Strong & Humble Men

Jill Meagher’s husband imagined for more than a year how he would hurt the man who raped and murdered his wife.  In this Salon story he explains how, while listening to this man speak intelligently in court, he recognized this killer as an everyman, rather than the comforting aberration he had constructed him as up to that point.

“What would make this tragedy even more tragic would be if we were to separate what happened to Jill from cases of violence against women where the victim knew the perpetrator, had a sexual past with him, talked to the him in a bar or went home with him. It would be tragic if we did not recognize that Bayley’s previous crimes were against prostitutes, and that the social normalization of violence against a woman of a certain profession, and our inability to deal with or talk about these issues socially and legally, resulted in untold horror for those victims, and led to the brutal murder of my wife.  

We cannot separate these cases from one another because doing so allows us to ignore the fact that all these crimes have exactly the same cause: violent men, and the silence of nonviolent men.  We can only move past violence when we recognize how it is enabled, and by attributing it to the mental illness of a singular human being, we ignore its prevalence, its root causes and the self-examination required to end the cycle. The paradox, of course is that in our current narrow framework of masculinity, self-examination is almost universally discouraged.

Since Jill died, I wake up every day and read a quote by Maya Angelou: “History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.” Male self-examination requires this courage, and we cannot end the pattern of men’s violence against women without consciously breaking our silence.”

St. Francis once asked "Can true humility and compassion exist in our words and eyes unless we know we too are capable of any act."

While I do not pretend to be an expert on masculinity or St. Francis, it seems to me that conventional approaches to masculinity squeeze out the space in our lives for humility in men…we (men) need to reclaim that space.