“Every Man: Why Violence Against Women is a Men’s Issue”

A brief origin story for my new book, due out February 20 from Penguin Random House UK

Much of my life’s work as an educator, author, and journalist has focused on the age-old problem of men’s violence against women -- one of humanity’s greatest tragedies.

More specifically, I’ve been part of the gender violence prevention field – and movement – essentially from the time I was a college student in the early 1980s. Over that span of time, I’ve been centrally preoccupied with developing sustainable ways in which to engage and mobilize men in prevention efforts, and to help them embrace -- not resist – feminist-led efforts for gender justice and women’s equality as basic human rights.

Along those lines, I have some very good news.

My new book Every Man: Why Violence Against Women is a Men's Issue, will be published on February 20 by Penguin Random House UK. It's currently available at Amazon.co.uk and will be available soon at most major bookstores in Great Britain and other Commonwealth countries.

Every Man will be available in Australia on May 20.

For readers in the US and Canada, the North American version will be published in September by Bloomsbury Publishing.

A personal note of possible interest: it's been a very long and winding road to mainstream publication for this book. That’s because conventional wisdom in the publishing industry has always presumed that a very small market exists for such a book – by a man. The vast majority of mainstream publishers have simply taken a pass on this.

Even after my 2013 TEDx talk called “Violence Against Women – It’s a Men’s Issue,” repeatedly went viral. (It currently has more than 5.5 million views.)

The publishing industry’s lack of faith in the market viability of a book about this topic is why previous books of this sort have generally been published by small, underfunded, and often obscure independent and academic presses.

And thus many people are totally unaware of the fact that a small but robust, multiracial movement of men has been working to end men’s violence against women since the 1970s!

There is one exception to this unfortunate record of marginalization and neglect. Sourcebooks, a medium-sized publisher in Naperville, Illinois, and the nation’s largest woman-owned independent publisher, did publish my first book in 2006. It’s entitled The Macho Paradox: Why Some Men Hurt Women and How All Men Can Help, and it’s done very well over the years. Sourcebooks released a fully revised and updated edition in 2019.

A breakthrough for books about the role of men in countering gender-based violence?

I have long disagreed with the conventional wisdom in book publishing that few people want to read a book by a male author about men’s violence against women. Still, with the exception of The Macho Paradox, I’ve run into a brick wall.

Until now. Thanks to some visionary and bold editors at Penguin Random House UK, we're about to clear that hurdle!

I hope that people who’ve followed my work -- especially in the UK and Europe -- help us get this book out and into people's hands as far and wide as possible. I would love to prove the conventional wisdom wrong.

Which brings me to why this book is being published initially in the UK, and not the U.S., my home country. Here’s part of the book’s origin story that I included in the Introduction:

“In 2021, Sarah Everard was abducted and murdered in London by a serving Metropolitan Police officer. This tragic event touched a cultural nerve, because the circumstances of her killing were not only horrific but also archetypal. A single woman, walking alone early in the evening, killed by a violent stranger. She took many of the precautions that women are taught. She wore bright clothing, took a well-lit route and was talking with her boyfriend on the phone. Her murder confirmed what so many women already knew: it’s hard to feel safe anywhere. Many people of colour understandably were upset that it took the murder of a white woman to attract the bright glare of the media spotlight. Where was the uproar when women of colour went missing, or when their bodies were found after they’d been murdered by a man? Still, women of all races and ethnicities took to the streets and social media to say ‘I can’t stop thinking about Sarah Everard,’ because they could all relate to her so directly. The feeling was widespread that ‘it could have been me.’

“Soon after, my email and social media accounts began to light up with inquiries from journalists and podcasters in the UK. They wanted answers to two basic questions: Why is men’s violence against women such a persistent problem everywhere? And what can men do about it? They were asking me because these questions have been at the centre of my work as an activist, educator and scholar since I was a university student in the early 1980s. As subsequent protest rallies made abundantly clear, multitudes of women – especially young women – had reached a point of deep frustration and anger about the ineffective response of cultural and political leadership to the age-old problem of misogynous violence. And there was a growing call for actionable solutions.

“Around the same time that I was doing those media interviews, an exercise I had designed many years earlier, ‘Sexual Assault in the Daily Routine,’ went viral for the third or fourth time on social media, receiving millions of views. The exercise involves drawing a line down the middle of a whiteboard and asking all the men in the room to list the things they do on a daily basis to avoid being sexually assaulted (usually nothing) on one side. Then, asking women the same question, and watching a long list cover up the entire other side of the board. Many women reported feeling seen and heard by this exercise, but it’s worth noting that it was originally designed as a consciousness-raising experience for men. It was meant to help them see how terribly unfair it is that women’s daily lives continue to be shaped by realistic fears of men’s violence – and to catalyse a conversation about what men can do about it.”

An editor from Penguin Random House UK heard me being interviewed in 2021 on one of the many interviews I did on the BBC or another London-based media podcast. She contacted me to ask if I’d be interested in pulling together some of my ideas in a new book.

I was. Nearly four years later, here we are.

A mixture of analysis and a call to action — for men

In Every Man, I acknowledge and honor women's leadership, across the ethnic/racial/religious/national spectrum and around the globe. Women’s leadership has been utterly transformative on the issues of gender-based violence (and much more) for decades -- and will continue to be so. We need that leadership now more than ever in this broken world.

What's been sorely missing has been men's leadership on these critical topics -- at all levels of familial, cultural, institutional, and political influence.

The need for strong anti-sexist men’s leadership has grown ever more urgent since Donald Trump was re-elected to the presidency. Trump won the votes of 77 million Americans, which included a very strong majority of white men, even with his long history of misogynous public statements, credible allegations against him of sexual assault and harassment by more than two dozen women, and a finding by a Manhattan jury that he was liable for sexually abusing a woman journalist.

Thus one of the many damaging effects of his reelection is that it helps to simultaneously minimize and “normalize” misogyny. This is quite literally the opposite of what’s required to make dramatic reductions in the incidence of gender-based violence.

Every Man is relatively brief (200 pages plus notes), concise, and energetic. It combines easily digestible analysis about the roots of the problem with a call to action -- especially for men.

Among many other things, I introduce the reader to the “triad of men’s violence,” a concept first put forth by White Ribbon Campaign co-founder and author Michael Kaufman.

The triad, as Kaufman laid it out in a classic 1987 essay, connects men's violence against women to men's violence against other men, which in turn is connected to men’s violence toward themselves (suicide is violence turned inward).

These types of violence overlap and interact with each other — something that people in the movements against all forms of interpersonal violence need to take into account when they design prevention programs and other initiatives.

The book has a chapter devoted to the ways in which victim-blaming, and the “monsterization” of abusers, are two sides of the same coin: they both function to deflect attention off the otherwise “normal” guys who commit most domestic violence and sexual assault.

The chapter on rape culture includes an extended discussion about the role of misogynous porn in shaping the sexual psyches of heterosexual boys and young men. I also discuss the online misogynous manosphere, and analyze the popularity with boys and young men of Andrew Tate, the manfluencer often described as the “King of Toxic Masculinity.”

One chapter is devoted entirely to a discussion of the predictable arguments many men use to evade responsibility for acting to prevent gender-based violence (e.g. #NotAllMen, Whataboutism), followed by my suggestions for how to rebut those arguments.

There are chapters about the bystander approach to prevention (I am one of its early architects), and the critical role that men’s leadership has to play in all of this.

The final chapter includes 21 Action Steps for Men, a list presented in the spirit of “go big or go home.” I explain that the steps are an expansion of a list that I first generated in 1990 entitled “Ten Things Men Can do to Prevent Gender Violence.” That document, initially a paper flyer, has been circulating around the internet for decades, and has been translated into more than a dozen languages.