Deconstructing Abuse

Jackson Katz is burly, a former All-Star college football player with a Boston accent as thick as peanut butter.

When he lectures, he uses only FBI crime statistics, because, as he tells audiences, “few people have ever accused the bureau of being a radical, left-wing organization.” He was raised in a blue-collar home where his stepfather--depending on the year--was a truck driver or a carpenter.

But getting a handle on Katz isn’t as easy as it might seem at first.

A self-styled culture scholar, he is founder of a gender violence intervention program that targets the friends and peers of abusers, and through role play, lecture and a barrage of media images, he asks them to question the current definition of masculinity.

Unlike many workshops, Katz’s MVP Strategies (MVP stands for Mentor Violence Prevention) has no aims to heal the batterer or the victim. He is an independent contractor who has spent the past decade jangling society at the elbow, steering it toward an examination of its destructive expectations of men. So far Katz has held workshops in 600 schools and military institutions around the country.

In 1996, he persuaded the U.S. Marine Corps to allow him to launch its first worldwide gender violence prevention program. By 1999, his work reached distraught Columbine High School administrators, who asked him to help implement his program for a student body traumatized by the shootings. And this year, Disney asked him to speak to animators about body image and gender stereotypes.

The litany of media examples he uses during his workshops was updated by the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, when television viewers saw tears streaming down the soot-covered faces of rugged firemen.

“Since Sept. 11, I’ve done about 15 presentations, and I say that the only positive thing out of this tragedy was that people might be more accepting of men being emotionally honest in public,” Katz said. “Men have always been emotional, but these real men were emotionally honest in public.”

Now look at the Marlboro Man, Katz says. He is held up as the embodiment of masculinity, but did anyone notice how wholly unapproachable this cowboy is? The Marlboro Man is withdrawn, silent and distant, and that’s exactly why he is considered tough.

“I wanted to find out how to involve men in what had traditionally been women’s issues. The idea that it is the battle of the sexes, or gender wars, is ridiculous,” he told a group of 11 noncommissioned officers at Camp Pendleton on a recent weekday afternoon. “It is not men against women--and think about that when we talk about assaulted women. They are international issues. Exhibit A: Afghanistan, and violence against women is central to who the Taliban is.”

These 11 NCOs will bring Katz’s lessons to their troops, spreading his message to thousands of Marines. Pendleton is a regular gig for Katz, and by one officer’s estimate, there is not a Marine on base now who hasn’t been exposed to his teachings. Facing the officers, who sat in a horseshoe of desks in front of him, Katz asked for a show of hands: Who had wives, mother, sisters or girlfriends? Everyone raised a hand.

“Over 99% of rapes are committed by men, and yet it’s been considered a ‘women’s issue,’” he said as the officers lowered their arms. “No. That takes our eyes off the ball. We need to be dealing with this upfront, as leaders.”

He majored in women’s studies in college, earned a graduate degree from Harvard University, and sits on the secretary of Defense’s Task Force on Domestic Violence in the military.

Mary Page, the civilian in charge of the Marine Corps’ domestic violence prevention program, said officers hear “this very difficult subject without experiencing it as male bashing, which was very productive.”

“He’s just real,” Page said. “He’s male and confronts them on issues without male bashing and that’s really appreciated, because I think that’s what men think is going to happen when they hear about domestic violence--that it’s all their fault.”

Page is being generous. Katz is talking about touchy stuff, and he said he would be surprised if he didn’t encounter some resistance. On this day, he hits a nerve with two of the nine male officers in the group who are clearly uncomfortable with the level of intimacy in the discussion. “This is a topic of controversy,” Sgt. Michael Valiente said. “What we talk about here stays right here.”

Another officer found Katz exasperating.

“Get to the point,” said the officer, who asked his name not be printed. “It’s like you’re trying to sell us on the course.”

So Katz introduced one of his favorite anecdotes--the one about Miller Lite beer. In 1972, the company had to figure out a way to unload its failed, experimental batch of “diet” beer for women with an effective ad campaign. The producers cast two undeniably macho guys--former professional football players Bubba Smith and Dick Butkus. They placed them in a sports bar and had them sit across from each other as they barked competitively. Shouting “great taste!” and “less filling!” banished the female stigma associated with low-calorie beer.

Miller Lite is now the official beer of the National Football League.

For Katz, Miller Lite’s ad history is an entertaining way to examine the cultural shorthand stamped on the image of a “masculine man.” But the image is not accurate, and worse, it’s not attainable.

Cornell University is tracking officers before and after the training to determine if Katz has made a difference in their attitudes. “Most Marines come into the class thinking it will be another domestic violence lecture, a waste of time, and essentially a ‘check in the box’ exercise,” said Cornell researcher Brian Leidy, who is conducting the study among Marines. “By the end of the second day, most feel the training provided a lot of valuable information that they are anxious to use. Finding the opportunity to use it is the hard part, especially out in the fleet.”

What’s even more difficult is quantifying the effect of Katz’s work.

“We’d like to see if we see changes in [crime] blotter reports,” Leidy said.

Still, Katz believes in his message, as do an increasing number of institutions who hire him.

“It’s positive peer pressure. I believe that the vast majority of men’s violence against women is preventable. The vast majority of men who abuse women are not sickos or pathological,” Katz said. “They are susceptible to model, mentoring and rehabilitation, and we’re trying to stimulate that with MVP to get other men to become mentors--not an authority figure, but like an older brother and sister.”

Katz’s work began through the MVP Program he founded at Northeastern University’s Center for the Study of Sport in Society in Boston, but a few years ago he moved west to establish MVP Strategies, taking the teaching model outside of the sports world and into institutions such as the military. Almost as important, the independent company enables him to live near Cal State Long Beach, where his wife works as a professor.

The couple had just learned she was pregnant with their first child when he was invited to speak to animators at Disney this spring. Reflecting on the visit, he said it took on renewed resonance when he realized that the first concentration of media images his son or daughter might see could emerge from the animators seated in front of him. He spoke about unrealistic body images in cartoons and toys, and the destruction they wreak on boys and girls.

Pop culture insists that males of worth are big and strong, while females of value remain small or “feminine” enough not to threaten men. These messages set up physical power plays, and Katz urged the artists to provide children more realistic versions of their own bodies--bodies that don’t condone weakness in girls or bullying strength in boys.

He played clips from the Media Education Foundation’s “Tough Guise: Violence, Media and the Crisis in Masculinity,” an 85-minute film that Katz narrates. G.I. Joe has gotten so pumped up and muscular in the past 40 years that the current model’s biceps are proportionately bigger than those of baseball great Mark McGwire, the film points out. It is another message to boys that size and power matter.

At the same time, the educational video shows, female models are getting thinner and thinner. An average healthy woman, according to federal statistics, stands 5 feet 4 and weighs up to 142 pounds. But the average model measures 5 feet 9 and weighs no more than 110 pounds.

The Disney animators started cracking up during a scene from the 1960s TV series “Batman,” in which actor Adam West, wearing loose-fitting tights and cape, runs chicken-chested as he holds a small, fiery cannonball. The next clip showed the 1990s version of the superhero, but this time he was played by a buff Val Kilmer, whose costume included a rubber torso shield crafted with rippling muscles and stomach muscles that are bulletproof.

But if boys and men are taught to be big, tough and alone, how do they effectively talk about their anger? Katz pressed. How do they work out relationships in nonviolent methods, even though it seems that everyone who “takes a stand” is armed?

Teaching artists and soldiers and athletes and students is an unexpected destiny, Katz admitted on a recent afternoon. But he can barely remember a time when these issues didn’t bother him. He specifically remembers an American literature course during his sophomore year at University of Massachusetts at Amherst in which a male professor assigned books by feminist and black authors.

“I was having conversations with my fellow students about experiences of people of color and women, and it was profound for me to experience life through their lens. Me--a straight, white guy from the suburbs. Instead of being defensive and thinking it was anti-male, it just really interested me,” he said.

It eventually did more than simply pique his interest for a semester. It evolved into an awakening about his own image. Katz saw an opportunity to push the limits of his traditionally masculine image by preaching a traditionally feminist philosophy.

“I was successful early on in the sports culture, so I was not intimidated by the male culture at all,” he said. “I knew I’d be a good person to do something about it.”

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Dana Calvo is a Times staff writer.