It’s Not Our Fault, But It’s Our Responsibility
NGM Executive Director Jake Stika shares a reflection that was first sparked by the abduction and murder of Sarah Everard in the U.K., and which then took on extra weight with hateful deeds that took place earlier this week in a shooting spree in Atlanta.
One phrase that has stuck with me over the years is this: “It may not be my fault, but it is my responsibility.”
This phrase has been front and centre in my mind in light of recent events. Those events being the disappearance and murder of Sarah Everard in the U.K., as well as, more recently, the murder of eight peoplein the Atlanta area, six of whom were Asian women.
I, myself, personally, did not kill anyone. I didn’t shoot anyone, didn’t hate anyone, didn’t do anything. So why am I saying these events are my responsibility?
Because—surprise, surprise—they were perpetrated by men. Men are staggeringly the perpetrators of gender-based violence, to the tune of 90 percent.
That can be a staggering thing for men to hear, and some of us might do our best not to hear it. There’s an impulse to deflect, to say that it’s a minority of men who do actively commit this violence, and to defend the majority who, fair enough, probably don’t.
But #NotAllMen is too easy. Letting yourself think, “I am not a part of the problem, therefore I must inherently be part of the solution”—that’s lazy. If that’s going to be our collective thought process, as men, we will keep getting called out as lazy and simple-minded, and we’ll deserve it.
Scottish comedian Daniel Sloss is someone I appreciate, both as a pretty funny guy myself (skill recognize skill), and as a fan of what he has to say, often especially to us men. This week, I’ve had the words from one of his bits ringing in my head: If you take 10 men, and even if there’s just one ‘bad guy’ among them—spreading the misogyny, committing the violence—and there are nine other men standing by doing nothing about it, then the bystanders might as well not be there. You might as well just have one bad guy. Or 10.
What this boils down to me is accountability. Accountability for our actions, our affiliations, and for the space we occupy in society. Accountability for ourselves, for each other, and for the community and culture of men everywhere. We need to step up and step into the problem at hand, we need to do so en masse, and until we collectively do so, we should be collectively embarrassed.
How can we do it? How can we tackle something so big? We break it down, like layers of cake, into pieces we can stomach. For me, it comes down to three levels of change that need to guide how we think, act, and react. Here they are.
Individual
As individuals, we can find ourselves constantly grappling with our strongest foe—ourselves. It is the little boy inside all of us who was steeped in a culture of competition and domination. It is that conditioning that primes us to believe that our own careers may be more important than that of our partner—we were told, after all, to grow up to be pilots, and not to be stewardesses. It is that same conditioning that primes us to believe that, as a man, we are competing with other men for the attention of women: the idea that the only reason she might be ‘not that into us’ is because of another man, and not her own thoughts, feelings and agency.
To start making change at this level, we can, for example, wake up to the fact she can think and feel for herself, and her interest or lack is not a reflection of our worth. We can bring awareness to the social conditioning that tells us we must pursue women as and when we want them, and that if they resist, that just means we need to try harder. Maybe it’s the fault of the media or of our upbringings or of something else; regardless, how we can take responsibility is by thinking critically about the situations we find ourselves in, or create ourselves.
Interpersonal
Such as the situations that arise in pubs, locker rooms, and board rooms that are often exclusive to women. I myself having played basketball at a high level have spent many years in locker rooms and looking back there were plenty of times where I didn’t actively contribute to the problem, but I definitely didn’t contribute to being the solution.
Here’s the thing: most of us guys think that locker room talk is abhorrent. If it was aimed at our girlfriends, sisters, daughters or loved ones, we’d get mad. In fact many of us use those women as a justification to care. But the reality is that every woman is someone’s loved one and is worthy of respect simply for being.
It may not be our fault that socially men and women segregate themselves by the interests they pursue or the entertainment they choose, but we are responsible for the culture that persists in the spaces where our communities gather, whether they’re locker rooms, pubs or the basement man cave. Every interaction can either build respect or inclusion, or degrade and exclude. It is on us to choose each time we speak or occupy those spaces.
Systemic
To this day, the male, pale, and stale (don’t get upset: I am male and pale myself, and am getting staler by the day) are overrepresented in the seats of power whether that be heads of state or heads of Fortune 500 companies. While these men did not build the current systems and structure of power they inherited them from their fathers, grandfathers, and forefathers who built it with the exclusion of women.
So while it may not be their fault that 93 percent of global heads of state and over 460 of the Fortune 500 companies do not represent the fact that 51 percent of the population is women, because they occupy these positions it is their responsibility to transform the systems that they occupy that influence so much of our day-to-day lives to be more reflective of the society they permeate and purport to serve.
Jake Stika is the Executive Director of Next Gen Men and one of its co-founders.