#NotAllMen Is More Than Just Needless Defensiveness

It’s actually misogyny and/or a head-in-the-sand protective strategy

When Nicole Bedera, a doctoral candidate in sociology at the University of Michigan, interviewed male college students in 2015, each could articulate at least a rudimentary definition of the concept (of consent): the idea that both parties wanted to be doing what they were doing. Most also endorsed the current “yes means yes” standard, which requires active, conscious, continuous and freely given agreement by all parties engaging in sexual activity. Yet when asked to describe their own most recent encounters in both a hookup and in a relationship, even men who claimed to practice affirmative consent often had not.

These young men weren’t monsters; they weren’t bad guys and certainly didn’t think of themselves as bad guys — and yet, they were self-reporting that they were sometimes engaged in behaviors that might well come under legal definitions of sexual assault. These guys who said they valued affirmative consent but didn’t always practice it most likely didn’t have intentions to be harmful or abusive. They probably weren’t consciously thinking, “This girl owes me something so I’m just going to take it.” None-the-less, their social programming around entitlement to female bodies contributed to them disregarding their own conscious beliefs about a woman’s full participation in deciding what kind of sexual experience they were going to have together.

On top of this, approximately 25% of male college students report engaging in some form of sexual coercion by the end of their fourth year of college. A lot of them do know and are conscious of exactly what they are doing, and they do it anyway. In other words, although most men aren’t rapists, and most men don’t intentionally abuse women, it’s also not just a few “bad apples” either. We have a culture that teaches young men to be aggressive and that women are on earth for their pleasure and enjoyment. The guys who are doing this are right in line with what it means to be a man by patriarchal standards.

Paul Kivel conceptualized the “Act Like a Man Box” in the early 1980’s, by asking high school boys what the rules were for being a man. It turned out the rules were pretty straightforward. They included. • Hide all emotions • Treat women as less, have control over women • Be tough, never admit self doubt, fear • Police and bully other boys who don’t conform.

In this gender binary, women are also seen as “human givers” even more than human beings. They are supposed to take care of men (and children), prioritizing their own needs last in order to ensure that the men in their sphere are comfortable and happy. In Kate Mann’s 2018 book, Down Girl, misogyny is explained not as a hatred of women outright, but as the policing arm of patriarchy.

“It (the book) argues that misogyny should not be understood primarily in terms of the hatred or hostility some men feel toward all or most women. Rather, it’s primarily about controlling, policing, punishing, and exiling the “bad” women who challenge male dominance. And it’s compatible with rewarding “the good ones,” and singling out other women to serve as warnings to those who are out of order. It’s also common for women to serve as scapegoats, be burned as witches, and treated as pariahs.”

So, in light of an androcentric culture that teaches boys that they are the top of the dominance hierarchy, or at least higher up than girls, and that also teaches them that girls and women exist to please and care for them, when a woman or women try to turn attention to their own needs and priorities, it feels like something isn’t quite right. Of course, all of this is happening on a subconscious level (where 98% of our thought takes place) and not every single man has embraced this programming in the same way. In fact, many have rejected it entirely, but ask any woman who has been taken to task by a man for being too openly outspoken about things that harm women, and she’ll tell you that this is exactly what is taking place.

He doesn’t like what she’s saying, because it’s not focused on his needs, where her attention “belongs” and more than that, he’s just doing what his societal programming has taught him is correct, and she’s complaining that she doesn’t like it because it’s hurt her. To the kind of man who feels the need to say #NotAllMen when a woman talks about the high rate of sexual violence against women, it’s pretty likely that unconscious misogyny is in play.

Every single woman I know who writes about this kind of thing has had multiple experiences with a man or men trying to hijack their story with one of their own. Meanwhile, no reasonable person is saying that all men perpetrate these harms against women, and no reasonable person is saying that they don’t care about the bad things that happen to men. They just want their own concerns, and those of their sisters to be heard and taken seriously, and for that to be the focus of that particular conversation. But to some guys, that just feels all wrong, even if they can’t truly articulate why.

To its agents, misogyny need not have any distinctive “feel” or phenomenology from the inside. If it feels like anything at all, it will tend to be righteous: like standing up for oneself or for morality, or — often combining the two — for the “little guy.” It often feels to those in its grip like a moral crusade, not a witch hunt. And it may pursue its its targets not in the spirit of hating women but, rather, of loving justice. It can also be a purely structural phenomenon, instantiated via norms, practices, institutions, and other social structures.

Her humanity may hence be held to be owed to other human beings, and her value contingent on her giving moral goods to them: life, love, pleasure, nurture, sustenance, and comfort, being some such. This helps to explain why she is often understood perfectly well to have a mind of her own, yet punished in brutal and inhumane ways when that mind appears to be oriented to the wrong things, in the wrong ways, to the wrong people — including herself and other women.

Manne, Kate. Down Girl (pp. 22–23). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.

This is exactly how these guys come across — as if they were only pursuing what is right and moral — and how dare some woman complain about the society that he has bought into and upholds because that’s not what she’s supposed to be thinking about. The overwhelming sense I get from men like these is that they are seeking to rein me in and put me back in my place, as if their policing efforts are needed to put the world back into the order that subconsciously makes sense to them.

Misogynists may not expect women to be overtly submissive, but it is anticipated that they will be “cool” girlfriends, loving wives, devoted moms, loyal secretaries, and good waitresses, etc. The emotional labor and care-giving that are a part of so many women’s daily experiences, both in the family and in the larger community, is unremarked upon unless a woman is notably resisting these functions. Speaking up about the things that women face at the hands of men is seen as just such a resistance. Misogyny is the hostilities that arise in the face of that resistance, which may be intended to punish, dominate, or condemn the women who are perceived as a threat to the status quo. They’re rocking the dominance hierarchy boat.

Even though I’ve experienced this first hand more times than I can name, it’s taken me a long time to really understand this dynamic for what it is. What looks like fragility is actually misogyny. Hey, you aren’t playing by the rules. Get back in line! Misogynists don’t hate women in a broad sense. In fact, they may truly love their mothers, wives, girlfriends, sisters, and female friends as long as they maintain their perceived place in the social structure. Being too outspoken or too independent is one of the violations of this tacit social contract. And for this, one woman may be made to pay for the sins of others who are similar.

Anything that distracts from the male-centered culture is seen as aberrant and in need of correction. Sociologist, Allan G. Johnson says, “People often confuse men as individuals with men as a dominant and privileged category of people and that [given the] reality of women’s oppression, male privilege, and men’s enforcement of both, it’s hardly surprising that every woman should have moments where she resents or even hates men.”

But even when women aren’t expressing resentment or disgust with men as a category, and are just trying to draw attention to the extremely high numbers of women who have experienced things like sexual violence, the men who do perpetrate it, and the society that often turns a blind eye to it, some guys just have to say #NotAllMen. Because that’s where they think we all should be focused — on the society that is built around men and their needs. But maybe they’re just being defensive, you might say. About what? If no-one is alleging all men, then why do they need to keep redirecting the focus away from the victims in order to make clear that most men are not doing this kind of stuff, even though most women have experienced it? We all already know that.

Because patriarchal dominance hierarchy, that’s why! It’s the same reason that some white people get so upset with blacks talking about racism. The top of the dominance hierarchy is white and male, and everyone else should be serving and taking care of them. This is why a black woman who is upset is seen as being particularly out of line. She’s not acting as she should on two counts. Until 50 years ago, this was overwhelmingly how our society was structured, so it’s really not all that surprising that it feels wrong, and like an actual loss of rights, to some people.

The other #NotAllMen types are the ones who don’t want to acknowledge what a dangerous world it is for women because they don’t want to have to grapple with just how uncomfortable it makes them feel that they can’t keep the women they care about safe. Saying, “I don’t do that and no-one I know does that” is a way to innoculate against the reality that millions of men do, in fact, sexually harass women, follow them on street, grope them, sexually assault and rape them.

One guy, a policeman who teaches self-defense to women, including his own daughter, clearly fell into this category. He seemed to be of the belief that if women could just learn how to defend themselves, they’d be fine, and besides, #NotAllMen… I pointed out to him that although it’s great to have self-defense skills, that’s no guarantee of safety, particularly from things like harassment, which may happen in subtler ways, and in places, like the office, where kicking the guy in the crotch could get you in a lot of trouble. And if you’ve made your daughter believe that it will be her fault if something does happen to her, that’s it’s own kind of harm.

Sexual violence doesn’t only take place on the street. 85% of rapes are committed by someone the woman knows and often has some kind of relationship with. Date rape is one of the most common kinds, and although a weapon or some sort of physical force may be used, coercion or simply not taking “no” for an answer is more common and also constitutes sexual violence.

I’ve never met a woman of any age, race, political affiliation, or part of the country who hasn’t been sexually harassed or made to feel unsafe by a man — usually more times than they can keep track of. A huge percentage of women have been groped or otherwise inappropriately touched by a man against their will. I can remember when I used to commute riding the subway and some guys would lean into my breasts as if they couldn’t quite help it because of the packed train. This is such a huge problem worldwide that Mexico and Japan offer “women only” subway cars.

The World Health Organization and the United Nations, as well as the US Center for Disease Control have all identified sexual violence against women as epidemic and something that negatively impacts women’s lives and health. Pretending that isn’t the case by saying that not all men behave in this way will not save the women you love from it, because it’s something they’ve been dealing with since they were probably about 10 or 11 years old.

One former friend of mine was insistent that #MeToo was completely overblown and almost entirely political because to accept that this is the world that the women he cares about have been living in all along was more than he could bear. Our friendship came to an end after I recounted to him some of the stories that my mom had told me about her own experiences with sexual violence and I shared with him some of my own. I encouraged him to ask his wife about the things that she had undoubtedly been subjected to and he verbally attacked me so savagely that I had to block him.

This too is taking the victimization of women and making it about yourself. You can’t handle that you can’t save them, but instead of doing what you can to assist in changing our society in response, some guys just retreat into a world where this isn’t about me, so I shouldn’t have to hear about it or face it. As Mark Greene so eloquently put it, if a woman’s house was on fire, you wouldn’t say, “I didn’t start it.” No, you’d grab a hose or a bucket and try to help put it out.

Millions of men are already doing this, but we need those who reflexively retreat into #NotAllMen to stop putting their ostrich heads in the sand or otherwise turning the conversation back to themselves as the right and proper place for our society to be focused. Yes, of course, we also need to talk about how society harms men (the Act Like A Man box is a part of that societal system of harm), but it doesn’t always need to take place in the same conversations as the ones about the societal dynamics that lead to the victimization of women.

And if that makes you uncomfortable for some reason, perhaps you need to ask yourself why. Are you trying to put women back into their social role as caretakers and nurturers of people like you, or are you trying to distance yourself from a problem that you don’t know how to fix, or both? Because continuing to say #NotAllMen when that isn’t what is being asserted is clearly about something other than just feeling a bit defensive.