Differing reactions to men & women getting abused

An "apologist" (which I think is the word you meant to use) is someone who argues in defence of an issue.

Someone who is "apologetic" is sorry for/about an issue.

It's confusing, I'd say. Especially as one is a noun and the other an adjective.

 

Can't handle the heat, get out of the kitchen.

Well, if he did make this thread to discuss the issue, he used the video to frame his discussion and that, I think, provides an unsatisfactory political bend that I must oppose. Does that make sense? The video colors the discussion by providing the point of view. It'd be like if someone made a thread about Jews in banking, or whatever, and prefaced a scholarly anthropological discussion of Jewish people in the banking industry with an anti-Semitic video on the historical evils of Judaism and usury. Like, the topic itself is perhaps interesting to discuss, but the video poisons the well.

Likewise here, I have given my commentary on the broader issue, and also expressed my problem with the video and the agenda behind it. If anything, the video should strengthen the feminist cause. It is almost quite literally the patriarchy making fools of its own. Why did so many women react when they saw that man "abusing" that woman? This is a shot in the dark, though I'd wager it is probably because they have experienced aggressive, controlling males in their own life. They know they must deal with it.

On the flip side, the man getting "abused" by the woman is the stuff of comedy. And both situations are the result of a patriarchy that insists that women are dominated by men, as that's simply how things are. That this notion, this ideal, is harmful to both men and women is eminently self-evident from this video. This is a feminist message: sexism hurts the very soul of the human condition, and should be opposed.

And then it gets co-opted by the MRA crowd. It's no longer, "we must oppose sexism;" rather, it's "we must advance the failing social conditions of men." This is a reactionary, senseless position, and the main thing I take umbrage with here.

 

I don't understand this. Why should it be 50%? Is violence more okay when it has a gender-neutral distribution? This seems to be an example of valuing statistical aesthetics over actual meaning

 

It should be a gender neutral rate of zero. 50% of zero is perfectly equitable.

Equally you might ask if it would be better if 100% of domestic violence were perpetrated exclusively on one gender, or the other.

 

Everyone in this thread has been civil except for you and have managed to discuss this without being nasty. You should get out of the kitchen if you can't stop throwing knives at people.

You have gone over your objection to the video but the thread goes beyond that, why are you still so stuck on the video?

 

The place where women should be.

Th rest of this is great comedy. You use a lot of words and yet you are saying very little. It seems like you have believed the feminist narrative of history.

 

What else could the purpose in stating "40%" be if not to insist it should be lower, or that it's too high? The people who are overvaluing statistical aesthetics are the people who think "40%" is somehow significantly bad.

Violence that doesn't have a neutral distribution across differing groups is probably violence that is uniquely targeted based on those groups, and is thus opposed. If the figure was 50%, we'd know for sure that domestic abuse affects both genders equally. But since it's 40%, we can reasonably infer that it's an issue that somewhat targets women.

Yeah, it's "just statistics." But I'm not even the one who brought it up and acted like it was significant.

I'm not throwing knives so much as toothpicks. It's not my fault if your skin is literally paper-thin.

Because you keep asking me about the video. Are you stuck on a DO loop or something?

What narrative of history should I be looking at? One that perhaps insists the world is 6000 years old?

 

Erm...

I suppose the point is that many people, who are less informed and enlightened than you, are - for the very reasons you outlined - unaware that partner abuse against men is "a thing" in a comparable quantitative ballbark as partner abuse against women and might warrant some roughly comparable pushback instead of widespread oblivion and/or apathy.

After all the pushback against partner violence against women has proven somewhat successful, in absolute terms, as well as arguably in relative terms (i'd hazard the guess that 100 years ago this was not a 60/40 thing and that the change in proportion is largely caused by a reduction of partner violence against women).
All that is being asked for here is that people appreciate this insufficient but still significant success and apply roughly the same attitude to partner violence by women against men - as well as partner violence between same-sex partners for that matter.

Oh, btw, recently on this forum:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=13164361&postcount=111
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=13168525&postcount=194

So, yeah, 40% of attention, ressources etc. would arguably be nice.
Not to mock, insult and re-frame battered men as being batterers themselves (because "that's simply how things are" as you correctly put it) would be a start...

See above. The purpose is to educate people that it's a lot higher than they think.
That doesn't mean it should be lower, on the contrary. You are perfectly correct in your assertion that it should be roughly 50% in a post gender society.

 

@metatron: I think that's the only good point that's been made in this thread, and I completely agree. As stated, my issue is with the anti-feminist bend of the message. I don't believe the entire point of the 40% figure is to let us know that it's higher than we think. It's part of it, sure - but why bother showing us the footage of the women laughing if that was that? Why not just tell us about the 40% thing? I think because there's an anti-feminist agenda in play.

 

By that you mean that there is literally no gender anymore, right?
Otherwise this statement makes no sense to me.
Because if we merely talk about a cultural post-gender-society (which I don't think makes sense either, but lets just assume we had one), man should suffer less physical violence. Because, duh, they are stronger.

So no @ Czreth, that violence is unevenly distributed does all by itself not already tell us that women are targeted for being women (though in reality this is probably a part of it). It may as well just tell us that weaker people are target for being weaker.

 

Well the answer to that is that one is almost always well served, rhetorically speaking, by combining statistics with anecdotes.

To be clear, I'm not defending the video. I think it has the "bend" you find in it. (I think I like that word as a replacement for "bias.") I don't resent people trying their bend, but then it's our role as consumers of rhetoric to do just the sort of critical analysis you've been doing.

How do we know that the cut-shots provided are truly representative of how bystanders reacted? How do we know that someone didn't eventually intervene in the woman-against-man situation and the videomaker just edited it out? How do we know that this would have been the typical reaction if the contrasting incidents were repeated a number of times?

Moreover, what one would also want is a poll, surveying people and asking them "what percentage of domestic violence do you think is man-vs-woman and what percentage is woman-vs-man?." If such a poll showed that people tended to radically underestimate the percentage of domestic violence that is woman-vs-man, then perhaps a video like this is valuable as a corrective.

And, of course, we don't want 50-50; we want zero instances!

 

Well... I mean... do you not care about defending weaker people?

This would be more convincing if males/females was not a heavily extant dichotomy upon which large swathes of social interactions are based. Since it, well, is, it makes a lot of sense to assume that has some role to play here.

Good post, I think. And it is known that men have much fewer resources for domestic abuse situations than women. Whether or not a video like this helps, however, is up in the air.

Well, if we had zero instances, we'd have 50-50.

 

I don't think the message itself has a bend.
The only bent thing in my view is the information at the end that this is produced by some MRA-ish organisation that may or may not also be involved in talking stupid utter nonsense about "emasculation" and the virtues of the "traditional family" and lunacy like that.
So, yeah, you can assert that these people want to validate their more reality-detached claims by association by making this valid point.
The more urgent question is though: Why didn't feminists themselves make this very video, like, yesterday?

Cause, well, this will obviously contribute to a reduction in partner violence against women, too. Actually it'll probably be very effective at that:
For one the video demonstrates how one should react to partner violence against women as a bystander and shows the immediate success of that. That's, like, the holy grail of marketing - arguably the most effective propaganda one can do.
Also the video works on removing the idea from people's heads that partner violence against women was not ok because women are supposedly weaker and replaces it with a more fumdamental moral prohibition of violence, that is in my estimation more effective.

Re: the laughing
I don't see any particular focus on women laughing. We can argue what exactly to include in a list on the matter, but i think what is prominently shown is the reaction of 6 people (in so far as that facial expressions are portrayed etc.):
1. Two pairs (a man and a woman in both cases), who all seem to be amused
2. The woman in passing, who may smirk somewhat but mostly seems just disinterested/preoccupied
3. The woman sitting right next to the couple, who is arguably the 3rd main character in the second half of the video. She doesn't look amused. For the longest time she looks concerned, eventually resignated.
I don't read amusement in her face. I read: "This is wrong. But i'm an introverted person. Why do i have to oppose this violent woman? Why is nobody doing anything?"
She's the bystander who knows better but merely can't push themselves to act i.e. she's the moral superior to the other five - hardly an edictment of women or feminists.

I'm talking about the aspired future, not the present.

 

And I talk about this aspiration making sense.

 

Because it's pathetic. The man could have easily restrained that woman, so of course no one reacted.

MRA's are utterly pathetic, miserable groups of conspiracy theorists, outright misogynists, etc. They are not serious groups.

 

The point is that if women were only targeted more for being weaker we should focus on weaker people being slapped and not so much women.

I agree that the reality is more complex (and that there is value in focusing on violence against females, for that matter). Right now though I am just focusing on one aspect of this complexity (physical strength) to demonstrate why a seemingly "fair" ratio of 50-50 is not necessarily actually fairer than 40-60. Simply but, because there is nothing "fair" about the biological differences of genders. It just is different.

 

Woah, woah, woah, what are you talking about? Feminists have been talking about this stuff for years (and years, and years). It is a central feminist point that sexism harms both men and women, and the matter of domestic abuse (specifically the fact that men are perceived as immune to all forms of abuse) is a popular feminist argument in that regard.

It really doesn't take a lot of digging to find the egalitarian arguments in feminism. It only seems so imbalanced because feminists constantly have to defend why they're feminists as opposed to, idk, humanists or whatever.

I mean, you can give them the benefit of the doubt if you want. That's just not the mojo I got from the video. The man-getting-abused scene gives me definite "oh, isn't that funny" vibes. The point being, of course, to communicate how people don't seem to take domestic abuse of males seriously.

The thing is, the video is very nearly a feminist video. But the 40% figure* and the #violenceisviolence are MRA talking points and deployed as such; and MRA is also explicitly anti-feminist.

*More on this: it's not mentioned how many of that 40% are adult males being abused by their wives or mothers. A good many of them are dependent males being abused by their fathers. So the video is even more misleading in that respect.

I hope you won't mind my saying that this is an obfuscating stance? The concrete reality is that women are targeted for being women. Often. In many, many areas of life. Sexism doesn't exist "just because" women are weaker than men, and domestic abuse isn't "just about" strength.

It's basically unreasonable to try to find other reasons for the discrepancy when we have a large body of evidence that suggests imbalanced gender relations are the culprit. It could be that gender is totally irrelevant here, or even just largely irrelevant. But that doesn't make a lot of sense and makes, in itself, some unspoken assumptions that are not necessarily true.

Or, let's say that domestic abuse does happen because of imbalances in strength, period paragraph. I don't understand how this makes it any less of a woman's problem, especially if it turns out they are the "weaker sex?" Wanting to erase the entire question of gender is pointless unless you don't want to tackle the issue of gender. Hence why I am currently, in my mind, ascribing a reactionary leaning to your posting here.

 

Good luck with trying to change biology and evolution. We have been taught that free sex does not come with a price. So all we are going to get is arguments over the reality of the situation. There will never be any resolution though.

 

I'm talking about the frequent framing of this issue (and many others) in popular left-of-center media with an exclusive focus on women.
They could really only do any worse if they wrote op-eds about the terrible effect of prostate cancer on women (wait, actually i bet they've already done that).
What you can of course do is to assert that this is not feminism, that this is merely intelectually light-weight journalists trying to do feminism and succeeding only in part, to put it mildly.
If that is so, then there has to be a push among feminist academia to actively grab the mic and do these things right before incompetent slightly feministy journalists do it wrong.

I refer you, again, to the CDC report on the matter. Table 4.1 and 4.2

http://www.cdc.gov/ViolencePrevention/pdf/NISVS_Report2010-a.pdf

If anything the 40% figure would be too low for the US.
The "Mankind Initiative" is a UK based non-profit.

Edit:
Apparently their main activity is to provide a help line phone service specifically for male victims of partner violence. It pretty much has to be their main activity, given the puny funding.
This is, again, apparently not superfluous at all.

 

@Crezth
I am not arguing that culturally constructed gender roles play no role in inter-gender-violence. Nor am I arguing that it wasn't fruitful to focus on violence against women as a distinct phenomena.
All I am arguing is that if gender roles didn't exist we shouldn't have a ratio of 1:1 of inter-gender violence, because constructed social roles simply are not the only relevant factor in inter-gender-violence. But only then would it make sense to say that our aim should be that the ratio is 1:1.
As it is, IMO our aim should simply be that there is less violence. Whereas one fruitful measure can be to focus on violence fueled by gender roles. But not to get a ratio of 1:1, but to decrease absolute violence.