Georgie Porgie Is a Bully

By Katha Pollitt The author is an essayist and poet. Her book of poems, Antarctic Traveller, won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1983.

My three-year-old daughter is puzzled. Why, she wants to know, did Georgie Porgie kiss the girls and make them cry? "Because he's mean," I say, with a sinking feeling, for how can this be the right answer? As the rollicking little rhyme makes all too clear, young George is a clever rogue, all pudding and pie; the tearful girls are merely boring. Mother Goose in one hand and a leaky juice box in the other, I begin the sad, infuriating task shared by all modern mothers of daughters: to raise my child to be confident, adventurous and happy in her gender in a society saturated with sexual violence and victim blaming.

Am I a humorless prude? Given what we know about today's America, certainly not. My mother could imagine rape was rare; I know it is common. She wondered if my future husband would "deserve" me; I wonder if my daughter's will put her in the hospital, or even the grave. My parents fretted over buying me a Barbie, and my husband and I will have that discussion too, one day. But whom are we kidding? What's one more sexist image in the current climate of meanspirited misogyny -- Sam Kinison and Andrew Dice Clay, Jason and Freddy, 2 Live Crew -- to which the woman-affirming alternative is supposed to be, of all people, Madonna, who dresses in armor-plated underwear and sings about liking to be spanked?

Here are some facts to curl any woman's hair. According to the Senate Judiciary Committee this past June, the rape rate is increasing four times as fast as the overall crime rate. One in five adult women has been raped, one in six by someone she knows. Between 3 million and 4 million women are beaten each year, 1 million so severely that they seek medical help. More than half of all homeless women are fleeing domestic violence. Think about that the next time a bag lady asks you for a quarter.

The one bright spot is that women have finally brought sexual violence to the front of our own consciousness. It is a triumph of modern feminism that an immense and very angry conversation is taking place among women nationwide. Society has been "sensitized": we have rape hot lines and rape shield laws, battered-women's shelters and battered-women's-syndrome legal defenses. Just how much real change is occurring, however, is open to question. Two years after the Washington police department directed officers to make arrests in domestic-violence cases, local women's groups found that the policy was rarely enforced. But at least the subject is on the table -- for women.

But what about men? Sexual violence is not about female behavior, after all. It's about male behavior. Physically, it may be women's problem; morally, it is men's. But where, outside a few campus grouplets, is their conversation taking place? Men's magazines still use the subject to titillate, as when Esquire puts the dead Laura Palmer of Twin Peaks on the cover of its "Women We Love" issue. A 10-year study suggests that more than one-third of alleged group sexual assaults on college campuses are perpetrated by athletes; fraternities are blamed for the majority of such attacks. Where are the coaches, the administrators, the alumni forever touting the value of male bonding? Where is the outrage from the good kids, the ones who don't gang-rape the drunken girl at the beer blast but hear their friends snickering about it the next day?

Most men, of course, do not rape or batter or kill. But that doesn't mean, as too many of them seem to think, that they have nothing to do with violence against women. Each of us in our daily lives helps shape the cultural images and assumptions that define the limits of the permissible. In the case of racial bigotry, we see this clearly: civilized whites don't tell racist jokes or defend the virulent gabfests on talk radio as harmless spleen venting. Where violence and misogyny are concerned, though, men just don't seem to get it. Give up skin magazines, bimbo jokes, woman-bashing rock and rap? Join women on a march against domestic violence? Get real.

I'm not talking about resurrecting chivalry, as conservatives claim to want, or about government censorship, which liberals rightly fear. I'm talking about men engaging in some serious self-scrutiny, challenging their prejudices and privileges, taking their fair share of responsibility for the mess we are in. Men should ask themselves why they like what they like, and what messages those preferences send to men, and women, and children. When Christopher Hitchens, for example, writes in his Nation column that he finds 2 Live Crew very funny, what is he saying about his capacity for empathy? Maybe if he knew why he laughed, the songs wouldn't sound so funny.

The fact is, to call sexual violence a "women's issue" is a serious misnomer. Women can't fix it on their own and shouldn't be expected to. Society doesn't expect Jews to stop anti-Semitism, or blacks to stop racism, or children to end child abuse. Until we demand that men do their share, we will always be going around in circles: safety vs. freedom, daring vs. fear.

My mother opted for safety and passed her choice on to me; you won't find me jogging in Central Park at night. I want something better for my daughter. I want fathers to raise boys to respect women as equals and keep their fists to themselves. Some cherished male folkways may have to go -- the cult of hyperviolent heroes like Rambo, for example. Too bad. I want men to confront their own aggression, the pleasure they take in its depiction and the excuses they make for its enactment -- that no really means yes, that wives need to know who's boss, that "bad" girls are fair game. I want them to tell their tiny sons what I tell my daughter: Georgie Porgie isn't cute. He's mean.