It is time we look past the binary of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ men

During the #MeToo movement in India, around 2018, there were few articles in the press written by Indian men that engaged seriously with what women were saying about sexual violence and with the social conditions that allow it to persist. But instead of a failure of individual men to support women, the gap reflected a difficulty in thinking about gender-based violence as something produced by individual acts as well as by social relationships and assumptions about masculinity.

By and large, men’s responses then, as now, following the Bombay High Court’s commendable decision to reverse Tarun Tejpal’s acquittal, have instinctively been to become defensive or huddle together rather than open up, meet women on their terms, and think through and talk about sexual violence.

What we can say

On August 11, a senior Supreme Court advocate argued in The Tribune that because criminal law can punish only conduct that satisfies the legal requirements of an existing offence, we should suspend judgment on the Tejpal case and wait for the decision of the Supreme Court, where Mr. Tejpal has appealed. A court cannot convict someone for conduct that does not constitute an offence under the law — and due process and the presumption of innocence are legitimate subjects of discussion. However, it does not follow that the only appropriate response outside the courtroom, as the advocate says, is to say “we do not know”. We can still distinguish between what a criminal court is legally entitled to conclude and what the social dimensions of a case allows society to conclude.

In 2022, Andrea Waling, honorary adjunct at the Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society, Melbourne, reported in a paper in the Journal of Men’s Studies “five key framings” in #MeToo coverage based on 163 media reports: “men are victims of masculinity requiring intervention, men are positioned as inherently ‘good’ or ‘bad’, boys and men are lost and need to be found, men are performative in their ‘awakenings’, and men’s take up of protector or allyship roles may in fact be attempts to be false heroes”.

“The findings of this work note several tensions and contradictions that highlight an overall lack of coherency and agreement regarding men’s engagements with, and roles in, the #MeToo movement,” she added.

Misleading distinction

The fact is, men saying “I support women” is not the same as men asking uncomfortable questions about masculinity, desire, entitlement, friendship, professional hierarchies, male conversations, complicity, and the ways ordinary men may participate in cultures that make sexual violence possible without themselves being predators per se. This is also the territory the #MeToo movement opened up in India but which men have seemed the least willing to enter. In an article in The Indian Express in 2018, Rimjhim Jain wrote that men were the “missing piece” of India’s #MeToo movement and that their silence has allowed the problem to continue to be framed as something women themselves have to resolve. That has not changed.

Men have remarkably little practice talking about sexual violence as a male problem. Instead, there is copious male discourse about false accusations, due process, the presumption of innocence, men being afraid to interact with women, and so on. Laws also reflect the society that makes them and criminal cases cannot encompass conduct the law already does not criminalise. However, none of this means other questions are illegitimate, or even less important. In particular, men still need to ask what it is about the specific social organisation of relations between men and women that produces the situations the law eventually confronts.

That in turn requires us to move beyond the misleading distinction between “men like us” and “other men” and to recognise that sexual violence is not the preserve of ‘monsters’. It can also emerge from ordinary assumptions about, say, flirting, persistence, seniority, alcohol, women’s accommodation of male behaviour, and men being disinclined to intervene when another man crosses a line. This is also why a group response by men can become a form of mutual psychological protection: “Let us establish that we are not all monsters,” they seem to say, “before we discuss what the group itself has to examine”.

Sexual violence cannot be understood using abstract political analysis alone. Instead, it demands attention to intimate behaviour. Put another way, it is not enough to identify The System as being patriarchal; at some point you have to ask how you should behave. How the men around you behave. What you have laughed at. What you have ignored. And whom you have believed — or not. A criminal trial has to determine whether particular conduct satisfies a particular legal standard but society can, and should, also ask what kinds of behaviour it ought to have learned to recognise as unacceptable before they reached the threshold of criminal proceedings.

Original insight

Fixating on the intellectual objects on the basis of which the High Court reversed the lower court’s decision in the Tejpal case, such as evidence, testimonies, criminal laws, standards of proof, judicial reasoning, and so on, also allows men a way to avoid confronting the larger question #MeToo posed. That is: what forms of sexual coercion, intimidation, and entitlement exist in the gap between behaviour that is socially acceptable and conduct that a criminal court can recognise and punish? As at the height of the #MeToo years, this question remains relevant, and in India still barely charted.

In fact, that the legal system reached different conclusions at different times validates #MeToo’s original insight, that there is a distinction between what a criminal court can establish in an individual case and what a society needs to learn to identify and change.

Women have exercised much of the intellectual labour of making this subject discussable whereas men have often treated it as something to consume rather than participate in. Today there are also sophisticated feminist analyses of consent, coercion, power, institutional complicity, testimonial injustice, workplace hierarchy, etc. One would like to see a corresponding body of male self-reflection asking what it would mean for men to understand themselves — ourselves — differently.

The author thanks Srividya Tadepalli for her feedback.

mukunth.v@thehindu.co.in

Published – August 15, 2026 08:19 am IST