"It was 'that' kind of man who harmed you, not this kind." But how can we prevent harm in the future? What did we miss? What went wrong?The burden
“It was ‘that’ kind of man who harmed you, not this kind.” But how can we prevent harm in the future? What did we miss? What went wrong?
The burden cannot remain: women, learn him better. The question must also be: why was he permitted to keep doing this?
There is an old trick in conversations about violence against women.
Photo by Danielle-Claude Bélanger
Find the kind of man who supposedly represents the danger.
Give him a name. Give him a category. Give society a way to recognize him as different from other men. Then gradually allow the category to become the explanation.
History has produced many versions of this man. He has been described through ideas about criminality, mental abnormality, class, race, sexuality, morality and stranger danger. Some categories described real characteristics of particular offenders. Others were built from prejudice, pseudoscience, or outright propaganda.
“This kind of man did this to you.”
And hiding underneath that sentence is another:
Therefore, this other kind of man is not the danger we are talking about.
That is the Exception Man.
1. ⚠️ The Exception Man gives society somewhere smaller to put the problem
Women noticing danger earlier is useful. Men causing less danger is prevention.
Male violence against women is an enormous subject.
It takes us into homes, marriages, dating relationships, workplaces, schools, religious institutions, prisons, medical settings, militaries, entertainment industries and ordinary social life.
The “Exception Man” makes the problem smaller.
Instead of examining male violence across relationships and institutions, society can concentrate attention on a recognizable category of particularly troubling men.
The category may contain dangerous men. That is not the issue.
The mistake is believing that identifying one dangerous category tells us where the boundaries of danger end. It does not.
2. 🕰️ We have watched the designated dangerous man change before
We cannot keep measuring prevention by how successfully women avoid men who intend to harm them.
Different periods produced different language.
There was the rake and the libertine. The masher became a recognizable figure associated with men who accosted and harassed women in public. “Degenerate” and “defective” emerged from eras influenced by pseudoscientific theories about human behavior.
The early and middle twentieth century gave considerable attention to the sex fiend, sex maniac, sexual psychopath and sexual pervert.
American racism created something even more sinister: the mythology of the sexually dangerous Black brute, used to portray Black men as a particular sexual threat to white women and to rationalize racial terror.
Later generations became deeply familiar with the stranger rapist, serial predator, psychopath, creep and monster.
These words did not all mean the same thing.
Their consequences were not the same.
But women should recognize the recurring temptation:
Find the exceptional man and let him carry an explanation far larger than himself.
3. 🔍 The Exception Man can be genuinely dangerous and still be a distraction
Every safety lesson taught to a girl should be accompanied by a harder question for the world around her: what are you doing about the person creating the danger?
This is where careful thinking is necessary.
Some men are repeat sexual offenders. Some are extraordinarily violent. Some offenders do present characteristics that are useful for investigators, clinicians and courts to understand.
Recognizing those men is not the problem.
The problem begins when:
Some dangerous men have Characteristic X
quietly becomes:
Characteristic X explains the danger men present to women.
Those are entirely different statements.
4. 🚪 Every Exception Man creates men who appear to stand outside the problem
Women, children, and males too deserve more than an ever-growing manual for navigating male behavior.
Categories have edges.
The moment society says, this is the kind of man who does this, another category begins forming on the other side:
the men who ARE NOT like him.
Respectable men.
Familiar men.
Successful men.
Married men.
Educated men.
Popular men.
Men from good families.
Men who do not fit the day’s norms.
Men whose friends assure everybody that they would never do such a thing.
But violence against women has never respected those boundaries.
A woman can be harmed by someone frightening. She can also be harmed by someone everybody trusts.
5. 🏠 Women were harmed by men they knew while society watched for strangers
Women are allowed to protect ourselves without accepting responsibility for the danger that made protection necessary.
Perhaps no example makes the weakness clearer than the cultural image of the “stranger rapist.”
Women and girls were taught to fear the unknown man following them down a dark street.
That man certainly exists.
But so does the date. The boyfriend. The husband. The relative. The coworker. The authority figure. The trusted family friend.
A safety framework becomes dangerously incomplete when women become excellent at identifying society’s designated villain WHILE remaining poorly equipped to recognize coercive behavior from someone who does not resemble him.
Danger is a behavior problem before it is a branding problem.
6. 🖤 Black women have particular reason to distrust the Exception Man
American history provides one of the clearest warnings about what happens when society becomes invested in identifying the right kind of dangerous male.
The racist mythology of the Black male rapist helped rationalize lynching and racial terror.
Ida B. Wells interrogated that story more than a century ago. Her investigations exposed how allegations concerning the protection of white women could operate alongside indifference toward violence experienced by Black women.
That contradiction should never be forgotten. A society can become intensely interested in who it wants people to imagine as the rapist without becoming equally committed to protecting women from rape.
7. 🧭 Women’s safety requires behavior recognition
Teaching women how to recognize coercion is valuable. Building a world that refuses to tolerate coercive men is the unfinished work.
A more durable safety question is not:
What kind of man is he?
It is:
What is he doing?
Does he ignore no?
Does he test boundaries?
Does he retaliate when denied access?
Does he believe women’s rules should bend for him?
Does he use intimidation, threats, or harassment?
Does he isolate?
Does he deceive women to obtain access they might otherwise refuse?
Does he exploit intoxication, dependency, disability, age, poverty, employment or authority?
Does he become angry when a woman exercises independence?
Does he have people around him who continually explain his behavior away?
Does he require accommodations that endanger or harm women and children?
Does he violate the boundaries or rights of women and children?
Those questions travel. They work when the man is rich or poor, celebrated or unknown, familiar or strange. Women do not need the perfect cultural vocabulary before recognizing dangerous behavior.
8. 🚨 Be careful when a new word promises an old reassurance
Women cannot screen, predict, anticipate, avoid, de-escalate, and escape our way out of a problem we did not create.
Language changes. It should.
We learn things. Some old terminology was cruel, inaccurate, or rooted in terrible ideas. Better language can improve law, medicine, research, and ordinary human understanding.
But new terminology should never receive automatic authority over women’s risk assessment simply because it is new.
When a new classification enters conversations about male violence, we are still allowed to ask:
What exactly does this distinction tell us about violence?
What evidence supports separating these men from other men for this particular analysis?
What behaviors are being illuminated?
What behaviors might disappear from view?
Who becomes the designated dangerous man?
And perhaps most importantly:
Who becomes the man we are encouraged not to worry about?
Those are not hostile questions. They are safety questions.
9. 🛑 Women do not have to exchange observed reality for vocabulary
We should be careful with any safety framework that becomes an elaborate explanation of what women should have recognized.
Women have lived through changing terminology before.
Words arrive with institutions behind them. Experts adopt them. Newspapers repeat them. Advocacy organizations incorporate them. Eventually a classification can begin to feel like reality itself.
But the word is still a tool.
Women are not required to reorganize our understanding of danger merely because society has reorganized its vocabulary.
If a distinction improves our ability to understand violence, demonstrate how.
If it improves prevention, demonstrate how.
If it helps women recognize risk earlier, demonstrate how.
And if it merely divides males into increasingly refined categories while violence against women continues across those categories, women are entitled to notice that too.
10. 🌿 Classification is not protection
After violence, society often becomes fascinated with the clues a woman missed. I am interested in the boundaries a man crossed.
The Exception Man has appeared under different names because there is something comforting about believing danger has a special face.
If only dangerous men belonged to a recognizable category, women could learn the category and avoid them.
History has not given women that luxury.
The frightening man may be dangerous.
The socially acceptable man may be dangerous.
The stranger may be dangerous.
The beloved man may be dangerous.
None of this means every man is dangerous. It means danger cannot be reliably excluded merely by placing a man outside society’s currently disfavored category.
That is why the Exception Man deserves to be recognized as a recurring pattern.
Because women have repeatedly been offered classifications that seemed to answer who harms women when the harder work was learning how women are harmed, what behaviors precede that harm, who enables it, and what actually makes women safer.
New generations will create new words.
Some will be useful. Some will eventually disappear. Some may describe meaningful differences.
But no new word should require women to surrender an old lesson:
A name for the dangerous man is not the same thing as safety from male violence.
Our vocabulary can change. Our attention to behavior should not.
If your solution to male violence requires women to become more restricted while violent men remain unchanged, you have placed the intervention on the wrong person.
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