When is it permissible to talk about male violence against women? According to a report from the National Police Chiefs’ Council, this is now so pervasive it constitutes “a national emergency”. The authors estimate that at least one in 12 women will be affected by crimes such as stalking, sexual assault and domestic violence every year, though the actual figures may be far higher due to low reporting rates. 

While this is terrible news, one could argue that it is good that something that many women are aware of anyways — which shapes and restricts our everyday lives — is gaining more formal recognition. We are not paranoid, fixating on events that are rare or seeking to politicise mere bad luck. What happens in one home is replicated in another — the same patterns, the same beliefs, the same escalations. Any effective response has to take the whole picture into account. 

What, though, should happen next? It can be difficult to make the move from the abstract back to the specific. It is easier to think about male violence in terms of charts and percentages than in terms of people you know. The cases that grab attention tend to be cut and dried, where there is little risk of anyone siding with the perpetrator. Most of us know — often through personal experience — that such cases are in the minority. Most of the time, there is a reason why he is a victim, or it is her fault, or it would be considered opportunistic, politically inconvenient or socially embarrassing to consider this incident representative of the way in which individual men’s violence towards women functions to keep all women in line. 

There are strict rules which govern how and when we are permitted to discuss male violence, ones that have seeped into feminism itself. I do not buy the idea that we can sometimes consider it an emergency, at other times, a moral panic. Male violence is either one or the other, yet some would like to play both hands at once. It is terrible, we are told, except when the threat is all in your head. 

Right now, even having a consistent definition of “male” when we talk about it is treated as unnecessary. Asking for it is considered pointed, churlish, when in truth it is about maintaining the possibility of an analysis of how violence, sex, gender and power intersect. Without such a thing, we are left with entirely circular analyses — Nicola Sturgeon telling us that “the threat to women is predatory and abusive men” or Judith Butler sneering at those who assume “that the penis is a threat”. We are meant, not to accurately describe who does what to whom, or to recall that safeguarding matters because we do not know which of the “nice” men are not in fact nice, but to blame toxic masculinity (because plain old “masculinity” would be a step too far).  

We are not supposed to talk about the relationship between men’s greater physical strength and women’s relative vulnerability

The more “progressive” your feminism, the more restrictive the conversation gets. We are not supposed to talk about the relationship between men’s greater physical strength and women’s relative vulnerability, because that is supposedly biological essentialism. We are allowed to talk a little, but not too much, about the relationship between pornography and male violence because, as Amia Srinivasan insists, “anti-porn feminists are too confident in their assumption that images of sexual and racial domination on screen can do nothing but exacerbate sexual and racial domination off the screen”. ‘Progressive’ conversations about police or prison abolition rarely address what forms of social censure or threat of punishment will serve to rein in male aggression against women and children. On the contrary, argues Alison Phipps, there just “would not be powerful groups dominating more marginalised ones through violence”. Which is nice, until you consider just how easy it is for the dominant to appropriate the status of the marginalised in a world in which sex isn’t permitted to matter at all.

Women who feel wary of male people in enclosed public spaces are routinely dismissed as pearl-clutching Karens, or even told they cannot possibly know who is male and who is not. This way of positioning the fearful woman as obsessive, shrewish, perhaps a little crazy, is absolutely of a piece with the way in which women are treated when they speak out about male violence in the home. She is paranoid, and if eventually he hurts her, well, that doesn’t prove she was right — it merely proves how far she pushed him. The false equivalence of men’s violent bodies and women’s “violent” tongues — made in claims that gender critical feminists indulge in “genocidal rhetoric” and have “blood on their hands” — is mirrored by the way in in which women experiencing interpersonal abuse are all too often portrayed as untrustworthy manipulators. Women who complain about abusive exes or threatening stalkers are not believed because of a worldview which interprets female complaints as an attack on male people. This worldview is everywhere. How can we tackle it, if we leave certain versions of it completely untouched? 

We need to take a long, hard look at our understanding of female victimhood, vulnerability and fear

On a personal level, I don’t worry a great deal about encountering male people in female-only spaces. I am privileged enough not to fear ending up in a refuge or sharing a prison cell. Nevertheless, what I hear when women for whom these fears are very real are dismissed or ridiculed is that if I were threatened by a man in other ways, including in the home, I might be believed or I might not. It would all depend on what kind of status this man had been accorded in relation to me. It wouldn’t be about my own experience so much as whether the perpetrator was a “nice guy” or someone towards whom it was socially beneficial for others to express sympathy. This is what I hear in the “progressive” mockery of terfs, pearl-clutchers and Karens: not just “we make an exception for this subset of males in our analysis of male violence” but “we make an exception — potentially — for any subset of males in our analysis of male violence”. In the end, it is no analysis at all. 

To tackle male violence, it is important to tackle beliefs about manhood and masculinity. At the same time, we need to take a long, hard look at our understanding of female victimhood, vulnerability and fear. All too often, a woman is only listened to when it is too late, or when her attacker is “over there” and “not one of us”. Should she speak out when it is undesirable, or in ways which disrupt the political narratives or communal identities we cherish, then she is treated in much the same way female victims have always been treated: as an inconvenience, sent, as Dworkin put it, to “that hallucinated place of exile where women with complaints are dumped, after which we can be abandoned”. The inconvenient victim’s story can be excised from our understanding of what really counts as male violence. It’s something bad men do and we are not permitted to see those men as bad, therefore her experience — however painful, however traumatic — is of lesser significance. 

This is why it is so frustrating to see feminists who understand this in some cases pretend not to in others. I am sure they care, but just not enough to think it worth maintaining a consistent analysis which recognises the validity of all women’s experiences and fears. To want this is not selfish, nor is it an attempt to make the topic of male violence “all about” one particular group of males. As long as we have a leaky, subjective analysis, the credibility of all women relies on the social status and declared self-perception of potential perpetrators. This makes all of us less safe.