Every Man Quotes

“As long as the spotlight remains fixed on the victims, light can’t shine on those who are actually responsible for the problem.”
― Jackson Katz, Every Man: Why Violence Against Women is a Men’s Issue, and How You Can Make a Difference

“After noting that, on average, women go back to their abuser seven times before they finally leave, she said to them, ‘You must get so frustrated when you think a woman is ready to leave and then she decides to go back.’ ‘No,’ one phone counsellor pointedly replied. ‘I’m frustrated that even though he promised to stop, he chose to abuse her again.”
― Jackson Katz, Every Man: Why Violence Against Women is a Men’s Issue, and How You Can Make a Difference

“But what about him? His responsibility remains hidden in the very language we use to talk about this.”
― Jackson Katz, Every Man: Why Violence Against Women is a Men’s Issue, and How You Can Make a Difference

“But shifting popular consciousness is no easy task – especially because victim-blaming is embedded in normative language. In discussions about gender violence, the focus often defaults to what the woman did or didn’t do – as if the man is not an active participant in the events described – or even present!”
― Jackson Katz, Every Man: Why Violence Against Women is a Men’s Issue, and How You Can Make a Difference

“They spent their youths daydreaming about being Jedi Masters, and they haven’t yet realized that they’ve grown up to be Stormtroopers, mindlessly doing the bidding of whichever evil leader they’re acting in service to.”
― Jackson Katz, Every Man: Why Violence Against Women is a Men’s Issue, and How You Can Make a Difference

“In an era of ubiquitous porn that has grown ever more misogynous and degrading over the past few decades, heterosexual men increasingly have been conditioned to identify the enactment of masculinity with sexualized dominance and control over women’s bodies.”
― Jackson Katz, Every Man: Why Violence Against Women is a Men’s Issue, and How You Can Make a Difference

“One key obstacle to change is the resistance women face when they try to hold men and male-dominated institutions accountable for abuse. They’re often told what they need to do differently.”
― Jackson Katz, Every Man: Why Violence Against Women is a Men’s Issue, and How You Can Make a Difference

“my or my colleagues’ work has been undermined or blocked by people who think efforts to engage men and boys in the struggle to address men’s violence against women is somehow unfair – to men and boys.”
― Jackson Katz, Every Man: Why Violence Against Women is a Men’s Issue, and How You Can Make a Difference

“In the starkest of terms, too many people tend to regard gender-based violence as something unfortunate that happens to women, rather than something men do to them.”
― Jackson Katz, Every Man: Why Violence Against Women is a Men’s Issue, and How You Can Make a Difference

“we have to challenge old and stale habits of thought that have long held us back. One of the biggest is the misguided notion that because only some men commit overt acts of violence against women, it’s not really something all men need to think about. Isn’t that why it’s called a women’s issue?”
― Jackson Katz, Every Man: Why Violence Against Women is a Men’s Issue, and How You Can Make a Difference

“How are we supposed to solve this enormous and vexing problem if we’re not even willing to say out loud who’s responsible for it?”
― Jackson Katz, Every Man: Why Violence Against Women is a Men’s Issue, and How You Can Make a Difference

“It says that women, girls, and gender non-conforming individuals face a disproportionate risk of gender-based violence, but it doesn’t say that men, young men, and boys face a disproportionate risk of committing it. This crucial point is frequently glossed over when people use the passive phrase ‘violence against women’, as if it’s a bad thing that simply happens to women.”
― Jackson Katz, Every Man: Why Violence Against Women is a Men’s Issue, and How You Can Make a Difference

“The goal now needs to be much more ambitious. It needs to focus on action – personal, institutional and political – to change the social norms that underlie misogynous abuse. One of the biggest stumbling blocks to that over the last few decades has been the reticence of ‘good guys’ to embrace this issue as theirs to solve.”
― Jackson Katz, Every Man: Why Violence Against Women is a Men’s Issue, and How You Can Make a Difference

“the main point of the exercise was to show men, straight from the mouths of the women seated next to them, how unfair and unjust it was that women had to order their daily lives and schedules around the realistic fear of men’s violence.”
― Jackson Katz, Every Man: Why Violence Against Women is a Men’s Issue, and How You Can Make a Difference