Mind Over Matter Psych Talks | Season 3 Episode 4 | Written Reflection
The Cornell case and the killings of women in Ekurhuleni have been on my mind this week, and both have left me with the same question: what did it look like at the beginning? Not the worst night. The beginning. The first joke, the first clip passed around, the first “no” that was treated as an opening offer.
Nobody wakes up owning the language that lets a man talk about a woman as if she were something to be shared. He picks it up somewhere: a group chat, a car full of friends, a room that laughed. By the time a story becomes a headline, we may be seeing the endpoint of attitudes and behaviours that were rehearsed for years in moments too small to be named. Those moments are what this piece is about. They are not the same as assault and I won’t pretend they are. But they are where boys and men learn what they can say, what they can take and what it will cost them, and it is the culture that teaches those lessons, never the women on the receiving end.
The sociologist Liz Kelly gave this idea shape in 1988 when she proposed that sexual violence be understood as a continuum. Picture a colour gradient, not a ladder: the leer, the remark, the unwanted hand, the pressure, the assault. Each has its own weight, and each is joined to its neighbour by the same belief, that a woman’s body and attention are available and her discomfort is an obstacle to be managed.
The continuum helps explain that what we call normal male behaviour and what we call unacceptable male behaviour bleed into one another with no clean border, which is why the early stages slide by so easily. A continuum describes a climate, not a prediction about an individual. The worst forms of violence do not exist in isolation; they can take root in environments where lesser violations have repeatedly been minimised, excused, or rewarded.
Consider something as ordinary as a video. Someone films the dancing at a braai or a birthday, and a woman is in the frame. The clip is shown to a few friends and later forwarded, and if she ever objected, the answer would be ready: it was just a video. That answer rests on an odd assumption, that consent is a single yes handed over at the door and valid for whatever follows. Being in a room is not agreeing to be archived, and every time the footage travels, the group absorbs a little more firmly the idea that her image is theirs to use. Psychologists call this normalisation. The first time something troubling happens, people flinch; by the tenth time, nobody registers it, and at no point did anyone decide.
What keeps a clip moving is what it earns among the men who pass it on. A woman’s body becomes a topic, and then a score, as when someone announces what he would give her out of ten and the others weigh in. Turning a person into a number is objectification, and research suggests that when we see people as bodies we credit them with less thought and feeling. Yet the ranking is rarely about her at all. It works as currency between men, a way of buying closeness and standing that sociologists call homosocial bonding, and speaking about women the way the others do is among the cheapest ways to buy in.
The same logic shapes what happens when a woman declines a drink, a dance or a lift home and is asked again, smiling. Our culture has an entire genre that flatters this. The man who won’t give up is the hero of the film, and persistence is filed under romance. What the script teaches is that a refusal is an opening position and that wanting something creates a claim on it, which makes her “no” cost far more than it should. That is entitlement in ordinary clothing. It needs no malice to operate, only an audience that never says otherwise.
And the audience is where much of the power sits. When someone says something that crosses a line and half the room laughs, the laughter acts as a reward, and behaviour that is rewarded is repeated. What complicates it is that many of those laughing are privately uneasy. Each hears everyone else’s laughter as sincere and concludes that he must be the odd one out, so he joins in, and his laugh becomes evidence for the next man. This is pluralistic ignorance. It can combine with diffusion of responsibility, where the presence of other witnesses can make each person feel less personally responsible for intervening. A room can hold a dozen men who each wish someone would speak, all waiting for another to go first. The discomfort travels through the room, but so does the silence.
Seen this way, each small act doubles as a test. A man who films without asking, keeps the footage after being told to delete it or sulks after a refusal can end up testing what the room will let him get away with, and everyone watching is measuring it too. The room’s answer, whether laughter, a shrug or a lazy “relax, it’s a joke”, becomes the new limit, and the limit drifts in only one direction.
The questions get harder the morning after, when someone finally raises it and is met with a chorus of explanations: he was wasted, he’s a sweetheart, it was banter. Albert Bandura’s work on moral disengagement describes precisely how decent people quieten their own conscience. They soften the name of the act, spread the blame until nobody holds any, shrink the consequences and shift fault onto the person harmed. Cognitive dissonance feeds it, because holding “he is my friend” and “he did something wrong” in one head is uncomfortable, and the easiest relief is to shrink the act. The halo effect finishes the job, since a good general impression colours everything a person does. The result is that the woman who felt uncomfortable now carries two burdens she never asked for: what happened, and the way people respond to her mentioning it.
It helps to look at a setting where these mechanics have been studied closely. I lived in the United States for a time, near enough to campus life to recognise the culture around fraternities. Researchers have examined those houses since the 1980s and describe a recognisable mix: loyalty ranked above conscience, secrecy, rivalry between houses, women discussed as status, alcohol everywhere and a venue the men control. Initiation is a powerful element. Effort justification is our tendency to prize what cost us dearly, so a man whose belonging demanded his comfort and dignity he is unlikely to be the one who questions the group later. Houses differ enormously in how dangerous they are, which suggests the culture is doing the work and not the label, and the same mix can be found in a rugby club, a boys’ hostel, a sports team or a workplace group chat.
Nor is this something South Africa can file under imported. Rachel Jewkes and colleagues studied South African men who reported rape perpetration and asked about their motivations, and sexual entitlement was the most common explanation, with boredom, group contexts, peer pressure and alcohol/drug use also appearing in the findings. The everyday versions are ours too: the voice note that circulates before the woman in it knows it exists, the comment shouted from a car and meant as a compliment, the friend who only wants to talk and cannot hear an answer. So is the reflex question about what she was wearing, which comes partly from just world belief, our need to feel that bad things happen for reasons that can be avoided. Blaming her feels safer than admitting it could happen to anyone, which is exactly why the question deserves to be turned around: what was he doing, and who around him let it pass? None of this belongs to one class, culture or suburb, and I distrust any conversation that quietly locates the problem somewhere else.
Those same reflexes protect men well beyond the party. When people speak of institutions shielding men, they picture something planned. Mostly I have seen it done by habit: the friend group that closes ranks, the family that asks her to keep the peace, the employer that moves her desk and not his, the club that answers a complaint with a meeting and a warning, the neighbourhood verdict that he is a good guy really. Psychologist Jennifer Freyd developed the concept of institutional betrayal, the harm done when an organisation people depend on responds badly to wrongdoing inside it. Being doubted or brushed aside by the people you trusted can compound the harm of the event itself. The first response a woman meets can also shape whether she ever speaks again. Soft outcomes teach as well. A penalty that costs a man nothing tells every man watching the price, and tells every woman watching what her report will buy.
Women, meanwhile, are left to plan around all of it, so quietly that many men never notice. The message that says text me when you’re home. The drink watched from pour to sip. The exit noted before we sit down. The steady background scan for risk can become a form of hypervigilance, and it is a sensible response to a real environment, not a flaw in us. It is also exhausting, shaping where we go, how late we stay and how much of ourselves we bring into a room. Self objectification follows, the habit of watching yourself from the outside because you have learned you are being watched. And when a woman’s discomfort is repeatedly met with “you’re overreacting”, she can begin to lose faith in the very instinct that was protecting her. None of that is a personal failing. It is the predictable cost of a climate she did not build.
For my part, watching these things has changed what I am willing to sit beside. Behaviour in my own circles that I would once have let slide now stays with me, and I’ve stopped believing I owe anyone a confrontation before I step back. I am also grateful for a partner whose respect for women does not begin and end with me. I see it in how he speaks about women when they are absent, and in the way he will speak up when something crosses a line, even among other men. I have come to think absence is where respect is truly measured, but so is what we are willing to say when the room is listening.
If a climate is built by what gets rewarded, it can be rebuilt by what stops being rewarded, and that work belongs to the people who do these things and the rooms that applaud them. Recording is not consent to keep, show or forward. Before a clip is shared, the question worth asking is whether the women in it would be comfortable knowing who has seen it. Screenshots of private conversations, group chat jokes about a woman’s body, ratings of her looks and contempt for an ex can be different expressions of the same underlying entitlement, and they fade when the men in the chat stop rewarding them.
Speaking up costs very little and does more than we credit. Because of pluralistic ignorance, one calm voice saying “delete that”, “not funny” or “would you show her that?” tells the room it is not unanimous. It can matter especially when it comes from a man, because a man’s objection may carry a different weight with other men than a woman’s does. That is unfair, and it is also a fact he can use. Bystander training helps people find the words and the nerve, though on its own it doesn’t seem to change who offends, so culture and consequences have to shift alongside it.
Prevention starts earlier, with boys hearing that a woman’s attention is not owed to them and that persistence is not respect. They also need the harder skill of being turned down without turning it into humiliation or anger. Entitlement was learned, which means it can be unlearned, and part of that learning is knowing the difference between shame and guilt. Shame says “I am bad”, and tends to produce defensiveness and hiding. Guilt says “I did something that hurt someone”, and can motivate repair. Nobody has to feel worthless. The aim is to notice, own it, and apologise because you understand why, not only because you were caught.
And when a woman tells you something made her uncomfortable, believe her first and ask what she needs. Any questions can wait. Schools, workplaces, clubs and families need to take the small report seriously before it becomes a large one, and respond in a way that is consistent, so that the person who pays when something goes wrong is not always the one who spoke.
Respect for women has to live in the smaller, everyday choices too, and Kelly’s continuum is useful because it never claims that the small things are the whole story. They are simply the places where attitudes become visible, and where a great deal can begin.
Mind Over Matter.
Disclaimer: Disclaimer: This article discusses gender-based violence against women and the attitudes and behaviours that can cultivate a climate in which it is normalised. It is not an article about all men, nor is it intended to suggest that all men engage in these behaviours. Some readers may find this content distressing or triggering. This article is for general psychoeducational and informational purposes only. It includes personal experiences and perspectives and is not a substitute for individual counselling, psychological assessment, diagnosis, or treatment. If you or someone you know is experiencing gender-based violence or sexual violence in South Africa, support is available through the 24-hour Gender-Based Violence Command Centre on 0800 428 428.