THE WANTON SLAUGHTER of 14 women at the University of Montreal has taken male violence against women to unimaginable lengths. Our minds spin trying to comprehend the incomprehensible. We are left speechless. Words fail us - at the very time when men must begin to speak about the unspeakable.

We discuss the weather or last night's game with fluid ease, but when it comes to rape, assault and battery, we stall. Our eyes drift and our tongues grow heavy.

Do men have nothing to say about violence against women? We do.

"Assaulted women like being beaten," a police officer said in a study prepared by the New Brunswick Council on the Status of Women, perpetuating a dangerous myth before launching another.

"I tell them, 'You like it since you stay with him.' he continues: "And I tell the guy to hit harder. If they go to court, these men have no chance. There is no justice. Feminists and Stalinists have influence on the judges."

Clearly, at least one Manitoba judge has yet to be swayed by these "feminists and Stalinists," or by any other women branded with the labels we reach for when feeling defensive. He condoned the behavior of a man who had pleaded guilty to hitting his wife.

How does a person admonish his wife," he asked, "if she goes out on the town with other people ... when she should have been home looking after the children or cooking, or whatever else she is expected to do?"

What we expect them to do is to talk about violence against women as though it were "their" problem and theirs alone, as though men have nothing to contribute to the issue other than a well-placed fist.

And we expect women to keep things in perspective, to be reasonable. To point fingers is unladylike. When we hear words such as "misogyny" we counter with "hysterical," dismissing women's concerns as the shrill protests of feminists and castrating lesbians. Or maybe "it's just that time of month."

WORSE, we try to defuse anger with misguided humor. Why talk seriously about violence against women when we can joke about it? When the Canadian Federation of Students launched an anti-date-rape campaign with the slogan "No means no," students at Queen's University were swift to respond with versions of their own, all in the spirit of a "good joke" - "No means tie me up," "No means kick her in the teeth."

As battered women flee to shelters, men retreat behind language. "Domestic violence" blunts the image of men who kill women in their own homes with guns, bottles and knives. And kill them we do. According to a 1987 government report, 62 per cent of the women murdered in Canada died as a result of domestic violence.

It's easy to think about violence against women in the abstract, as someone else's wife, mother, sister or daughter. An imagined bruise fades all too quickly.

But someone we know is assaulting women: a colleague, a close friend, a casual acquaintance. In a discussion paper entitled The Politics of Women Abuse, author Melanie Randall speaks of "a national epidenic"- between 2.5 million and 6.25 million Canadian women are assaulted by the men with whom they are involved.

Behind every epidemic is a cause. These assaults are committed by men of all ages, from all backgrounds. Men in stained overalls and three-piece suits, high-school dropouts and tenured professors.

We see women pursuing careers once considered male bastions and we feel wronged. We see their growing financial independence and we feel threatened. We see women's bodies as ours to violate. We don't understand their bodies. What we don't understand or can't control frustrates us, and frustration is a good enough excuse for aggression. Forty per cent of the wives who are assaulted begin being accosted during their first pregnancy. That which we don't understand or can't control often leads us to fear. Fear leads to aggression.

According to poet Adrienne Rich, "Women and men do not receive an equal education because, outside the classroom, women are perceived not as sovereign beings but as prey."

Now they are prey inside the classroom, too. It's too late to find our way through the dark mind of a man who chose to express his feelings with a semi-automatic weapon on the bodies of 14 young women. But we can begin with our own feelings, and recognize that there are ways other than violence to express them.

Women have always spoken out against the violence they encounter at home, at school, at work, on the street. Every year they hold rallies and candlelight vigils to demand their right to Take Back The Night. It's time men began to talk about how we can give back the night, and return what was never ours to begin with.