It’s been a week since the vigils, in Melbourne and elsewhere, for Eurydice Dixon, raped and murdered while crossing Carlton’s Princes Park. Feelings are still raw, and they will remain so for a long time — at least in the inner-city area of Melbourne, essentially a large village, for which Princes Park is a sort of central green.

Eurydice Dixon’s rape-murder was particularly awful, not only for people like her, but also for people who had come to the inner-city from the ‘burbs, seen their, or their friends’ children grow up and become self-made, self-styled people — musos, comedians, artists. Public grief is distributed as unfairly as anything else these days; a life that projected into the future, a life as a series of projects and possibilities, is, for a broader public, more to be mourned than the murders of the poor and afflicted, which is most murders. Even more than the murder of Jill Meagher six years ago, this was an event that in some way cannot be accepted.

There seemed little point writing anything on this last week. Like a few other people, I wrote something, then deleted it. The temptation was to be too aestheticising of such a horrible death, or too impatient with the claims being made on behalf of it. Every response, from #yesallmen, to discussion of statistics, seemed beside the point. There was a weariness, also, at the way in which any discussion of this came to be a matter of attack, defensiveness, people talking past each other, a near wilful-misunderstanding.

What came to the fore after Dixon’s death, prompted by a police warning – initially given when no one was in custody for the murder – focusing on avoiding risk, was an absolute demand, couched in terms of right, that men stop murdering women, rather than that women have to take precautions against such. The segue to that was that men had to change, not women adjust. As the debate became more fraught though the week, any possibility of reasonable discussion more or less disappeared.

This seemed – understandably enough – to be something other than a policy statement: a sheer cry of rage that such events can happen so casually, even if they are unusual. But there has also been, in the last few days, a reaction by many against those interconnected demands: that we could be able to achieve a world of perfect public safety, and that that can be done purely by acts of collective consciousness-raising. From multiple directions, even from many who would hitherto have been fairly straight-down-the-line on these matters, have expressed an exasperation at some of the fragments flying around. Is any statement about caution, in public space, at night, illegitimate? Has “yesallmen” become a notion fuelling the idea that a violence-free world could really be achieved, rather than a rhetorical gesture?

The debate hangs between two contradictory notions: that male behaviour and identity is so malleable that it could be wholly reconstructed by consciousness-raising; and yet the propensity to violence is also suggested as so general as to be almost hard-wired in men.

This approach, at its worst, verges on the frivolous, and exploitative, of the core issue: how can violence – especially, but not exclusively, violence against women – be reduced? Most of us can accept that yes, practically all men are capable of aggression, and various forms of violence against women. But for this to be the focus on the occasion of a rare, hideous event skews the whole discussion.

It’s absurd to suggest that most men are capable of such acts, and highly tendentious to suggest that there’s a continuum of perfect smoothness from harsh words to stranger rape and murder. Absurd, and possibly counterproductive. If major violence is concentrated in relatively small sections of the male population, then this endless insistence that the vast category, men, are collectively responsible for the behaviour of all other men, is simply unactable upon.

Whether “talking about attitudes with your mates” will reduce rates of everyday aggression and violence is debatable; that it would reduce stranger rape/murder is ridiculous. There is a sense that it is substituting for a possible melancholy truth: the homicide rate in Australia is one of the lowest in the world. At some point, perhaps societies hit a point where the contingency of human existence, the mixture of malignity, transferred violence, distorted desire, make it impossible to take the occurrence of such violence below a certain level.

Yes, that violence will be overwhelmingly committed by men. That will never change, a permanent inequality, written down, ultimately, in the musculature and endocrine system. The only way to live without it is to live without men, and it’s indicative that one of the few movements not to have been revived from ’70s second-wave feminism has been separatism. Though this unspeakable event has produced the loudest expression yet of zero tolerance, it has also produced its opposite: the rising understanding that we desperately need a better, smarter conversation about such violence, if we are to understand what can be changed, and what is immutable.

If you or someone you know is impacted by sexual assault call 1800RESPECT on 1800 737 732 or visit 1800RESPECT.org.au. Lifeline on 13 11 14. In an emergency, call 000.