One man in five dies before the age of 65.
TOGETHER we can change that.

Men! What can you do about misogyny?

24/03/21 . Blog

'Men! What can you do about misogyny?' is the title of a new Guardian podcast.

If you care about violence against women it’s worth listening to. If you do, you’ll understand how even that last sentence is unhelpful.

The podcast features Jackson Katz, a man with a long track-record campaigning in this field. He points out that when we talk about violence against women, it’s very passive. It makes it sound almost inevitable. The point is who is carrying out this violence? It’s mostly men. So let’s talk about violence by men or male violence. Let’s not just collect data on the number of women who have been attacked/assaulted/raped but on the number of attacks/assaults/rapes by men.

Male violence is not inevitable

Katz points out that there’s nothing inevitable about male violence aganist women. It’s not purely biological or genetic for men to be misogynistic. The evidence for this is that the levels of violence by men against women vary enormously across societies. If the behaviour was purely biological, this would not be the case. The variable is masculinity. The more ‘macho’, for want of a better word, the view of masculinity, the higher the sexual violence.

Katz argues that we need to reframe masculinity in a non-misogynistic way. We need to define strength not as something physical that involves power and domination over others including women but, for example, as standing up against injustice rather than being a bystander. It is a redefining of what it is to be a man that is politically as well as socially challenging for some men, especially those whose power rests on exploiting male privilege but it’s surely the way to go.

We've added a 'male violence' tag to our website content and added the hashtag #endmaleviolence to hashtag we've used until now: #endviolencegainstwomen. Small steps but a start. What else should the Men's Health Forum do? What can you do about misogyny?

Jim Pollard,
Editor

The Men’s Health Forum need your support

It’s tough for men to ask for help but if you don’t ask when you need it, things generally only get worse. So we’re asking.

In the UK, one man in five dies before the age of 65. If we had health policies and services that better reflected the needs of the whole population, it might not be like that. But it is. Policies and services and indeed men have been like this for a long time and they don’t change overnight just because we want them to.

It’s true that the UK’s men don’t have it bad compared to some other groups. We’re not asking you to ‘feel sorry’ for men or put them first. We’re talking here about something more complicated, something that falls outside the traditional charity fund-raising model of ‘doing something for those less fortunate than ourselves’. That model raises money but it seldom changes much. We’re talking about changing the way we look at the world. There is nothing inevitable about premature male death. Services accessible to all, a population better informed. These would benefit everyone - rich and poor, young and old, male and female - and that’s what we’re campaigning for.

We’re not asking you to look at images of pity, we’re just asking you to look around at the society you live in, at the men you know and at the families with sons, fathers and grandads missing.

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