In general, women are made invisible when they do something that might elevate their status, such as raising children into healthy adults of coming up with a brilliant idea in a business meeting. Men, however, are often made invisible when their behavior is socially undesirable and might raise questions about the appropriateness of male privilege. Although the vast majority of violent acts are perpetrated by men, for example, news accounts rarely call attention to the gender of those who rape, kill, beat, torture, and make war on others. Instead, we read about mobs, crowds, people, students, gangs, citizens, youths, fans, workers, militants, party members, teenagers, insurgents, soldiers, and so on - ungendered categories that presumably can include both women and men. If a crowd of women gather to make a news-worthy event, however, one can be sure they will be identified as women, not merely as a crowd. But such attention is rarely paid to maleness per se. And on those rare occasions when someone mentions statistics on male violence and suggests that this might be a problem worth looking at, the response is yawning impatience ("Oh, thisagain?") or, more likely, a torrent of objections to the male-bashing straw man defense: "You're accusing all men of being murders and rapists!" [In fact, this happened to me the other day on the forums - Aqualung]
When the media do identify male gender, they rarely make much of it. With numbing regularity, we hear reports of violent crimes perpetrated by men, from wife beating, stalking, rape and murder to the gunning down of workers and bystanders by disgruntled employees to the September 11 disasters to mass murder as an instrument of national policy. Yet rarely do we hear the simple statement that the perpetrators of such acts are almost always men. Nor do we take seriously the idea that men's pervasive involvement in such violence provides a clue to understanding it and why it happens. No one suggests, for example, that an ethic of masculine control might be connected to the use of violence or that there is good reason to limit the male population's opportunities to harm others. Note, however, the radically different response when subordinate groups are the focus The fact that most early AIDS victims were gay men, for example, brought demands to quarantine and repress the entire gay population, even though most gay men didn't have AIDS. [Or, in response to 9/11, the rise of racial profiling around arabs and muslims - Aqualung] Teenage pregnancy - a state that describes women and not men - is a hot topic in the United States, but not male insemination of teenage girls. And if people of color did violence to whites at the rate that the male population produces violence against women, there would be national mobilization to do something to contain this "dangerous population."
