Murmurs of anticipation filled the Neilson Library Browsing Room as guests filed in on Sept. 24. Attendees—men, women, Smithies, and community members alike—all made the same decision: to spend their Thursday evening listening to activist and writer Jackson Katz speak. His words retroactively feel more relevant than ever given the current cultural conversations sparked by the recent news from Cornell University.
Katz, who describes himself and other men like him as “pro-feminist,” was there for a book talk on his new book Every Man: Why Violence Against Women is a Men’s Issue. He has been engaging in topics like this for decades, ever since he graduated from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he was the first man to get a minor in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Throughout the evening, Katz spoke passionately about the role of men in fighting gender based violence at a systemic level. “The missing piece in all of this work [of feminism] is men’s leadership,” said Katz.
The event began with an introduction from Smith College Professor of the Study of Women and Gender, Carrie Baker.
In a subsequent interview, Baker explained her past with Katz. “I have been aware of Jackson’s work for decades, but I only met him when I moved up here, maybe 10 years ago, ” she said. The two have been friends ever since, and it was Baker who reached out to Katz to plan this book talk. “I knew the book was coming out, and he’s never spoken at Smith, and, you know, he lives right here in the valley, and I really wanted to bring him to speak at Smith, and to talk about his new book because I think it’s really important. He gives talks all over the world and is paid huge sums of money to give talks, and we have him right here in our backyard,” explained Baker.
The event began with Katz stepping up to the podium, his first words immediately setting the tone for the night. “I’m gonna say some things that are pretty provocative; I mean, we have some pretty big issues in the world.”
The first section of Katz’s talk revolved around shifting the basic framework we use to discuss men’s violence against women. Even the words most commonly used to describe these issues–violence against women–removes the “active agent,” the male perpetrator, from the conversation,” said Katz.
This passive language is clearly present, for example, in stories about the so-called “Cornell Seven” case. For example, even the BBC removed the male agent at the beginning of their piece on the case. The article, written by Nardine Saad, Kayla Epstein, and Nada Tawfik on Sept. 30, states that Jane Doe alleged: “she was drugged and raped at a fraternity house at the university.”
To illustrate his point, Katz used a nearby scratchpad to do an exercise that, according to him, is the single thing people remember most from his 2013 TEDx Talk, despite it being a last-minute addition. To start, Katz wrote the phrase “John beat Mary,” an active sentence clearly delineating John as the perpetrator. Through a series of questions to the crowd, he wrote several altered sentences, eventually landing on the one people tend to actually use, “Mary is an abused woman.” Here, said Katz, we have made Mary’s victimhood her whole identity and completely removed John from the equation.
Katz then shifted to his next point, which embodies the bulk of his message: men must be the leaders in fighting to end gender-based violence. And, he clarifies, this fight cannot be at an individual level. “It’s irrational to think we can run from one broken man to the next, wondering what went wrong.”
Katz went on to explain the method he teaches young men across the country, in the military and on college campuses, what he calls the Bystander Approach. Essentially, this approach revolves around changing the acceptability of abusive behaviors in male circles. By getting men to challenge each other, we can begin to change cultural norms.
However, as Katz notes, an important factor in the success of this approach is the willingness of leaders to implement and enforce these techniques at a systemic level. This point brought up a discussion about the current political climate of the United States; Katz criticized both President Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, citing the way Hegseth has systematically replaced “people who have been outstanding with gender equity.” “All of these powerful men, and no one holds them accountable,” said Katz.
The event then transitioned to a Question and Answer section, where community members and Smithies asked several engaging questions about his work. Smith student Olive Sterry ’29 had a particularly interesting question. Sterry, a Women & Gender Studies major, prefaced her question by stating that she was lucky to have men in her life who are “open to having these conversations.” But she asked, what advice did Katz have for having “fruitful conversations with men without them getting defensive?”
The best way, Katz replied, to cultivate and engage in these meaningful conversations is by finding areas of connection; essentially, relating men’s issues to women’s. “The same system that produces men that abuse women produces men that abuse men,” Katz said. This phenomenon is referred to as the Triad of Men’s Violence: men’s violence against women leads to men’s violence against men, which, ultimately, leads to men’s violence against themselves. After all, according to the CDC, the “suicide rate among males in 2024 was nearly four times higher than the rate among females.”
According to Katz, this is because, while women attempt suicide more often, men use far more violent methods, due to the systems of violence they are often entrenched in. This fact is, as Katz described it, the “point of entry” with men. After all, the men’s health movement sprang up directly as an outgrowth of the women’s health movement.
Perhaps this concept was the single most important takeaway from this book talk. Everyone in the room: men, women, and non-binary people alike, had come that night with the hope of learning more about how to fight the societal problem of gender-based violence.
At one point of the evening, Katz quoted recently deceased Smith alum and feminist Gloria Steinem ’56: “Make no mistake about it: Women want a men’s movement. We are literally dying for it.” As Katz said, gender-based violence impacts us all, regardless of who we are: “This is not about the individual; it’s about the society at a bigger level.”
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