Are Men Necessary?
The author says yes—but then, he would.
(Page 2 of 4)
I’m mad at men too. I am disgusted by the rise in child abuse cases and reported rapes. I deplore sexual harassment. I’m grateful for the ascendancy of women in business and politics, which may yet advance the humanity of those callings. I have to issue these disclaimers because I’m a man writing on the subject. But I’m also mad at being the object of such slanders as that men are incapable of compassion. Anyone looking at men today should be able to see that they are confused and full of despair. It’s not just our place in society or the family that we are struggling for; we’re fighting against our own natures. We didn’t create the instincts that make us aggressive, that make us value action over consensus, that make us more inclined toward strength than sympathy. Nature and human history have rewarded those qualities and in turn have created the kind of people men are. Moreover, these competitive qualities have been necessary for the survival of the species, and despite the debate over masculinity, they are still valued today. Trial lawyers now include their levels of testosterone, the most abundant of the androgens, on their résumés.
A couple of weeks ago I went to pick Caroline up at her afternoon school day care center at the neighborhood Presbyterian church. She had a new teacher, a man, in fact. I made a point of going over to introduce myself and make him feel welcome. The new man was out on the playground with a walkie-talkie. “I’m Caroline’s dad,” I said, but before I could get around to my welcoming speech, he said, “I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to ask you for a picture I.D.” As Caroline’s father, I appreciated the security, but as a man, I took offense at having to prove that I was not a pervert. True, women are also asked to show identification, but I suspect that it was done in the spirit of fairness. Everybody assumes it is men that are the problem.
I WAS ON THE STAIRCLIMBER IN THE HEALTH CLUB watching a talk show on TV. The subject of the show was self-defense for women, and there was a lot of audience tittering as the experts demonstrated how to knee a man in the groin or scratch out his eyes. It was a bit hard to watch, if you want to know the truth. The object, said a woman on the show, was to teach women how to deal with rapists.
“Alleged rapists,” the guy on the stairclimber next to me remarked under his breath. All around us were sweaty women pumping iron and riding stationary cycles.
“It does happen,” I said, shocked because I knew this fellow slightly.
“Yeah, it does,” he agreed, “but, you know . . .” He trailed off and shut up. It’s too sensitive to talk about, even among men.
After all the arguments about income inequality and “glass ceilings” for women executives, the fundamental imbalance between men and women that will never change is the power to rape. “Not a day goes by that I don’t worry about it,” a woman friend confided to me. “You can’t know what it’s like. I guess the best parallel is being in a bar where everybody’s bigger than you, and you know somebody there wants to beat you up. But I also can’t explain to you why being raped is so much worse than being beaten up.”
Rape is an assault on a woman’s self-esteem and her sense of trust. Its pernicious legacy endures in the victim’s psyche for the rest of her life. I know several women who have been raped, and what impresses me about them is how they have struggled to hang on to their relationships with men, despite those shattering experiences. I thought of these women when Clayton Williams uttered his fatal gaffe during the last gubernatorial campaign, that rape victims should just “relax and enjoy it.” In Austin, a rapist actually quoted that statement as he assaulted a woman in my neighborhood.
The fact that it is not safe for women to be out on the streets at night, or even alone in their homes, is a compelling indictment of American men (there are many other cultures where women are far safer, although their lives are more oppressed in other ways). Given the statistics that most convicted rapists have committed seven rapes prior to their first conviction, that sex offenders who began as juveniles average 380 sex crimes during their lifetime, and that our overcrowded prisons are returning these people to society after they serve only a fraction of their sentences, I believe we should seriously explore the option of voluntary castration.
But I understand the confusion and anger of the fellow on the stairclimber too. Rape has become a political issue between men and women. Lately, the term has broadened so that it includes seduction and even (in the opinion of some feminists) consensual sex. Between that and what we ordinarily think of as rape— that is, forcible sex with the use of violence or the threat of violence—there is a vast and murky terrain.
Advocacy groups have been using hugely inflated statistics to bludgeon the public into believing that men are waging a war against women and children. “One out of four men is a rapist” is an anecdotal statistic I’ve heard on several occasions that is not tied to any real survey that I can find. Similarly, “For a female over 14, her chances of being sexually assaulted during her lifetime are 1 in 3,” this figure coming from Men for a Rape Free Society, which also produces the pseudo stat that 55 percent of female college students will be sexually victimized while in school—the victimization meaning “attempted rape, completed rape, sexual harassment, groping, innuendoes and verbal abuse.” Can it really be possible that 45 percent of women get through college without sexual innuendoes?
The real statistics are bad enough. According to Department of Justice victimization studies, the actual chance that a woman will experience a rape or an attempted rape during her lifetime is 8 percent (one out of twelve), although it is higher in Texas, which was second in the nation in the number of reported rapes in 1990. A recent study by Neil Gilbert, a professor of social welfare at the University of California at Berkeley, showed that the incidence of date rape, though still far too high, has actually declined substantially since 1980.
Figures about child abuse and domestic violence have been similarly inflated and biased against men. I’ve read that one out of four females, and one in six males, will be molested or raped by the time they are eighteen. Most of these scary figures are conjectures based on reports of abuse received by police and child abuse hotlines. More than a million such reports are filed every year. About 60 percent of them turn out to be unfounded. More than half of the cases that are categorized as neglect or abuse are actually “deprivation of necessities,” such as poor medical care, inadequate clothing or shelter, malnutrition—problems of poverty, in other words. Only about 5 percent involve serious physical battering of the sort that we think of as child abuse, and about the same amount turns out to be actual sexual abuse.
Child abuse certainly is a serious problem, but it has been so for centuries; it is only very recently, really in the last two decades, that the treatment of children by their parents was considered a matter of interest to the state. What seems like a rise in child abuse is actually a change in social attitudes. In fact, the mistreatment of children that we now call abuse may actually be declining, according to the National Family Violence Surveys conducted by Murray Straus, a codirector of the Family Research Laboratory at the University of New Hampshire, and Richard Gelles, a sociologist at the University of Rhode Island, who compared the incidence of domestic violence between 1975 and 1985. Their study, which focused on interviews with families, not on police reports, found that there had been a 27 percent decrease in child abuse over that period, perhaps because of heightened public awareness and better treatment programs.
My Library
