Nhung Nguyen

Jackson Katz is an Anti-sexism educator who has over 20 years of experience in educating thousands of men, military, and university athletics on sexism. He represented a useful Ted Talk on Violence against women — it’s a men’s issue, focusing on the reasons for the violence against women prevalence and a paradigm-shifting approach to change this.

First, he emphasized that gender-based violence is needed to be considered not only as a women’s issue sorely. This will help to diminish the message that men have an excuse for not paying attention to the issues. He provided two examples of (1) the issues often considered as victim’s or minority groups’ issues such as racism, gender, and sexual orientation and (2) the language discourse of diminishing the role of the perpetrators and majority groups in such issues.

Second, he questioned the whole system “What’s the role of religious belief systems, the sports culture, the pornography culture, the family structure, economics, and how that intersects, and race and ethnicity and how that intersects?” These are very important questions to touch on the root cause of gender-based violence against women.

Third, he pointed out that “victim-blaming” is one of the key aspects of such issue’s causes. Women who stood up to speak for themselves and to protect others are often called names such as “male-basher” and “man-hater,” and the disgusting and offensive “feminazi.” These are undermining the fight of women against gender-based violence. The system tends to like this premise because it is easier to just ignore the problems rather than to face and resolve them.

He indicated that gender-based violence is not only harmful to women but also negatively affects men who care for those women. Almost all men are having some women that they care about. Seeing their beloved women being abused is not a pleasant experience for men too.

Finally, Katz proposes a “bystander” approach, where men are advocated to actively take on the leadership role in dealing with such issues. Everybody knows so much about how hurtful it is to be abused and how to prevent it, he said. However, it is important for each proactive man to speak up, to stop the silence or ignorance when they see other men advocating racism or power to control women. This will help to create a peer culture that violence against women is wrong and unacceptable. He also cited Martin Luther King, Jr. that “In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends,” to emphasize that men cannot stand outside of such issues to tackle them and to protect the upcoming generation: both male and female.

It is a substantially interesting and inspiring talk from Katz. The talk was released in 2021. Ten years later, it seems that the issues have remained serious. I hope that a more proactive and systematic approach to dealing with gender-based violence will be utilized to help protect not only women but also men from this systemic belief of violence and power against women.