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Where Are Men’s Voices in the Fight for Women’s Health?

By Rob Okun

Now that the public outcry has died down over the Susan G. Komen for the Cure’s ill-advised decision to defund Planned Parenthood (within days they reversed themselves after a blistering protest) there’s time to consider men’s role in the controversy. As a group, caring men were silent, ceding public discourse to the same intrusive men who have long tried to control women’s reproductive lives; men who, in seeking to destroy Planned Parenthood, politicized breast health. Yes, women were major actors in this story, especially including senior management at the Komen Foundation. But men’s fingerprints have long been all over women’s health issues.

To me it’s manly to speak out on behalf of our sisters and mothers, wives and daughters. Too much is at stake for men to stand mute while sideline blowhards go after the women in our lives—first their ovaries, then their mammary glands.

Consider the politics of the situation—right, left, center, who isn’t in favor of breast health? In case anyone thinks men are immune: we get breast cancer, too. My wife’s cousin, David, was diagnosed three years ago. (See “My Father’s Breast Cancer, Fall 2011.) It’s in men’s interest to acknowledge these are community issues, not women’s issues.

Last summer my wife and I joined our cousin for seven of the 60 miles he walked into Boston to raise money for the Komen foundation. It was a classic New England August Sunday morning and there was a festive buzz among the throng of walkers. Survivors, families of those who’d died, young and old—a rainbow of citizens strolling under an azure sky, all with a common purpose: to cure breast cancer. The most heated conversation I heard all afternoon concerned baseball: would the Red Sox make it back to the World Series in the fall.

At the end of our leg of the walk, after we’d sauntered through Cambridge neighborhoods and down Boston thoroughfares, slaked our thirst with orange wedges and our hunger with granola bars, we wrote a check to the foundation in honor of our cousin. We were delighted he was two years cancer-free. And I said a prayer of gratitude for my wife—healthy and strong 21 years after her own bout with breast cancer.

Despite reversing its decision to sever ties with Planned Parenthood, I am still angry the foundation inserted politics into a nonpartisan issue—publicly working on behalf of one aspect of woman’s health while privately working against another.

Meanwhile, unfathomable as it may be to many citizens at the start of the second decade of the 21st century, another heated debate is underway; this time it’s birth control as it applies to the 2010 health insurance law (aka Obamacare.) On one side is the White House wanting to ensure that women who  work at or seek services from Catholic health care facilities have access to birth control. On the other side are employees at those institutions who, for religious reasons, insist they shouldn’t be compelled to dispense birth control. Another community issue where men’s voices are too few and too soft.

What if it were men’s health on the line instead of women’s? I can’t imagine caring men standing silently by as other controlling men clog the public airwaves and the blogosphere. Too often, though, instead of speaking out on behalf of women’s rights, we remain bystanders. Are we too timid to speak out, fearful we’ll be put down, castigated as a mangina instead of celebrated as a mangina warrior?

Remember the bumper sticker, “Keep Your Laws Off of My Body?” It’s not just a slogan for women. Deep down, men know that an assault on women is an assault on us, too. But unless more of us are willing to raise our voices on behalf of our mothers and sisters, our wives and daughters, we risk ending up like the boys who were banished to the back row of middle school chorus. You know, the ones who were ordered to mouth the words, the ones who sometimes grew up to be tough guys with hardened hearts and scowls on their faces. The risks are too great to be silent. It’s time to open up our mouths. It’s time to sing.

Redefining Manhood After Penn State  

By Rob Okun

Joe Paterno, the Penn State football coach who died in January just three months after a child rape scandal had stained his reputation, left behind more than a flock of adoring fans and a growing band of critics. His legacy now includes inadvertently energizing the movement to stop the sexual abuse of children. There’s more. That the heinous actions that came to light took place in the athletic world also offers a rare, national opportunity to raise questions about the culture of sports and the silence of men.

Paterno did the bare minimum, reporting only one rung up the chain of command what was reported to him about his longtime assistant, Jerry Sandusky—seen raping a 10-year-old boy in a university athletic department shower. While legally in the clear, morally Paterno missed the goal by a wide margin. No points scored and a lifetime penalty. His silence was deafening. How much more did that eat at him than did the lung cancer officially cited as the cause of his death?

Although officials could have done much more, by firing Coach “JoePa” (who, it was reported, planned to retire at the end of the season), the university changed the rules of the game: No longer would hush-hush trump sound the alarm. Going forward, the precedent now is: a bystander who doesn’t try to intervene, who doesn’t try to stop an act of abuse, will be held accountable.

Programs and organizations like Coaching Boys into Men, Mentors in Violence Prevention and the Waitt Institute, among others, are poised to lead trainings on this lesson. They have long facilitated workshops for students and staff on bystander intervention—learning the how and why of speaking up.

The college football season ended without the general public hearing much from the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA). That was a lost opportunity for the NCAA to exercise leadership in tackling the issue of sexual abuse. There still is time. Well before college players return to training camps this summer, the NCAA should announce they are financing—not just a one-shot teach-in at Penn State—ongoing trainings at colleges and universities across the country. What is needed is a sustained, national campaign addressing sexual assault, male socialization, and the masculine culture of violence. Money for such an effort is not an issue since the NCAA long ago turned college sports into a megabusiness.

In every state, sexual and domestic violence prevention coalitions are working night and day to stop the violence; they also can and should be tapped. And men’s antiviolence organizations including Men Can Stop Rape, A Call to Men, and Men Stopping Violence, among others, can play a role in an all out effort.

Starting at Penn State, let’s get ESPN and Sports Illustrated to broadcast and cover the teach-ins nationwide—so students especially can see this is a national crisis, not just a campus scandal.

“The bottom line,” says activist-writer Kevin Powell, “is that our notions of manhood are totally and embarrassingly out of control…[S]ome of us have got to stand up and say enough, that we’ve got to redefine what it is to be a man… But to get to that new kind of manhood means we’ve got to really dig into our souls and admit the old ways are not only not working, but are painfully hurtful to women, to children, to communities, businesses, institutions, and government, to sport and play, and to ourselves.” As he says, “Looking in the mirror is never easy but if not now, when?”

The truth is, most men are good guys who don’t abuse women, girls, boys, or other men. A simultaneous truth is the overwhelming majority of perpetrators of abuse against women, girls and boys are male. So while the minority abuse, assault, rape, sometimes murder, we look away mouthing our sorry excuse, “That’s not me.”

Men have a long history of colluding with other men in codes of silence, said Ted Bunch and Tony Porter in a statement posted on their A Call to Men website (acalltomen.com), not long after the Penn State revelations came to light. “This pervasive silence among men in our culture to protect the status quo, to win at any cost, and never tell on your brother is a glaring example of how destructive the current model…of manhood operates to demean, diminish and oppress anyone… not considered a ‘real man’ in our society. Our fear of being perceived as less than a man or weak, keeps us in line with these codes, regardless of right and wrong.” To too many, being a whistleblower is out of the question, especially after our boyhoods reinforced the message of never being a tattletale.

Only when men recognize our relationship to perpetrator, bystander, and-or victim, can we become most effective as change agents. Wherever the silence comes from, it ignores our collective responsibility to insist more men join women in working to end rape and abuse.

Out of the scandal at Penn State may come some good: the sexual abuse of boys may no longer remain invisible, “kept under the tight cloak of domination, stigma and internalized masculinity,” as Men’s Resources International’s Steven Botkin reminds us. “The impact of this reality feeds the male violence machine in ways we may not yet fully understand,” Botkin says. “Our collective silence about this part of the system means many of its victims go unrecognized and limits our capacity for intervention and prevention.”

Women have long been on the front lines of efforts to end domestic and sexual violence. They and girls, boys, and men should be free both from actual harm and the threat of abuse. For more than a quarter century, more and more men have joined them, challenging the masculine culture of aggression even as it digs in, continuing its efforts to bully us. Beyond all the trainings and teach-ins, we need individual men to mobilize right now—from isolated rural outbacks to teeming urban centers; from high up in the grandstands to the sidelines at midfield. There’s the whistle; what are we waiting for?

A version of editor Rob Okun’s commentary appeared Thanksgiving Day at Women’s eNews (www.womensenews.org). He can be reached at rob@voicemalemagazine.org.