The problem is men!

[DollyDayScream]

Please forgive me if you've covered this before, I just need to get this off my chest.

I've noticed that the media are reluctant to name men as the problem in widespread harassment against women.

For example, Moira was reading the news on bbc Radio 2 this morning. She reported that an astonishing number of school girls has reported being sexually harassed. At no point were men mentioned. The problem was reported as being harassment, whereas I would say that the problem is the men, the behaviour is symptomatic.

Why is this? It's seems as if there is a very conscious effort to distance the perpetrators (men) from the violence and harassment they commit. Is the media therefore shielding men?

That's really interesting re the failure in the R2 news article to mention the sex of the harassers.

Interesting. I read a county child protection policy which mentioned the increase in 'child on child' sexual violence in schools. I thought the same - name the problem. Frustratingly, I mentioned this to a family member who is a safeguarding lead professional and she couldn't see the problem - 'after all, girls commit sexual violence too'.

You're right
It's a perennial problem.

www.thejournal.ie/readme/violence-against-women-language-2068085-Apr2015/
There are feminists who have written about it now and again.

Ultimately the mainstream media very rarely makes the agent of male violence clear as it would offend most of their audience.

It's a huge shift in mindset.

Controlling men who are unable to take on fellow males that choose to harm the vulnerable and weak to feel powerful.

This was something that Karen Ingala-Smith talked about very powerfully when she spoke at FiLiA last year. We need to name the problem. Right now, we're erasing the perpetrators.

I've been listening to BBC TV news since about 6.30 and every time that item has come up I have waited to see how it changed - they do as the morning moves on. But no! At no time did anyone, news reader, reporter or invited guest every even allude to men being the issue!

That's right. In a piece about young girls in school uniform being sexually harrassed, no one said MEN were doing the harrassing. No one said that FATHERS, SONS, HUSBANDS were sexually harrassing DAUGHTERS, SISTERS.

And yes, I have been irritated for the first 3 hours of my working day! Way to go Woke Peeps!

Spot on, this drives me nuts.

My tweet recently (possibly ever) was from Julie Bindel: 'Men. Sort yourelves out.'

Men cannot deal with having it named. If you say "Men do this" or "the problem is men" they feel attacked and switch off. Was talking to someone (male) about precisely this yesterday. It is frustrating that protecting men's egos is more important than being able to recognise systematic issues of violence against females. It's a very good example of the patriarchy.

Men love themselves and each other more than they love any woman.

There are a few exceptions, Graham Lineham and Jonny Best are examples.

'child on child' sexual violence
I've seen it referred to as "peer on peer", too. I get the need to distinguish between boys attacking girls and grown men attacking girls, but language like this hides the reality of male violence.

It's a real issue. If it men's crimes were more accurately reported I don't think so many young women would buy the current gaslighting that is going on. I have only become radical (ised!!) quite recently despite being a mother for a few years and despite being a victim of several acts of male sexual violence half my life time ago. I know its stupid but I really didn't fully join the dots until recently.

Me too helped (although I hate how women yet again do the hard work I like that the male problem can now be referred to more easily).

All of society should care about male violence because it affects all of us. Its not about hating men to name it. I want to learn how to raise emotionally healthy male children for one thing. You cannot solve problems you are not allowed to name.

I have been thinking a similar thing.

I've also been interested to see that the focus of arguments/rage against the idea of female only spaces etc is against the women who speak out to protect them. It seems clear to me that the real issue, and the thing worth everyone, regardless of sex/gender etc getting upset about, is the fact that men commit sexual crimes against women and girls. If this were not the case, everywhere would be a safe space for women. Surely the answer is to do more to tackle male violence/sexual crimes. But no- silly me, it's the women who are at fault.

Yes, to so much of the above.

May I recommend Jackson Katz's Ted talk and his research? The section in the talk about language specifically addresses what happens with language to take men out of the equation.

If you scroll down to this section of the transcript and click - it will take you to the correct section of the video:

I want to share with you this exercise that illustrates on the sentence-structure level how the way that we think, literally the way that we use language, conspires to keep our attention off of men. This is about domestic violence in particular, but you can plug in other analogues. This comes from the work of the feminist linguist Julia Penelope.

03:07
It starts with a very basic English sentence: "John beat Mary." That's a good English sentence. John is the subject, beat is the verb, Mary is the object, good sentence. Now we're going to move to the second sentence, which says the same thing in the passive voice. "Mary was beaten by John." And now a whole lot has happened in one sentence. We've gone from "John beat Mary" to "Mary was beaten by John." We've shifted our focus in one sentence from John to Mary, and you can see John is very close to the end of the sentence, well, close to dropping off the map of our psychic plain. The third sentence, John is dropped, and we have, "Mary was beaten," and now it's all about Mary. We're not even thinking about John, it's totally focused on Mary. Over the past generation, the term we've used synonymous with "beaten" is "battered," so we have "Mary was battered." And the final sentence in this sequence, flowing from the others, is, "Mary is a battered woman." So now Mary's very identity Mary is a battered woman is what was done to her by John in the first instance. But we've demonstrated that John has long ago left the conversation.

www.ted.com/talks/jackson_katz_violence_against_women_it_s_a_men_s_issue/transcript?language=en

I'd like to think that it's because it's so obviously male violence that it goes without saying. But if that ever was the case it's been lost now.

Often when male violence is being talked about, the "not all men" and "women do it too" arguments are given that both derail the discussion and feed into the lie that it's a few men and a few women that are the problem.

The reputation of "men" is too important therefore the problem isn't being named.

This is where language is fascinating. We've been told so long that embedded 'They' is implicitly male and female.

Now, we're hearing this nonsense that because sex isn't specified people are professing to believe that the incidence of sexual violence from women and girls is comparable to that from men and boys.

Thank goodness we have statistics that demonstrate otherwise, What's that, Daphne? Not for much longer now statistics are being collated according to stated gender rather than sex? And, if statistics are retrospectively edited to fall in line with somebody's new birth certificate, then we may well discover that some of the most abhorrent and violent crimes were, in fact, despite our memories, carried out by women.

arranfan. It is interesting.

When reporting becomes all about the victim and not about the perpetrator, it's almost as if the crime just happened to the victim and no one was responsible.

Just wait - any moment now there will be a man, telling us namalt.
Every single thread on this gets derailed with it.

Male violence is the issue. And with a few honourable exceptions men cannot and will not accept it. They certainly don’t want to stop it.

Even good men benefit from it.

arranfan that is really interesting. This struck me about the reporting of sexual harassement of school girls. It was all about the girls and no mention that it is men harassing them.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/amp/uk-45777787

If the problem is not named then the situation cannot be improved.

Whenever people talk about this, I don't know why men don't want to address that they are the biggest threat to each other. Overwhelmingly, men assault and kill other men. Men and boys are responsible for the larger proportion of sexual assaults and rapes of men and boys.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-42906980

Men would benefit enormously from dealing with male violence.

Although it's #notallmen which is do doubt the excuse, it is perfectly possible and reasonable to talk about violence against women and girls, or 'mainly' and 'mostly' by men, male violence etc.

Marilyn French also wrote about this in The War On Women, published in the early 90’s. To take one example, a man beat a woman with a length of pipe, yet what he did ends up being described as ‘how can two people hurt each other in this awful way’.

A friend of mine filled in some survey for her local housing association years back, i.e. did she think there should be better lighting, etc? She wrote that the problem was men who attacked women, and if they would stop attacking women it wouldn’t matter how dark it got. She never heard back, of course.

If the problem is not named then the situation cannot be improved.

Yes! As PP say, if we don't have the language, we can't name the oppressor and transgressor.

Jean Hatchet on an exchange at Manchester Standing for Women in Manchester, 28 Sept.:

Woman last night : “really it’s a shame you all have to waste your time on the trans issue when there’s so much to do in feminism”

No. There isn’t. All the rest depends on this. If men can say they are women and women have to believe them - they killed feminism. It’s over.

When men take the word “woman” from women and use it for themselves it is the most aggressive collective act of male violence against women and girls you will see in your lifetime.

These men know .... oh yes they know... that if we can’t define “woman” ... we can’t name our oppressors “male”. We can’t fight them. We can’t overthrow them.

Let this pass and it’s over women. The whole game is up.

Fight now. For feminism and for your lives as women. (Do read the full thread and exchanges with commenters.)

twitter.com/JeanHatchet/status/1046022461945524225

That last line gives me the chills. Eve of battle chills.

Top of the pile is Stella Creasy talking about 'peer on peer' abuse to a mother who had just told her that an XY trans pupil was masturbating in the girls shower in front of her daughter at school.

'gender-based violence' is a bugbear of mine

Stella Creasy only has interest in Stella Creasy.

Stella Creasy is a danger to women.