Editor’s note: This commentary is by Stephen McArthur, of Montpelier, publisher for Rootstock Publishing. He was a staff advocate for Circle Inc., which serves victims and survivors of domestic violence in Washington County, for 10 years and a longtime volunteer for its predecessor Battered Women’s Services.
[T]his is about me (but not #metoo).
#MeToo is about men’s beliefs, attitudes and behaviors toward women and girls. It is about our privilege, our entitlements, about what we learn from sexual stereotyping and objectification. It’s about the examples of sexual behaviors by men that inundate and overwhelm our world in the form of power and control, dominance, blame, intimidation, emotional and psychological abuses, and physical coercion and violence. It is about the individual rapes, and the mass rapes, and about the men who beat and terrorize their partners. It is about our proclivity toward war, toward the use of guns, toward solving problems with the time-honored men’s machismo and masculine traditions of being on top, of mounting everyone in sight, of winning, of never being wrong, of never backing down.
Years ago, when I was first a volunteer advocate (later a staff advocate) for survivors of domestic violence, I had an experience that was stunningly revealing to me early on in my learning about the lives women are forced to live. I was the only man at a domestic and sexual violence conference of 50 or 60 women. At a break, the facilitator took me aside and asked that I not come back into the conference at the end of the break because she was going to poll the group of women about a question she was planning to ask the entire group. She wanted to make sure that all the women would be comfortable with my presence given that the question raised an implied level of confidentiality. So I waited outside the conference room and then she came out and asked me to come back. She then asked the attendees to stand if they had ever been sexually harassed, abused or assaulted. Every woman in the room stood up. Every one. I learned later that the women attendees had unanimously agreed that I should be present when the question was asked, and they unanimously agreed to honestly answer the question in public.
“Confronting” ourselves personally as men is a part of our “confronting” other men. Holding ourselves accountable is part of the process of holding other men accountable. Recognizing, understanding and uprooting male privilege, white privilege, straight privilege — all are challenges for each man, and once we start the process, it does not end. It’s not like we are “cured.” We certainly can change, we certainly can be vocal, we definitely can be allies, but the roots of our centuries-deep male beliefs, behaviors and attitudes toward women and girls run very deep and we need to remain aware of that depth even if we are “allies,” “good men,” “healthy fathers,” or even a part of movements started by women, like the domestic and sexual violence movement I have been privileged to be a part of since the mid-1980s. In these past 30-plus years, I have been faithfully and gently (in most cases) reminded by women mentors, called out for words or phrases, questioned about something I did or said. And rightly so. I am still learning.
Finally, however, what men must understand is that #MeToo is about the courage of tens of millions of women who have been abused, assaulted and harassed, and who have stood up and said so. It is also about the women and girls who have survived in silence. It is about the women who report being raped and about the women who have chosen not to report being raped. It is about the women and girls who have been abused by their boyfriends and by their husbands. It is about the women who are dead because they left their abuser, or were planning or thinking about leaving him. It is about the women and girls being assaulted, coerced and harassed right now we don’t know about.
In the end, men need to acknowledge that #MeToo would not exist, would not be necessary, would not be so deeply painful, traumatic and deadly if it were not for the culture of male violence that underlies it all.
