“Violence Against Women – it’s a Men’s Issue”

Jackson Katz –  “Violence Against Women – it’s a Men’s Issue”

Jackson Katz begins his TED Talk by explaining the way that we as a society have begun taking men out of the conversation about sexual and domestic abuse. In turn, we focus on the victim, women, and what they are doing to be placed in scenarios where they are abused, instead of focusing on men and what we should be doing to stop the abuse altogether. Katz does an exercise where he rewrote the sentence “John beat Mary” until it eventually became “Mary is a battered woman” to showcase the way that we take the abuser, the man, out of even the way we talk about abuse. We pull the blame away from them as though the problem isn’t the way our culture brings up men to think that it’s okay. Katz believes that we have to not only bring the subject of men back into the conversation, but get them involved. He asks then men begin taking an active stance against the way that men overly sexualize and talk against women and each other. In order to create change, men need to use their natural pedestal in order to draw attention to these issues. Nothing is going to change until men are standing up to other men because the things that we’ve been allowing as a society like sexual and domestic abuse are not okay.

As a woman in today’s society, I don’t think I necessarily learned anything incredibly new during Katz’s lecture. These are all things that I’m aware of because I witness first hand the way a patriarchal society looks down on women who try to stand up for other women. Katz addresses the way that these women are called “man-haters” and “femi-nazis” when they try to speak out against men. This is why he wants men to start making a difference. It’s a shame that I’m almost afraid to define myself using the word feminist because I don’t want people to immediately think I hate all men because of it. We need to stop focusing on how sexual and domestic abuse is the victim’s problem instead of calling attention to the way we raise men to think that they can do those types of things. It’s 2020. The problem should never be that a girl’s skirt was too short or that she put herself in that situation by going to a party or a frat house or by drinking. Everything still could have been avoided if we taught men that it’s not okay to use and abuse women. Every woman is someone’s daughter or sister or friend. I don’t understand how we’re still able to make excuses for this.