Transcript of "How feminism conned society, and other not so tall tales..."

I wanted to talk today a little bit more about why society in general seems so reluctant to tolerate men standing up for themselves, their rights and their interests, and how our collective views of gender inform our responses to such things.

A couple of weeks ago, I was asked by Harry Crouch--president of the NCFM--to travel to Montana and speak at a symposium and recruitment meeting for the Montana State U's new NCFM chapter. I took a week off work, drove down, and prepared a presentation touching on the new rules for adjudicating sexual misconduct cases on campuses across the US--rules that take a sledgehammer to the once sacred democratic concepts of due process and burden of proof. The chapter head, Chris Thompson had been putting up posters and giving presentations at some of the frat houses, explaining why these young men should join the chapter and why they needed to start looking out for their rights. He'd had a lot of positive feedback from these frat members, though in public they tended to talk in hushed voices about it.

We set up our conference room at the local library, got the power-point ready, and....well....no one showed up but the reporter for the local NBC affiliate. She was a trooper, and decided to do a story posing the question of WHY no one showed up, and to her credit, it was an unbiased story and she seemed largely sympathetic to all the issues we discussed--things like job deaths, rates of suicide and homelessness, underrepresentation in post-secondary, as well as the obstacles involved in advocacy for these issues.

For one, out of about a hundred posters that went up around campus to advertise the event, all but two were ripped down within a day. Businesses that were requested to post them in their windows refused, citing a need to "remain neutral", even though campus feminist organizations use those same windows to advertise their events. The few men who'd talked to Chris in public kept their voices hushed and obviously did not want to be seen to be interested in a men's organization, or their own rights.

I was quoted in the news story that there was a "strong, strong social condemnation of men standing up for themselves. They're supposed to stand up for other people, but not for themselves." I think the public resistance inherent in businesses refusing to post ads for a men's symposium, posters being torn down, and the feverish glee evinced in places like shitredditsays and manboobz over the MSU event only proves that that social condemnation exists in spades. Especially since both the srs crowd and manboobz have repeatedly stated the MRM is an impotent movement with no relevant issues comprised of losers who live in basements and can't get girlfriends--I mean, one would think that if the MRM had no relevant issues and consisted of ineffectual people, no one would waste their breath criticizing the MRM or socially sabotaging its events.

For whatever reason, I've become something of a target of criticism and hostility from these people. SRS has multiple dossier-style posts filled with quotes they've mined from my online conversations, going back months, and even went so far as to mine quotes from other websites to post on a subreddit devoted to "unacceptable" things said ON REDDIT. That's a lot of time and energy to devote to discredit people you believe have no issues to speak of, and who could never generate any kind of public support. And I constantly come across people who attribute things to me that I've never said, and when asked, it's revealed that they heard it from someone else.

So given all of this, the resistance of regular people to support men's rights causes even in uncontroversial ways, and the intensity of the feminist-spearheaded campaign to discredit, misrepresent and silence a group they profess to be impotent and irrelevant in the first place...all of this has really got me thinking about how it is that feminism managed to gain the steam it did despite it being "ostensibly" against all established social norms, and become the beneficiaries of so much public tolerance despite the hate speech that was common to academic and literary icons of the second wave like Mary Daly and Andrea Dworkin, and writings like the SCUM manifesto.

Especially since men advocating to end circumcision can come up against some extreme hostility and accusations of being insensitive and even anti-woman if they don't preface every commentary with 1000 words describing how female genital mutilation is a much more harmful practice (even though it often isn't). One cannot advocate for accuracy in informing the public as to the true nature of intimate partner violence, how half its victims are men, and how the system leaves both them and their children twisting in the wind, without being called a misogynist. David Futrelle, manboobz himself, has characterized the MRM's efforts in this area as an agenda to dismantle existing protections for women--in his mind, we don't want to direct state funds toward battered men's shelters or provide equal access to existing ones, we want to tear down battered women's shelters.

How is it that advocating to end circumcision or to provide domestic violence services to male victims can be seen as anti-woman? Well, I'm coming to the conclusion that anyone who fights FOR is also perceived--whether it's accurate or not--to be fighting AGAINST.

And when there's a gender binary with men on one side and women on the other, fighting for women as a group is going to be perceived as fighting against men--and vice versa.

This didn't pose much of an obstacle for feminists. They had a lot of gendered perceptions working in their favor, all of which made their attacks on men and masculinity--which have frequently been much more vicious and overt than anything from the icons of the MRM--palatable to society's collective consciousness. Keep in mind these perceptions have existed pretty much forever--they existed long before feminism did.

*Female violence and hostility are nonexistent, essentially harmless, or excusable.

*Men are powerful, threatening, and potentially dangerous.

*Women are the appropriate beneficiaries of society's protection, help and support.

*Men are the appropriate objects for absorption of violence and harm.

*Women are objects that are acted upon.

*Men are agents who act upon others and the environment.

Those collective perceptions of men and women only facilitated every one of feminism's efforts, from their demands for suffrage, equal rights and protection under the law, to the extraordinary measures they've demanded to protect women from harm. All of those demands dovetailed beautifully with our perception that giving women what they need is beneficial and appropriate. They've also facilitated feminism's ability to demonize masculinity and are responsible for society's ability to tolerate the levels of hate and violent fantasy found in, say, the SCUM manifesto, since we perceive the hostility of women and their proxies to be harmless and excusable, and the group such writings target are, in our perceptions, not only powerful and potentially dangerous, but the appropriate objects for the absorption of violence and hostility.

These perceptions also allowed feminism to essentially rewrite history, to craft palatable and believable lies about the nature of society in the past. For example, their claim that domestic violence against women was traditionally socially acceptable. This claim ignores easily accessible facts such as historical laws AGAINST wife battering, which provided for punishments from chain gangs to public flogging, incidences of vigilante justice against battering husbands that included lynching, and newspaper reports of convictions and sentences going back to at least the early 1800s. At the same time, utter falsehoods appear not only on blogs and in media opinion pieces, but in Feminist textbooks written by scholars, such as Domestic Violence Law, 2nd edition--which, according to Berkeley law school is the premiere textbook on the subject. This book brazenly states that the rule of thumb (described as a law limiting a man's right to beat his wife to sticks no wider than his thumb) was attributed to an emperor of rome who never existed (Romulus, son of the god Mars), and was perpetuated in English Common law and throughout Europe, even though no such laws have ever been found to exist.

These are easy lies to believe. Men are powerful and potentially dangerous agents who act upon others, while women are seen as objects at the mercy of outside forces who require protection. They are easy lies to tell even by those who know they are false, because there is no socially or instinctively ingrained taboo against attacking men--in fact, the absorption of violence and hostility is a man's natural place in the scheme of things.

These perceptions are what lead people to justify a woman beating a man in public by assuming he must have done something to deserve it: men are dangerous, women are harmless, men are appropriate targets of violence, and men act while women are acted upon. In order to maintain the agent/object dichotomy and all our other perceptions of men and women, we will actually manufacture justifications for such a woman, to turn her action into a reaction to some hypothetical action on his part--"I bet he was cheating on her."--to force the situation comply with our internal gendered narrative.

So when feminism fights FOR women, even when it's representatives are actively and hostilely attacking men in order to do it, most people see those attacks as harmless and reactive rather than active, attacks aimed at a group whose natural role is to accept and absorb hostility. And the moment feminists constructed out of whole cloth their elaborate justification--namely Patriarchy Theory--everything they told us complied with what our instincts tell us, and all was right with the world.

It is that desperate desire that exists in most of us to recharacterize all female action--especially hostility and violence--as reactive, that left society wide open to the snake oil of patriarchy theory and feminist ideas of male privilege and the gendered oppression of women. Here were feminists, angry and hostile and hating on men, and the rest of us did what people do when they see a woman beating on a man--we think to ourselves, "well, he must have done something to deserve it. I bet it was horrible, too." And there was Patriarchy Theory to explain it all.

So many people have swallowed patriarchy theory because if men hadn't always been oppressive assholes, then feminists wouldn't have a reason to be so angry at men in the first place, and the first thing we all look for when women act is what, exactly, they are reacting to. If men hadn't been holding women down all this time, then feminists wouldn't even see a need to rectify the damage to women, so therefore it must be so.

Patriarchy Theory was simply the tasty, tasty rationalization most of society gobbled up to explain the overt hostility of second wave feminists toward males, and feminism's ever-increasing advancement of women's interests at the expense of everyone else. If those ladies are hating on men and pushing to spend ever more public dollars to protect and support women, productive or dysfunctional, well, they OBVIOUSLY have a damn good reason, right? They're obviously reacting to some injustice, and the most obvious place to look for that injustice is in the public sphere actors who occupy the other side of the gender binary.

Just like that man whose getting a beat-down from his girlfriend down the sidewalk, men as a group MUST have done something horrible to deserve all this.

And now let's flip the record and take a look at how our perceptions of men and women inform society's reaction to the MRM.

If men are fighting FOR men as a group, who are they fighting against? The most obvious answer is women, of course, the people on the other side of the gender binary, and this is first place our knee-jerks lead us. Even if MRAs confine their condemnation to feminism, feminism is "women by proxy", and the perceived stench of misogyny remains.

And women are not the appropriate objects for absorption of violence and hostility in our collective perceptions--they are, in fact, the appropriately protected class. To the majority of society, men fighting for themselves feels on a visceral level dangerously close to a man kicking the shit out of a woman--and because she is an object rather than an agent, she can't possibly have done anything to deserve it.

Because men are seen as agents who act upon the world, society is more interested in focusing on suppressing their acting out, rather than exploring any causes for it. Because we perceive men as appropriately placing the wellbeing of others before their own, they appear churlish and immature when they prioritize their own interests. Because they are perceived as strong, they are assumed to not be subject to any hardship they should not be able to just weather or overcome as men.

And Patriarchy Theory, which posits that men created society in such a way as to oppress women for the benefit of men, means you can blame all of men's problems on...well, on men. When women are oppressed, it is men's fault. When men are oppressed, it's their own fault. Men are in all the positions of power, so if there were any REAL problems for men, those guys would be on it. After all, these guys constructed patriarchy JUST to benefit men at the expense of women, right?

Except there is NO evidence to back this up. There is no evidence to back up the claim that when men are in power they will oppress women for the benefit of all men, or that they even act in men's interests at all. In fact, there is evidence that demonstrates the opposite is true:

A 2004 study of gender differences in automatic in-group bias found that men lack a mechanism that bolsters automatic own-group preference. Only women showed this bias in all four experiments, and in 3 of them, all subjects, male and female, showed a strong bias toward women.

Which is a horrifying thing, to me. Because it shows women in power will act strongly in the interests of women, while men in power exhibit no own-group preference, but will act more often than not in the interests of women instead.

Society has been well and truly conned by feminism's pathological lying, we've been duped by our own instinctive perceptions of men and women, and our own internal biases that serve women's interests over those of men--and we've managed to vilify, shortchange, disadvantage and marginalize half our population in doing so. In the UK alone, shifts in social and education policy along with the rise of single motherhood have rendered 20% of men under 25 officially unemployable, and no one seems to want to do anything but wonder what the hell is wrong with boys that they're dropping out of school.

If and when we ever snap out of this cognitive coma to see the damage we've done in our slavery to appease the ravenous female at the expense of men, families and social cohesion, we'd better hope men aren't so marginalized, damaged, uneducated, impoverished unemployable and apathetic to pick up the shovels and start helping us dig ourselves out.

Transcript of "I am a sexy woman, so stop objectifying me!"

So, a perplexed viewer recently messaged me to ask if I'd do a video on sexual objectification, after he stumbled across two internet brouhahas that had him scratching his head.

In the first, an atheist blogger who writes about ethics posted a list of "sexy scientists" who happened to be all female, other than PZ Myers, who was included as a joke. He was immediately taken to task for compiling a sexist list that objectified women based on their looks. My viewer found the level of anger among those chastising this blogger kind of stunning, and noticed that the blogger had to repeatedly correct some commenters' blatant misrepresentations of things he'd said.

But what got my viewer really wondering WTF was how so many of the people offended to their cores by the list came out and admitted, explicitly, that such a list featuring sexy male scientists would not be offensive to them.

He sent another example of this phenomenon he'd found on Jezebel, where many of the women there were shamelessly objectifying male soccer players, and a few other women said things like "If the World Cup featured women ... we'd be pissed about the objectification. This is not any different."

The response was, "Yeah, we'd be pissed about it. But it's not the same. Here's why: In our current universe, men do not have trouble being taken seriously based on their looks or perceived sexiness, nor is their worth in society primarily judged by them. ... it also won't contribute to the overall oppression of men, ... They will not be treated like meat or chattel. Period."

My viewer asked me if I could explain to him what planet these people are living on.

First, I would have to say that these people are living on a planet where they do not know or understand, or WANT to understand, how sex works.

I'm going to quote a favorite sex columnist of mine, Dan Savage, because his ideas about sexual objectification dovetail very neatly with my own:

"Face facts, ladies: people always have and always will objectify the people they're attracted to. Men who wanna fuck women objectify women (at places like Hooters); women who want to fuck men objectify men (at places like Centerfolds). Gay men objectify other men (at places like Ashton Kutcher's asscrack), lesbians objectify other women (at places where Venus and Serena play tennis). The urge to objectify is universal, and so long as it's fairly and respectfully indulged, it's not offensive, not a problem, and not news."

I would also have to say that these people are living on a planet where everyone lacks the hardwiring and software to view women as having any active role in anything other than as passive beings that stuff--including everything concerning sexuality--just happens to. Which is...sigh. I guess I shouldn't say it's bizarre at this point, but more like par for the course.

I've mentioned before that feminism seems to be the biggest objectifier of women out there, and this bullshit provides me with a convenient way to explain my reasoning to the uninitiated. At its heart, objectification is a denial of personal or moral agency. Agency is the idea that the things you do have an affect on the world and on yourself. That your action A will result in outcome B or C or D, that the outcome actually depends on your action. When people are seen as objects, they're seen as incapable of effectual decisions or actions--actions that actually lead to outcomes. It's basically like saying "nothing you do matters, because shit just happens to you".

Feminism posits that objectification of women is a process that originates in men's brains and dicks, rather than partly in women's decisions and actions. They completely remove women as a causal or interactive factor in this phenomenon. A man's decision to objectify a woman is a decision that originates spontaneously within himself, based on nothing but his piggishness.

I mean, to someone like Rebecca Watson, posing in a "Sexy women of skepticism" calendar should have no bearing on how anyone sees or thinks of her. She may be showing tons of cleavage all the time, and cashing in on her sex appeal, but at the same time she lives in a universe where even as she exploits her sexuality, she denies it has, or should have, any effect on anyone, and woe betide the evil man who might fap to still images of her looking coyly into the camera with an acre of boobage on display because he's not acknowledging her as a human being. Perhaps he is allowed to fap to an audio track of her talking about feminism with her voice electronically altered to conceal her gender, but I wouldn't bet on it. Masturbating to thoughts of anyone you do not know on a deep, spiritual or intellectual level is the purest evil there is.

Unless you're a woman rubbing one off to images of David Beckham.

Which brings me to the other half of the sexual objectification equation. You know, the one feminists have never heard of or thought about because they're too busy admiring their own vaginas in a completely non-objectifying way, unlike you disgusting men who are only interested in SEX.

So let's look at the whole picture, based on the criteria of sexual attractiveness with respect to men and women, and the intellectual dishonesty in people like the commenters at common sense atheism and jezebel.

Women spend hours a day sometimes turning themselves into beautiful and sexy objects. They wear high heels because small feet correlate with high estrogen levels and fertility, and feet look smaller in high heels. Legs also look longer, which correlates with youth, and because those high heels cause the lower back to arch they make a woman's bum look more alluring. Women wear lipstick because women's lips are naturally darker and fuller than mens to mimic women's genitals and lipstick enhances that effect. They dye their hair to hide greys and use wrinkle creams that give the illusion of youth, and agonize over acne because clear skin indicates health and good genes to potential mates.

They may not do any of this consciously knowing why it works, but they do it because they know it's sexy.

And they're MORE likely to do all of these things when they go out in the world where there are LOTS of men to attract, and then live in sweat-pants and yesterday's make-up around their significant other (the man they supposedly want to be attractive to) or when they're alone at home. So, they are indeed doing it for the male attention, and not to just "feel" sexy. It's basically like putting out a broadcast, but hoping only the most fit and acceptable guys will receive and act on the signal.

This is an action, ladies. And it results in an outcome. The outcome is that you are now MORE sexually attractive to men you don't know and who don't know shit about you as a person, and contrary to what you'd like to believe, that IS the outcome you were going for.

And the retarded idea that men aren't objectified and judged based on sexual criteria...it just shows feminists have NEVER been able to put themselves in men's experience, or even understand how their own brains work.

What are the "sexy poses" for women? The ones that show superficial indications of qualities men find attractive--poses that emphasize curves (fertility and child-bearing capability), facial expressions that are coy or coquettish (pleasant disposition), angles that display beauty (good genes), clear skin (health), and long legs (youth). The nakeder the better, because a man's visually detectable criteria for what is sexually attractive in women is based on her body.

What are the "sexy poses" for men? Action poses. Strength and power poses. Work poses. Rebellious or defiant poses. And if those men are all the way naked, then you can't see that they can afford that Hugo Boss suit, or what kind of work they do, or whether they're in some kind of uniform, or what kind of social status they have, can you?

Men are sexy to women because of what they can bring in the way of protection, social status or resources. The poses reflect that, and just because they are all based on what men can do or have or can get or earn doesn't mean they aren't objectifying, and it DOES NOT mean that men aren't judged based on those visual criteria. I read once that a woman decides within five seconds of looking at a man whether she wants to get to know him better, and a lot of the time the decision is based on things like the quality of his shoes rather than how nice his smile is.

And while it might suck to be objectified based on your looks when your looks aren't something you can easily change, it must also suck to be objectified based on how much you bring to the table in performance standards--essentially, objectified based on your utility to a given woman.

Now, you don't hear the kind of moaning and caterwauling over the sexual objectification of men that we ALWAYS seem to hear over the slightest hint of the sexual objectification of women. And the difference not that men have male privilege--it's that men who are UNable to be seen as sexual objects by women because they fail to meet the criteria are seen as losing out, while women who ARE objectified usually feel threatened.

And THAT can be attributed to the differing biological costs and benefits of sex depending on whether you're a man or a woman. Now, for the sake of argument, let's just pretend that we're living 20,000 years ago, before the pill and abortion and slutwalks and the sexual revolution and all that, because 20,000 years ago is the environment our instincts think we're living in.

Unwanted sexual attention--that is, sub-par men or men who haven't been vetted ogling a woman--feels threatening to a woman because the biological cost (pregnancy) of that attraction carried too far (rape) is extremely high.

Getting pregnant by a sub-par man was a biological disaster for a woman. She'd waste one of her finite, timed shots at the reproductive target, risk her health and life, and might have 4 years of decreased fertility from breastfeeding before she'd be able to try again, all of it thrown away on a sub-par child, sired by a man who at the very least had not proven to her in advance that he'd stick around and help her raise it.

That's a HUGE set of risks and costs, so *unwanted* sexual attention from a man she feels doesn't measure up makes her uneasy. But she can't get any sexual attention at all, even from the men she does want, unless she presents herself as a sexually attractive woman, can she? So when she's applying all that make-up and pulling on that snug t-shirt, she's instinctively (but maybe not consciously) aware of why she's doing it--to be attractive to an awesome guy, which will make her feel sexy--but when non-awesome or non-vetted men express unwanted or premature interest in her, she's made uncomfortable and she buries the agent/object conflict under an illogical tangle of rationalization wherein she deems men should NOT objectify her even when men objectifying her was her goal, and wherein none of it has anything to do with HER or anything she is or does--it's all the fault of those men and the dicks they're led around by.

This is one of the reasons why male behavior around women was always bound by strict rules of courtesy, and why even as recently as my grandfather's time, a man could get his lights punched out for offending a woman by using vulgar language in her presence. And it's why women are still the group with the most power to control discourse and rules of politeness--they set the limits of what is acceptable speech and behavior, and pretty much everyone caters to their lowest common denominator of comfort level.

Because of those female costs and risks, men have to compete and perform in order to get a shot at reproducing. But 20,000 years ago, if HE had sex with a sub-par female he wouldn't be interested in hanging out with long term, he lost nothing but a few million sperm that regenerate constantly. He could--at least until recently--just walk away, no loss no foul, and try again with someone better the moment he could spring another boner.

And for him, being objectified is a GOOD thing. He has to compete for females, remember. Being objectified is success, and success makes him a winner, even if he doesn't end up having sex with any of the women making eyes at him across the cave.

So he doesn't make a big deal about being found sexy. Being found sexy by many woman costs him nothing, and can only pay off more the more women objectify him, because then HE might actually get to have his pick of women rather than the other way around. And none of this means that men want sex all the time, or from many different women, or anything like that. It just means they aren't going to have that visceral, instinctive uneasiness around an appreciative gaze from a woman they don't know.

And even if he has no interest in women or sex or reproducing, the things that make him a sexy object are things that will make his life awesome as an individual--money, self-sufficiency, respect, physical fitness and the admiration of others. Even if he doesn't EVER want sex, any of women's sexual criteria he meets are of benefit to him as an individual. Up until very recently in our social and legal evolution, he did not face the conflict that what makes him valuable sexually is also a HUGE potentially life-ruining or even fatal liability if his sexual judgement led him astray, or if a woman took advantage of him.

Women have always had ALL the power in the sexual equation, but up until an eyeblink ago it was a power that could utterly destroy them if they weren't able to exercise total control over it, and even if they don't consciously understand that, their instincts do. Men have always had to earn their sexual power, and it was a power that, once they had it, cost them nothing. It was the getting it that used to cost them a fuck-ton--often their lives as they performed their way into proving themselves valuable enough to lease a woman's uterus.

Now what really gets me is how completely oblivious most feminists are to things like this, how they will deny the agency women exercise when they objectify themselves by shifting all the onus onto men to effectively gouge their own metaphorical eyes out or else they're being pigs, rather than acknowledging the part women play in the game of sexual attraction. And the cognitive dissonance of saying something like "men will not be treated like meat. Period," EVEN WHILE THEY ARE TALKING ABOUT MEN LIKE THEY'RE PIECES OF MEAT.

It gets me that instead of understanding that their problem with the problem of sexual objectification of women originates in instincts that served women in the fucking cave but have nothing to do with the social, legal, technological or economic realities of today, feminists will perform the pathetic intellectual gymnastics required to blame their own double standards on the collective delusion of Male Privilege so they don't have to admit that women are instinctively cautious about sex and men instinctively cavalier about it.

And what I find most hilarious is the denial that women objectify men based on criteria they can determine with their eyes alone--all the cues and signals so obvious in sexy images of men that showcase their utility to women, and that can be as simple as the way he's standing when the shutter clicks.

If women are objectified as ornaments, then men are objectified as appliances. And the difference between an ornament and an appliance is that ornaments are coveted objects prone to theft by the unworthy, while appliances that no one wants get hauled to the dump. A woman objectified by the "wrong man" feels uneasy because once upon a time, her reproductive costs and risks could cost her everything, while a man objectified by women was actually deferring his disposability.

And I can even see that little nugget of truth in the lament of a 50 year old attractive businesswoman who laments that it's been ages since a strange man gave her "the look". “Leering hasn't happened in years,” she says wistfully. Of visiting Italy 20 years ago with friends, she says, “we were furious that the Italian men pinched your bum. When we went back, in our early 40s, we were furious that no one was pinching our bums.” She's now discovering what men understand right from the get-go--that being objectified by others is proof of your market value, which is why young women go to such lengths to make themselves beautiful even as they scold the men who dare to notice.

And though none of this instinctive bullshit, as I've presented it, can be changed on the fundamental level of limbic hardwiring, I really think knowing what the fuck we're dealing with here, and why it exists, is the first step to dealing with the issue. If women WANT to be seen as sexual agents in this age where most of the reproductive risks and costs to them have been mitigated by modern technology, they have to stop denying they have sexual agency, and they really need to grow a pair and talk themselves out of behaving like they live in the goddam victorian age, where women were so at the mercy of their biological vulnerability that a double-entendre from the wrong man could earn him a beating.

It might come as a shock to a lot of people, but WE DON'T LIVE THERE ANYMORE. In this reality, in this environment, with women's fertility on total lock-down if they so desire, and men facing legally enforceable $100,000 baby mortgages when they have an "oops", our instincts are actually diametrically opposed to our current relative risks and costs.

And all this female kvetching over a few appreciative glances or the thought that a guy you wouldn't have anything to do with might be jerking one off with an image of your tits in his mind, really needs to stop.

If feminism wants women to be taken seriously as men's equals, then it's women who are going to have to do the adjusting for a change. And that means not calling for her smelling salts whenever some guy tells her she's pretty.

okay, getting my shit together...

I promised to post text versions of my videos here ages ago, and I'm just getting around to it now. I'm going to start with the most recent and work my way backwards, just to make things extra difficult for all of you.

So here goes:

The invisible man riding the donkey backwards

Okay, someone sent me a link to an article in The Atlantic, called "What's Wrong with the Violence Against Women Act". Now I suppose I could pick apart the article, confirm many of its points, and examine what it leaves out of its analysis, but I didn't get further than the sub-heading, which reads as follows:

"A bill that was designed to rectify gender discrimination tips the balance too far, putting accused men at an unfair disadvantage."

There is so much wrong with that sentence, I don't even know where to start. Oh wait, actually I do.

The bill was never designed to rectify gender discrimination. It was designed to increase the gender discrimination that already existed. Believing that there was gender discrimination AGAINST women in domestic violence law and in society's attitude toward it, is to essentially rewrite women's history, and to utterly ignore men's.

Up until the early 1700s in the UK, there existed archaic laws regarding husband's discretion to physically chastise their wives. By this law, a husband was permitted to give his wife "mild correction", and I think it's important to note that this law existed because a husband was legally answerable for his wife's actions. If she committed a public crime or misdeed--stole from or assaulted someone, for instance, or even gambled away the family fortune--it was her husband who was held to account, legally, financially and socially. This law afforded him the power of correction "within reasonable bounds" and actually prohibited husbands from using violence.

A couple of things:

I'd guess that, considering the nature of the culture back then, how common corporal punishment was wrt children (not just by parents), convicted criminals, servants and apprentices, etc, the 1720s definition of "violence" is a probably a little different from our definition today, and the 1720s definition of it within the context of domestic violence--wherein current definitions include "not speaking to your wife" or "using logic"--will have been VERY different indeed.

Considering a husband was answerable for his wife's behavior in public and any wrongs or crimes she might commit against others, forbidding him ANY means of holding her accountable to HIM would have been an egregious imbalance of power within the institution of marriage. The law equally afforded men the right to correct the behavior of any individual for whom he was held legally answerable--children and apprentices, for instance.

And finally, before anyone pounces on the idea that men were answerable for their wive's behavior because men were in authority over their wives, and that this authority was a benefit given them by the system in order to oppress women, I'm going flip the sequence of that line of thought around.

Instead of "marriage is an institution to oppress women for men's benefit" therefore "husbands have authority over their wives" therefore "men are answerable for their wives since they could order those wives to do bad things", I'm going to posit a different sequence of logic based on a different primary assumption. "Marriage was an institution designed to serve children and protect women" therefore "women were entitled to the protection of their husbands" therefore "men must stand as a shield between their wives and the violence of the rest of the world, including that of the law" therefore "men must have authority over their wives." That is, if a man must be answerable for his wife in order to protect her from the consequences of even her own actions, then she should at the very least be answerable to HIM.

Why would I posit this sequence based on this different starting point? Because there were laws limiting what husbands were legally permitted to do to the women under their authority. Not just physically, but financially as well. Laws like [privy examination] also existed to protect women from financial abuse by their husbands. The law of [privy examination] required a woman who owned property and wanted to sell it--say, a house she had brought with her into a marriage--to be interviewed outside her husband's presence by a legal official to determine that she really did want to sell it, and that her husband was not forcing her to do so.

And I'd also posit this because lifelong marriage itself is a raw deal for men--a man's value in the sexual marketplace often increases with age, as he accumulates wealth and social status, while a woman's ALWAYS decreases and eventually fizzles to nothing long before she'll die of old age.

In a "male-dominated" society where marriage really WAS designed to oppress women for the benefit of men, it would have been legally easy, socially acceptable and even encouraged for a man to divorce his wife the moment her youth and beauty faded, if he could trade her in for someone better. Maybe a LOT better considering he'd have had a decade or two to acquire more wealth, and considering he owned his children, who could have contributed to that wealth in an age of child labor.

And frankly, the entire notion that marriage is the equivalent of female oppression and slavery is belied by the hand-wringing from pundits across the political spectrum clamoring that women want husbands and men aren't doing their duty and dragging themselves to the altar. If marriage is a form of slavery for WOMEN, why is it women who still desire marriage? And if it's an institution devised to benefit men, why is it MEN who are avoiding it like the plague?

So I think it's reasonable to assume that in the past, a man was expected to stand as a shield between his wife and the dangers of the world, even when those dangers were posed by the legal or criminal consequences of her own actions. Does ANYONE believe it would be remotely fair to hand a man the job of bodyguard and handler, to hold him accountable not only for the safety but the behavior of his charge, and then give him no means to enforce his judgment on that charge? To say to him, "If this person is harmed, you will be held accountable for it, and if they commit a crime, you will be punished for it, but oh, by the way, they don't have to do one damn thing you say"?

As early as 1768, when Lord Blackstone, gathered up all the assorted laws of England into one big compendium, it was made clear that physical violence and even physical restraint by husbands against wives was in violation of the law, though he noted it was common for such violations among the underclass to be swept under the judicial rug. Perhaps because female members of the underclass would be more likely to find themselves on the wrong side of the law, male members of the underclass spent more hours a day performing labor and therefore had less time to supervise the behavior of their wives, and all members were subject to hand-to-mouth living that meant jailing a battering husband would subject his wife to financial destitution?

Likewise, in the US, there have been laws against wife-battering since before the American Revolution, and by 1870 it was officially illegal in nearly every state. I have only heard of one gender neutral domestic violence law in this period--Massachusetts Bay Colony's law of 1655. Even prior to the drafting of these laws, wife-batterers could be and were, in fact, arrested and penalized for abusing their wives using the simple criminal charge of assault and battery. Punishments for wife-beating included 40 lashes at the public whipping post, fines ranging from $255 to $1000, and sentences of 1 to 5 years in prison.

Moreover, male family members, neighbors, and members of religious congregations were known to enact vigilante justice on wife-beaters--sometimes beating them, abducting and whipping them, or even running them out of town. Even in accounts I have read from feminist sources that include excerpts from women's diaries, there is often a male relative or family friend who steps in and removes the battered woman from her batterer's immediate presence, or even from his household, when serious abuse was witnessed.

And before anyone jumps in and claims that these protections and restrictions were based not on gender but on the power imbalance between those who had authority over others (husbands) and those who were under their power (wives), I'm going to call bullshit.

Because, we have a perfect example of a huge, socially and legally systemic ungendered power imbalance in history wherein women received protections that equally powerless and vulnerable men did not--slavery.

In France and Spain, in the early days of slavery, provisions in the slave code existed to protect pregnant and sick women from physical abuse. Other legal amendments prohibited sexual use or abuse of female slaves by slave owners--wrt both rape by owners and pimping.

In the 19th century, Britain introduced laws to limit the types of punishment allowed wrt slave women, forbidding punishing one in public, restricting the number of lashes she could receive, and prohibiting any physical punishment for pregnant slave women.

And though enforcement of these laws probably left a lot to be desired, no such protections existed for male slaves to be enforced or not.

Only 2/3 as many slave women were brought over to the European colonies as slave men, however, in many colonies females outnumbered males--because they lived longer. I wonder why?

Keep in mind, too, that even when I was a kid, children were still receiving corporal punishment in some schools--including caning. So attitudes toward physical punishment were VERY different from what they are today--yet wives and even female slaves had legal protections that prohibited those in authority over them from going too far, while men had no such protections.

Nor were they protected in ANY way from the violence of their wives. In fact, when a man was battered by his wife, the community held him answerable for THAT, too. In France, when neighbors discovered a man in their community was being dominated or beaten by his wife, he was paraded around town while seated backwards on a donkey holding its tail, while the crowd ridiculed him. In England, battered men were routinely strapped to carts and subjected to the derision and mockery of the community. Essentially punished for the abuse they suffered at the hands of their wives--abuse, I might add, that had no legally codified limits or restrictions in most jurisdictions.

And while many experts have attributed this treatment to a kind of blind adherence to the patriarchal norm of "husband as lord of his household", and systemic vilification and contempt for weak men that still goes on today, when you look a little deeper, it's not quite so simple.

Life was a lot harsher back then, and as I've said before, when life in a community is harsh, things like individual wellbeing, safety and fulfillment tend to take a back seat to more important things like social cohesion and collective survivalism.

Back then, when a woman married there was only one legal entity to which a she was fully answerable--her husband. A woman who beat her husband was seen as a HUGE threat to the stability of the community. Here was a woman capable of defying the socially enforced and legally endorsed norm of husbandly authority, a breaker of social and legal taboos. If such a woman--one already predisposed to ignore the rules of society--got up to malicious or harmful behavior outside the home, there was no way for the community to hold her personally accountable for her actions. That was her husband's job, and clearly he couldn't be trusted with it.

If she committed a crime, her husband might even be sent to prison for it, and if that happened, what little external constraint there'd been on her behavior--her husband's authority--would be out of the picture entirely. She would, in effect, be free to wreak havoc in the community, a socially irresponsible woman who is answerable to none.

Forcing a man to ride the donkey backwards served a couple of purposes within the community. For one, it put other men on notice, reminding them how important it was to social cohesion for them to exercise authority within their households and control misbehaving wives. Any man watching or participating in such a spectacle would be reminded just what things would be like for him if he failed the community in the same way this poor chump did. And secondly, it essentially stripped the battered man of respect and social status within the community, which was a consequence his wife--who shared in the respect and social status of her husband--could not avoid. She could not be punished directly for her behavior, but she could be punished through the public humiliation of her husband, and the decrease in her own social status that accompanied it. If the contempt of the community extended to such things as, for instance, job loss, she'd be forced to live with that consequence as well.

A few things have changed since those days, when it comes to battered husbands. The elaborate rituals of public ridicule are gone, but men are, by and large, still held accountable for the abuse they suffer, and women excused for their misbehavior within marriage. There exists little outreach or assistance for such men, because Patriarchy Theory and its twisting of reality fooled everyone into believing battered husbands could not possibly exist. Female batterers are still not held fully accountable for their behavior, nor does the community intervene the way it always has when men were horribly abused by their wives--we instead expect individual men to deal with the problem on their own.

Legislation and arrest policies are more biased than they ever were, but it's no longer because we see men as a shield between their wives and the violence of the rest of the world, even the violence of the law. It's because we've been fooled into believing that marriage was an institution designed to oppress rather than protect and support women. We've been tricked into believing marriage was always a raw deal for women and a great one for men, despite the fact that single motherhood--which is a struggle even now--would have been a one-way ticket to extreme poverty for 99% of women through history, and despite the fact that its lifelong component was designed to keep men from abandoning their wives after menopause, rather than the other way around.

We've been tricked into believing the job of a husband was to be a bully rather than a bodyguard, and that "male-dominated" societies are oppressive to women because hey, when men are in charge they will always act in ways that benefit men without ever considering the wellbeing of women. We've been fooled into thinking the extra rights and freedoms men had were cookies given to them "just because they were men" rather than because women were biologically vulnerable and dependent on men, and giving men those extra rights and freedoms enabled them to do the job society expected of them--to support and protect women.

We've been fooled into thinking the authority society gave husbands within marriage was a means to oppress women, rather than a necessary component of men's expectation to protect them, even from the consequences of their own actions. We've been tricked into believing the exception--the husband who used his authority to victimize and cruelly abuse his wife--was the rule.

We've been fooled into believing the battered husband is a time-honored and well-worn comic trope that makes appearances in Bugs Bunny cartoons on Sunday mornings, because it has always been RARE, rather than because it defies our internal gendered narrative of women as harmless and deserving of protection and our expectation on men to be strong and capable of taking care of and protecting themselves as well as others.

We've been bamboozled into believing that domestic violence against women was NEVER considered a crime until feminism arrived to enlighten us, and that it was ALWAYS socially acceptable, despite tons of historical evidence to the contrary. And the safer the world gets and the less directly dependent on individual men women become for their support and protection, the easier it is for us to believe that men are brutes and abusers by nature, and the easier it is for us to toss them in the trash when they're abused.

We don't even have to notice them anymore.

Because before the age of the pill, child support enforcement, subsidized daycare, safe streets, welfare benefits and safe, easy indoor jobs, the task of protecting and providing for women...well, that necessary task fell to individual men and it necessitated keeping those individual men around to do that job.

Whereas 200 years ago, the community could not afford to pretend a battered husband did not exist, well...we've come a long way, baby, and arrived at a point in our social evolution where society, rather than individual men, can do the job of supporting women and protecting them from harm, even when that harm arises from their own actions, and where battered men, instead of being subjected to ritualized humiliations, are essentially invisible to everyone, even when they're standing right in front of us, because we can afford not to care about them one way or the other.

By defying our gendered assumptions, battered men make us so uncomfortable we'll recast them as abusers themselves whenever we possibly can, and when we can't, we'd rather close our eyes and stick our fingers in our ears when they beg for help, than acknowledge their existence. And when even the people who are smart enough to realize that VAWA is the equivalent of gender apartheid are laboring under the misperception that historical laws and social attitudes about domestic violence discriminated against WOMEN, is it any wonder that it's so fucking easy for the rest of society to sweep all those male victims under the rug?

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/03/whats-wrong-with-the-viol...

http://www.canlaw.com/rights/thumbrul.htm

http://freedownload.is/doc/women-and-their-forgotten-role-in-slavery-nigel-sa...

http://www.fact.on.ca/Info/dom/george94.htm

http://www.fact.on.ca/Info/dom/lupri05.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coverture

http://unknownmisandry.blogspot.ca/2011/10/societys-acceptance-of-domestic.html

Been busy...

Doing this:

And a few other videos, you can check them out here.

I've also started writing for A Voice For Men, thanks to John the Other's enthusiasm.

My first article there is here, and my second here, for any of you who haven't heard or had a look yet.

Other than that, I've been pounding the mall pavement, stockpiling goodies to go under the tree, and trying to schedule all the required holiday visits with family in. Also, a lot of drinking, to try to stay sane.

For the near future, I'll be doing an interview after the holidays with Stephen Molyneux of Freedomainradio, a philosophy webshow. And after that, who the hell knows? 

In between all that, I'll be posting here now and then, and kicking up my usual fuss on reddit, but if I don't get another chance between now and Santa Day, Merry Christmas to all of you, and thanks for your support. 

Hugs, all. :)

Coming Out

I've said more than once that the men's movement needs more female voices if it's going to achieve any sort of mainstream status, voices like Barbara Kay, Erin Pizzey and Christina Hoff Sommers, but for the longest time I've been reluctant to add my own voice in a meaningful way. Anonymity is comfortable. It feels safe.

But words on a blog and on men's forums are too easy to dismiss, especially if there's no face behind them. Part of my credibility derives from the fact that I'm a woman, but like the old man in a chat room pretending to be a teenage girl, when I choose not to show my face, it becomes very easy for people to doubt my identity, and in doing that, dismiss my words.

So. After a great deal of weighing the pros, I've decided to come out. I am girlwriteswhat.

Gender Bending...no girlie men allowed!

I've often described myself as a little gender-queer. Though I very definitely identify as a woman, I'm a masculine one, for sure, and those masculine qualities are part of both my social "uniform"--boy's haircut, little to no make-up, serviceable shoes, jeans and wife-beaters, zero jewelry, trimmed fingernails--and my ability to relate to the male viewpoint on many issues. I have a preference for male company, not because I dislike women, but because they often behave in ways that lie outside my scope of internal experience. I frequently find myself quietly bemused among them, unable to find common ground.

And I can get away with this, enjoy the respect of my male and female coworkers and bosses, and I have never had any trouble finding heterosexual sex partners. The same cannot be said for men.

For men, gender is much more severely enforced. It is enforced by women, in their choice of sexual partners (though I know there is a small subset of women who are attracted to emo-boys and androgynes, and "fag-hags" have existed since long before Oscar Wilde). It is also rigidly and often brutally enforced by other men, as Bill Burr so beautifully and succinctly explores in this bit of stand-up.

Displays of weakness are either ridiculed by friends looking to hold their buddies to a standard of masculinity, or exploited by enemies looking to prove their own masculinity by kicking your ass. And the indoctrination as to what is manly starts in the cradle. I've read some material (though I don't have the studies to hand) that demonstrate that, although boy babies are more likely to be fussy, parents are more quick to console or attend to a girl baby. So men's socialization with respect to becoming physically self-sufficient, emotionally self-contained, and sturdy enough to "tough it out" on their own begins in infancy. Moreover, the socialization that begins through peer groups after infancy steers boys toward risk-taking behaviors, pain-tolerance, competition, projection of strength, and a serious reluctance to ask for help.

Over the last year, I developed an online friendship with a fellow Canadian who's been living and working abroad. We bonded over our bisexuality and our openness to new sexual experiences, and the emotional fall-out that can happen when what was billed as a casual, no-strings-attached encounter becomes complicated by unexpected emotion, manipulation or dishonesty. He's hoping that when he returns to Canada, we'll be able to hang out a little. According to him, I am the only person here to whom he feels comfortable speaking about his sexual adventures and experiences abroad, and he's told me more than once that his friends--"dudes" one and all--would NOT understand any of the things he's felt or done over the last few years. He lives in fear that they'll discover it, or sense it somehow, and punish him accordingly.

And while I find his fears saddening, I know they're justifiable. He told me once it would be easier if he were gay--that if that were the case, there would be a clear line that would distinguish what he is as an issue of sexual orientation rather than one of gender. We still live in a predominantly monosexual, either/or culture, especially with respect to men. While me dallying with the occasional woman does not make me any less of a woman, him experimenting with male/male sexuality--even in the context of three-way sex involving a woman--calls his status as a man into question. It may be acceptable for a man to go with men, but such activity renders him entirely unworthy of playing the man to a woman in the eyes of society.

It's the same way with displays of weakness and emotionality, needing help, being victims, crying, or anything else commonly associated as "female". As much as feminists and "new-age" women insist they'd like men to do more of these things, what they say they want from men, and what leads them to choose a sexual partner (whether long term or for a one-off) are often two completely different things. I can't even imagine the level of frustration involved in being repeatedly "friend-zoned" for embodying all the politically correct attributes that women have been saying, for the last god knows how long, that they desire in a man.

Which brings me to the "why" behind all of this--behind my freedom (both socially and sexually) to express my slightly bent gender orientation and not be penalized for it by being considered "not a woman", while men who do the same are considered "not men".

Most of the feminists I've come across have concluded that this penalization of "girlie men" originates in the relative positions of men and women, and societal views of "maleness" as intrinsically superior or preferable to "femaleness". That women have always been considered "less than" men.

But you know what? I actually believe it's the exact opposite.

I mean, let's look at society as an employer. The employer wants all its employees to be useful and valuable, otherwise, there's no point in paying them. And what does our employer need in order to perpetuate itself and grow? It needs strong backs to do the work of making things happen, and it needs people whose job it is to provide more strong backs to replace the ones that wear out or retire.

Women provide those strong backs by bearing children. This is their primary role, because it's an important one and who the hell else is going to do it? Because this role is so important, and because women's ability to effectively do this job requires safety, support and assistance, women are often pigeonholed into a position where those needs can be efficiently and consistently met. They are "warehoused" in safe little cubicles, and not permitted to engage in work that could put them at serious risk of not being able to perform their primary function. Instead, they are relegated to safe, relatively easy tasks in between their periodic larger, more important projects.

The attributes that are most valuable in a female employee are a willingness to take direction, an ability to make their individual needs known so they can be met, and the physical characteristics considered most helpful in performing that primary function many times over.

What role does that leave for men? It leaves them the job of being the strong backs. They do the heavy lifting, they tinker with the high voltage wiring that services the office complex, they go out into the dangerous world and return with provisions and office supplies.

While men are necessary as project contributors to assist in the primary function of the female employees, when it comes to this particular contribution, one man can do the work of many, if need be. Since there are always going to be men employed by the company, those men vary in their capacity to be useful to the company, and men pass on their attributes to the new strong backs they help to provide, it is in the company's best interest that only the most valuable men perform this particular function. It is of no value to the company if a man who is a slacker or otherwise unfit is allowed to contribute in this way, since the new backs he helps provide will not be as strong as others. And it is in the women's best interest, to be selective in choosing their project partners, since women's value to the company improves if the new strong backs they provide are exceptionally strong.

Can women fill those primary "male" jobs? Of course they can. And they have, at points all through history, where and when it's been necessary. While performing these tasks may put them at risk (which is to be avoided, if possible), and often puts a double burden on them in that they may be expected to do the work of two people, it's entirely possible for them to do it and still be of value to the company.

A woman can provide more strong backs while doing some of the heavy lifting and some of the more risky jobs, when that is required. And a woman can also fill her primary female job just by lying around doing not much at all. Even if she does next to nothing else, if she is performing, or potentially can perform, that function for her employer, she has value. She likely won't be paid that much if she's not being productive in other ways, but she's still entitled to a salary if she does her primary duty, or a retainer if she has the potential to do so. If she can't perform this primary duty, there are other tasks she can perform that have value, either in the male department or in the female one, and there's still the off chance of her managing to provide at least one future strong back. That primary function is SO important, that the company has policies in place to provide pensions for its female hirees, even if they've been unproductive in any way.

Can a man fill that single, primarily "female" job? Well, no. No he can't. Like not at all. His entire value to the company is in his ability to perform the more difficult, risky, strenuous jobs so that women can enjoy light duty while they contribute in more important ways. To perform these jobs, he requires certain attributes--physical strength, sanguinity in the face of danger, a willingness to take risks, a sense of putting others before himself, and a drive to perform. The more of these attributes he has, the more valuable he is to the company. The fewer he has, the more likely he is to get fired. He won't be placed on retainer or earn a pension if it looks like the company can't use him for anything, because if the company does that, he'll only be a burden on their payroll.

Men have to earn their value to the company. They can't earn their value through being good at secondary female tasks--there are tons of females in the company, and they can perform those secondary tasks while also performing their primary one. He's not going to get hired to do half a job, and he's not qualified to do the entire thing. The only role he can fill, while retaining enough individual value to the company to remain on the payroll, is the male role.

So in my opinion, men suffer more strict enforcement of their gender roles not because they are considered more valuable than, or preferable to, women, or because women are considered less than men. It is because women are and always have been more valuable, on an individual and inherent basis, to the company than men are. A woman retained that inherent value no matter how useful she was, because women as a group were considered so valuable that it was in the company's interest to keep the entire group on the payroll. A woman who could step outside her assigned duties and perform other ones when need be--that is, a woman who sometimes behaved like a man--was, to a point, more valuable to the company for her ability to do so. She was Woman Plus. She could do her job that only she could do, and then some. Conversely, she was Man Plus. She could do a man's job, and then some. She can be the strong back and the provider of strong backs, the most versatile and valuable employee there is.

Men, on the other hand, had to provide value in order to maintain their employment. Their value to the company lay in performing specific tasks so that females wouldn't have to, and in being valued project contributors who had to earn their entitlement to work with females in this way. Men who did not act "like men" were Less Than Men. Likewise, they were Less Than Women. They were incapable of doing a complete job either way, so there was no added value in them demonstrating female characteristics without having a womb to go along with it.

And at that point, the company, for the sake of its own solvency, would either vigorously "retrain" them, or give them their pink slips. It is not that maleness is "better than" femaleness. It is that maleness has always been extremely limited in its useful and productive permutations, while femaleness is simply less so. The essential feminine can only be added to and gain value, while the essential masculine can only be subtracted from and lose it.

Many women have been able to completely abandon their essential feminine--their primary function--and still retain status as whole human beings with value to society, but men simply cannot do the same. When they abandon masculinity, they throw away all that makes their lives worthwhile to anyone but themselves.

Is it possible to change this? Perhaps. The same social, biological and economic progress that has allowed women to set aside their essential feminine and still retain some value to our evolving society should certainly work the same way for men. There are more roles available to everyone--meaningful ones--now that the old "primary" roles are becoming less important to the "corporation", and men are a part of that "everyone". But as long as women are not willing to fully embody these new roles, they're going to want to hold men to their old ones. And the dynamic, all through history, has been about men putting women--their safety, provision and comfort--before themselves. Because of this, the ride to true liberation for men from their gender roles is gonna be a hell of a lot more bumpy than the one for women has been.

The violence of the oppressed...

...is not the same as the violence of the oppressor.

This phrase conjures images such as the slave revolt that liberated Haiti, the Storming of the Bastille that set off the French Revolution, or of rugged, battle-hardened Mujahideen soldiers harrying the Soviet occupation force in 1980s Afghanistan.

Or...well, if you were a radical feminist, it might conjure images of Lorena Bobbitt, Catherine Kieu Becker, and any number of women who've enacted horrific, sometimes sexual, violence upon men.

This philosophy--that the violence of the oppressed is not the same as the violence of the oppressor--is what led to feminist suppression and dismissal of the almost 300 studies on domestic violence published since the early 80s, studies that demonstrate women are as aggressive, if not more aggressive, in their relationships as men are. It is the philosophy that causes feminists to emphasize the importance of "context" (something many of those almost 300 studies explicitly address), and then twist those contextualizations completely out of shape. It is what led women's advocates to conclude that the mandatory arrest policies enacted in the 1980s had resulted in "victims" being arrested alongside or even in place of their abusers when arrests of women in California rose by 446% and men's by just 37%, and to enact predominant aggressor policies to remedy this "problem".

It is what leads them to assign empirically groundless motivations to female abusers that fall in line with "men's and women's relative positions in society", and therefore characterize husband-battering as a "reaching upward" for empowerment, rather than a "stomping downward" act of anger, jealousy, domination, and, yes, oppression. It is what allows ordinary people and feminists alike to consider women's violence against men not only understandable but a justified and even admirable resistance to "patriarchal norms", while male violence against women has become even more universally condemned than it has always been.

It is what leads the general public to conclude, against all the glaring, neon-colored, sequin-and-road-flare-festooned evidence to the contrary--PSA ad campaigns, VAWA, mandatory arrest policies, crisis lines, battered women's shelters, easily obtained restraining orders, primary aggressor policies, Joe Biden, rape shield protections, campus sexual assault committees, billions of taxpayer dollars' worth of funding, sporadic vigilante harassment, shootings and beatings, and lessons every boy learns from toddlerhood that "it is NEVER okay to hit a girl"--that society does not take violence against women seriously enough. 

That's right. In a world where female on male domestic violence is fodder for hilarity on Bugs Bunny cartoons, where FGM is abhorred and legally banned while infant male circumcision evokes shrugs of indifference, where hitting a woman back can land a man in the hospital while an hours-long public assault on a man by a woman is no big deal to passers by, it is violence against women we do not take seriously enough.

When the simple fact that this could be our collective perception in the face of the billions of dollars we spend on the problem, the millions of words' worth of legislation we've enacted to address it, and the thousands upon thousands of hours of media time devoted to it...all this tells me is that society, on the whole, takes violence against women SO seriously it will stop at nothing to put an end to it.

And why? I mean, it's not as if society hasn't always taken this issue seriously--men used to fight to the death over women who'd been harmed, leap in front of bullets to protect them, and even married women have almost always had some form of legal recourse against battering husbands. The protection of women from physical and sexual harm has always been in society's best interest, because women are inherently and individually important to the functioning of society. But now? It's as if we've all collectively gone nuts in our drive to protect women, to the point where we will happily recast female batterers as victims, jail the men they've assaulted, and cram every instance of violence within a relationship into a narrative of dominant, angry, controlling man and victimized, cowed woman--even when it's obvious that the roles are the exact inverse.

Because a single instance of violence by an "oppressor", no matter how mild or or how justified, is horrible enough to overshadow a thousand such offenses on the part of a member of an "oppressed class". If women are believed to be, or to have been, an oppressed class, and beneath men in society, then female violence against men is a righteous uprising, while male violence can be cast as all that is ugly and evil in a tyrant, the boot-heel of oppression.

This is how feminism has taken our already healthy desire--whether innate or socialized or a little of both--to protect women from violence, and turned it into a steroid-enhanced, mutant, logic-defying impulse to not only protect women from harm, but to take as many men down, innocent or guilty, as we can, even if in doing so we put children at risk. Because if women are and have always been an oppressed class, their violence against their oppressors isn't abhorrent. Every penis severed and shoved down a disposal is a metaphorical triumph against tyranny and oppression.

It is this philosophy that allowed an audience of women to laugh and gloat over the barbaric castration of a man who'd committed the dire offense of asking his wife for a divorce, and to lead many people to speculate, without any other details, that she was probably a battered woman. It is what led women all over North America to view Catherine Becker's atrocity as not just excusable, but "quite fabulous", because even though all we knew (or now know) about Mr. Becker is that he was a man, any man, every man, well, you know how men are...you know he had to have done something to deserve it.

This philosophy is what leads many feminists--from academics to manboobz--to characterize MRAs' attempts to bring domestic and sexual violence against males into the public eye (and the governments' budgets) as "zero-sum thinking", anti-feminist, misogynistic, and an agenda to dismantle existing protections for women. It is this view of oppressor (male) and oppressed (female) that views any outreach toward assisting male victims of female violence as a threat to women that borders on violence itself, a heartless revictimization of an "oppressed class".

And none of it...I mean, none of it, is based on reality. The reality is, women's and men's relative positions in society, throughout history, have always been balanced. Were they equal? Not by a long shot. Were they equitable? Absolutely. And the oppression feminists insist was a one-way street in patriarchal societies, well, this just isn't the way it was. Women were elevated above men in many respects--most notably in the motivation of society to protect them from harm.

And before anyone goes off on some bullshit diatribe concerning benevolent sexism and how women were protected because you protected what you owned, or because they were seen as children, or because the were useful to men as sexual objects, or because they weren't considered full human beings and they had no power in society relative to men, I will direct you to Exhibit A.

The White Feather Girls didn't entice men to enlist with a promise of sex or favor. Those young women went in for the kill, striking men at the very heart of their masculine identities, the bestowing of a feather telling them, "If you don't go off to be maimed or die, you are no longer a man in the eyes of some brassy chit you've never even met before and will probably never see again." And many men went, because a woman's censure--ANY woman's censure--had the power to drive them straight into the teeth of death.

Many feminists will attempt to tell you that Patriarchy (or men, depending on who you talk to) constructed femininity in such a way as to benefit men, thus Othering women. But masculinity and femininity evolved together, so that each would benefit the other, and women had, and still have, a strong hand in shaping what is socially acceptable in men and what is not.

That skillet-wielding Victorian harpy chasing her husband out the door and off to work with shrieks of "lazy, good for nothing layabout!" was wielding the "Hulk SMASH!!!" version of a power all women had, have always had, and still have, over men.

That feminism managed to convince the world that the oppression of patriarchal societies placed women at the bottom in every single facet of life (even areas where they were elevated), in a position where they were utterly powerless and incapable of inflicting oppression, or where their only avenue to power and agency was through their usefulness as brood mares, domestic slaves and receptacles for male ejaculate, while men alone had the power necessary to oppress anyone, is a feat of sociopolitical chicanery worthy of Charles Ponzi.

And until western societies open their eyes and start seeing reality, instead of continuing to believe what they are told, we will continue to see women's violence as what it is not--excusable, justifiable, less harmful, a righteous rebellion against tyranny, and a reaching upward for empowerment--rather than what it actually is.

And until we, as a society, come to terms with this divergence between what we have been told to believe, and what is actually real, we will continue to enable, excuse and even reward female violence, and sweep all those inconvenient male victims who challenge our ideas of what society actually looks like, under the carpet where we don't have to see them, or worse, recast them as abusers themselves--a whole underclass of people whose crime was bruising women's knuckles with their faces.