Why Men are Blind
By: Joseph Zelezniak
Tags: Social Justice, Violence Against Women, Gender Equality

Note: I am a cis-gender male and my perspectives on this issue are inherently restricted and not all-encompassing. I highly value the input and perspectives of all womxn who would like to comment on this piece, any comments can be sent to my email zelezniakjoseph@gmail.com. Please be warned that this article covers topics of sexual assault, harassment, and slight discussions on terrorism. No graphic imagery or descriptions are provided but anyone who may find these topics disturbing is warned. I write about this issue as a male to try to provide that perspective in order to solve or shed new light on these issues. My writing is not the be all end all on this subject, far from it.

I am a problematic man, though I am more of a boy than a man. I was raised in a fairly liberal household, my parents were no freedom fighters but they opposed apartheid, and my father, as an Israeli expatriate, took quite a strong anti-occupation stance. More importantly, I was raised surrounded by three sisters in a fairly female-dominated household. Despite all of this throughout my early childhood I held stereotypical views about women. I never really quite treated them as equals, never really listened to my mother as much as my father, always saw myself as the person who would take over the family business, not my sisters, and a whole assortment of disturbing ideas of what it meant to be a man. When 4th wave feminism took the internet by storm in 2013, I like many other self-designated liberal boys shook my head and said to myself, “Well of course sexism exists but really these women are taking it all too extreme.”

What I like many other boys were really saying to ourselves was that sure the situation was bad but it wasn’t that bad. This is the same thing men are still saying to themselves today and they’re still saying it for the same reasons. Because for some reason the world that men see just isn’t the same one that women tell them exists. It’s because of this that men fail to treat women’s oppression as seriously as it deserves; we don’t treat it like the crisis it is, we frown at strong language like ‘femicide’, and feel affronted by slogans like ‘men are trash’. So in order for women’s movements and progressive society, in general, to get those middle-men (though in my opinion, those men are far from the middle) on the bandwagon we try to make them see those harms in a different way, by making it about them. We try to justify helping women by showing how we need them because they take care of our young, by showing how solving gender issues helps men, or by showing the benefits men get from fighting for women’s rights.

Now, social movements allying themselves with other issues is not a new phenomenon, the early suffragists allied themselves with prohibition activists in order to get the social and political capital needed to enact change, and one can assume that this is what 4th wave feminist media is trying to do by pandering to men which is not inherently bad but it does bring with it some harms. When the conversation becomes all about men women lose the spotlight. While in some cases the sacrifice might be worth it when issues come around that uniquely affect women it means we can struggle to draw proper attention to them. This all comes back to the main problem of men being unable to truly see the situation that women are in and rather than just try to find ways to sidestep that I am going to try to show reasons why men are so blind in order to try to help them find their way.

The reason is not so simple as men just wanting to be blind. Truthfully, there are many men who want to be progressive and sympathise with the plight of women but just don’t see it. This is because patriarchy hides itself from men. Its very nature is deceptive in order to shepherd its actions and effects out of the limelight.

A prime example of this is catcalling, one of the most prevalent forms of harassment that women face. Surely something so common should be obvious to men? Surely they should see it happen daily as women do? But they don’t. They don’t because catcalling is a form of harassment that hides itself from men. While women who walk alone down the street are highly likely to get catcalled, the moment a man is walking with her those odds drop tremendously. This happens for a variety of reasons; men are more afraid of being held accountable by other men, catcallers see that women as having already been ‘claimed’, catcallers prefer women who have no excuse to not respond to them — like having another person you’re talking to. All of this means that when men are with women catcalling happens much less. Which means, you guessed it, that men are not confronted with this harassment. They don’t see it happen. So when women try to raise awareness about how bad street harassment is all men see is a girl who cried wolf.

The problem doesn’t just stop there. Even when men are forced to accept that sexual harassment happens they still try sidestep the issue by drawing attention to, what they see as, other more serious problems. Men will share pictures that highlight the statistics of how many men die in wars, in dangerous jobs, or any other statistically large harm that affects men. They will say that surely we should either care more about these larger harms or that if they can handle it, so can women. They’ll demand statistics to prove how bad the situation is for women and if those don’t satisfy them they’ll once more fall back into the worldview that the world surely isn’t as bad as women say it is. But there’s one big problem with this type of damage evaluation that men do; it misses one of the most damaging effects of patriarchal oppression, fear. You see fear can’t be measured, it can’t be graphed, and it can’t be empirically tested as easily as other harms. Fear is the hidden killer of the patriarchy. The Patriarchy uses fear like terrorist groups. Terrorism is most commonly defined as “the unlawful use of violence and intimidation in pursuit of political, ideological or social aims.” and if the rampant sexual violence that rape culture uses in order to try scare women into feeling unsafe and less powerful isn’t that then I don’t know what is. Terrorism doesn’t work by killing the most people or causing the most economic damage, rather it inflicts its damage through instilling a culture of fear in a society. That’s why terrorism is marked by having few actual activities but having every one of its activities be one that will shake a nation. Decapitation, cars driving through crowds, suicide bombers? These don’t kill nearly as many people as car crashes but ISIS isn’t trying to sabotage our handbrakes because ISIS knows that it can do much more through the fear that these actions cause.

The reason people feared ISIS even though they only killed around 1200 people in international terrorist acts by 2016 is because you couldn’t protect yourself. The murders were random and arbitrary; whether or not one killed you was up to the luck of the draw. The same thing is happening in our streets. Women are afraid of walking alone, even in the daytime, because they fear being attacked for no other reason besides being a woman. The damage that this fear causes can not be brushed away; young women are growing up in a world where they feel as if their very existence lays a target on their life. Living your life in terror causes trauma, it rips away at your dignity, and it forces you to feel as if you are not welcome in your own country.

This is the truth that men need to realise. That they aren’t actually blind and women aren’t just overreacting; that they can pull off the blindfold and see the reality that lies in every dark alleyway and long street, the reality women are confronted with every day. Men must reevaluate how they judge situations and enter the modern era where emotional warfare is just as dangerous as being shipped out to Afghanistan, and maybe even more.