As a male sideline supporter of most of the Athens Take Back the Night marches since 2000, I would like to offer a somewhat different take on this year’s controversy surrounding how men will relate to the march.
This year’s decision to invite men to march alongside women in Take Back the Night has been particularly controversial. With only a few exceptions the event has been a women’s march since the late 1970s. Yet regardless of whether men march, every year Take Back the Night is surrounded by controversy. All of the controversy is educational. Most of it is inescapable. But some of it is more divisive than it needs to be.
Most controversial is not whether men will march in a feminist march, but whether anyone will march at all. In every year I have participated in sideline support, male students opposed to the march have shouted sexist slurs and rape threats from the balconies of Ohio University’s fraternity houses and the windows of its residence halls. Most years the marchers have made too much noise with their chants to hear much of this, but sideline supporters got an earful. The current debate over men marching pales in comparison to the controversy that greets any expression of feminism in a society that remains plagued by patriarchy, and perhaps at Ohio University in particular, which, according to the U.S. Department of Education, frequently outranks even the substantially larger Ohio State University when it comes to the number of rapes reported in residence halls. By refusing to succumb to this patriarchal rape culture, Take Back the Night marchers and supporters create division – a division between those working for a better world and those working for a worse one. So “controversy” and “divisiveness” aren’t always bad words. As Frederick Douglass pointed out, they’re absolutely necessary for progress.
But the controversy that is mostly unnecessary and counter-productive is the divisiveness created among Athens feminists/sexual assault opponents over whether men will march. Some is unavoidable; even people who share the same goals will disagree about the best strategy for achieving those goals. But much of the conflict flows from two easily corrected but longstanding problems with the march – one of messaging, the other of decision-making.
If the march’s purpose is opposition to sexual assault in general, then it makes sense for everyone to be welcomed to march, since men as well as trans and genderqueer people are also survivors of sexual assault. Conversely, if the march is a way for women to empower themselves to combat the overwhelming majority of sexual assault committed by men against women, then a women’s march probably makes most sense. So which is it? That’s the problem of messaging. And who gets to determine the message is the problem of decision-making.
In her March 30 letter, Devin Aeh argues that TBTN is a women’s march for women’s empowerment and against sexual assault. In an April 1 letter, Erin Fischer contends that Aeh speaks for only “a few bigots”; that “TBTN is not about ‘women’s empowerment’; it’s about standing up to sexual violence and assault.” Decades of local tradition are on Aeh’s side. So are tens of thousands of women and men I wouldn’t identify as bigots. But traditions and even majorities aren’t always worth going along with. So which is it?
In past years, Take Back the Night marches for women’s empowerment eventually gave rise to an additional march against sexual assault per se. Now, a Take Back the Night march against sexual assault per se is giving rise to a separate march for women’s empowerment. Just as in Aeh’s and Fischer’s arguments, these developments make two things crystal clear: 1) there is a big difference between these two types of marches and 2) there are people in Athens who feel the need for each type of march. Given that both types of marches are oriented toward worthy goals, perhaps there are even people who feel the need for both.
But whichever type of march the organizers of a particular year’s Take Back the Night choose, the march’s message needs to be made clear so people will be less inclined to continue to fight over it, and instead focus on fighting patriarchy and/or sexual assault.
Yet even if the message is clear, if the process for deciding upon that message isn’t considered legitimate, then there will still be unnecessary conflict and resentment.
The process for deciding TBTN’s message can be authoritarian or democratic. The authoritarian option is for one person or a handful of people on OU’s Student Senate, to make the decision unilaterally, after receiving some degree of wider input (or not). This is what usually happens. Then the decision maker(s) can sit back and see how many marchers and would-be marchers resent not having a say. And by “say,” I’m not talking about mere input. I’m talking about people having a share of actual decision-making power through some system of majority rule or consensus process, which would constitute a more democratic approach to determining TBTN’s message.
In addition to clearer messaging, a more democratic process that’s open to a wider constituency of TBTN stake-holders would go a long way to decrease the unnecessary kind of conflict and increase the necessary kind.
Damon Krane is a former weekly columnist for
The Post
, contributor to
The Athens News
and editor of
InterActivist
magazine from 2005-2008.
