Transcript of "All those dangerous woman-haters!"

I've mentioned more than once how I've come across people who are able to get behind some--even many--of the causes championed by the men's rights movement, but who are essentially put off or even scared away by the anger, misogyny, aggression and generalizations of women (or even feminists) commonly found in MRM spaces. I think it's probably every other week that someone posts in r/mensrights on reddit that if only the gang would tone down the language, not be so accusatory toward feminism, and stop generalizing women, that they'd be more comfortable there, because...oh, because feminism did accomplish some good things, or because not all women are like that and it's unfair to generalize, or because anger and hostility will scare support away from the causes. (One thing I think these people don't realize is that men's advocates tried that for almost 30 years in the field of domestic violence advocacy, and I think we can all guess how well the whole "asking politely and calmly" thing worked for them.)

This squeamishness of would-be supporters when they're confronted with the levels of frustration in the MRM is kind of ridiculous, all things considered. When people's rights are trampled, you can expect them to get mad and to express that. And when I look at even mainstream articles, no one seems to be shy about generalizing men or masculinity, or criticizing large subgroups of men for either embodying masculinity or failing to embody it "properly". Hell, Obama's father's day address admonished black fathers--a demographic that faces some serious social and economic challenges--for failing to man-up to their paternal responsibilities. (Of course, there was no Mother's Day admonition toward black mothers to, say, woman up and not have babies until they're in stable relationships, or to facilitate their children's access to their fathers, when both behaviors heavily contribute to the problem of fatherlessness in the black community in the US. And why wouldn't he? Because that would be generalizing and unfairly critical, right?)

Anyway, a week or two ago, I stumbled across a video wherein a prominent and popular online feminist vlogger, Jessica Valenti gave a monologue on misogyny, and her estimation of the MRA community online, trying to portray it as some festering, oozing, pathogenic ulcer of misogynistic sentiment and hateful anti-feminism (who don't really do anything for men, no less). And from the histrionics and accusations of a recent commenter on my channel as to the misogynistic nature of my entire audience, I'm pretty sure Ms. Valenti isn't alone.

Okay, I can't say I was shocked watching Ms. Valenti speak on this topic, or even disappointed. I think it's fair to say I rolled my eyes so hard at her desperation to connect the MRM in any possible way, no matter how absurd, with misogynistic violence and hate, I may have actually sprained my eyeballs.

I can't be sure whether Ms. Valenti feels so threatened by any expression of maleness that does not comply with the drawing room decorum demanded by feminists, that she hied herself to her fainting couch before learning one damn thing about us, or whether she knows what we're about and is deliberately smearing the movement with the flimsiest of accusations, hoping that if she paints us all in a poor enough light no one will bother to go look and see if she knows what the hell she's talking about.

Neither possibility reflects well on her, or on others who agree with her.

First bit of ignorance, she conflates anti-feminism with misogyny, and immediately after, she conflates the men's rights movement with the game community (otherwise known as pick-up artists, or PUA).

A little background on the MRA/PUA thing for those of you who might be new here. Both "movements" are based at least in part on an acceptance of the empirically supported biological reality of gender differences in behavior and psychology. Both movements recognize the system we currently have in place, largely due to rampant and unchecked feminist advocacy acting in concert with traditional white-knighting, is...well, fucked. Annnnnd that's pretty much where they part ways.

MRAs want to fix the system, or create a new one based on real equality. PUAs either think the system is beyond repair, or don't care to fix it. After all, if they fixed it, they wouldn't be able to exploit and capitalize on all the openings provided by its fucked-upness in their endless quest for low-cost fun and poon.

MRAs often characterize PUAs as pussy-worshippers, while PUAs disdain MRAs as pointless and counter-productive beta-grovellers who could be milking the broken system for all it's worth if they'd just get the right attitude, some decent clothes and weren't so busy whining. There is a fair amount of cross-over as far as each being interested in some of the writings and activities on either side, but to conflate the two and lump them into one big bag of male discontent is as foolish as claiming fundamentalist islam is the same as Buddhism, because both are based on spirituality.

So to recap: PUAs are happy with the status quo, and even if they see a collapse coming, they're happy to fuck and drink and carouse all they can while it all falls apart. MRAs are trying to prevent said collapse.

Now these distinctions are important, because of the fact that unless someone like Valenti can connect the MRA and the PUA communities into some kind of organism with a common purpose, you can't say things like this: "George Sodini, the man who shot those women at a gym in Pennsylvania not too long ago this past year, was kind of peripherally involved with some of them online," in the context of a discussion of the MRM.

Because I looked for quite a while and the only connection I could find between Sodini and the men's community online is the fact that he attended a seminar on how to be more successful with women--I'm assuming he was there to learn Game. And you can be sure, if someone like Valenti had something more concrete, she wouldn't have been circumspect enough to say, "peripherally involved"--she'd have named names and told the camera exactly where and with whom online this guy was hanging out. So there it is. A single seminar on how to learn Game Theory.

So here's a guy who's arguably been slowly going crazy for a long time, who hasn't been laid in 20 years, who happens to attend a single PUA seminar in the months before he finally flips his nut and shoots a bunch of women, and this is indicative--according to Valenti--of the misogyny in the Men's Rights Movement, and that's how she can rationalize her way into saying: "So I do think that kind of paying attention to the misogyny and the anti-feminism that's happening online and the way that these men are bolstering each other and supporting each other in really violent views about women, it's something important that we need to pay attention to. Blah blah, hateful toward women, danger, blah blah blah, violent misogyny, violent views, blah blah, hate women, blah blah, no accountability online, blah blah, want to kill women, blah blah, place where people are like 'yeah me too'." And she can say all of that and frame it within the context of a discussion of the men's rights movement.

Because George Sodini attended a PUA seminar sometime before he went off his rocker, he is now ONE OF US.

Now, there was a lot of discussion in men's communities online about Sodini, and the very worst of it was pretty bad, but largely if not entirely confined to the comment sections of various blog posts, most of which occurred in the PUA community--a community of social nihilists, mind you, who look down their noses at the MRM for trying to fix the system that provides them with all that cut rate pussy. A few of those commenters praised him overtly or in a roundabout way, but most of the comments were of the "canary in the coal mine" sort--the kind you might see when a woman does something awful and people believe they know why, and then discuss the systemic problems that might lead to more people doing more horrible things of that nature for the same systemic reasons.

In other words, most of the discussion revolved around how the system marginalizes men, and how we can fix the system so that we DON'T end up with more George Sodinis.

Right or wrong, Sodini felt that our feminist society had cheated him out of any kind of normal or decent life. A lot of people in the MRM feel the same way to one degree or another. So I'm going to repeat this: most of the examination of Sodini in the men's rights community was about how society can change so that we don't get more Sodinis.

But it seems that the very fact that men were discussing it in the larger context of systemic discrimination against men rather than simply condemning Sodini as a monster and then shutting up about it...this is a clear sign to feminists like Valenti and other hand-wringers and pearl-clutchers that MRAs hate women and have violent views about women. Despite the fact that on most MRA blogs, any kind of incitement to violent action, either against isolated women or against the system, is swiftly and sternly rebuffed, and even though MRAs want to fix the system that creates men like Sodini, it must have been MRAs who brainwashed Sodini into hating women enough to kill a bunch of them.

Oh, noble Jessica, and noble noble feminism, a movement that is benign and peaceful and has everyone's best interests at heart.

So I was just thinking we should examine another famous shooter, one who went by the name of Valerie Solanas.

For those of you who don't know, Solanas is the feminist author of the infamous SCUM manifesto, whom many feminists today have tried to characterize as a satirical work (yet more revisionist history right there, but I'll get to that in a minute). Another feminist told me just the other day that it was, at its heart, wholly nihilistic, calling for the end of humanity altogether--which I found interesting, since the manifesto actually calls for the systemic extermination of the male sex through violent rebellion on the part of women, after which said women could live the rest of their lives in peace, at which point why would any of them want to burden themselves with children. To conclude that the main point of the manifesto was some sort of egalitarian vision of nihilism wrt humanity as a whole is basically equating the genocidal killing of males with the free choice on the part of women to not spoil their male-free Utopian existence by having children.

In other words, the brutal murder of a man is exactly the same as a woman choosing not to have a baby, in the mind of at least one feminist I've spoken to.

Solanas' other claim to fame was as the person who shot and nearly killed Andy Warhol. She actually attempted to kill three men that day, shot Warhol and art maven Mario Amaya, an associate of Warhol's, and put the gun against the head of Warhol's manager, Fred Hughes, at which point the gun jammed. If the gun hadn't jammed, there's no reason to believe three men wouldn't have ended up dead.

Not as well known to most is the fact that Warhol wasn't even the man Solanas had set out to kill that day. Her intended target was her publisher, Maurice Girodias, whom she felt had wronged her. As a condition of him publishing the SCUM manifesto through Olympia Press, which he owned, he'd required her to give him the right of first refusal to all her future work. This is a common clause in publishing contracts, and simply stipulates that the author will bring all future, or all related, work to that publisher first, at which point the publisher can offer for it or decline, and the author can accept the offer, negotiate better terms, or decline altogether and offer it elsewhere. Ms. Solanas took this agreement to mean that Girodias now owned the copyright to all her future works. So clearly if the redundant and meandering, incoherent drivel of the manifesto itself was not indicative enough of the woman's extreme level of crazy and stupid, the fact that she never bothered to ask anyone what that agreement meant--either before complying with it or after, or indeed before setting out to kill because of it--should be evidence enough of some serious deficiencies.

When Solanas went looking for Girodias, he wasn't at his office. For whatever reason, she decided Warhol would be a suitable stand-in to vent her spleen at men, and claimed to police and at her hearing that Warhol--who had done nothing more than give her a couple of bit parts in two of his movies--had "too much control in her life", had her, "tied up lock stock and barrel" and was "going to do something" to her that would have "ruined" her. At her hearing she insisted she was right in what she did and had nothing to regret. After some very well-needed stints in Bellevue Hospital for psychiatric evaluation, she pled guilty to reckless assault with attempt to harm, and was sentenced to three years. She was reported at that time to be dedicating "the remainder of her life to the avowed purpose of eliminating every single male from the face of the earth," and though aware of the feminist movement of the time, she considered them a "civil disobedience luncheon club."

In essence, even the most radical second wavers were not radical enough for Solanas. They might hate men, they might want to liberate themselves completely from men, but they weren't prepared to eliminate all males from the face of the earth--at least not yet--so Solanas had no time or patience for them. They were merely "playing" at being feminists, apparently.

But as much as Solanas couldn't be bothered to associate herself with the radical-but-not-radical-enough feminists of the day, those feminists practically jumped at the chance to associate themselves with her, once she flipped her nut and pulled a Sodini.

Robin Morgan, a prolific feminist author who eventually became editor of Ms Magazine (arguably the most influential feminist rag there is) joined demonstrators demanding Solanas' release from prison. Ti-Grace Atkinson, feminist author and then president of the NY chapter of NOW, praised Solanas as "the first outstanding champion of women's rights." Florynce Kennedy, a lawyer and active member of NOW, who went on to found the feminist party and the women's political caucus, called her "one of the most important spokeswomen of the feminist movement."

Wow. So if a few comments on PUA blogs sympathetic to George Sodini is a sign that the Men's Rights community online is filled with misogyny, what does the fact that prominent feminist writers and thinkers beatified Valerie Solanas say about misandry within feminism?

And it's not like I have to go very far back in history to find feminists glorifying violence against men and pedestalizing the women who commit it.

Lorena Bobbitt, whose initial statement to police--according to the NY Times--was "He always have orgasm and he doesn't wait for me to have orgasm. He's selfish. I don't think it's fair, so I pulled back the sheets and then I did it,"--was hailed as a national folk hero, an obviously terrorized battered woman striking back at her oppressor. Never mind that there was plenty of evidence of reciprocal violence in that relationship. Never mind that he was in the process of leaving her, and they'd been discussing divorce.

The feminist narrative reared its ugly head, and the case was crammed into that model, complete with a rape accusation that could not be proven in a court of law, and a story that repeatedly changed gears, from her initial statement onward, to fit the dogma of domineering, abusive husband and terrified, cowed wife. Before she had even she cried abuse, the feminists of North America picked her up on their shoulders, a display of sisterly solidarity with a violent offender that culminated in carnival-style demonstrations outside the courtroom, including the dispensing of cocktail wieners slathered in ketchup, t-shirts extolling the sweet virtues of revenge, and feminists selling buttons nominating Bobbitt for surgeon general.

Mainstream magazines hailed her as a feminist heroine, and perhaps most disturbing, a major feminist group in Ecuador, Bobbitt's home country, not only bankrolled her defence, but threatened to castrate 100 innocent American men if she went to prison for mutilating her husband.

Nope. No misandry evident in any of that. Or violent sentiment. Or terrorist leanings. At ALL.

I mean, feminists must be super-aware of terrorism, since I've been warned by well-meaning feminists that supporting men who go their own way is an act of terrorism because MRAs sometimes use harsh or colorful language, so I'm sure the vast majority of prominent feminists loudly and firmly condemned that group in Ecuador for the terrorists they are, and admonishing the movement as a whole for associating with such groups....oh wait. Never mind.

Anyway, even as recently as a couple months ago, the very same danger Ms. Valenti claims runs rampant within the men's communities online--the danger that "because there's no accountability online the same way there is in real life, all of a sudden you can say like, "yeah, I hate women, I wanna kill women," you can say that online and not only will you find a place to say it, but you'll find a place to say it where people are like, "yeah, me too.""

Which brings me to a little corner of the online, feminist universe called RadicalHub, and some lovely quotes found there:

A feminist child care worker, speaking about the boys in her care: "I honestly have been reassessing the fact that I am giving care to these little future rapists....I know it is kinda going against my principles to support and care for these little fuckers."

A feminist web developer: I'm one of those bad, shameful feminists who wish we could all just kill the fuckers (whether it's a practical tack to take or not).

A feminist and fellow Canuck: "Females don't have to kill baby boys. Just not nurture them. Females are forced to birth baby boys, but beyond that a female's physical actions are her own. Males will die without the constant infusion of female energy that they get from our wombs and from our lives.... Females need to not be emotionally and intellectually invested in a male future."

A UK feminist lobbyist: It needs to be so unfashionable to have boys, and then they would be aborted before seeing the light of day...violent revolution is the only answer...

And a feminist and bestselling novelist: ...your proposal to exterminated the male entirely a la Solanas is to me more of a last resort.... I assume you object that lowering testosterone levels would not necessarily end the oppression. You may be right.

These aren't random, unemployed internet kooks who live on chee-tos and haven't seen the sun in years, either. They're lobbyists, community development coordinators, they work for Arts Councils and Chambers of Commerce, teach special ed and care for children, lawyers and bestselling authors. These are not basement dwelling losers, they're respectable people with jobs that involve public trust. Other contributors to Radicalhub include noted feminists, Julie Bindle and Sheila Jeffreys.

I'm starting to wonder just how atrocious a feminist would have to behave in order for others in the movement to accept the kind of guilt by association that they're so quick to apply to the MRA and men like George Sodini, whose association with the MRM consisted of attending a seminar on how to pick up women.

I don't understand how Paul Elam saying, "Men going their own way IS fucking feminists' shit up" qualifies as terrorism in the MRM, while a publicized threat called into several media outlets to sever the penises of 100 random American men if a violent woman spent a night in prison wasn't enough to so much as dampen the carnival atmosphere and feminist glee outside the courthouse at Lorena Bobbitt's trial. I really don't understand how feminists can now rewrite history and claim the SCUM manifesto was a work of satire, when not only did its author take it to its logical conclusion on a small scale, but other feminists of the day who have since risen to prominence lauded her violent and murderous actions as those of a feminist champion.

Seriously. What the fuck is going on? You put a monster in some strappy sandals and lipstick and suddenly it's not a monster anymore but a hero, or harmless? I just don't get it.

And at the same time, the moment a man gets angry or speaks passionately, everyone's ducking and covering because some lunatic who shot a bunch of women made some of the same criticisms of the system that influences all our lives, and attended a single seminar on how to pick up women?

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