Jackson Katz > Quotes

“I draw a line down the middle of a chalkboard, sketching a male symbol on one side and a female symbol on the other. Then I ask just the men: What steps do you guys take, on a daily basis, to prevent yourselves from being sexually assaulted? At first there is a kind of awkward silence as the men try to figure out if they've been asked a trick question. The silence gives way to a smattering of nervous laughter. Occasionally, a young a guy will raise his hand and say, 'I stay out of prison.' This is typically followed by another moment of laughter, before someone finally raises his hand and soberly states, 'Nothing. I don't think about it.' Then I ask women the same question. What steps do you take on a daily basis to prevent yourselves from being sexually assaulted? Women throughout the audience immediately start raising their hands. As the men sit in stunned silence, the women recount safety precautions they take as part of their daily routine. Here are some of their answers: Hold my keys as a potential weapon. Look in the back seat of the car before getting in. Carry a cell phone. Don't go jogging at night. Lock all the windows when I sleep, even on hot summer nights. Be careful not to drink too much. Don't put my drink down and come back to it; make sure I see it being poured. Own a big dog. Carry Mace or pepper spray. Have an unlisted phone number. Have a man's voice on my answering machine. Park in well-lit areas. Don't use parking garages. Don't get on elevators with only one man, or with a group of men. Vary my route home from work. Watch what I wear. Don't use highway rest areas. Use a home alarm system. Don't wear headphones when jogging. Avoid forests or wooded areas, even in the daytime. Don't take a first-floor apartment. Go out in groups. Own a firearm. Meet men on first dates in public places. Make sure to have a car or cab fare. Don't make eye contact with men on the street. Make assertive eye contact with men on the street.”
― Jackson Katz, The Macho Paradox: Why Some Men Hurt Women and How All Men Can Help

“The first school shooting that attracted the attention of a horrified nation occurred on March 24, 1998, in Jonesboro, Arkansas. Two boys opened fire on a schoolyard full of girls, killing four and one female teacher. In the wake of what came to be called the Jonesboro massacre, violence experts in media and academia sought to explain what others called “inexplicable.” For example, in a front-page Boston Globe story three days after the tragedy, David Kennedy from Harvard University was quoted as saying that these were “peculiar, horrible acts that can’t easily be explained.” Perhaps not. But there is a framework of explanation that goes much further than most of those routinely offered. It does not involve some incomprehensible, mysterious force. It is so straightforward that some might (incorrectly) dismiss it as unworthy of mention. Even after a string of school shootings by (mostly white) boys over the past decade, few Americans seem willing to face the fact that interpersonal violence—whether the victims are female or male—is a deeply gendered phenomenon. Obviously both sexes are victimized. But one sex is the perpetrator in the overwhelming majority of cases. So while the mainstream media provided us with tortured explanations for the Jonesboro tragedy that ranged from supernatural “evil” to the presence of guns in the southern tradition, arguably the most important story was overlooked. The Jonesboro massacre was in fact a gender crime. The shooters were boys, the victims girls. With the exception of a handful of op-ed pieces and a smattering of quotes from feminist academics in mainstream publications, most of the coverage of Jonesboro omitted in-depth discussion of one of the crucial facts of the tragedy. The older of the two boys reportedly acknowledged that the killings were an act of revenge he had dreamed up after having been rejected by a girl. This is the prototypical reason why adult men murder their wives. If a woman is going to be murdered by her male partner, the time she is most vulnerable is after she leaves him. Why wasn’t all of this widely discussed on television and in print in the days and weeks after the horrific shooting? The gender crime aspect of the Jonesboro tragedy was discussed in feminist publications and on the Internet, but was largely absent from mainstream media conversation. If it had been part of the discussion, average Americans might have been forced to acknowledge what people in the battered women’s movement have known for years—that our high rates of domestic and sexual violence are caused not by something in the water (or the gene pool), but by some of the contradictory and dysfunctional ways our culture defines “manhood.” For decades, battered women’s advocates and people who work with men who batter have warned us about the alarming number of boys who continue to use controlling and abusive behaviors in their relations with girls and women. Jonesboro was not so much a radical deviation from the norm—although the shooters were very young—as it was melodramatic evidence of the depth of the problem. It was not something about being kids in today’s society that caused a couple of young teenagers to put on camouflage outfits, go into the woods with loaded .22 rifles, pull a fire alarm, and then open fire on a crowd of helpless girls (and a few boys) who came running out into the playground. This was an act of premeditated mass murder. Kids didn’t do it. Boys did.”
― Jackson Katz, The Macho Paradox: Why Some Men Hurt Women and How All Men Can Help

“Some of the proudest moments in the history of this country are grounded in the principle that members of dominant groups have a critical role to play in the struggle for equality.”
― Jackson Katz, The Macho Paradox: Why Some Men Hurt Women and How All Men Can Help

“We talk about how many women were raped last year, not about how many men raped women. We talk about how many girls in a school district were harassed last year, not about how many boys harassed girls. We talk about how many teenaged girls got pregnant in the state of Vermont last year, rather than how many men and teenaged boys got girls pregnant. So you can see how the use of this passive voice has a political effect. It shifts the focus off men and boys and onto girls and women. Even the term violence against women is problematic. It's a passive construction. There's no active agent in the sentence. It's a bad thing that happens to women. It's a bad thing that happens to women, but when you look at that term violence against women, nobody is doing it to them. It just happens. Men aren't even a part of it! Jackson Katz, Ph.D., from his Ted talk "violence against women: it's a men's issue”
― Jackson Katz, Ph. D.

“As long as the spotlight remains fixed on the victims, light can’t shine on those who are actually responsible for the problem.”
― Jackson Katz, Every Man: Why Violence Against Women is a Men’s Issue, and How You Can Make a Difference

“we have to challenge old and stale habits of thought that have long held us back. One of the biggest is the misguided notion that because only some men commit overt acts of violence against women, it’s not really something all men need to think about. Isn’t that why it’s called a women’s issue?”
― Jackson Katz, Every Man: Why Violence Against Women is a Men’s Issue, and How You Can Make a Difference

“How are we supposed to solve this enormous and vexing problem if we’re not even willing to say out loud who’s responsible for it?”
― Jackson Katz, Every Man: Why Violence Against Women is a Men’s Issue, and How You Can Make a Difference

“But what about him? His responsibility remains hidden in the very language we use to talk about this.”
― Jackson Katz, Every Man: Why Violence Against Women is a Men’s Issue, and How You Can Make a Difference

“But shifting popular consciousness is no easy task – especially because victim-blaming is embedded in normative language. In discussions about gender violence, the focus often defaults to what the woman did or didn’t do – as if the man is not an active participant in the events described – or even present!”
― Jackson Katz, Every Man: Why Violence Against Women is a Men’s Issue, and How You Can Make a Difference

“In the starkest of terms, too many people tend to regard gender-based violence as something unfortunate that happens to women, rather than something men do to them.”
― Jackson Katz, Every Man: Why Violence Against Women is a Men’s Issue, and How You Can Make a Difference

“They spent their youths daydreaming about being Jedi Masters, and they haven’t yet realized that they’ve grown up to be Stormtroopers, mindlessly doing the bidding of whichever evil leader they’re acting in service to.”
― Jackson Katz, Every Man: Why Violence Against Women is a Men’s Issue, and How You Can Make a Difference

“The goal now needs to be much more ambitious. It needs to focus on action – personal, institutional and political – to change the social norms that underlie misogynous abuse. One of the biggest stumbling blocks to that over the last few decades has been the reticence of ‘good guys’ to embrace this issue as theirs to solve.”
― Jackson Katz, Every Man: Why Violence Against Women is a Men’s Issue, and How You Can Make a Difference

“my or my colleagues’ work has been undermined or blocked by people who think efforts to engage men and boys in the struggle to address men’s violence against women is somehow unfair – to men and boys.”
― Jackson Katz, Every Man: Why Violence Against Women is a Men’s Issue, and How You Can Make a Difference

“the main point of the exercise was to show men, straight from the mouths of the women seated next to them, how unfair and unjust it was that women had to order their daily lives and schedules around the realistic fear of men’s violence.”
― Jackson Katz, Every Man: Why Violence Against Women is a Men’s Issue, and How You Can Make a Difference

“In an era of ubiquitous porn that has grown ever more misogynous and degrading over the past few decades, heterosexual men increasingly have been conditioned to identify the enactment of masculinity with sexualized dominance and control over women’s bodies.”
― Jackson Katz, Every Man: Why Violence Against Women is a Men’s Issue, and How You Can Make a Difference

“One key obstacle to change is the resistance women face when they try to hold men and male-dominated institutions accountable for abuse. They’re often told what they need to do differently.”
― Jackson Katz, Every Man: Why Violence Against Women is a Men’s Issue, and How You Can Make a Difference

“After noting that, on average, women go back to their abuser seven times before they finally leave, she said to them, ‘You must get so frustrated when you think a woman is ready to leave and then she decides to go back.’ ‘No,’ one phone counsellor pointedly replied. ‘I’m frustrated that even though he promised to stop, he chose to abuse her again.”
― Jackson Katz, Every Man: Why Violence Against Women is a Men’s Issue, and How You Can Make a Difference

“It says that women, girls, and gender non-conforming individuals face a disproportionate risk of gender-based violence, but it doesn’t say that men, young men, and boys face a disproportionate risk of committing it. This crucial point is frequently glossed over when people use the passive phrase ‘violence against women’, as if it’s a bad thing that simply happens to women.”
― Jackson Katz, Every Man: Why Violence Against Women is a Men’s Issue, and How You Can Make a Difference