“EXPLAINING MALE VIOLENCE”

Lynne Segal (1990)

                Somewhat less controversially, historical studies of Western societies also suggest wide variation in the incidence of rape.  Roy Porter has carefully sifted historical data on British society.  The writings of women in diaries and elsewhere provide no evidence of female fears of the menace of rape in pre-industrial England – despite the expression of a multitude of other fears.  Early feminists – from Mary Astell to Mary Wollstonecraft – decried the wrongs of women, yet did not mention rape.  Those nineteenth-century feminists who wrote and campaigned against sexual abuse ( child prostitution and the forcible medical examination of prostitutes) likewise fail to mention anxiety about rape.  Porter concludes that rape, and women’s fears of it, probably did not loom so large then as they do today.  Contrary to Brownmiller’s history of rape, it does not seem that rape was the principal agent to subordinate women in this period.  The historical reality of men’s oppression and exploitation of women in British society is not in doubt.  But what Porter suggests is that men had little need to imply the threat of rape to maintain their dominance: ‘Men no more cherished the threat of the rapist in the wings to maintain their authority over women than property owners encouraged thieves to justify the apparatus of law and order.’

                A study of eighteenth-century Massachusetts by Barbara Lindemann comes to similar conclusions.  Only one rape per decade reached the high court before 1729, and the recorded rape level remained consistently low throughout the century, averaging one every two years.  Neither wars, the presence of high concentrations of bored and lonely American and British troops, nor economic crises and rootless destitution affected recorded rape levels.  Lindemann considers, more fully than Porter, the possibilities of unreported rape and, more significantly still, the narrow definition of rape – defined by law and custom to refer exclusively to a woman who resisted a man who had no rights of sexual access to her.  One reason so few rape cases occurred, she suggests, was because sexual assaults committed by upper- and middle-class men on servants would not be perceived as rapes, even by the women victims.  They were a form of men’s sexual assertion of authority for which neither wives nor servants would have legal redress.  Notwithstanding these factors, however, Lindemann nevertheless argues that ‘The conclusion is inescapable that the number of rape prosecutions was so much smaller in eighteenth-century Massachusetts than it is today because many fewer rapes were committed in proportion to the population.  She attributes this to the cultural condemnation and frequent punishment of extra-marital activity by men and women alike, and to the belief that women were as interested in sex as men: ‘The rape prototype of female enticement, coy female resistance, and ultimate male conquest was not built into the pattern of normal sexual relations.’  This was a culture which, while securely patriarchal, discouraged rape, and a community which offered fewer opportunities for its perpetration.

                Other studies highlight historical contrasts in men’s expression of sexual violence.  Writing of the high incidence of husband-wife violence in working-class lives in London between 1870 and 1914, when many wives ‘did not hesitate to beat up their husbands’ (though it was the former who would more likely be injured in violent rows), Ellen Ross links such violence to the upheavals of domestic life and men’s power in the home caused, in particular, by male unemployment and chronic family poverty.  This overt physical antagonism between men and women was usually over money; men’s failure or inability to provide for wife and children inducing women to challenge their domestic authority.  And yet despite this violence, and despite men’s belief in the ‘right’ of husbands to beat up wives, Ross suggests that London’s pub culture in the generations before the First World War was ‘less poisonously misogynous’ than it would later become: ‘Sexuality was not yet the domestic and social battleground it had become by the mid-twentieth century or the locus of the belligerent assertion of male power.’

                […] [F]eminists are right to proclaim that the cause of violent crimes against women cannot be located simply in pathological individuals, brutal families, or the stresses and humiliations of poverty and racism (alongside the violent sub-cultures) of many rapists, batterers and murderers.  But, contrary to many feminist claims currently being made, these factors are also crucial in understanding which men are most likely to resort to sexual violence or violence against women and children, what type of violence they are most likely to display, and which women are most likely to be its targets.  The wider causes of men’s violence must be located in societies which construct ‘masculinity’ in terms of the assertion of heterosexual power (in its polarized difference from ‘femininity’), and which continue to see sex as sinful, while locating the object of sexuality in women, and the subject of sexual desire in men.  But this does not mean that any man could be Peter Sutcliffe, even when, like his younger peers on the Leeds football grounds, they may delight in taunting police with chants of ‘You’ll never catch the Ripper’ and ‘11-0’ (referring to what was then the number of Sutcliffe’s victims).

                Peter Sutcliffe was nicknamed ‘the Yorkshire Ripper’.  In her analysis of a hundred years of ‘Ripper’ stories and iconography since the original Jack the Ripper murdered and mutilated five prostitute women in London in 1888, Judith Walkowitz points to the crucial role of the popular press in establishing the Ripper as a media hero, and amplifying the threat of male violence to women.  The message of the Ripper mythology, as Walkowitz sees it, was to establish the cities as a dangerous place for women, and to sanction the covert expression of male antagonism toward women, as well as to buttress male authority over them.  But feminists, Walkowitz argues, need to probe behind Ripper mythology to uncover the complex reality it masks:

By flattening history into myth, the Ripper story has rendered all men suspect, vastly increasing female anxieties, and obscuring the distinct material conditions that generate sexual antagonism and male violence…In the ‘real’ world, neither male violence nor female victimization has single-root causes or effects.  Only our cultural nightmares and media fantasies construct life this way.

Women are right to see our society as riddled with the cultural expression contempt for them as the subordinate sex – a contempt by no means confined to pornography.  The continuum of men’s violence is real in the very particular sense that it is experienced by women as such, in a world where we are threatened by petty acts of violence or at least of sexual intrusiveness.  Overall, women are less at risk from men’s violence in public than are other men.  But women feel more vulnerable.  They feel more vulnerable because, as Elizabeth Stanko illustrates from her research, and women know from everyday experience, if we include all the forms of intimidation women suffer at men’s hands – the smacking of lips, muttering of obscenities, kerb crawling, grabbing of breasts and so on – women are subject to a kind of constant intimidation.  When a flasher jumps out at a woman, or  a voyeur lurks at our window, he is usually not a rapist or a killer.  But he just might be.  His actions certainly serve to make the world feel unsafe for women, particularly when we are likely to have read fairly recently of some serious sex attack – always given greater media prominence than men’s attacks on men.

                There is a continuum of men’s violence in so far as the effects of the variety of men’s intrusive acts all contribute to women’s experience of lack of safety.  What is not convincing, however, is some feminists’ insistence that all men really are similar in terms of the individual threat they pose for women.  We need to get to grips with the paradox that while women are mainly afraid of men whom they do not know, those women who are physically attacked are generally assaulted by men they do know.

                As feminists, however, we can agree that a society which equates masculinity with assertiveness, sexual and otherwise, is one which encourages and condones men’s violence against women.  People with power have usually been allowed to express anger at, and often use force against, the less powerful with relative impunity.  It is surely true that a central aspect of men’s use of violence against women lies in social assumptions of men’s right to dominate women and expect servicing from them.  This has allowed men to use anger and use physical force to get what they want, and get away with it – at least in the domestic sphere.

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IS VIOLENCE MASCULINE?

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That women, like men, are affected by the general levels of violence in their immediate social world is illustrated by the dramatic increase in young women’s involvement in crimes of violence over the last fifteen years – an increase which, comparatively, exceeds that of men.  As Anne Campbell argues in criticism of much feminist rhetoric, virtually all our ideas of ‘femininity’ are derived from the middle-class ‘lady’: ‘To be pampered, egotistical, passive, nurturant, care-taking requires a certain level of economic security.’  Surveying a sample of 251 16-year-old schoolgirls from working-class areas of London, Liverpool and Oxford, Campbell found that 89 per cent of them had engaged in at least one physical fight.  These girls were mostly negative in their attitudes towards fighting, regarding it as a good way of releasing anger and perhaps settling disputes.  As with young male delinquents, most of them had been systematically encouraged to fight by their parents: ‘In the subcultures from which these girls come…interpersonal violence emerges as the vicious expression of hatred and resentment and is bound up more with establishing and maintaining a tough reputation than with settling disputes.’  Campbell is critical of a feminism which can see women only as the victim of men, rather than of a whole economic system: ‘Without more radical change in the status quo, we shall succeed only in liberating women into poverty, alienation., despair and crime – along with the men who are there already.’

                Somewhat analogously, in his study of soccer hooliganism David Robins asks, ‘What were the girls doing while the boys were putting the boot in on the terraces?’  many, he says, were up there with them.  There are more boys than girls, but the girls do join in the fighting and encourage the boys to fight.  Where girls’ gangs do exist, they not only emulate but may try to outdo the boys: ‘We go to fight,’ the ‘Leeds Angels’ told Robins.  ‘At Norwich and Ipswich, there’s sometimes more lasses than boys…When Man. United played Norwich…there were forty arrests and must have been thirty lasses got arrested.’  It is obvious that in our society physical violence and aggression are still predominantly seen as masculine, and acted out by men.  Working-class images of  masculinity in terms of physical hardness have been analyzed, by Tolson and others, as bound up with the requirements of manual labour and earning a wage.  This image persists.  But with nearly 50 per cent of young people in Britain leaving school for the dole, enjoying little hope and not much self-esteem, Robins argues, ‘working-class youth is being forced into a position of wildness and irresponsibility’.  And while they may lack the symbolic trappings of power which unite the boys in their sexist jibes, and rarely be afforded the same freedom of action and choice as men, young women, Robins believes, are learning that they can give as good as they can get.

                Nevertheless, even if aggressiveness is not exclusively masculine, there is no doubt that the media and the public at large display their greatest anxiety in connection with violence with men – mostly from young, working-class men in the form of vandalism, gang fighting and football hooliganism.  Football hooliganism is now a prominent cause of social concern, feeding the appeal of the law-and-order politics of the right.  Some researchers, like Peter Marsh, Elizabeth Rosser and Rom Harre, have stressed that the degree of serious violence, as distinct from ritual violence, on and around the football terraces is exaggerated by the media.  But the extent of young men’s violence is not merely a media creation; nor is its association with lower working-class men merely middle-class phobia.  Sociological studies of football hooliganism like that of Eric Dunning and his co-workers conclusively demonstrate men in football gangs are overwhelmingly from the lower levels of the working class.

                We need to ask why a type of working-class aggressive masculinity seems such a perennial feature of the social environment, a feature which feeds today’s feminist imagination in its equation of violence as male.  Dunning stresses the inevitable homogeneity, circumscribed horizons and narrow neighbourhood loyalty of men who, at best, will find work in low-paid, insecure and monotonous jobs at the bottom of all authority and status hierarchies.  Moreover, in jobs sex-typed as male, and with home which remain strongly male-dominated (the equivalent jobs for women of this class, if any, being even less well-paid, lower in status and more insecure) the lower working-class tends to produce sharper sex-role distinctions than other classes.  Just as there is a Black underclass, so too a white underclass exists, in which the men are the most likely of all men to adopt aggressive masculine styles and values whereby status is imparted to males who display loyalty and bravery in confrontation with ‘outsiders’:

Apart from the ‘street-smartness’ and the ability and willingness to fight of [these] adolescent and adult males, they have few power resources.  This combination of narrowness of experience and relative lack of power tends to lead them to experience unfamiliar territories and people as potentially threatening.  Usually it is only in the company of people with whom they are familiar and who are like themselves that it is possible for them to feel a relatively high degree of social assurance…Being part of a group augments their sense of power.  It also provides an opportunity to hit back at the established order and context in which they can ‘get their own back’ by taking the lid off…For a short illusory moment, the outsiders are the masters; the downtrodden come out on top.

The aggressive masculine style which lower working-class men are more likely to value and adopt is not exclusive to them, of course.  It is part of the fantasy life, if not the lived reality, of the majority of men enthralled by images of masculinity which equate it with power and violence (where would Clint Eastwood be without his gun?).  However, […] there is no simple, direct transmission from men’s shared collective fantasies to individual action.  Many social mediators – from school, jobs, friends, family, religion and politics – affect the way fantasies may, or may not, be channeled into any active expression, and determine what form, if any, they take.  It is the sharp and frustrating conflict between the lives of lower working-class men and the image of masculinity as power, which informs the adoption and, for some, the enactment, of a more aggressive masculinity.  There was a time, it seems to me, when feminists would not so readily have lost sight of the significance of class oppression for the sake of identifying a universal male beastliness.  But that was in the early 1970s, when they were more actively a part of left politics and culture which was itself more aware than it has since become of the alienation and exploitation of class relations.

                It is true that women can be, and some women are, as aggressive and violent in their behaviour as men.  It is equally true, however, that from an early age most women are made aware of obstacles to, and restrictions upon, the expression of their own desires – if only in terms of the expectations of those around them.  More importantly, they are sensitized to greater social condemnation of female aggressiveness – shouting, fighting, swearing, and so on.  Men, by contrast, in sport and elsewhere, are more likely to engage in at least the rituals of aggressive display, and to enjoy greater social tolerance for many forms of aggressiveness.  But I think we should be aware that women’s greater suppression of their own aggressiveness is not necessarily healthy.  Women’s attempts to disown and repress their feelings of frustration and aggression almost certainly result in them turning such aggressive feelings against themselves, or their children.  This would account for women’s greater vulnerablility to depression (twice as high as that for men), or expression of their own pain in emotional abuse of children.  It can also lead, as Janet Sayers, Jean Temperley and other clinicians have commented, to women projecting their aggressiveness and violence onto others, or onto the world in general, as in paranoia and agrophobia.  […] Jane Temperley suggests from her work with women patients that we need to consider whether women’s perception of, preoccupation with, and (as she sees it) attempts to provoke, men’s violence towards them may not be overlaid by women’s projection onto men of their own frustration and aggression; thereby permitting women to retain for themselves a monopoly of moral righteousness and virtue.

                Some feminists, as well as therapists like Temperley, have seen in women’s image of the all-pervasive, all-threatening nature of male sexuality a projection of women’s own aggression and frustrated power.  The political journalist and feminist Sarah Benton, for example, suggests that because it is less legitimate for women to be aggressive and powerful, and because women are so much less accustomed to taking responsibility for the state of the world, ‘We project all power, all aggression onto men.’  Moreover, she detects in this projection, women’s denial of sexuality itself.  It is a denial bound up with women’s difficulties, in sexist culture, in accepting and expressing their own sexuality; in particular, acknowledging that female sexuality can be violent, cruel and ‘perverse’, as well as masochistic, yielding and submissive.  ‘The barrier to that acceptance and expression,’ she concludes, ‘is more to do with our difficulty in getting, exercising and accepting power in the world at large than any specific sexual threat from men.’  The fact that women are the main readers of true-crime magazines, which provide salacious case histories of the most violent, often sexual, murders, and that it is women who appear in large numbers at the trials of sex-murderers, where they feel entitled to display extremes of punitive moral aggression, verbal and even physical violence, would seem to lend credence to such interpretations.

                However, the extent of some men’s violence (and many men’s viciousness) towards women, the tendency of those with power either to ignore, or to blame women for, its occurrence, and the general context of men’s greater power and control over women, all dictate that we must proceed very carefully – more carefully, at any rate, than Temperley and most psychoanalytic commentators have done – in assigning weight to arguments which suggest that men may have an investment in feeling victimized.  There is no doubt that many women’s entrapment in dependency and powerlessness makes it hard for them to envisage any positive alternative to suppressing their own anger and aggression, while suffering, however resentfully, aggression from men.  At the same time, it is equally necessary for us to be aware of the need to understand what happens to women’s aggression, and for us to abandon the dominant conservative and, more recently, popular feminist attachment to idealized views of women as inherently less aggressive than men (the former regarding the connection as biological, the latter, more often as cultural).

                Some of our perception of the social and cultural linkages between ‘masculinity’ and violence derives from the fact that most of the socially approved uses of force and violence are the jobs of men – the police, army, prison officers and other agencies of ‘defence’ or correction.  It is men, rarely women, who are officially trained to use violence in our society.  Yet, as David Morgan has suggested, it is possible in this context to reverse the assumed causal links between ‘masculinity’ and ‘violence’.  It could be that it is men’s socially determined systematic involvement in various forms of violence which constructs our notions of ‘masculinity’ as indissolubly linked with ‘violence’.  The idea that what is at stake here is state violence in the hands of men  (rather than, as many feminists believe, male violence in the hands of the state) is supported by reports of women’s use of force and violence when they are placed in jobs analogous to men’s.  For example, women prison officers were found in the late nineteenth-century to enforce especially severe physical and corporal punishments on their female charges for any infraction of rules, by comparison with those meted out to male prisoners and, to this day, female prisoners are more consistently punished and put on report by their female warders than are men.  Similar tales of women’s zealous use of force, including conventionally defined acts of violence, appear in many accounts of women’s behaviour when in positions of power.  I have written elsewhere of the importance, often repressed or denied, of women’s relationship to war and military enterprises – both as passionate supporters of war or in active military engagement themselves.  Nevertheless, it is apparent that some men’s far more formal training in the use of violence is something which can, and from the evidence of women who are battered, frequently does, spill over into these men’s greater resort to violence in their personal relations with women.  It also provides opportunities for men to be particularly vicious to women (and men) in the performance of their ‘public’ duties.

                […] ‘Violence’, it seems clear, cannot simply be acquainted with ‘masculinity’.  Neither are unitary phenomena.  There are many different types of violence, some legitimated (from sport and beating children to policing and warfare), and some not (from corporal punishment in state schools to rape and murder).  It is easier to understand and attempt to change men’s engagement in these practices if we see them as operating relatively autonomously from each other.  Fear of violent attack from men is the number one fear of women in both the United States and Britain today.  But if we want to get to the heart of this fear, and the escalating rates of violence in modern society, we shall have to include, but also progress beyond, an analysis simply in terms of gender.

                There are links between the prevalence of violence in our society and men’s endeavours to affirm ‘masculinity’.  And these links may even be reinforced, as the assumption of men’s dominance over women – part of the traditional definition of ‘masculinity’ – continues to crumble.  Some men, increasingly less sure of such dominance, may resort more to violence in their attempt to shore up a sense of masculine identity.  Others, however, may not.  Some, indeed, may turn towards new ways of being men, even to support for the struggle to put an end to men’s use of violence against women.  For it should be remembered that some men have always worked in organizations committed to non-violence – even when this has provoked the harshest ridicule and punishment, including loss of life.  At the same time, there are links between the prevalence of violence in our society and forces which are not those of gender: forces, indeed, which have impacted as strongly on certain groups of men as on certain groups of women.  There are close and frightening links between sexual assaults on women, and the steep rise in crimes of violence generally – the primary targets of which remain other men.

                These links derive from the creation of a permanent underclass in many Western societies – an underclass built around dependency, self-destruction, crimes against property and crimes against people.

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