“You’re not worth going to jail for.”
Let’s call him John. I met John walking on the beach several months ago. He is an angry 60 something guy, divorced and about as anti-woman as any one I have met. He divorced a long time ago, he told me he wanted to kill his ex, he choked her but released the choke, telling her that she was not worth going to jail for.
He told me that several times over the times we have said the ‘G’day, how’s it going?’ greeting.
John’s anger is deep seated, his sense of entitlement is paramount. More importantly, his ex is lucky to be alive.
His sense of entitlement is anti-authoritarian. He does not like others, especially women, having authority over him, a female council ranger threatened him with a $100 fine for walking his dog on a beach which was not the dog beach. It was a friendly warning. He was not fined but would be the next time, so he has a quick look around to make sure the ranger is not about as he proceeds to the people’s beach with his dog. Public safety is the issue there, nothing about hating dogs but more about allowing people who don’t much want to spend time fending off dogs while at the beach have a safe place to be. (One of my granddaughters was attacked by a dog, she had 12 stitches on her face and is still traumatised by the event, several years later.)
I think we have a man problem, and it is not just here in Perth, not just here in Australia, it is a worldwide problem.
Argentine’s recently elected president, Javier Milei is about to shut down a ‘anti-gender violence agency’ despite increased violence against women according to an article in the Guardian today (8 June 2024).
In the same edition of the Guardian, a feature article entitled ‘Power, patriarchy, victimhood, denial’, cites three experts on why men harm women.
Yesterday evening’s ABC news bulletin carried a story where three women were interviewed on the topic of Domestic Violence, each impacted by the death of a woman close to them, a sister, daughter, friend, murdered by their estranged partners.
We see political leaders try to address the issue, the State Premier looking at gun control, the most recent event here in Perth saw two women murdered, shot by a man looking for his wife and daughter, couldn’t find them so shot their friends and then turned the gun on himself. The man was a licensed gun owner, owning a small arsenal of firearms.
The Prime Minister is on TV stating the obvious; something must be done.
Browsing in a local bookshop last week I stumbled upon an intriguing title, The Ten Types of Human by Dexter Dias. It’s a fat book, but the title grabbed me and my credit card leapt from my wallet. Dexter Dias QC, according to the introductory notes, is a human rights barrister, part-time Crown Court judge and a visiting researcher at Cambridge and Harvard. And he has me absolutely captivated. The stories he relates as he examines each of the ten types of human are amazing, confronting, distressing.
One of the ten types is ‘The Beholder’, people, men, who are entranced by the beauty of a woman and desire them, stalk them, harass them and when rejected have destroyed the beauty they could not attain, acid attack to the face, scarring the women for life. The two incidents written about are from India and Kenya.
Lots of words are spoken, many tears are shed, but the most I get out of it all is a sense of impotence.
Obviously, something needs to be done to stop this insanity. That is acknowledged each time someone is asked… Prime Minister, State Premiers, Police Commissioners, they have all have faced cameras, issued press releases, tried to be empathetic but the problem looms larger than ever it seems.
I’m a man, and the problem lies with men, men like me, men like John, men like Anton who is a neighbour, men like my sons and sons in law. It lies with each of us who enter relationships, that we value those relationships, that we listen to the women in our lives, that we shed the sense of entitlement. (I have a throwaway line when people call me ‘sir’. I am neither titled nor entitled.)
Not only am I a man, but I am also a divorced man, and needed to work through the issues divorce, rejection, and estrangement bring about. The sense of lostness, loneliness, aloneness. The anger that rises, the sense of worthlessness. The readjustment to starting a new life. But the scariest is the rising anger. The ‘how dare she do that’, the fear of looking deeply into myself to understand how this happened and that it was in large matter, my fault. To come to a place where I can love myself again, to have a sense of self-worth.
And to deal with ME, the issues I face, the ones I can control.
The rebuilding of a life.
I mention myself here, because for every man who faces rejection, divorce, relationship breakdown, there needs to be a deep look at themselves. It is too easy, as John does, to place the blame on the woman. For John it has meant that the only relationship he seems to have is with his dog. He fears women, he fears any deep relationship where there is any sense of accountability, even in our beach chats, there is his anger, his misogyny, his unwillingness to examine himself.
For others there is the comfort in drugs and alcohol, the papering over of the hurt for it to break through again when sobriety awakens with a hangover, or the body shakes in need of another fix.
I don’t know the answers, but the man problem needs to be addressed. The issues in part are social media where we can get trapped in hateful discussions, where violent rhetoric is the order of the day, anger rules, rail against women, rail against perceived injustices, rail, rail, rail, but don’t take the time to look to closely at the real problem, ME.
Constant questions of money allocation within government handouts, constant pressures placed by questions which address the impotency of the responses as the death toll rises.
It’s a man problem, and when we see men isolate themselves, refusing to connect with available counselling, refusing to rise beyond their ‘oh woe is me’ depressions, allowing them to blame other, the problem will not go away.
Possible solutions lie in men’s groups, and when we look at the issue in, say, the Indigenous groups where domestic violence seems to be an intractable problem, perhaps getting out with a group of guys and kick a football around, no alcohol, just play a bit of kick to kick, run around, sit down for a rest and talk. Connect in a healing environment.
Or in the fly in fly out work environment that counselling is on offer, that networks are made available during the time at home as well as on the work sites.
But most of all that the sense of male entitlement is addressed. That women are equal partners in relationships, not chattels, not servants, not inferiors. Cultural barriers need to be addressed, those issues such as the Biblical positions such as in Ephesians 5, “For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the saviour. Now as the church submits to Christ, so wives should submit to their husbands in everything.”
Too often that becomes the standout instruction, but neglected are other references to marriage relationships, starting in the very first book, Genesis 21, “Listen to your wives”, and in the New Testament too, in 1 Peter 3, “Husbands must give honour to your wives. Treat your wife with understanding as you live together. She may be weaker than you are, but she is your equal partner on God’s gift of new life.” But even in those, the husband’s role is as the head, as the leader, as the authority.
I was raised in a churched family and attended church well into my fifties. I cannot recall sermons on the last two quotes but recall many on the call to wives’ submissiveness. The sense of entitlement, of male superiority is deeply embedded in religious teaching and dogma. It is also deeply embedded in traditional societies where many of our immigrants come from. It is expressed in the cultural influences we have, film, entertainment, the internet, politics.
The apparent breakdown of community and communal influence is also part of the problem. The way we live without the connections of the village community of the past, where neighbour really did look out for each other, means that relationship problems remain behind closed doors, there are no safe places to go to. And as witnessed recently in a bun fight in the City of Perth closing down a women’s shelter, trying to push the responsibility onto another branch of government, the problem is shoved aside, put in the too hard basket as budgetary constraints and political ambition stand in the way of trying to solve the problem. The mayor is a bit of an Alpha Male, shock jock radio personality now endorsed Liberal candidate for the next election. (Liberals have a woman problem? Or could it be a man problem?)
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