Author: Jackson Katz

Jackson Katz, Ph.D., is a regular Ms. contributor and creator of the 2024 film The Man Card: 50 Years of Gender, Power, and the American Presidency . He is a co-founder of the Young Men Research Initiative and writes a Substack newsletter, In the Arena with Jackson Katz. The American version of Katz’s new book, Every Man: Why Violence Against Women is a Men’s Issue, was recently published by Bloomsbury.

Is the Cornell Rape Case a Turning Point for Men?

What allegedly took place at Cornell was a preventable tragedy. One young man with the guts to say, “This is wrong!” might have stopped it from happening.

It’s a crying shame that didn’t happen. But a silver lining in this sorry tale is that a growing number of men seem to grasp that their silence has contributed to the problem.

Programming with boys and young men should go beyond awareness-raising and behavior-change messaging, to address the gender norms, power relations and social structures that sustain violence.

This means giving young men the opportunity to talk with each other, as well as with their female peers, about what it means to be a man.

This means allowing them to ask and answer the following sorts of questions:

—If you’re a guy, what does it mean to be one of the guys?
—Are you willing to compromise your values for the sake of fitting in?
—What is the price of being part of the brotherhood?
—Is other men’s approval more important than treating women with respect and dignity?

For Gloria Steinem, Women’s Liberation Meant Men’s Liberation, Too

Since her death, social media has lit up with heartfelt stories and testimonies, mostly from women, about Gloria’s impact on their lives. When men have weighed in with expressions of gratitude, it’s often been to thank her for helping to create a world in which their mothers, wives and daughters had a much better shot at pursuing their dreams.

For the record, this “better world” for women has been a tremendous boon for men and boys, too. And what has largely been missing from men’s grateful accounts of Gloria Steinem’s good works are the ways in which her leadership contributed directly to improvements in men’s lives.

She did this, in part, by using her platform to articulate—in a very public way—the idea that patriarchal culture was damaging not only to women, but also to men of every ethnic and racial background and sexual orientation.

Gloria Steinem was also one of the first prominent feminists to express empathy for men—like me—who struggled with the question of what it means to be a strong man who supports gender justice and wants men to lead more connected and authentic lives.

Andrew Tate in His Own Words: On Men’s Rights, Anti-Feminism and How He ‘Threatens the System’

Andrew Tate is not a garden variety misogynist. Nor is he a typical sexual assault suspect.  

Rather, he is a leader—and icon—in the global anti-feminist men’s rights movement who rose to fame and fortune over the past decade through a potent blend of personal charisma, overweening ambition and cynical opportunism.

And he is an alleged rapist and sex trafficker.

He is currently in U.S. federal custody in Miami, along with his brother Tristan, awaiting possible extradition to the United Kingdom on 59 criminal charges that include multiple allegations of violent rape and physical assault.

Andrew Tate is also a right-wing political figure who has vociferously and repeatedly attacked feminism, and has had an outsized influence globally in the normalization of overt expressions of misogyny by men and boys.   

Much has been written about Tate over the years. A recent piece in The New Yorker that has attracted much attention is entitled “Andrew Tate’s Empire of Abuse,” by Heidi Blake. The article’s subtitle reads “How the defining figure of the manosphere built a fortune—and became a political force—by systematically exploiting women.”

But for anyone who wants insight into the ways in which the former professional kickboxer has been able to assemble an enormous following of boys and men, there’s another valuable source of information: Tate himself.

Eric Swalwell and the Persistent Problem of Silent Complicity

The Eric Swalwell scandal is an altogether familiar and tired exercise: When allegations surface against a powerful man, the people around him scramble to distance themselves, downplay what they knew, or deny any knowledge at all. And yet, time and again, these cases are described as “open secrets.”

The real question is not just what he did, but what the people around him saw, heard and chose not to act on.

This is where the conversation needs to shift. For decades, sexual assault prevention educators have argued that we need to move beyond the perpetrator-victim binary and focus on the role of bystanders: What could colleagues have done? What kept them from speaking up?

The pressure to be “one of the guys,” to not rock the boat, to protect friendships or careers, remains enormously powerful. If we are serious about preventing abuse, institutions like Congress need to do more than react after the fact. They need to equip people, especially men, with the tools, the permission and the expectation to intervene before harm escalates.

Every Man Has a Critical Role to Play in Ending Violence Against Women

(An excerpt from Jackson Katz’s Every Man: Why Violence Against Women Is a Men’s Issue, and How You Can Make a Difference, out March 19 from Bloomsbury Publishing.)

In 2024, a mass rape scandal rocked France and reverberated around the world. Fifty men in a small town in the southern part of the country were convicted of raping Gisèle Pelicot, a woman who had been secretly drugged by her husband and set up to be assaulted. The shining light of this horrific case was the courage and dignity of Gisèle, who became an international feminist icon when she insisted on being present and highly visible throughout the spectacle of the trial. She made it clear that she wanted to appear in the courtroom to stand up for survivors and send an unmistakable message: “Shame must change sides.”

But this epochal story had another major angle: the 50 men. A brief glance at their bios revealed most of them to be otherwise ordinary men.

The concept of “every man” suggests there is growing recognition among the broader public that this enormous problem has deeper societal roots, and is not primarily about the deviant behavior of pathological individuals.”

Men from every walk of life have a critical role to play on this issue. But first we have to break through some of the layers of denial and resistance that have impeded progress for far too long.

From ‘Every Man’ to the ‘Epstein Class’: Misogyny in Male Peer Culture Cuts Across Class Lines

The rich men surrounding Jeffrey Epstein, and the working and middle-class men who were lured into Dominique Pelicot’s twisted fantasy, navigate the social world from very different sides of the class chasm.

But they share something in common, too: They’re all men who were socialized into a misogynous culture that dehumanizes women, turns them into sexual commodities and licenses men to mistreat them.

Misogynous exploitation is not rooted primarily in plutocratic privilege. The sense of unquestioned entitlement to women’s bodies that many observers have noted about “Epstein class” men is hardly confined to the wealthy.

The Missing Voices in the Epstein Files’ Media Commentary: Sexual Assault Prevention Educators

The Epstein files scandal has all the elements of a gigantic media spectacle. It encompasses everything from true crime to political intrigue, and offers a peak behind closed doors into the lifestyles of the rich and famous. It has more than a little sex and violence. 

It’s a conspiracy theory come to life.

Media commentary has explored seemingly every angle. Or has it? On closer examination, something has been missing.

At Home and Abroad, MAGA’s Politics of Force Try to Reassert White Male Power

The connective tissue of Donald Trump’s takeover of Venezuela, his threats to invade Greenland, the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by masked federal agents in Minneapolis, and the EEOC’s encouragement of white men to bring claims of discrimination against them is this: All represent increasingly desperate efforts by Trump and MAGA to forcefully put white men back in charge.

At Turning Point USA, JD Vance Picks Up Where Charlie Kirk Left Off

Vice President JD Vance gave the closing keynote speech at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest 2025 conference in Phoenix on Dec. 21. It was the first TP gathering since the right-wing organization’s co-founder, Charlie Kirk, was killed in September, and thus bound to attract an extraordinary amount of media coverage and commentary.

His speech cycled through a laundry list of right-wing Christian nationalist gripes about Democrats and the “left.” It’s certainly his right, and prerogative, to share his views. But it’s up to us—his audience—either to accept or push back on those takes.

That’s what I’m doing here.