I’ve been thinking about why it is that so many men and boys feel so free to be violent to women or to assault women sexually. I think I have to go quite deep into my life to begin to see it.

My mother was a very strong woman, creative and fiercely independent. She started a classy gift shop in Providence, she managed an art gallery, she help run a pioneer vegetarian restaurant, she had great ambitions for herself.

Yet she permitted herself to be defeated or deterred in every single endeavor of her life by deferring to the wishes of a husband who cared absolutely nothing for her wishes or creativity. All of her life, she raged and railed at him and about him, making all of our lives miserable. But she never once said no when he blocked or undercut her life’s work and ambitions.

Her anger and resentment nearly destroyed her.

It was just accepted by everyone, including her, that her life was less important than his, his career choices – and salary – more important than hers. Although my mother was a very strong woman, it never once occurred to her or my father or anyone in my extended family that her wishes or needs  were of equal importance to his.

I never met a truly strong and independent woman until I married my first wife, and even she struggled with this same issue – whenever she applied for a job at a newspaper (she was a journalist) her application was referred to the fashion desk.  She could not apply to a single college that my daughter applied to, they only took men. We moved a dozen times in our first years together, and every move was about my career, not hers.

She finally said we would not move again after my daughter was born, and we didn’t, but I think the seeds of our eventual divorce were already ready planted and deep. I see now that every time we moved, I was saying my work was more important than hers, that I was more important than she was.

Almost every man alive has grown up in an environment that taught them that women were less than they were, less important, less powerful.No wonder broken and powerful men thought of them and their bodies as the inevitable perks of power.

Wasn’t that what all of us saw growing up, and in the movies and on TV?

I never met a woman who said no, or who assumed she was as powerful as men were until I got to television and ran into some of the first female anchors in news.

They were tough and empowered – I think of Diane Sawyer in particular – and  demanded an equal role in the presentation of news on their broadcasts. If they were not exactly treated as equals, they began to get what they wanted and deserved.

That was the first time I had ever seen that happen. They planted the seeds, even as their bosses and agents warned them not to be too tough or assertive, their audience didn’t like tough women. But they had to be quiet about it. They are not quiet about it now.

Women in vast numbers are doing the same thing,  talking to one another and saying enough is enough. The Rolling Stone has picked up enough moss.

They are demanding that men who injure or harass women be held accountable, and at least some of the men are being held accountable. Stirring stuff, I have only recently suspected I would see this in  my lifetime

I am  reading a helpful book as I reel from the news, and rejoice in much of it, as sad and disturbing as it is. It is called “The Macho Paradox: Why Some Men Hurt Women And How All Men Can Help,” by Jackson Katz, who has studied gender violence prevention with men and woman, he is co-founder of the Mentors in Violence Prevention program at Northeastern University.

I would like to be one of those men who help but the issue seems to deep and widespread and old that it is overwhelming to even think about how to help. I like Katz’s (idea) that violence and harassment are not just a women’s problem, but a men’s problem.

The issue is personal for me in several ways. One is my mother. The other is my wife, who, when I met her, was nearly crippled by deference to men, she felt powerless.

That is no longer true, and I know for sure that this can be done. It is a beautiful thing to see her strength. I want my daughter and granddaughter to live in a better and safer world. I believe in justice.

Katz has written a sad but compelling book arguing that violence against women  will never stop until men accept responsibility for what they have done and are doing. I know very few men, in or out of the news, who are doing that.

In 2001, the Journal Of the American Medical Association published a study which found that 20 per cent of adolescent girls were physically or sexually abused by a date.

Nearly one-third of American women reported being physically or sexually abused by a husband or boyfriend at some point in their lives.

An estimated 17.7 million women in the United States, nearly 18 per cent, have been raped or have been the victim of attempted rape.

Between one in four and one in  five college women experienced completed or attempted rape during their college years.

Women are far more likely than men to be killed by an intimate partner. In 200, intimate-partner homicides accounted for 33.5 per cent of all murders of women, and less than 4 per cent of murders of men.

And forty per cent of girls aged fourteen to seventeen report knowing someone their age who has been hit or beaten by a boyfriend.

So this, argues Katz, is what makes all of the dreadful harassment stories we are reading about and all those we don’t read about a men’s issue. It is men who are doing it, men who are violent, men who are doing the beating and killing and harassing.

Strangely, this horrendous pandemic of violence is continuously reported by our media and politicians as a women’s issue, or just a “violence” issue. Just watch the news.

Stories about men stalking, attacking and murdering women and children make the regional and national news just about every day. Husbands kill their wives, members of the clergy are arrested for sex offenses, , coaches are arrested for abusing their athletes, corporations are sued almost daily by female employees for harassment by male employees, college athletes are charged with gang rape, husbands terrorize, maim and kill their wives and ex-wives.

Jackson Katz reminds us that the vast majority of gender violence is not reported at all, women fear a hostile and indifferent legal system.

Katz says we will never dramatically reduce men’s violence against women until we can at least name the problem correctly. “At present,” he writes, “few people view this violence the way I’ve described it: as a men’s problem or a men’s issue.”

It’s not something that happens once in awhile, but every day, everywhere.

A consequence of this failure, he writes, is that there is little discussion in the media or anywhere else about why so many American men and boys rape, batter, sexually abuse, and sexually harass women and girls.

“Mainstream commentary about gender violence – and other forms of interpersonal violence – is remarkably degendered,” he writes, as if men and women are doing it equally to one another, that “people” are violent. It’s true that the media rarely, if ever, report the fact that men and boys commit the overwhelming majority of sexual violence.

Few of us know that without men, violence and sexual assault against women would hardly exist.

His idea, which makes sense to me, is that once the spotlight falls where it belongs – on men – then a true dialogue could begin about the causes and solutions to what is clearly a horrific and vast problem. I think what men have seen this Fall is that this does not happen to just a few women, it seems to have happened or be happening in one form or another to almost every woman.

That is the big shock to me, the thing I didn’t get, but get now.

So for me, speaking only for myself, I am thinking about this, talking to myself and other men. I am her to say that this is not acceptable to all men, nor is it the behavior of all men. I know it’s wrong, the men I know it’s wrong. We have always known it is wrong. There is no excuse.

Men are not treated gently by other when they speak up for women, they are often seen as sissies or  traitors,  it will be a long and hard slog all around, for women most of all. But men who care about this will have a hard time getting into the discussion too.

I don’t know what, if anything I can do about it. I do know I can at least name the problem, and if it gets one man to think, that will be worth it. My motto in all things is  one at a time, we know the left and the right will never get anything done.

I guess the bizarre truth is that we were never asked or expected to be involved before, men do not have a movement, and are generally not considered part of the women’s movement. Perhaps that will change.

The issues are overwhelming, but not impossible. Something important has happened, and doors and windows are beginning to open. There is a great window of opportunity, it ought not to close again.

Moral men will be there, it is their issue, if it is anyone’s.