Can I come too?
A man’s place in Take Back the Night
EVAN JOHNSON, STAFF
In preparation for attending this year’s Take Back the Night march (the political and social context of which is discussed in Melissa Hiebert’s article “Take Back the Night”) I decided to scour back issues of the Manitoban to determine what had previously been written about the event, and I was rather discouraged to come across a 2001 comment piece arguing forcefully against male participation in the march. (The organizers of Winnipeg’s 2007 march insisted that everyone was welcome.) “It is the men who try to march who just don’t get it,” it said, and immediately I was thrown into a self-absorbed panic. Putty in the article’s admonishing hands, I leapt to its dubious conclusion: “I don’t get it,” I surmised, more than a little ashamed of myself for ever thinking I did.
But one moment of dull-witted credulity tends to beget another with me, so I soon lashed out and absurdly decided that I was being oppressed, as a man. For a couple minutes of misty reverie, I reflected on my own one and a half encounters with violence and how they affected me. “What a survivor I am,” I thought with a twinge of pride, as I stared off into my dangerous past, convinced that the violent incidents therein were just the ticket to justify my presence at the march.
In 2001, on the way to my first bar experience, my friend and I were rudely accosted outside the U of M’s own WiseGuys by two large muscular sporty-types with shaved heads. I was wearing an extremely campy baby-blue curling cardigan, thick-rimmed burgundy glasses and, most inexplicably, a ’70s-style tennis headband — I was both effete and a nebbish, not the most masculine combination. The two hooligans angrily and homophobically insulted us as we walked by, but mere words couldn’t hurt us! Perhaps with this thinking in mind, my usually timid friend muttered an obscenity, barely audible, and made a lewd gesture, barely perceptible. But the brutes caught the offense, chased him down, and began to violently pummel him.
In my head I objected courageously and forcefully to this violence, but my audible objection was a thin cry, wavering and cracking in sad panic. My very reasonable query, “Hey . . . don’t you want to talk about this?” was met with three or four quick and heavy gorilla-fisted blows to the head, which I took like a champ by buckling immediately to the ground and peeing, just a little, in my pants. Perhaps because my headband softened the blows, I was able to scramble to my feet and, in a feat of staggering heroism, run, run away with my dizzied and ashamed friend, who was given a kick down the stairs for good measure.
My other “encounter” with the threat of violence came just two blocks away from my home one night as I was returning from work. Oh, I was feeling pretty good! Strutting along, holding my portable CD-player in my slender, pacifistic fingers, when three drunken teenage ruffians cornered and shoved me. The biggest, drunkest, and ruffianest of the three was brandishing a tire-iron — four prongs of potential head trauma.
He demanded my CD-player, and I politely obliged, but sneakily removed my headphones before handing over the goods. Being an unusually perceptive ruffian, he noticed this sly move and demanded my headphones, too. At this moment, one of the strangest of my life, one of his accomplices began to heartily object to this latest atrocity: “No, man! Let him keep his headphones!” he cried, truly outraged (I still love that guy). But the tire-iron was calling the shots, so I lost my headphones too. Boo hoo; they were encrusted with earwax anyway.
As I emerged from this reverie, patting myself on the back for a charming story, well-reminisced, it occurred to me that my encounters weren’t going to cut it. One wasn’t even violent; and the other, though it hinged on the overflowing, aggressive masculinity of two hulking man’s men, wasn’t exactly the sort of violence that Take Back the Night seeks to address. If the march is exclusively about creating some kind of symbolically inspiring man-free space, then there’s nothing I can do or have had done to me as a man to warrant my attending. I’d still have to be shooed away, like a yappy little dog, from such a rally, because I feel much more comfortable and safe around women than men.
The rally as I saw it, however, seemed to define its goal in terms of raising awareness about sexual violence as it relates to the broad social problem of misogyny, and because misogyny dictates harmful roles for both women and men, there didn’t seem to be any question as to the appropriateness of male presence. Rather, the focus was on creating a warm sense of community and engendering passionate devotion to an important cause. And so I was able to realize that it wasn’t all about me . . . though this article certainly is.
