the bottom of the barrell. To only focus on one side is just another face of the “men should” gynocentric theme that we have been discussing.
You can probably see that traditional men are well represented in just about every sphere from sports to lawmakers and even academes and researchers. Most have a similar message: men need to improve themselves (often with the unspoken para message that their improvement will help them support, provide and protect for women and children.)
With a history like this it is easy to see how these “new” men who are asking for the needs of men to be addressed are automatically seen as being a threat and a big problem. This may be the first time in history that men are actually voicing their own needs rather than focusing on the needs of others. Traditionally men have been focused exclusively on the needs of others but now some men are starting to speak up for themselves. As can be expected, their efforts are being met with ridicule and shaming but these new men have grown immune to these shaming tactics. They are the white mice who have escaped from the jaws of the snake and shaming them simply won’t work any more. These men are starting to tell other men and the chorus is growing. The kindling is dry and abundant with so many men in our culture who have undergone hateful treatment from such places as the family courts, domestic violence industry and many others.
It’s time we started listening to these men and working together on bringing a fair balance to a system out of whack. In order to hear them out we will need true humanitarians who can hear both sides without the knee jerk shaming that we see all too often.
How about you? Are you ready to listen to these new men?
I have been reading a book titled ”The Death of White Sociology” that focuses on the birth of the black sociological viewpoint and also the death of what they term “white sociology.” It describes a shift in worldview from the traditional Euro perspective to the black sociological point of view written about blacks by blacks. It is a fascinating read. Parts of the book examine the ways that our culture, media, and academia in the United States fostered the potent messages that blacks were inferior to whites. It observes the period after slavery and maps out the different ways that the “common sense” lies of black’s inferiority were spread and maintained.
As I read through the book I became shocked to find that the very same tactics used to keep blacks “in their place” looked strikingly similar to the ones being used against men in today’s world. This is not meant to say that men are facing the same rampage of racism that blacks faced and continue to face to some degree. It is however, very apparent that the mechanisms that maintained and spread the lies of blacks inferiority to whites are strikingly similar to those being directed towards men in today’s world.
The book describes three basic arenas where the ideas of black inferiority were spread. The first was “common knowledge” which was basically the general public mouthing the accepted stereotypes of the day. Most of the public simply “knew” that blacks were inferior. it was accepted as fact. The second was the media who amplified the “common knowledge” by portraying blacks in a negative and stereotypical fashion. Third was academia who did studies that sought to prove the erroneous “common knowledge” of the day through biased and questionable research. The three together packed a powerful punch.
The Three General Paths: Common Knowledge, the Media and Science.
We all are familiar with the ways that ideas and stereotypes get spread at the water fountain at work or over the backyard fence. This sort of negative stereotyping of blacks was prevalent with almost everyone assuming that blacks were inferior to whites up until the 1960’s when things started changing. The stereotyping was global and was applied to not some blacks or to just criminal blacks but to all blacks. The same sort of stereotyping is now true today for men. Even paying casual attention at the beauty shop or shopping mall will show you that men are seen as the problem. Not some men, not criminal men but all men. The basic assumption is that there is something wrong with men. This is very similar to the early 20th century where all blacks were the recipient of extreme prejudice based on race. The similar assumption was that there was something wrong with blacks. As people today blame men as being, pigs, violent, selfish, greedy or other negative attributes the implied message is that men are indeed inferior to women. This same sort of prejudging could never happen now about blacks, women, Jews, gays or just about any other group. Men are the last group to be held up as a scapegoat by our culture and it is not hard to see, unless you are the one doing the judging.
We are also likely familiar with the media and their ways of perpetuating stereotypes and prejudiced ideas. Blacks were surely the recipient of these for many years. Think of Steppinfetchit and the way the media used him as an example of slow and dullard blacks, and as a befuddled and shiftless fool. Then came Amos n Andy with the same stereotype: blacks were slow and dull and not making very good decisions. Then after the 1960’s this started to shift until we ended up with the Bill Cosby Show, Will Smith and others who were being portrayed in a much different and highly positive light. Contrast that with the path of men being shown in the 1950’s and early 1960’s TV shows such as Father Knows Best, Roy Rogers, Bonanza or Andy Griffith. Now we don’t see those types of portrayals of men, what we see is more like Amos n Andy with men being routinely shown to be dull, insensitive, slow, and needing women to make decisions. It is clearly no longer the blacks facing stereotypes. Now it is men, especially white men, who are getting a similar sort of stereotyping and no one seems to notice or to care.
The most unlikely sources of proliferating stereotypes is our scientific community but sadly this book points out the various ways that our academics went out to prove that blacks were indeed inferior and in need of whites in order to be civil and successful. The book describes the white sociology and social science research that was designed with the intent of proving that blacks were inferior and needed whites. In today’s world we see something very similar in the research of social scientists that seems to try and prove that men are at the root of our problems and are consequently inferior to women. We will go into that in more detail later.
For now let’s move on to examining the specific ways the book showed that blacks were proven to be inferior and how this is similar to what we see in men today.
The Specific Paths That Were Used
Probably the most potent and global of the memes that were spread to prove blacks inferiority was summed up by the book authors as:
“Blacks are defined as the perpetrators and creators of social pathology and not as its victims.”
By linking blacks as being perpetrators and creators of social pathology the culture was able to devalue blacks and paint them as inferior to whites. When blacks were shown to be victims of a hateful culture people turned a blind eye. The predominant meme was that blacks were the creators and perpetrators of social pathology and anything varying from that was ignored. Even in research when blacks were seen as victims it was all too often hidden from view by the researchers. This sort of devaluing took a huge toll on the collective esteem of blacks. When you live in a place that paints you as the problem and only sees you in that light it makes it pretty tough to feel proud and good about yourself. Many will remember that one of the first things that Black activists did in the 1960′s was popularize the phrase “Black is Beautiful.” It was this sort of phrase that helped to begin in shifting the long standing disdain held by the culture towards blacks. Far too many blacks had surely internalized these hateful messages. It is easy to see how this was damaging and how it took a great deal of effort to turn things around. Prior to the 1960′s I think often the activists had to deal with blacks whose spirits were simply too broken to even care to defend themselves. They had been too damaged by the weight of the years of judgements placed upon them by the culture. The 60′s started changing all of that pumping esteem back where it should be.
Anyone even vaguely familiar with the issues of men in today’s world will immediately see the connection here. At this point it is no longer blacks who are defined as the perpetrators and creators of social pathology, this has shifted and now it is men who are sitting in that seat. It is far too common to hear the cultural meme of “Men cause wars” or “Men are jerks” or “Men are violent” or “Men have ruined the economy if only women ruled the world.” Men are actively being blamed as the creators of social pathology both on a micro level and macro. Have a look at any newspaper and see if you notice any articles on men as victims of social pathology? It won’t take long to notice that men as a group are very rarely listed as victims, only the perpetrators while women are repeatedly seen as victims. What at one time was a mechanism to keep blacks in their place has now been shifted. This harness is firmly around the necks of the males in our culture. As with the blacks before, this is now taking a toll on the esteem of our men and boys. Since their sex is held as the root of our cultural problems they grow up thinking that they are inferior to women, that their sex is the cause of our difficulties, that growing up to be a man is something about which he should ashamed.
This sort of shaming was very rare in the 1950′s when men were held in relatively high esteem especially if they were providing and protecting. Then from 1960 onward things started to change. By the late 1960′s blacks were beginning to shed the onerous cultural burden that we are describing. At the same time women were expanding their sex roles and getting good press as being model human beings. Areas where women and girls faced victimization became common topics in the public domain, the media, and our new laws which attempted to protect them. The culture began to see women in a most positive light. Sadly, even to the casual observer, our culture seems unable to hold both women and men in a positive light. As it saw women as good and worthy of support it started its equal and opposite descent into seeing men as a problem. This was likely intensified by the false blame heaped on men at the time for allegedly having been the oppressors who had intentionally held women back for centuries with the associated assumption that all men had to pay for this. Men cause wars. Men’s greed ruins the economy. Men were now getting the cultural shadow projections. It was about this time in the 1960′s when young men started killing themselves nearly SIX TIMES as often as similarly aged young girls. Could this dramatic shift be related to boys feeling the impact of the cultural negativity that was now being broadcast about their sex? (see chart below) But we are getting ahead of ourselves, let’s get back to the book.
The Bondage of Common Sense
The book points out that after slavery blacks were held in a different sort of bondage, one that was unwritten and basically invisible. This bondage resulted from what most people know as “common sense” or common knowledge. It is what most people believe automatically without thinking. It is the accepted “norm” that lives just below the surface. What was this accepted normal, this common knowledge? It was that blacks are inferior to whites. This was just a given. These thoughts and memes were obviously culture-wide. The scholars from this book have mapped out just how this “common sense” functioned and how it resulted in putting blacks into a continued bondage. This is an unsettling story of the power of mainstream thought as expressed by “most” people. It’s a story of the power of the media to reflect that thinking and perpetuate it through news and entertainment. And finally, it’s a story of the power of our academic institutions to then capture the essence of the erroneous assumptions and assume they are true and then go on to prove them through “science” thus adding mortar to the bricks and solidifying a solid wall. When people hear that science validates their “common sense” those beliefs become entrenched and act like immovable objects.
So what were these memes that carried the cultural message of blacks inferiority? Let’s go through a few of them as described in this book:
Blacks are better if they are around whites.
In the early and mid 20th century one of the tactics the researchers used in painting blacks as inferior was to do research on blacks, whites and mullatoes. The conclusions were almost always the same. The more white influence in your blood the better you were. If you were light skinned you were automatically seen as better. They took this a step farther and would write about blacks being more cultured when they had more time being around whites. It was as if, the good manners and attitude of whites mentally rubbed off simply by contact. When blacks did poorly it was often assumed that they simply didn’t have the good influence of white people. This meme disdained blacks and glorified whites as being the truly cultured ones.
It’s easy to see how this transposes in today’s culture. Now it is men who are deemed “better” if only they would act more like women. Men who are not around women are seen as suspect. Men who don’t emote like women are thought to be in need of learning to be more like women which is assumed to be the default. This meme now glorifies the female way as being the default and shames men for not living up to this. This meme now glorifies women and disdains men.
Research showing blacks were superior to whites was hidden from public view.
When the early researchers would do studies where data was obtained that showed blacks to be better than whites in some way the researchers would consistently hide the findings. It simply wouldn’t see the light of day. In this way whites continued to be seen as always superior.
In today’s climate we see something very similar. When studies show that men and boys are victimized in some way the data is hidden and not published. Other times when men do better than women it is seen not as a strength of men but as discrimination against women. The man’s strength is ignored while the woman’s disadvantage is seen as a call to action with people scrambling to institute change. When men are shown to be victims in research, such as the domestic violence studies, the data is hidden and not published. These sorts of things solidify the cultural attitudes of the superiority of women and men as inferior. Even our president voices this message when he said in a speech “Girls can do anything boys can do, and do it better, and do it in heels”. Girls/women are seen as superior. Boys and men are seen as lagging behind.
Aversion of whites toward blacks proves their inferiority
The book points out that the aversion of the whites towards blacks was used as proof that blacks were inferior in the 20th century. The assumption was “why else would whites look down on them?”
Women’s aversion and disdain of men is now used as proof that men are inferior. Just think of some of the catch phrases we have heard in our culture. All men are rapists. Man hating is honorable. Men are Pigs. Boys are stupid, throw rocks at them. It has gotten so bad that the media responds to a man having his penis cut off by his wife with laughter and jokes. Can you imagine any other group that might garner such a response without censure? I can’t.
The psychological research of the day in the early to mid 20th century was not geared to help blacks but to blame them and chronicle how they need to change.
Articles that were written and placed their focus on blacks tended to feature issues that showed blacks to be at fault for problems and stayed intent on how they needed to change. This of course ignored the needs of blacks.
We see the same pattern in today’s research on men. It is not geared to be of help to men it is geared to expose and blame them for social problems. Over the past fifty years we have seen a profound shift in researcher’s attitudes and assumptions towards men. In the mid 20th century researchers were analyzing male roles and naming them as “confident” “risk taking” “level-headed” “independent” “aggressive” and other descriptors that seemed fairly accurate and not excessively value based. But since then we have seen a remarkable shift so that in today’s world we have psychological research that is labeling male norms not as the reasonable above descriptions but as “violent”, seeking “power over women”, having “disdain for homosexuality” and being “playboys”. Have a look at the chart below to see the shift in norms. It is eye popping.) We have gone from describing men as strong, aggressive and risk takers to seeing male roles as pathological and the source of our problems. The similarly to what blacks faced is striking. What you don’t see, just as you didn’t see it for blacks, is any mention of where men are facing hardship or discrimination.
The same sort of bias can be seen in the American Psychological Association’s section on the study of men and masculinity. What you see is a group of psychologists who openly blame men for the world’s problems and support the sexist sorts of attitudes described in the previous paragraph. The focus is on what is wrong with men and what is omitted is the places men face hardship and discrimination. Even the programs supported by this division focus on helping men to change the violent ways of other men in order to make the world a safe place. While this is a noble goal it speaks volumes to the worldview of this division. There are no programs to help men who are facing hardship or discrimination. In fact those men are never mentioned and bringing up this sort of topic will bring on shaming and fuming.
Blacks are just animals - without the influence of whites it was assumed that blacks were simply animalistic/primitive and constantly focused on sex. The fear was of black men raping white women. Black men murdering and stealing etc. Now this is focused on men. They even call men by the name of an animal “Men are PIGS”. All men are rapists! Men are violent! Same message, different recipient. Men cause wars, men are insensitive etc. Picture an exasperated woman shaking her head and saying out loud, “men.”
Blacks are Violent and criminals - The source of crimes are blacks. They were perennially linked to crime and in so doing linked to being the problem themselves. People who are the problem are not deserving. In today’s world men are linked to crime and to violence. Not just the one or two percent of men who commit crimes (just as it was a minority of blacks who committed crimes) but all men are seen as the problem just as blacks face a similar harsh and undeserved judgement. It is a curious fact that women are more often the abusers of children but we have never heard anyone blame women as a group for that. It would seem absurd to do so yet it seems okay for most people to label and judge men as a group due to the actions of a tiny percentage.
Blacks are immoral - Without the white influence blacks were seen to be immoral. They were thought of as animalistic and always interested in sex with little restraints. Rape was a strong fear that was apparently encouraged by the memes of the day. Immoral people are looked down upon. They are the problem. Now it is men who are looked down on as being immoral and lacking in restraint without the civilizing impact of a woman in their lives.
The book pieces together the various lies about Blacks that were maintained over time that had the powerful impact of “proving” that blacks were inferior to whites. So inferior in fact that the general assumption was likely that they deserved their sub-human treatment. These scholars tell us that this is part of the purpose of these common sense lies. They relieve any guilt that the bearer may have felt about poor or inhumane treatment that was doled out. Here’s a quote from the book:
“The group in power is always likely to use every means at its disposal to create the impression that it deserves to be where it is. And it is not above suggesting that those who have been excluded have only themselves to blame.”
So the “common sense” that was the cultural meme was propagated as common knowledge but had the impact of not only condemning blacks as inferior it was also key in justifying poor treatment or poor conditions. Blacks were obviously the victim of this type of thinking with the idea that since they were were root of social pathology they really didn’t deserve to be served like others. The same can be seen with men today. The assumption is that since men are the problem they really don’t deserve to get any sort of special treatment. These are both ways to justify poor treatment by those in power.
Conclusion
I think we are safe to assume that these memes were being propagated unconsciously. I don’t think that most citizens were intentionally hateful and judging towards blacks, they simply were going along with the tide of thought that was prevalent at the time. It is obvious that these sorts of memes were very damaging to blacks. It doesn’t take much imagination to conceive of the hurtful impact of being seen as inferior. Over time I am sure it was building up and building up. A new consciousness needed to arise in order to leave the old programming.
As we have seen blacks begin to shed the old judgements and racist attitudes a curious thing is transpiring. Black women are doing much better than black men on almost every parameter. Could it be that black men are now more free from the racist attitudes but are now forced to carry the harsh judgements about being male? This seems to surely be a possibility.
Today I think men are suffering because of this sort of cultural meme. Like the early 20th century no one notices that they are carrying and expressing this misandry. Even the men are slow to realize it. This is eerily similar to the invisibility of the 20th century treatment of blacks. No one (or very few) knew at the time that they were acting like bigots. It took years of challenging and exposure of the hatred for people to realize they were carrying and propagating racism. I can only hope that we are able to more quickly help people see that they are carrying a similar hatefulness towards men.
Boys and girls often process emotions differently. When my daughter was young and in need of support she had a special technique. She would come to me and say “Daddy, I need special time,” and I knew just what that meant. We needed to face two chairs towards each other and she would talk about what was bothering her. She might complain that her friend had said she talked too much and I would respond with a supportive “Ah, Julia.” She might then tell me that another friend had told her that she didn’t want to play with her ever again and I would again offer support through a simple, “Ah, Julia.” After about 5-7 cycles of “Ah, Julia,” she was ready to go! Her cup was full and, she would say “Thanks, Dad” and off she would go outside to play.
What was Julia doing? She was creating a “safe place” for herself. One important aspect in healing is that when people are in trouble psychologically they will first look for a safe place. Julia went a step farther. Once she had the safe place she used it to tell her story. Combining these two elements is the outline of the common path that most of us use in healing ourselves. Finding safety and then telling our personal story. Julia arranged for me to steward that safe place and then talked about what was bothering her. Through this story-telling process done in a safe place she began to find healing. One other common example of this process is attending a support group which acts as a safe place for people to tell their story and through the repeated telling balance is found.
My son, however, would not come to me and say, “Daddy, I need special time.” Absolutely not. Why not? The reason is that sitting face to face is simply not safe for him. Where do men and boys like my son feel safe? More often, it is not when they are face to face, but rather when they are shoulder to shoulder taking action. Think of the places where men feel close to other men. It is most often when they are taking action and working on a common goal. The more dangerous the goal, the closer the men feel to each other. Wartime, police departments, fire departments, and sports teams at a championship are all examples of this. Through working together, shoulder to shoulder, the men feel close to other men. Here lasting friendships are forged within that safety.
Would Luke ask for special time? No. He would come to me and say, “I wanna wrestle!” Keep in mind that he was in first or second grade, and I am 6’2″ and far from tiny. I would say, “Okay, but you better be ready for me!” Then the wrestling would commence. At first he would have me down, then I would have him down. Back and forth it would go. At some point during the battle, Luke would stick his little head up and say, “Jimmy got beat up at school today,” and I would ask if it was bad and he would say “Oh yeah, there was blood coming from his nose.” Then the interlude abruptly ceased, and he growled loudly and attacked me with all his might. A minute or two later, Luke might stick his head up again and say, “I miss Granddaddy.” He was referring to my father who had died just a few months before. My heart cracked open, and I responded that I missed him too. In a flash, he would growl and attack again and was on top of me with all his might.
Luke was doing the same thing as his sister but was using the wrestling as a safe place to tell his story. Boys and girls often find safety in different places. The general rule (not true for every child of course) is that girls will more often tend to seek out safety in INTERACTION while boys will more often seek out a safe place through ACTION [2].
Dr. Shelly Taylor, professor of psychology at UCLA, has spent many years investigating the possible neural substrate for these sex differences. She began by observing that most of the research on stress published before 2000 had been conducted on men [1]. Women had been left out for a variety of reasons, such as the concern that hormonal variations associated with the menstrual cycle might skew the results. Taylor has now conducted many studies using only women as subjects. What she found has changed our understanding of stress and the role of sex differences. She found that most women do not engage the “fight or flight” system as readily as men; instead, they engage a different system, which Dr. Taylor calls “tend and befriend.” Women, when stressed, will (according to Professor Taylor) tend to move towards others and move towards interaction. This is very different from the masculine habit of moving toward action when stressed (fight), or moving towards inaction (flight). Professor Taylor’s findings brought to mind what I had seen in Luke and Julia and started to make sense of these different strategies.
Dr. Taylor believes that these differences in the biobehavioral response to stress may be due, at least in part, to underlying hormonal differences between men and women. She cites research suggesting that oxytocin plays a key role in the “tend and befriend” system in women. Some have called oxytocin the “cuddle hormone”. What Taylor found was that though both men and women release oxytocin after stress, a women’s estrogen amplifies the effects of the oxytocin which increases her urge to affiliate (tend and befriend). The higher testosterone levels in men appear to blunt the effects of oxytocin, reducing the inclination to move towards others when stressed.
Dr. Taylor suggests that there are two basic strategies in response to stress: action (“fight or flight”) or interaction (“tend and befriend”). Luke and Julia followed the expected path based on their biological sex, with Luke preferring the more male strategy of action and Julia preferring the female strategy of interaction. Importantly, while this is common, it is not always the case. Each child is different and our challenge is to evaluate them individually based on their unique approach.
Boys and girls often process emotions differently. Being aware of each child’s unique way of finding safety and telling their story can only help in facilitating their growth and healing.
References
Taylor, S.E. (2003). The Tending Instinct: Women, Men and the Biology of Our Relationships. New York: Henry Holt.
Golden, T.R. (2000). Swallowed by a Snake: The Gift of the Masculine Side of Healing (2nd Ed.), Gaithersburg, MD: G H Publishing.
Is there a bias against men in our culture? Are men stereotyped? Is there such a thing as
“male bashing?” There are some excellent books written on this topic by notable authors like Dr Paul Nathanson and Dr Katherine Young, two professors from McGill University who wrote the book Spreading Misandry: The Teaching of Contempt for Men in Popular Culture1. Spreading Misandry is a convincing volume that observes an anti-male bias through television, movies, and popular culture. While Nathanson and Young make a convincing case for the presence of a a strong anti-male bias in the media the question this article addresses is does the same sort of bias exist outside the media? Could it exist in the mental health professions? I think so.
The bias against men in the mental health profession is something I have seen for many years. I have worked a great deal with men and have specialized in helping men and boys through crisis since the late 1970’s. During that time there was much said by my female colleagues about men that could easily be construed as anti-male. I remember numerous comments from women therapists that were less than flattering towards men in general and the way they dealt with emotions. Comments went from “Men don’t deal with their feelings” and “Men don’t grieve” to “Men are cold and unfeeling” to “How can anyone live with someone like that!” It was comments such as these that prompted me to write a book that honored and cataloged men’s paths toward healing. Slowly, through books like mine, brain research and increased knowledge of hormonal differences I think this sort of perception is changing. People are beginning to see that we all have differences in our choice of healing paths. I always found the comments from the female therapists to be largely based on stereotypes and the self-centered assumption that men should have reactions similar to their own. Once these women were educated on the important differences between men and themselves they were very quick to change their stance. With that history I tend to see the source of the problem as one of education and knowledge. The problem though, has shown itself to be considerable and indicates a significant anti-male bias.
A part of the reason for this anti-male bias is that men simply donʼt speak up. That is starting to change. Lately I am hearing more and more male therapists speaking about the anti-male bias they see both in the stereotyping of men and in the female therapistʼs lack of understanding of male/female differences. This is not a big surprise since most therapy is based on talking and open emoting and this is harmonious with what we have come to learn to be the nature of the female response to stress and loss but runs counter to the masculine path. Itʼs little surprise the male therapists would be in a position to understand the nature of men and boys and see clearly the bias inherent in the more feminine ways of looking at things. Most therapy with the exception of behavioral techniques and techniques such as EMDR, is based on talking and this is playing directly to the woman’s strength and into the manʼs weakness. Considering this, it is little wonder that men tend to avoid traditional therapy and that male therapists are starting to speak out.
Other areas where discussion is growing would include the anti-male bias in the family court system and the default solution of having dad pay but having mom be the custodial parent. We see the same sort of stereotyping at work with the media portraying fathers as inept and infrequent caretakers of children and of course the stereotyping of men as deadbeat dads.
The domestic violence industry is yet another area where more and more people are speaking up about an anti-male bias. The domestic violence industry is funded by the billion dollar a year Violence Against Women Act and as the name makes clear men need not apply. The peer reviewed research of the last 30 years3 shows clearly that men are a sizable percentage of the victims of domestic violence4 and over a third of the seriously injured victims5. This hasnʼt stopped those running the show from stereotyping men as a tiny fraction of the victims and aver the bogus claim repeatedly that men are the primary source of the domestic violence problem6. Male bashing? Yes. Promoting a stereotype of men always being the violent spouse abusers and never the victims. The media of course reinforces this anti-male stereotype by publishing mostly stories about women who are badly beaten by men. These articles promote the popular stereotypes which sell more papers than articles that feature men being abused by women. At the same time television continues to routinely broadcast shows where men are kicked, hit, slapped or otherwise abused by women but rarely the other way around. Stereotyping yet again. Sadly, it continues to be common for shows to use a man being hit in the groin for comic purposes. Does anyone ever laugh when women are injured? Violence against men is all too common and accepted while services for men who are victims of domestic violence are rare or non-existent. This is where the stereotype leads to a double standard and men, having been labeled as perpetrators only, get left out in the cold when it comes to receiving services.
It was these sorts of musings about the stereotyping of men that have made me wonder about an anti-male bias in mental health beyond the clinical setting and how strong it might be. I decided to have a look at some Professional Journals on menʼs and womenʼs issues and was not surprised to see indications of an anti-male bias. The first thing I did was simply look at the titles. The Womenʼs Studies Quarterly had article after article where the title seemed “woman friendly” and portrayed the feminine in a most positive light. This of course, is fine and is a good thing. The Journal of Men and Masculinities however had numerous articles where the title portrayed the masculine as negative. This is quite a contrast from the womenʼs journal titles. The female articles portrayed women as having been victims of oppression for many years and now deserving to be set free from this bondage. The masculine articles portrayed men as oppressors who needed to learn to be more like women!
Obviously not all of the titles were good examples of the man=oppressor woman =opressed man=bad woman=good dichotomy but it seemed hard to find a womenʼs journal title to be negative toward women or to find a menʼs journal article that was positive towards men. Just to give you a sense of the differences in the two I will list some of the article titles I found that serve as examples of this. Here are a few titles from the Womenʼs Journal:
1)Dignity Overdue: Womenʼs Rights Activism in Support of Foreign Domestic Workers in Singapore, 2) The Power of Pottery: Hopi Women Shaping the World, 3)Female Agency and Oppression in Caribbean Bacchanalian Culture: Soca, Carnival, and Dancehall , 4) For Love and Justice: Ovadiaʼs Story, 5) A Planet of Women (poem)
6) 25 Years to Freedom: An Interview with Betty Tyson
And here are a few from the Men and Masculinities Journal:
1) Gender (and) Imperialism: Structures of Masculinity in Tayeb Salihʼs Season of Migration to the North, 2)The Stain of White: Liaisons, Memories, and White Men as Relatives, 3) Masculinities and Power in New Historical Research 4) School Violence, Peer Discipline, and the (Re)Production of Hegemonic Masculinity, 5) Beyond Machismos: Recent Examinations of Masculinities in Latin America 6) Narrative Therapy as a Counter-Hegemonic Practice (and inspiring men to perform alternative narratives of self that have preferred real effects and counter the practices of hegemonic masculinity.)
The difference between these two groups of titles is noticeable. It seems from the titles that we want femininity to blossom and masculinity to be countered! One is more affirming while the other is more condemning. One is more a blessing and one is more questioning at best. One is uplifting and the other is shaming. We canʼt make any large conclusions from a selected group of titles but it does give us a sense of how the sexes are seen in very different ways even in our professional journals. It looked so far that the stereotyping we saw in the media was stretching into the mental health journals. The underlying assumption seems to say that women are worthy and men are in need of change.
As a therapist I have been taught to be very suspicious of situations where people are seeing complexity in black and white terms. This seems to be one of those scenarios. Women are being seen as needing greater opportunity after having been oppressed. The men/masculinity are seen as the evil doers who have caused this oppression and as morally inferior and needing to become more like the women. As you can see this is in some ways the same theme that I noticed with female therapists comments about men. “The men need to be more like the women, then things would be better.” Any time you view a group as being globally “negative” stereotypes are close at hand.
Looking at titles will only get us so far and is shaky ground at best. Perhaps looking specifically more at a Journalʼs content rather than just the titles might tell us a bit more. I was reminded of an inventory I ran across a while back called the CMNI (Conformity to Masculinity Norms Inventory). This is an inventory that claims to show how men either conform to or reject our cultureʼs masculine norms. Since the inventory claims to focus on masculine norms it seemed like a good place to examine to see if there might be some anti-male bias. Additionally the existence of a CFNI (Conformity to Femininity Norms Inventory) created by the same researcher seemed to offer a valuable method for comparison. What I found was a shock. The masculine inventory listed numerous characteristics that it claimed were our cultureʼs masculine norms7. Some of them seemed accurate but a good number of them seemed very negative and judgmental. In fact, they reminded me of the female therapists judgements of men prior to learning about their nature. I will list the “norms” here as presented in the journal article so you can get an idea of my experience:
Violence
Winning
Power Over Women
Emotional Control
Risk-Taking
Dominance
Playboy
Self-Reliance
Primacy of Work
Disdain for Homosexuals
Pursuit of Status
This inventory seemed to be trying to say that violence, power over women, disdain for homosexuals and being a playboy are all masculine norms for our culture? This was a surprise for me. I thought that the masculine norms centered around providing and protecting. The Journal article states:
“Gender role norms, or those rules and standards that guide and constrain our behavior as men and women, are special types of social norms. Similar to how general social norms influence people to engage in specific social behavior, gender norms also operate when we observe what most men or women do in social situations, are told what is approved or disapproved behavior for men or women, and observe how popular or admired men or women act (Mahalik, 2000).”
Violence
I was shocked that this inventory seemed to be listing violence as a norm for masculine behavior. Is violence “approved behavior” for men? Is it normative? I simply don’t see how it can be thought of in that light. Violence is not a norm for men, rather, violence occurs when the norm for men breaks down. It is also not a common behavior of the majority of men in our culture. Yes, some men are violent, but no, violence is not a descriptor of men in general and to imply that violence is a norm for men goes beyond being anti-male and moves into being a hateful attitude towards men and masculinity.
Lumping all members of a birth group into a negative category is never wise and is clearly the domain of stereotyping. Just imagine that we are creating a scale of norms for women. We know it is a fact that women murder their children twice as often as men8. We also know that women commit the majority of child abuse and that women initiate violence in intimate relationships more often than men4. Knowing this should we put in our norm scale that women are child murderers or child and spouse abusers? Or maybe just that women are violent? Of course not, and anyone who tried to do this would be laughed out of their profession. Although women are the majority of child murderers, child abusers and initiate violence more often in intimate relationship the percentage of women who act this way is a tiny fraction of women in general. It is absurd to try and imply anything about women based on the behavior of such a tiny subset. So why is it that when this is done with men it is not laughed at, not criticized, not even a blink from mental health professionals? This seems to be a good example of misandry.
Disdain for Homosexuals
Some men and some women surely have disdain for gay people but is this even close to being a defining characteristic of masculinity? Again, if this were about women, the offenders would be pied. The idea that most men have disdain for homosexuals is simply nutty. Implying or outright claiming that this sort of characteristic is representative of a birth group is again misandrous.
Power over Women
Can someone explain to me how this is a masculine norm? Where is the data showing that the majority of men have a tendency to want power over women? I emailed Dr Mahalik, the inventoryʼs creator, and asked about these “norms.” He wrote back that he had found the norms in the literature and offered me an article that he said showed the sources. When I read the article it was clear that there was very little evidence supporting these four categories as being masculine norms in our culture. The “power over women” category offered a cite of a paper that was over 25 years old. Maybe I missed it but I couldnʼt find any statistical evidence that supported using these categories as norms for men. While I am sure that some men want power over women I think these investigators would be hard pressed to show that most men in the US seek power over women. Again this is a very negative accusation and is irresponsible to try to accuse a birth group of having such a negative trait. If the same sort of implication were to be made against any other birth group (such as a race of people, just imagine the reaction to a claim that blacks want control over whites) there would be great incredulous consternation and accusations of racism.
Playboy
In the paper which Mahalik sent there was a reference to the “Playboy” category. I tracked down the specific book, which was published over 10 years ago which had made the reference. “Playboy” was one of four roles the books author had listed of mens ways of loving. The other three were Breadwinner, Faithful Husband, and Nurturer. The book stated that the playboy role in their questionnaire data had only gotten 1% of the votes from the men describing their most dominant role. The data from the book seemed to be gathered from a survey and from interviews. Hardly indicators of global norms for men. This left me wondering why a researcher would choose such a negative characteristic for such a large group. Out of the four possible choices of breadwinner, nurturer, faithful husband and playboy, why would he choose playboy only and bypass the others?
These four categories of violence, playboy, disdain for homosexuals, and power over women are decidedly negative and make a clear statement that the researchers feel that masculinity itself is negative. I realized also that they were encouraging negative stereotypes. By trying to link masculinity to such negative and pathological characteristics the inventory was actually attempting to bolster a stereotype of men as oppressors. In some ways the TV male bashing that used repeated stereotypes was being repeated here but on an academic level. Now the academes were foisting their own stereotypes just as a sitcom might do. Clearly a bias against men and masculinity but this time promoted by what are supposed to be our best and brightest.
I was truly shocked at this point to realize that this inventory was willing to pass judgement onto men and boys so easily. It made me wonder if maybe I was over- reacting and that this sort of thing had been done before? To get a sense of whether this was new or was a continuation of previous research practice we can look at examples of masculine norms that have been used by researchers over the last 40 years. The chart below offers examples of the terms researchers have used to describe masculine norms. The first column shows the norms used in 1970, the second 1978, then 1984 and 1986 and finally the norms used in this Conformity to Masculine Norms Inventory. Notice the shift in the terms over the years:
1970 (Turner)
1978 (Cicone and Ruble)
1984 (Brannon)
1986(Pleck)
2003 (Mahalik)
1) Independent style of
achievement
1)active
1) proscriptive norm against anything feminine
1) Independent
Violence
competency
dominant in relationships
acheiving status
Assertive
Power over Women
incompetency in feminine activities
achievement oriented
independence
Strong personality
Disdain for Homosexuals
suppressing emotion
level headed
self-confidence
Forceful
Risk-Taking
self-contained
aggressiveness
Has leader abilities
Pursuit of Status
Willing to take risks
Emotional Control
Willing to take a stand
Dominance
Aggressive
Playboy
Self-Reliance
Primacy of Work
Winning
Notice that in the above examples prior to 2003 the focus is on characteristics and almost none of them seems negative or insulting. Then look at the 2003 CMNI variables and note the difference. Suddenly masculinity has been cast into a negative light. What could have happened between 1970 and 2003 to bring about such a drastic change? Suddenly there is an implication that there is something wrong with masculinity. Violent, Power over women, Disdain for homosexuals, and Playboy are all descriptors that are obviously negative and condemning.
My shock at the harsh judgements and apparently ill-suited variables in this inventory left me wondering just how this researcher came up with these categories? There seems to be a large jump from the relatively neutral examples of the 1970ʼs and later and then the more male bashing examples of the CMNI. Were the variables such as Playboy and Violence pulled out of thin air or was there some research behind these choices? Was there an attempt made to choose norms that fit with men of all ages across the US? The Journal article states that the researcher first did a review of the literature for masculine norms and then started two focus groups to discuss and refine the masculine norms. It is stated that:
“The construct was chosen because Mahalik posited the gender role norms from the most dominant or powerful group in a society affect the experiences of persons in that group, as well as persons in all other groups. Thus, the expectations of masculinity as constructed by Caucasian, middle- and upper-class heterosexuals should affect members of that group and every other male in U.S. society who is held up to those standards and experiences acceptance or rejection from the majority, in part, based on adherence to the powerful group’s masculinity norms.”
This clearly states that they sought the gender norms of white middle to upper class males and believes that these norms impact not just the white males but all people in the society since this group is the most “dominant.” The purpose of the inventory seems to be somewhat different from simply noting when men conform or donʼt conform to our cultureʼs masculine norms. The purpose according to this quote seems to be to label middle and upper class white males as having norms that “affect the experiences of persons in that group as well as persons in all other groups.” That the norms of “white males” are portrayed so negatively we can only assume that the author believes that the actions of white males are at the root of our cultures problems with masculinity.
We begin to see that the negative stereotyping is less about men in general or men of color and is specifically about white males. Even the search for “masculine” norms was specifically focused on white men. This too is a shock. How could anyone title an inventory with the global term “Masculine” but intend it to be about a sub-set of that group. We also see that the norms the researcher seeks and portrays as masculine are not about all men, not even all white men, they are about middle and upper class white men. This parallels the media male-bashing patterns of primarily making fun of white men and very rarely bashing men of color.
Letʼs be clear. White people comprise about 70% of the U.S. population. Of that 70% upper class men are about 10% while middle class is difficult to assess but for our purposes we can assume that another 50% below the top 10% might be considered “middle class.” When we crunch those numbers we find that even with these very conservative numbers that leaves us with a male population of 42% of the total. Clearly a minority. So what we have in this inventory is a scale that tries to identify the norms of a minority of the men in the US and gauges how other men conform to that? This is a very different message and intent than the title “ Conformity to Masculine Norms Inventory” seems to claim.
The stated goal was to map out the norms of middle and upper class white males. To do this the investigators created two focus groups to refine the norms the researcher had identified in his literature search. The groups meet for 90 minutes each week for 8 months with the researcher. The curious part of this is that of the nine people that comprised these two focus groups only 3 of the 9 are white males! Five of the nine are females. Here is the composition of the focus groups:
Group 1: 1 Asian American man, 1 European American man, 2 European American women;
Group 2: 2 European American men, 2 European American women, 1 Haitian Canadian woman
Notice that men are in the minority and that white men make up only 1/3 of the total persons in the focus groups. Importantly, they are also in the minority in both focus groups. This seems odd considering the overt claimed objective was to develop norms of european american males. Why include so many women? Why have the group you are seeking to understand be the minority? I started to wonder if the researcher had some pre-conceived ideas that he wanted to propagate and having too many men, especially too many white men, might foil his attempt to plant the seeds of his favored ideology.
Itʼs also important to note that the focus groups for the masculine inventory were populated solely by grad students in counseling psychology. According to the email from the researcher these groups were comprised of young people in their mid-20ʼs. In a nutshell, the groups lacked diversity in age. Hardly the sort of group one would want to make decisions about the norms of such a large birth group encompassing the entire lifespan for men.
What we seem to have with the CMNI inventory is a group of young men and women making judgements about masculine norms which would be used in the inventory to apply to middle aged and older males as well as adolescents. I am beginning to think that a better name for this inventory would be the Conformity to Adolescent Masculine Norms Inventory. It is built and geared for that population and some of the conclusions it draws make a great deal more sense when applied to an immature and adolescent masculinity. Perhaps the authors are simply unaware of and have little experience with the mature masculine? We simply donʼt know that at this point but it is clear to me that this inventory is anti-male and misandrous.
CFNI Female Conformity to Norms Inventory
When I first saw this inventory I was a shocked at the anti-male content but wondered if maybe this was simply a shift with the turn of the century to have a more willing look at the shadow side of things and bring those more unconscious aspects of life out in the open. That thought was dashed when I saw the companion inventory for this the CFNI (Conformity to Femininity Norms Inventory) created by the same researcher. I wondered if maybe this other version for women would contain similarly negative and judgmental “norms” for women. I thought maybe gossip or the queen bee passive aggression sorts of things might be listed or possibly some form of characteristic about gold-digging. What I found was that the norms for the feminine side were almost completely positive/sweet and nice. Here is a list of them:
Nice in Relationships
Thinness
Modesty
Domestic
Care for Children
Romantic Relationship
Sexual Fidelity
Invest in Appearance
All of these “norms” are either flattering or neutral. There is not a hint of judgement towards the feminine norms. All of them could be manifested robustly without causing harsh judgments. A woman could invest greatly in her appearance and be very concerned about her sexual fidelity or children or her modesty and she would be considered fine and dandy by our cultures standards. Contrast this with the menʼs “norms” such as violence where even a little of that “norm” is a horrible thing that deserves scorn and harsh judgement.
To me the feminine norms seemed pollyanna and overly flattering as if the researchers were reluctant to make any negative claims about the nature of feminine norms. It was readily apparent to note the contrast between the masculine and the feminine. One is harsh and judging and the other is sweet and nice. This reminded me of the titles in the two journals. Women = Good Men = Bad
Even more interesting was the manner that these norms in the CFNI were constructed. The author created focus groups, not unlike for the masculine, but the womenʼs focus groups were only women. No men. Also the age of the participants was considerably older. The mean age was 32 with a standard deviation of 10 years. This means that most of the group members were likely between 18-46 years of age. Indeed the women were placed into one of five different focus groups. Several of the groups were largely young women and two of the groups were adult women from the community. Unlike the masculine groups this seems to have represented more than just the adolescent population.
Comparing the CMNI and CFNI
Letʼs take a minute to contrast the two inventories. Both used focus groups to refine the norms that would be used. In the masculine version (CMNI) the focus groups were predominantly women while in the feminine (CFNI) the groups were comprised only of women. One would think that if you wanted to get a clear idea of the norms of a group you would want members of the group being studied to make those assessments. To intentionally create a group with the majority of members outside the group being studied defies explanation. I emailed the researcher asking about this and the reasons for this and he didnʼt respond directly to the question.
Another factor that is worth noting is the age of the focus group participants. The groups for the female CFNI had a greater range likely between 18-46 with a mean of 32 years old and a standard deviation of 10 years. This gave these groups a much broader range of ages than the focus groups for the masculine CMNI which were exclusively young people in their mid 20ʼs. It is easy to assume that the older group of women would have a markedly different view on life and on the feminine norms. The younger group in their mid-20ʼs doing the masculine norms would be much more likely to have a view closer to that of an adolescent.
The two inventories contained remarkably different “norms” with the male norms including some that were quite negative and judgmental while the female list seemed much more neutral and complimentary. It is an interesting question to wonder why the female norms didnʼt include any negative stereotypes similar to those included in the masculine inventory. We do get a hint about the reasons behind this from a section of the Journal article about the CFNI where the author states:
“In addition, because the CFNI is intended to measure conformity to traditional norms of femininity in the U.S., we thought it should also relate to womenʼs development of a feminist identity. In describing womenʼs feminist identity development, Downing and Roush (1985) proposed a five-stage model in which the first stage, passive acceptance, reflects acceptance of traditional European American, North American, gender roles, beliefs that men are superior to women, and that these roles are advantageous. The second stage, revelation, is in response to a crisis or crises that lead women to question traditional gender roles and to have concomitant feelings of anger toward men. Sometimes women in this stage also feel guilty because of how they may have contributed to their own and other womenʼs oppression in the past. The third stage, embeddedness- emanation, reflects feelings of connection to other women, cautious interactions with men, and development of a more relativistic frame of life. The fourth stage, synthesis, is when women develop a positive feminist identity and are able to transcend traditional gender roles.”
This quote is very different from the earlier quote regarding the culpability of white males. The women are seen as developing a “feminiist identity” and learning that they have been living in a world that oppresses them. Men are the ones who have been holding them back with ideas that women were inferior. It is clear that the researchers frame women as “good” and in need of space to grow while at the same time framing men as “not good” and needing to change. This sort of thinking is the same thing we see with the application of negative stereotypes to men, it is a huge generalization that sorely lacking in evidence. It is exactly what we see in male bashing stereotypes in the media. Sadly these two inventories boil down to women=good man=bad. Cartoons have successfully made their way into academia.
If women were seen as so inferior to men why would the majority of men on the titanic give their lives for them? Does a slave owner consider himself superior to his slaves? Yes. Would a slave owner give his life for his slaves? No. Men gave their lives because they held women in high esteem! America, mom and apple pie doesnʼt describe someone who is seen as inferior. It describes someone who is cherished. Women and men were both under the rule of rigid sex roles which limited both in their choices. It did not pronounce that one was superior and the other a lackey. Saying such as that is propagating a bigoted mythology that only makes things worse.
Conclusion
It seems clear from our observations of this inventory that male-bashing is alive and well in the mental health professional journals. I simply canʼt see any other explanation for the willingness to lump an entire birth group into such negative categories. If this sort of thing was done with any other group there would be a revolution on our hands. How can we blame our television and media for their male-bashing if our research scientists have the same tendencies? The sad fact is that male-bashing resides in most areas of our lives and most of us are not even slightly aware. Police, the judicial system, our politicians and of course entertainment and academia. All of these are areas where stereotypes of men are held as truth. How can we start to root out this sort of hatred? We need to move to a point where we can see both men and women, masculine and feminine as having positive and negative qualities and learn to value each individual. We have a long way to go. You can help things along by speaking out.
REFERENCES
1. Nathanson, Paul & Young, Katherine R. (2001), Spreading Misandry: The Teaching of Contempt for Men in Popular Culture, Harper Paperbacks, Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, ISBN 9780773530997
2. 3.
Nathanson, Paul & Young, Katherine R. (2006), Legalizing Misandry: From Public Shame to Systemic Discrimination against Men, Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, ISBN 9780773528628
Fiebert Bibliography which contains abstracts of over 150 studies many of which show that women initiate domestic violence at a greater rate than men http://www.csulb.edu/~mfiebert/assault.htm
4. August 3, 2007 American Psychiatric Association article pointing out that among violents couples women were more often the aggressos than men. http://pn.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/content/full/42/15/31-a
5. Archer, J. (2000). Sex differences in aggression between heterosexual partners: A meta-analytic review. Psychological Bulletin, 126, 651-680. (Meta-analyses of sex differences in physical aggression indicate that women were more likely than men to
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Anti Male Bias, Tom Golden
“use one or more acts of physical aggression and to use such acts more frequently.” In terms of injuries, women were somewhat more likely to be injured, and analyses reveal that 62% of those injured were women.)
6. This page is a Montgomery County sponsored page which falsely claims that men are over 95% of the perpetrators of domestic violence http://www.montgomerycountymd.gov/hhstmpl.asp?url=/content/hhs/bhcs/mfadv.asp
7.Mahalik, J.R., Locke, B., Ludlow, L., Diemer, M., Scott, R.P.J., Gottfreid, M., Freitas, G. (2003). Development of the Conformity to Masculine Norms Inventory. Psychology of Men and Masculinity, 4, 3-25.
8. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services statistics on child murder,
The sex roles that drove a man’s and a woman’s behavior for thousands of years had great impact on each sex. One of the impacts of the sex role on men was the attitude of disposability that developed over the years. By that I mean the tendency of people to be less likely to get emotionally close to men and to see them as expendable. Why would that be?
Imagine we are living long ago and the women were caring for the hearth and the children and making forays to gather while the men were more likely to go out and hunt. The relative danger of those two behaviors is not subtle. Going out to hunt is decidedly more dangerous and the liklihood of the man returning home after a hunt was much smaller than the same liklhood for the woman performing her daily activities. When we dont’ expect someone to return what impact does that have on our interest in making an emotional attachment to them? It diminishes. We are less likely to invest our emotional ergs into someone or something that we fear may not be with us. This was obviously not just around the issue of hunting. Men were expected to guard the perimeter and to repel attacks by intruders. This was a dangerous activity and again, increased the liklihood that the man would be dissappearing. We tend to not invest in folks who we fear will not be returning. Yet another example is war time. Men were the ones who were expected to go to war and die protecting the village/community/country.
This diminished investment is not subtle but very few people are aware of their own tendency to do this. Let’s try an exercise to evaluate your way of thinking. Has it ever bothered you that only males are expected to sign up for the selecttive service? That it is only males expected to go and die in case of a national emergency? Does that bug you? Okay, now imagine that congress in all its wisdom has changed the law and decided that we need to draft only girls and women until an equal number of women and girls have died in combat to the numbers of men and boys who have died. Would that upset you? Why? Do you value women and girls more than boys and men? How about if we decided to draft only Black people? Maybe only Jews? Would either of those groups being sacrificed upset you? Would you protest for any of those to not be the only group drafted? Can you feel in your bones how upsetting that would be? If you answered yes to any of those questions, how was your response different from thinking it is okay to draft only men? If you had a different reaction then you are likely holding some of that tendency to consider men and boys to be more disposable.
You can see this tendency in many places. Boys and men comprise almost 80% of suicides and yet we have no outcry or services specifically for this. Men and boys are over 90% of the workplace deaths in the Unted States but no one seems to notice. Over 97% if the deaths of U.S. servicemen in Iraq are men and boys and yet we hear no protest in support of men and boys or calls for equality. Men are the victims of domestic violence in considerable numbers and yet we have no services directed towards their needs. All we need to do is open our eyes to see the extent that men and boys are seen as expendable. It is all around us. Ever heard of the wife telling the husband she will go investigate the loud noise that awoke them from a deep sleep?
The age old sex role for men has trickled down into a straight-jacket that harnesses men to be the expendable ones. Most people are simpy unconscious of this and treat men according to their own unconscious programming. How abut you?
This is anyone’s guess. My own sense is that the entire domestic violence industry is built on the Duluth Model which holds men as being violent and the perpetrators and women as the victims. The system has been built from the ground up with that thesis. One needs only look at the public service announcements that any domestic violence center produces and it is easy to see that the over-riding assumption is that women are the victims and men the perps. Have you ever seen a public service announcement that is directed towards men who are victims of domestic violence? I would bet not.
The domestic violence emergency shelters are only for women. They only allow female residents and staff. No men allowed. Most shelters will not allow young boys above the age of 12 in the shelters. They are considered dangerous. The staff of the shelters is largely volunteer driven and many of the volunteers are women who have been victims of domestic violence. These women obviously have a viewpoint that is skewed towards believing that men are the violent ones and that women are the victims.
There are a number of reports from ex-staff members of shelters who discuss the blaming of men that goes on. The staff are largely radical feminists who already have an ax to grind in blaming men and add to that the volunteer staff who have personal experiences that lead them in a similar direction. This leaves us with the paid staff and the volunteers likely being anti-male.
There is an interesting battle of information going on in the domestic violence scene. The service providers and legislators offer statistics that show the ever increasing incidence of domestic violence. It faithfully shows that men are the perpetrators and women are the victims. Importantly most of their numbers come from hospital and police records or their own statistics. This gives them a decidedly biased flavor. The flavor is that women are nearly the only victims and men the only perpetrators. Keep in mind that the services they offer are for women only. Imagine that we built a hospital for only caucasion diabetics our statistics would reflect that whites were the overwhelming majority of people we served. We could easily make a case for the need for more services for whites who had diabetes and disregard the need for other races. In the same way, the domestic violence industry’s reliance on their own statistics is skewed and misleading and fails to count the male victims due to its bias.
But what if someone else studied the problem from a different perspective? A perspective that relied on scholarly research in peer reviewed scientific Journals? That is just what has happened. There is an alternate voice that paints a very different picture. Bonafide peer reviewed research. When you look at the scientific research on domestic violence done by legitimate scientists in studies that are supervised by other non-partisan scientists you get a very different story. What you find is that women actually initiate domestic violence more often than men. You also find that men are a significant portion of the injured victims of domestic violence. The Archer meta-analysis published in Psychological Bulletin (2000) looked at all the previous research and found that when they were all tallied that men comprised 38% of the injured victims! Starkly different figures than you get with the stats offered by the domestic violence industry.
For a quick look at a listing of numerous scentific studies you can go to Martin Fieberts page. Skim through the entries and get a sense of the number of studies that have come to the same conclusion: that domestic violence is a two way street with both men and women being victims and perpetrators. In fact Muarry Strauss PhD., one of the grandfathers of domestic violence research, states that domestic violence is 25% men beating women, 25% women beating men, and 50% brawl between the two.
The obvious question is why do we have no services for men?
Some time ago I had the belief that our system of government was fair to all and considered the needs of each person as being important. I no longer feel that is the case. This page will give you a birds eye view of how I came to my present conclusions. If you are happy with your view of the government and don’t want that to change, stop reading now. If not, read on.
As a therapist I often get calls about potential referrals. A number of years ago I had gotten just such a call about a man who was in crisis due to his wife’s violence. He was looking for a safe place for himself and his children. I wasn’t sure what services were available so I decided to call around to find out prior to meeting this gentleman. I called the local abused persons services and told them of the problem and they described at great length the myriad of services that were available. Then I told them the victim in this case was a man. They stopped in their tracks. They backed up and said “Well, what we discussed doesn’t apply to men. The services we described are for women only.” I was shocked. I asked what they could do for him and they told me that in lieu of offering him the shelter and all of the associated services they could put him up in a motel for a night.
I was stunned. I had assumed that the services provided would be for anyone with a need. I was incorrect. I thought that I should contact my Congressman and Senator. I wrote letters to Connie Morella and Barbara Mikulski my Senator and Congressperson at the time but both turned a deaf ear to my concerns. Mikulski literally said it wasn’t her problem, that is was a local concern. Of course she had voted in favor of the Violence Against Women Act several years before which overtly discrminated against men but she didn’t mention that. Again I was shocked and stunned by the disinterest in the pain and suffering of men. I turned to the service providers and contacted them thinking that they were colleagues and would be open to hearing my concerns. Wrong! What I was to find out was that the domestic violence industry is based on what is called the “Duluth Model” which claims that women are the victims and men the perpetrators. Any reverse of that is treated at best as an aberation and at worst simply ignored.
My efforts turned to local legislators and I received the same sort of response. I began looking for others who might see the same discrimination and want to do something about it. I found some small groups who were concerned. Some of these groups were involved in lobbying to change the VAWA to include services for men. In 2005 the law was up for re-authorization. We gathered an impressive group of lawyers, professors, authors, clinicians and male victims of domestic violence to testify on capital hill to encourage our legislators to adjust this bill to include men for services. We lobbied the members of congress on the important committiees and during lunches and meetings with them and their legislative assistants we were assured that our group would be allowed to testify at the public hearings. The hearings were held. Not one of our group was allowed to testify. Not one. The only people invited to testify were the ones that were invested in the status quo. They put on a dog and pony show saying the same things that had been said for the last 10 years. What the congress didn’t hear was the voice of a large group of very intelligent and compassionate professionals who had a very different perspective. Those people were essentially silenced. I thought I was in North Korea.
Prior to my getting the call about a possible referral I had no experience with domestic violence. It was far from an issue for me. I was happily married, with two grown children, having never been divorced or abused in any way. Nothing. The reactions I received from the people to whom I expressed my concern about male victims of domestic violence were consistent. I was treated like a pariah, as if I had some plague and needed to be avoided. At one point I sent out an email to local service providers asking about services for men and was mistakenly cc’d on a response from a local politician to the service providers that said basically, “People like that? Oh just ignore him and hopefully he will go away in time.” It made it clear that this was not simply a dialogue of information. It became clear that the information I was promoting was considered dangerous to them.
The sex roles that drove a man’s and a woman’s behavior for thousands of years had great impact on each sex. One of the impacts of the sex role on men was the attitude of disposability that developed over the years. By that I mean the tendency of people to be less likely to get emotionally close to men and to see them as expendable. Why would that be?