Five Ideas For Reducing Sexual Violence
And why the "man/bear" conversation is a terrible strategy for meeting this goal.
The Sexvangelicals weekly newsletter will be released tomorrow. This article is free for everyone. We would love your financial support, as well as comments about this incredibly important issue:
Six days ago, Julia went on a run through Utrecht, as she often does. Typically, Julia returns from a run reenergized, motivated, and calmer.
On this particular day, Julia came back pissed.
She frequents a really beautiful nature preserve that connects Utrecht with Oud-Zuilen, a small town just to our north. There’s a sidewalk that runs north-south, parallel with the canal, and an offshoot of wooded pathways to its east. While she was running through one of the wooded pathways, she noticed a man on a bicycle trail her.
While Julia is fast, a bicycle is faster, so she was understandably nervous to be followed by this man for longer than 15 seconds, let alone the amount of time that she was actually followed.
She turned around and noticed that the man had his hand in his pants. Julia began to sprint. A few seconds later, the man rode around her, whipped out his erect penis, finished masturbating, ejaculated, and yelled something at her in a foreign language.
Julia fled on a beeline from the woods to the more populated sidewalk along the canal, skipping over the wooded pathway, peering over her shoulders to make sure that she wasn’t followed. Fortunately, she wasn’t.
I could make this particular Substack article about the litany of experiences that Julia has had, nationally and internationally, where she’s been sexually harassed or assaulted.
Not my story to tell. Also, fuck you incels and all of the men and women who sexualized the bodies of little girls in the name of “Purity Culture”.
Instead, I want to shift this Substack to talk about this guy:
Over the last week, social media got inundated with some variation of the following question:
Would you (with women being the intended audience) rather be stuck in the woods with a man or a bear?
I get it. We need to talk about sexual violence, especially sexual violence toward women, from sexual harassment to rape, and everything in between.
I’m struggling to think of a worse, more condescending way to start this conversation.
For starters, the “man/bear” conversation is an example of the motte-and-bailey doctrine. Wikipedia explains these as:
“An informal fallacy where an arguer conflates two positions that share similarities, one modest and easy to defend (the "bailey") and one much more controversial and harder to defend (the "motte"). The arguer advances the controversial position, but when challenged, insists that only the more modest position is being advanced. Upon retreating to the motte, the arguer can claim that the bailey has not been refuted (because the critic refused to attack the motte) or that the critic is unreasonable (by equating an attack on the bailey with an attack on the motte).”
For more information about the motte, bailey, and other information about the medieval architecture of the fallacy’s namesake, check out Nicholas Shackel’s 2010 article, “The Vacuity of Postmodernist Methodology”.
In this case, the violence of the bear (no less, the polar bear, which is so dangerous that in territories with high volumes of polar bears, humans are highly encouraged to carry rifles) is the bailey, and the universal danger of men is the motte.
When folks challenge the basis of the motte, either through some variation of “not all men” or more geeky responses like mine referencing the remote territory of Svalbard, the person making the man/bear attack can respond in a variety of ways, from throwing statistics about sexual violence to saying things like “You don’t understand” (to which my response is “I understand more than you think I do.”), to suggesting that the other person is “mansplaining”, to calling the challenger sexist.
Meanwhile, back in Utrecht, Julia was weeping and panicking this morning when I left home to work in the library following a PTSD-related sense of overwhelm, something that I, as a committed partner to someone with sexual abuse-inflicted PTSD, see all too often. And if the data is true that approximately 40% of women experience sexual violence at some point in my life, something that other committed partners observe commonly as well.
I have to navigate my own rage toward the men who have inflicted pain upon Julia, all while not taking that rage out on Julia, while Julia is navigating her own rage toward the men who have inflicted pain upon her, all while not taking that rage out on me.
Don’t get me wrong. The rage that drives the bear/man conversation makes a ton of sense.
It’s also a terrible way to have conversations about vitally important topics. It’s a passive way of talking about the immense fear that a lot of women (and men who are afraid of being targeted by men) have. It criticizes and demonizes men, and discourages men from being the allies needed to actually eliminate sexual violence. (Although I suppose the downgrade from “monster” to “bear” is a net positive.)
As we’ve talked about before on Relationship 101, when someone gets criticized, they have two common responses:
Shut down, which many women have been socialized to do in response to critical and dehumanizing comments from men.
Criticize back, which many men have been socialized to do in the name of protecting pride and ego.
So how can we have this conversation about eliminating sexual violence toward women? I’d like to propose five possibilities, some of which involve changing the discourse between two human beings, and some of which are off-the-wall ideas that address systems that reinforce sexual violence.
First and foremost, listen to women and men who have survived sexual harassment and assault. If you are the receiver and a person is initiating their experience of sexual violence, listening involves slowing down, asking what verbal and physical comfort would be helpful and providing it, and reminding the initiator that they are not crazy. If more people got this interaction right, we wouldn’t have to rely on dumbass metaphors like bear/man to talk about sexual violence.
We have to stop pitting men and women against each other. And men need to name way more when the pitting of men and women against each other is actively happening. And this isn’t just naming overt sexism as it happens, but also addressing more covert forms of sexism like complementarianism, the idea that men and women should play specific, gender-informed roles in the family as a way of creating relational wholeness. bell hooks writes in The Will to Change, “Dismantling and changing patriarchal culture is work that men and women must do together.”
Develop a 501c4 nonprofit dedicated to holding systems accountable for prosecuting men for sexual crimes. Think of it like the ACLU or Southern Poverty Law Center. The goal would be using the legal system to ensure that folks who harass and abuse receive appropriate discipline (loss of job, jail time without bail, inclusion on a sexual offender list, except for adults, appropriate rehabilitation pathways), and that Human Resources departments, court systems (read #5), and religious organizations would not interfere.
Redefine the budgets of municipal criminal justice systems to include more therapists/social workers, assault and sexual assault advocates, and mental health training for all staff, from police officers to emergency dispatch operators. The money is there, but line items need to be allocated from weaponry and supplies to actual human services.
Request accountability from the American Bar Association. What if someone created a meta-analytic study that addressed all of the ways that defense attorneys used in the last 3-5 years to protect those accused of sexual crimes by disproving the validity of the victim? And then, what if the American Bar Association agreed, in protecting victims of violent crimes, to ban practices that defense attorneys use to badger victims, and if judges held defense attorneys to those? Local law enforcement get scapegoated (sometimes understandably), but most women don’t report sexual crimes because they don’t want to go through the legal process.
Shaming people doesn’t create long-lasting change. If anything, the #metoo movement is an anomaly in that regard. Telling men to “stop raping people” also doesn’t work either, especially when we’re also telling men to repress their emotions, compete with other men and women, and reducing men to their genitalia. (If I hear the phrase “Big Dick Energy” one more time, I’m gonna lose it.)
Sexual violence is a systemic issue, and as such, needs systemic solutions.
What are some ideas that you have to reduce sexual violence in the communities and systems that are important to you? What have you done that’s worked?
Let’s heal together,
Jeremiah and Julia