For many men, treating women equally in the face of aggression means not helping them. Because they themselves are put up in this way - at school, on the street, but also by politicians who want to condemn them to compulsory military service.
This text has been auto-translated from Polish.
In August of this year, a girl was attacked in downtown Warsaw. A shirtless man followed her, accosted her, wanted her to go with him. She unequivocally refused. Finally, he threw her against the street and pulled her to her feet. She started screaming. None of the people in the cars reacted. City center, Warsaw. The woman was recording everything.
The police reacted in a standard way - since there was no rape or murder, and the victim was "only" followed and thrown to the ground, she was told to report to the police station. There, too, she received no help. The perpetrator fled. After the case was publicized, the police reported that they had caught him and would perform procedural actions. If hundreds of people had not shared the video online, there is no telling how things would have turned out. Many crimes, such as violation of bodily integrity or criminal threats, are prosecuted by private prosecution. If the rape or beating did not happen, there is no way to count on the initiation of a case from the office, and often no help from the police. You have to write a private prosecution yourself or with the help of a lawyer. Few people have the skills to do it themselves. A lawyer takes from 3 to 10 thousand zlotys for such a service. Most people cannot afford it. Their abusers walk free, unperturbed. They can keep hurting.
If the abuser is wealthy, and the victim, out of helplessness and lack of police support, publicly mentions the violence he committed, he can file a private charge of libel or insult and win. This is the kind of country we live in.
Fault regardless of the circumstances
Publication of the video sparked a wave of support for the girl and outrage at the perpetrator's behavior. Police, under pressure from the community, issued an announcement. This is nothing new. Some time ago, along with hundreds of users and users of social media we publicized the case of a stalker she had been unable or unwilling to catch for months. She did so a day after the case gained publicity. The boyfriend humiliated the teenager, threatened her, posted photos of her whereabouts on the X platform and described how he intended to harm her (including raping her - he expressed hope that a pregnancy would result and that a son would be born). Only after the case was covered by the media did the police find him and arrest him.
In addition to voices supporting the girl attacked in Warsaw, there were thousands of comments blaming her. As usual. People began to reproach her for recording the incident instead of immediately calling the police. That she thinks only about the likes. That by recording the perpetrator, she provoked him to physically assault her. For when individuals don't have irrefutable evidence of the violence they experienced, they hear that they are making things up or slandering. That they want to destroy an innocent person. That they are doing it for the sake of attention.
The victim has resisted in no uncertain terms. In discussions of violence, one usually hears: "You wanted it yourself - why didn't you say no?", "how was he supposed to know you didn't want it?". This time determined resistance became an argument against the wronged party.
In this optic, the perpetrator disappears from the landscape. No one tells him what he shouldn't do. "Everyone knows that you can't attack or throw a person to the ground." No. It is the victim who is held responsible for the "wrong actions" she did or did not take.
She didn't say no? Guilty, apparently she wanted it.
She said "no"? Guilty, she prodded.
Did she record? Guilty, because she made him angry.
Didn't she record? Guilty, she made it up.
The equality of men and women in being pounced upon when they experience violence
People commented with indignation that no one helped the girl when she screamed. Others declared that they themselves would not have helped ("you wanted to be independent, this is what you got"). As if there is something reprehensible about women's struggle for equality and not ignoring the violence that happens next to us. If women's emancipation makes it "as punishment" that you won't help them when their lives are in danger - then we are dealing with a deadly backlash.
You can also be held criminally responsible for failing to respond and help. The penalty is up to three years in prison. The gender of the person attacked and the attacker is irrelevant. If the victim is a man, no one writes that he did not deserve help, because he is independent and self-reliant. But men are also denied help because, after all, "a guy has to manage on his own." These are two sides of the same coin.
At first I saw only misogyny in these reactions. She, of course, is there too.
"I wouldn't help any woman. They wanted to be independent, to fight against men and the patriarchy, now let them fend for themselves. I will turn on my heel and watch with satisfaction as they breathe away or are raped," similar comments were not lacking.
But there were also voices showing other perspectives on the fear of helping, dishonestly mixed with aggressive ones. On the one hand, they concerned the consequences that can be incurred, such as charges of violation of bodily integrity against the abuser. On the other - the position of men in such an arrangement.
After some time, I realized that declarations about not helping women stem not only from anger at the fact that they are independent and fight for themselves, but also from the fact that according to commonly accepted norms, women are helped (because they are "weaker") and men are not. Many commenters feel that if they were the ones in danger, they would not receive support. And some have a track record of such experiences.
We see it almost everywhere: during disasters, women and children are rescued first. Men go to be executed. News reports about accidents or wars often state the number of casualties, and among them highlight "women and children". As if the deaths of men were less significant. Men are sent to wars - forced to kill, risk their own lives and watch their colleagues die. Violence against men is greeted with ridicule - he got beaten, he lost the fight, he is weak. Weak as a woman. Cunt.
"Boys will be boys" - is not only a way to justify violence by men against women, but also by men against men. A classmate beat up another boy? Boys do. They're crackers. Meanwhile, a boy who is beaten can suffer a trauma that will affect his entire life. In doing so, he will be placed on an equal footing with his abuser, as if he had simply "participated in a fight." His harm will not even be recognized by anyone - he will have to deal with it completely on his own. Or not deal with it.
Few people would justify a boy who beat up a girl. Until recently, it was common to downplay boys' behavior that violated the physical autonomy of female classmates - like pulling pigtails or pushing. "Horse courting." Thanks to our reactions, this is slowly changing. But still, no less than years ago, physical violence between boys is ignored, justified by "boyish nature." As if the fact that the victim and perpetrator share a gender makes them equal in responsibility.
"A masculine code of honor: you defend women from the aggression of fuckers" - these kinds of comments from conservatives are supposed to counterbalance declarations of indifference to violence. Just why doesn't the "men's code of honor" tell us to defend men from "fucker aggression"?
In TV series not so long ago, the norm was scenes where women would angrily lash out at men in an argument or give them a lashing when they didn't like something they said. They could do this because they are women. Because they are considered weaker. Because hormones, she got carried away. Because she is impulsive. This works against both women (they are infantilized, made into hysterics who are not fully aware of their actions) and men (violence against them is condoned).
For many commentators, equal treatment of women in the face of aggression means not helping them. Because they themselves are put up in this way - at school, on the street, but also by politicians who want to condemn them to compulsory military service. After all, conscription (for men) is all but suspended in Poland. When asked about it, politicians do not express a desire to change the situation or even a willingness to talk about it.
We are afraid to leave the house at night. Men too
Women with experience of violence are sometimes afraid of men. They may try to disassociate themselves from them and, together with other women, support themselves in spaces reserved exclusively for women. And a man hurt by another man? A supportive space without men - is a space without him.
When such a guy hears that "it's better to meet a bear in the forest than a man" - on the one hand, he may agree, because he himself has experienced male violence. On the other hand, he himself is a man - and a victim at the same time. He is no worse than a bear. He too has been blamed for "giving in," for "not knowing how to defend himself," for "not being a real guy."
As post-violence women, we repeat that we are afraid to leave the house at night. We are not alone in this. I've talked to men who react to the sight of other men at night the same way we do - with fear, clenching their keys in their hands or reaching for pepper spray. The difference is mainly that it is more often fear of physical violence than sexual violence.
When your own gender is portrayed as evil and toxic, and you yourself are the victim of someone who shares that gender with you - you may start to hate yourself. You may even feel that nothing of the sort happened. "Tough luck, I lost the fight," you think as you recall how you were battered by a strange man at night because he didn't like your pants. After all, you're a guy, you have to take it in stride. You begin to feel guilty not only for how you (didn't) react, but also for simply being. You are a man. It's the kind of entanglement of guilt and shame that as women we never experience.
The most common form of physical violence is that of men against men. Making masculinity a piece of identity of evil incarnate and a source of aggression is a way to retraumatize male victims. It is also hurtful to those who are neither victims nor perpetrators.
It's not in being a man that the problem lies - it's in violence and the social condoning of it, normalizing it and even glorifying it. Influencers reaching out to children are often aggressors and criminals who make a point of pride out of the harm they have caused, while those who report them are demeaned as "60" or "confidants." Events involving them are also promoted by mainstream media, major TV stations or the National Stadium.
"Then embrace the representatives of your gender. You are the ones responsible for crimes," women sometimes advise when a man objects to being equated with aggressors. Just what influence does he have over the billions of strangers with whom he shares only gender? How is he supposed to "embrace" them? And if he himself has experienced violence from a man - what influence does he have over the one who hurt him?
Of course, any person can react to violence. But it's best that we do it together - not dividing by gender and not settling based on it. That way, the perpetrators will not go unpunished, and those who respond will be isolated.
Violence has no gender?
How about dropping the term "violence has a gender" in favor of "violence has consequences"? Because those consequences for perpetrators and perpetrators are still not the best. And shifting the burden to gender relieves the burden on the perpetrator who chose to hurt - half the world becomes co-responsible, rather than this particular person and the people who protect him (not infrequently women). The guilty parties disappear, the blame is diluted. Neither does this punish the perpetrator, nor does it improve the situation of the wronged.
When I talk to men with experience of violence, I see that I have much more in common with them than with women, who have very different experiences. Our reactions, feelings of shame and guilt, are often similar. It's easier for me to identify with a man who has been wronged and experienced a lot of pain, than with a businesswoman who has made a fortune through exploitation of workers on the lowest of the land and has no qualms about standing up for her set-up mate who used sexual violence against female employees. What unites me with her is gender - what divides me is much more. Such a woman often closets the slogan "women's power" or claims to be a representative of all of us, even though she has little in common with the majority: closer to her exploited workers than to herself.
Why, then, should it be the male perpetrators of violence - who are in the minority with respect to all men - who should represent everyone, even if the majority wants nothing to do with them?
I understand the intentions behind the figures "violence has a gender" or "I'd rather meet a bear than a man in the woods," and perhaps at one historical moment they made sense to show the systemic nature of the phenomenon - the point being to illustrate the scale of violence against women and the social acceptance of it and the victimization of the victims. The problem is that this victimization is also experienced by wronged men, and the language and its figures change with the development of social consciousness.
Feminism is a constant movement and constant change - each new wave is a recognition that in earlier struggles some discriminated group was left out: dark-skinned, indigent, transgender or non-binary people. Maybe it's high time to notice the excluded group of men, too?
