Scorpions, Frogs, and Hitchcock: Why The ‘Dangerous Men’ Principle is Bad Feminism
Boys will be boys, right? Well, when it’s in their favor, yes
Have you ever seen an Alfred Hitchcock movie? Don’t worry, this isn’t a boring auteur essay, I’ll fill you in as quickly as I can. Is there a common theme? Yes. Basically, there’s always a good man who is led astray by a sexy bad woman, who ultimately gets her comeuppance after being raped, murdered or abused by the good man. In all these stories, the tragedy was that the good man had been made bad by the bad woman, and it was all her fault. As a cool 17 year old studying film theory, I smugly pointed out to my teacher that Hitchcock just seemed to be living out his voyeuristic hatred of women through his movies.
“So he’s just an old, bitter man living out his fantasies?” He replied, a bit more angrily than I had anticipated. I shrugged. “Yeah, I think so. He must have known no beautiful young woman would ever be into him and maybe he internalized that.”
“You know,” he said to me as I left his office, “Not all men are as bad as you think.”
Not All Men: But Enough Men?
I’ve come full circle as I’ve got older here. Like many teenage women, I found it very easy to be very angry and very bitter about the world I was just discovering. Mansplaining had just been coined, and we had just kicked off the whole webfeminism and #MeToo thing. I was furious to discover how often I was wolf whistled, groped and harassed in the streets, and to be honest, it was easy to be mad at #AllMen. If so many man were okay making my life a total misery through sexual objectification, and if so many of my female friends had harrowing stories of abuse, assault and rape, maybe it was innate for men to be cruel. Maybe they were just the dangerous, evil, soulless and uncaring Adult Men we had been taught to fear since kindergarten.
Adult Men were never presented to us as people at school: they were always creeps in anoraks behind a laptop, cartoon villains luring you into their cellars with candies, and tropey dealers on VHS health tapes who referred to amphetamines as ‘the drugs’. It was very easy to just embrace what we’d always been taught: be afraid.
Be frightened of men. Be scared of them. Be wary of them. Be vigilant against them. Be sensible around them. I can’t tell you the ever increasing list of things we were told to do to avoid being raped, assaulted, attacked or groped. Some of it was just pretty good life advice (don’t leave your car unlocked) and some of it delved straight into the hysterical (don’t listen to music in case a rapist uses it as a distraction to rape you). A lot of it was just laughable: don’t wear your skirt above your knee being a classic anti-rape talisman. I wonder if Edwardian women managed to avoid rape with their ankle length skirts.
But ultimately; this is a very damaging, untrue way of looking at the world. By talking about male behaviour- that is, male choices and decision making- as ‘men’, we misanthropically reduce then down to the worst tropes of their gender. As any good psychiatrist will tell you:
The actions of an individual do not define their demographic or potential.
Men Are Not Scorpions And Other Facts
So there’s an old story about a frog and a scorpion, where the frog is stupid and agrees to trust the scorpion and ends up being stung, because, moral, it’s a scorpion and inherently dangerous. This is often applied to why we should not, at various points in history, trust foreigners, the Dutch, lawyers, unionists, the USA, or Russia.
There’s a bit of a problem with the idea that women should always be wary of men because they are inherently bad (or scorpions) though: history tells us that’s a totally untrue, if convenient, lie. Men are not inherently rapists. Men are not inherently wife beaters, gaybashers, gropers, flashers or any other abusive behaviour you are thinking of right now. Look around you. I’m sure you know men who would rather be caught performing WAP than ever do anything to hurt you, or any woman. Men who would be deeply guilty and distressed at the thought of groping a woman, or making her feel uncomfortable. This isn’t even the exception to the rule: this is just normal, human behaviour. Normal people don’t like knowingly hurting eachother. And bad people don’t like getting punished or spurned for hurting someone.
One of the big arguments against women getting the vote was that men would never accept it. It was impossible, they argued, that men could ever have any faith in democracy if they knew a mere woman had voted. Similarly, when the first female MPs and congresswomen were elected, there was a strong outcry that men could never possibly tolerate a woman being in politics. Then, when women started showing their knees, there was widespread debate about whether men would be helplessly forcing themselves on women who were so lewdly uncovered. When women entered the workplace, men fretted about whether they could resist their sexual urges having to be around the opposite sex. When women started campaigning against wife-beating, men questioned whether it was possible to have a successful marriage without beating your wife. When women started speaking out against being assaulted in acting and modelling, men wondered aloud whether it was possible for men not to grope or assault beautiful women in a provocative profession.
Amazingly, no one seems to believe any of these concerns are ‘innate’ to male psychology today. No one questions whether a man is mentally capable of seeing a female doctor without assaulting her, no one muses on whether it’s possible not to rape a young woman who attends your university, and no one debates whether men can handle seeing a woman’s knees in public.
Because we recognise that behaviours and attitudes can and do change.
How many men felt it was okay to rape a woman while at war in 1880? How many men now? How many men thought it was okay to beat their wife in 1920? How many feel comfortable beating their wife up now? How many men thought it was okay to beat up gay people in 1970? How many men would be happy to do the same now? How many men would grope their secretary’s ass in a meeting and wink at their friends in 1980? How many men would do that now?
Men are not bestial animals who innately, bluntly, enact their most evil behaviours on women without any hope for change or consideration. Whether the ‘women need to be vigilant against men’ crowd accept it or not, men can and are changing the way they treat us. When I was at school, being non-consensually groped by male students was considered a bit naughty by the teachers. Now, any boy who gropes a girl in school can expect the police to be called and an expulsion.
I believe that the onus has to change from us being afraid of men to rapists being afraid. In the same way a man being a pedophile or a wife beater is disgusted and loathed, we must create a culture where men fear and despise men who rape drunk women. We must create culture where men call the police when a friend slips a pill into a girl’s drink for a laugh. We must create a culture where the police are so disgusted and horrified by a man who follows a woman home to scare her that they press for a prosecution. We must create a culture where 100% of the guilt is on the predator.
In the same way we know a woman who gets beaten up by her husband shouldn’t ‘learn self defence’ or ‘read the warning signs’ or ‘be vigilant’ against his violence, we must turn the tables fully on rapists, abusers and predators in the same way. I never want to hear another ‘precaution’ a rape survivor could have taken, in the same way I’d never want to hear about how the victim of a gaybashing attack could have been more vigilant.
Are there bad men out there? Yes. There always will be. But we need to bring that risk level of encountering a bad man down from 1 in 2 to 1 in 2000. A man’s choices make him bad, not his gender. I’m never, ever going to teach my daughters that men are a threat. I’ll teach her about rape, pedophiles, consent and predators, but I refuse to tell her that it’s normal to live in a world of fear, vigilance and terror against men.
Men: I believe you can and will take responsibility for the sexual assault crisis. Because I refuse to believe you are all Hitchcockian Monsters.
