03/01/2020
: The greatest human rights violation on the planet is the harm men do to women
“on the depressing list of hatreds that human beings feel for each other, none other than misogyny involves the profound need and desire that most men have for women".
“Hatred co-exists with desire in a peculiar way,” he wrote. “This is what makes misogyny so complex [because] it involves a man’s conflict with himself."
This is the greatest human rights violation on the planet, with the World Health Organisation reporting that a billion women will be r***d or beaten in their lifetime.
Add to this the hundreds of thousands of women requiring medical attention or hospitalisation, who fear daily for their lives, who are controlled menacingly by partners and former partners, whose children are weaponised by their fathers, and this is the national emergency we can no longer ignore, if ever we could.
I would like to offer another suggestion – a national education program that starts with boys, perhaps as young as two or three, that teaches them skills such as empathy and self-regulation, and unpacks the crippling stereotypes that socialise boys to feel superior to girls so they grow into men who objectify women and see them as their property.
You start out in life sensitive and full of wonder, open to the world and all its possibilities, but, then, after a certain age, these qualities are shamed, beaten, bullied out of you by the culture and, often, by the men who run our nations, corporations, legal firms, sporting clubs, schools, advertising agencies, film industries and media outlets. Is it any wonder that men are never taught to deal with their emotions in a healthy way?
Perhaps this is at the heart of men’s rage, whether expressed through murder, r**e, domestic violence, su***de, alcoholism, reckless driving or simply sullen withdrawal from the world. If men attack – or are in conflict with – women in the outer world, it is because they are at war with their inner world. Don’t be a sissy. Suck it up. Stop your crying now. All the stock definitions of masculinity that prevent boys from dealing with – as Steve Biddulph puts it – “the storms and subtleties” inside our hearts.
Centuries of patriarchy have raised boys to reject and scorn the interior world where our deepest feelings are lodged. Why should it surprise us, therefore, that boys might grow into men who view women as less than fully human?
Women are right to feel exhausted and terrified. The body count is rising and there will probably be another woman killed next week, and the week after. What are we men going to do about it?
The author has spent past two-and-a-half years investigating crimes against women. Now, moved by the murder of Hannah Clarke and her three children, he is grappling with the hatreds that possess violent men.
