I was listening just now to @Mara_Yamauchi ‘s contribution to BBC Radio 5 Live ‘Breakfast Show’ (1st October 2021, starting at 1hr 08mins), discussing what men can do to bring about a world in which women are, and women feel, more safe from male violence.
Nicky Campbell (Radio 5 host) asked of Mara: what can men do?, and he picked up on Mara’s comment, that she had chosen to drive rather than take the train and walk home at night, after going out, because that felt safer.
Nicky Campbell asked ‘So, for example, if I see you running [Mara is an athlete] towards me, do I cross the road?’
To which Mara replied (I am paraphrasing), ‘Yes, you could make space by stepping into the road’.
Mara went on to make some reasonable connections with the impact of certain so-called ‘inclusive’ (i.e. ‘trans-inclusive’) language which means that the word ‘woman’ is being dropped out of discourse in favour of terms like ‘body with a vagina’. I think the point was that such language is de-humanising, it invites thinking of persons as somehow independent of their bodies, and that very deliberate divorcing of mind / person and body, so to speak, is relevant to this conversation about women’s experiences and male VAWG. I think this is a very reasonable point.
But what I am writing about here, is what the Radio 5 exchange reminded me of, as I listened.
After Sarah Everard was (as we now know fully, and to our horror) abducted and murdered, there was a vigil held on Clapham Common to memorialise Sarah.
I was living quite near Clapham at the time, tho I didn’t attend the vigil.
One evening quite soon after the vigil, I engaged in a conversation with a co-occupant of mine in the multi-occupancy house where I lived. We are both male, in later middle age - our childhoods were the 1970s and 1980s.
The conversation was about the reactions to Sarah Everard’s killing, and the vigil, on social media, which was, understandably, a huge protest against violence against women, and appeals (as there are now again, after Sarah’s killer’s sentencing) for men to participate, adjust, challenge behaviours which objectify women, to think and act differently.
This conversation followed many others we had had on socio-political issues driving the pandemic year 2020, with all the massive upheaval and reaction not only to the virus but also to the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, USA, and other events.
Well, my neighbour was unhappy about the social media reaction, which he regarded as having crossed over into being anti-men. There was apparently a grievance about the tone it had taken, which I understood (and put back to him, by way of a question, to check is this was right).
I sensed something like a #NAMALT reaction, which is a common reaction from a man, when he becomes defensive in the face of a *general charge being made towards or about men*, in general.
“It is difficult”, I said - or tried to say, “to listen to statements of that sort” (meaning the general charges made about men, and demands for men to change) “and to not take them too personally, but to recognise the position of the women making them”.
It is a sensitive and difficult subject to talk about, but I tried to understand more of what he was getting at, by asking him what he thought had made the social media conversation go too far.
We then began to consider hypothetical situations, like walking along a street, and being conscious of a lone woman approaching. What do we do?
As we talked, I became aware of what seemed to be his feeling of affront with the suggestion that he make space for a women on the pavement by stepping into the road (‘into the gutter’).
(This is what had been mentioned in the exchange I have just listened to, between Mara Yamauchi and Nicky Campbell, on Radio 5).
It was a consequence of my quite gentle (I thought) challenge, that the conversation then turned into something that was more about what was going on *between us two men*.
Because his opening to the conversation was something like, that a general charge was being made of men - unfairly, going too far, and he felt - so I understood - something like #NAMALT.
I think, looking back, that he had an expectation that I would agree with him, but I did not immediately agree. Knowing what I know of myself, and something of this person’s style of engagement and presentation, which was frequently with a sort of ‘typical’ male aggressiveness - e.g., things said with an expectation of the listener’s assent, speaking loudly, standing rather than sitting, etc.
So in my challenging - which was really only a questioning, and a desire to *not simply give assent* - to look at and consider examples of what we do, how we do, in fact, react to encountering a lone woman - the conversation became about the relation *between us two men*, and something emerged about what he felt was proper, or appropriate, in principle, for us two men - and ‘therefore ALL men’ - in relating to women.
The matter of ‘stepping into the gutter’ now took on a different meaning. It was not a simple, practical thing that could help to make a woman feel safer, as it perhaps was thought of in Nicky Campbell’s question to Mara.
Now the conversation between us two men had slipped into being *about* us two men, and how we behave, which might make us the same, or different. Now ‘stepping into the road’/‘stepping into the gutter’ was presented by my neighbour as a demeaning thing, and an injury to a his (therefore ‘all men’s’) pride.
This is how the conversation went.
It became a matter of pride, and being proud as a ‘manly attribute’ and therefore a desirable attribute to have *as a man*.
In the conversation, as he became closer to his real feelings of manliness (sort of rising to his own emotion) my neighbour, a man in late middle age, was communicating that he liked to have *the capacity to be intimidating* (to signal a potential for being violent) to men and women. It was a source of good feeling in himself, that he he can present himself like that. In our conversation, as I asked him, if he took umbrage at the suggestion that he might step into the road, he switched from thinking about the woman’s safety (the hypothetical encounter) to how he wanted things to be between us, and how he wanted me to think about him, and he communicated, quite clearly, how being able to show this intimidating aspect was part of who he was, and this was intended to be intimidating *to me*.
I could see that talking things out further was not in my interests and would probably only serve to make his tone more defensive in relation to me, and to go nowhere with respect to thinking about the social media reaction, or to thinking about women and safety.
He was, in fact, intimidating to me. And that was the point.
And that was the point when I decided to break off the conversation.
This is what it can be like between men, when seeking to challenge something in another man’s behaviour or speech that sounds ‘everyday’ sexist or #NAMALT.
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