Put Yourself in Her Shoes™

Since 2001, men, women, and their families around the world have joined award-winning Walk a Mile in Her Shoes®: The International Men's March to Stop Rape, Sexual Assault & Gender Violence. It is a dramatic opportunity to raise awareness in your community about the serious causes, effects, and remediations to men's sexualized violence.

What are Walk Events?

Why men in women’s high-heeled shoes? We ask men to walk in women's high-heeled shoes to actively confront gender stereotypes and expectations. In this space of playful confrontation and openness, it's possible to reveal and consider many of the underlying causes of men's sexualized violence with less defensiveness and denial.

Why Men in Women’s Shoes?

There is an old saying: "You can't understand another person's experience until you've walked a mile in their shoes." To get people listening, learning, and talking, Walk a Mile in Her Shoes® education Events organize around men literally walking one mile in women's high-heeled shoes. It's not easy walking in these shoes, but it's an experience around which a lot of education, self-reflection, and change happens. It's impressive to see such a visually stunning public statement of listening, learning, allyship, and commitment. It's an engaging event that gets the community talking about sex and gender biases, gender identity, gender relations, and men's sexualized violence.

What is Sexualized Violence?

Sexualized violence is any act of physical or psychological violence targeting sexuality or gender and used to undermine a person's sexual or gender integrity. Sexualized violence is a deadly virus lurking in everyday cultural beliefs, attitudes, and practices, and, while hidden, is immune to prevention, treatment, and cure.

Anyone can fall victim to sexualized violence regardless of gender identity. Sexualized violence devalues women, female practices, feminine ways of thinking, feeling and being, feminine energy, and femme presentation. The target of sexualized violence can be a female body, the body of someone presenting as female or femme, or a male-bodied or male-presenting person insufficiently performing masculinity. The goal of sexualized violence against someone sufficiently male-bodied and satisfactorily performing masculinity is to degrade them by feminizing them; otherwise nonsexualized forms of violence are used.

Prevention Education and Action

We must talk about the causes, effects, and solutions to ending men's sexualized violence. We must educate ourselves and others, examine the sexual and gender biases that seed sexualized violence, and innoculate ourselves and our cultures.

Men Standing Up to Sexualized Violence

Men cannot end sexualized violence without undoing patriarchy. Patriarchy is a social system that privileges men with power. With that power comes the requirement to dominate others in roles of political leadership, moral authority, social superiority, property control, and sexual supremacy over women. Men do not volunteer for patriarchy; they are born into it and subjected to masculinities dictated by patriarchy.

While men benefit from patriarchy, they also suffer from patriarchy's restrictive gender identities and roles. Misunderstanding the responsibilities given to them by patriarchy or acting out from the suffering caused them by patriarchy, men must learn to take better care of themselves and others. Men must become leaders in undoing patriarchy and ending sexualized violence.

Men's Pledge

We will no longer knowingly participate in and reproduce patriarchy. We will actively work to reveal, know, and overcome our gender biases. We will actively work to end men's sexualized violence. We will actively deconstruct patriarchy and toxic masculinity and re/construct and co/construct gender identities and gender relations that are:

• more supportive to those who identify as male,

• masculinities that do not diminish the identities or roles of anyone identifying as female, femme, nonbinary, or nonmasculine, and,

• masculinities that support a more ethical relationship to the earth and fellow living beings.