There is a wordpress.com blog post about a recent Salon article on feminism and domestic violence. The gist of the article is this: with the millions and billions of dollars spent of the Violence Against Women Act, a court system that makes it laughingly simple to get legal sanctions such as restraining orders out on men, and a precedence in the court system that allows women to claim either physical or emotional abuse as a defense against committing violent crimes and even murder, women are worse off and evil abusive men are better off because of these things.
The argument is all these battered women’s shelters somehow keep the batterer safe just long enough for him to become a pathological beater and beat the living shit out of his wife or girlfriend or sister or whatever and kill her. Somehow these shelters and programs that have millions of dollars and hundreds of social workers and legal professionals at their disposal is powerless to stop these abusive battering males from killing women. Cuz that’s what us men do; we batter and murder cuz it is fun. It’s what we talk about at the water cooler every morning before we have the women do all the work for us at the office.
Whatever. The facts and studies speak for themselves. The government has found that the number of women who go to the hospital and are killed by their male partners is so small and such a small percentage of the total that it isn’t even funny. The statistics that Salon.com references are ones where the impartial feminist study makers place all of the unknown cause of women’s injuries cases from hospitals in with the battered ones. That’s abotu as statistically accurate as lumping deaths from unknown causes in with cancer to make the point that cancer is a deadly disease and needs more funding and effors to combat.
The real government and top studies, done with impartiality and no bias, show that women batter their male partners just as much as men batter women. Gay men beat other gay men at the same rate as straight men batter. Lesbians are the worst batterers with higher rates of abusive behavior towards each other. Yet all the funding and all the noise on the airwaves and in the senate is that men are the problem, men are getting a great deal, men are evil, blah blah blah blah blah. Total crap and a huge disservice to the male population and those who are actually trying to get DV down instead of furthering their own political agenda.
And the really big kicker in the article was the claim that feminism has kept abusive men alive. Now what exactly does that mean? Does that mean before feminism that abusive men were just killed by their wives? Well that still happens. Mary Winkler and others have gotten away with shooting, stabbing, running over their husbands and boyfriends with cars, and then saying with no physical proof that they were abused and got away with the murder or the assault. So how is this protecting the abusive men and keeping them alive?
Personally I think the author is just insinuating how she wouldn’t mind the killing of men. How many jokes have you heard the clique of girls or friends laugh their butts off about how they wish they could just off that man in their life giving them problems. To me the killing of anyone, male or female, is serious and not somethign to laugh or joke about, but hey I’m just a male.
