I don’t deny women are more often the victims.

I also don’t deny men are more often the perpetrators.

These are both true. But my point is that pointing it out avoids the actual power dynamic.

(I often work in science, so that is the way I think, apologies if this gets a bit dry, but it’s the way I handle things.)

A 75% correlation is statistics is not a final answer. It is a clue leading to the answer.

Sure, 75% of the harassment is perpetrated by men.

Also, I can pretty much guarantee you that 75% of harassment is perpetrated by right-handed people.

I don’t blame right-handed people either. That’s just a fact that the majority of people are right-handed. Nearly anything that studies people will find 75% of the people investigated were right handed.

50% of people, roughly, are male. So you’re guaranteed a minimum of 50% for any study for anything probably finding 50% being male. So beyond the minimum, we have an additional 25%. That DOES mean there’s correlation, but it DOES NOT mean cause and effect. In science, there is a concept called ‘the p-value’. It is a percentage value that has to be met for two things to be considered linked into cause an effect. The p-value is 0.05. This is used in everything from the drugs you eat, to sociology studies by the government, to making sure your electronic devices don’t kill you. A surprising amount of modern life relies on the p-value to determine cause and effect.

The link between harassment and maleness does not meet the p-value, but there is a better-than-coin-flip relationship between harassment and maleness. This means that maleness and harassment are not a cause and effect, but they share a trait that correlates them; that causes them to overlap.

What it means is you have the first clue towards harassment, not the cause. Like a detective who found that that the thief always wears a blue shirt and frequents a certain nightclub, and you found someone who always frequents a nightclub and is wearing a blue shirt. But everyone that frequents that nightclub and is wearing a blue shirt matches that criteria too. Matching only 75% the suspects description does not make the suspect the thief, especially when there are other suspects who fully match the description too.

An example of another correlation is murder and blacks. There is a higher number of blacks as convicted murderers than any other race in the U.S. However, it would be called racist (and rightly so) to start accusing every black person of being a murderer. There’s a statistical overlap, a correlation, but they are not cause and effect, they are not synonyms, you cannot blame one for the other. You cannot blame murder on blacks, you cannot blame harassment on men, for the exact same reasons.

Being male shares traits with whatever is the cause for harassment, and it may even use maleness as a guise to hide what’s really going on, but a 75% match just doesn’t cut it. It’s like the thief at the nightclub trying to convince the detective that another person in a blue shirt that is the thief. “Maleness” is not the cause. That’s not what’s really going on. It’s something deeper, something more hidden.

However, untested, I feel pretty confident that if it was tested, 95+% of harassment would show that the harasser had some self-perceived and society-encouraged superiority over the person harassed, but is feeling things rougher than normal in some way, and is lashing out.

If we want to stop harassment, instead of attacking maleness, the solution would be to go after the actual cause. Which, I suspect, would be the idea that any person is inherently better than any other person.

Now, at this point, we would have come almost full circle, and the point could be made, “Hey, we should blame males so they don’t feel superior to women.” The problem with that is although it’d work for a time, the pendulum would eventually swing, and that 25% of harassment perpetrators that are women would grow as women… as they feel empowered over men (note, not generally empowered, but over men specifically), eventually some would start feeling they’re innately superior to men, and then you’re left with the exact same dynamic we have now, just with the genders reversed, except with the added social stigmata of “Men are the source of problems” and not just claimed as superior due to ‘they’re better at reaching higher shelves’ or some silly nonsense. The risk of thinking an ethnic or genetic sub-group is an inherent problem can be seen throughout history, so I don’t think I need to go into detail on the risks of that.

We don’t want to just swing the pendulum back, we want to stop it entirely.

And you can’t do that with “Us vs Them” attitudes. It is only done with attitudes of solidarity. There can be no “Those of US are good, It’s THEM that are the problem.” The solution to oppression must be, “WE (as in all of us) have a problem, so how do we correct it?”

So, how do we correct the problem we have with oppression and harassment? We have to teach people that other people are all intrinsically worthwhile, that we all live in society together, that we are connected, that we rely on each-other: that hurting another person hurts ourselves. We have to teach our children that everyone has a life story we can learn from, that everyone is a role model. Without them even thinking of gender, color, nationality, etc. I want to see young girls from Africa asking, “Einstein is my role model. How can I be more like him?” I want to see white teenage boys from the Bronx sittind back and thinking, “I idolize Empress Wu Zetian. How can I apply lessons from her life to mine?” I want to see an a low-caste indian schoolgirl sitting in class thinking, “You know, Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcom X are my heroes. I’m going to help my caste get equal treatment, just like he did for his.” And so on.

We don’t solve barriers by reinforcing them. We solve them by tearing them down.

To this end, teaching about fluidity of gender, getting rid of gendered bathrooms, getting rid of separate boys/girls sports/gym classes, teaching history holistically, and similar will be how we solve harassment. Not another round of “let’s blame someone.”