Below is the entirety of a debate on domestic violence that I had with David “Manboobz” Futrelle. It was a fun debate that served its purpose. And part of that purpose was to demonstrate convincingly that in the world of blogging on men’s issues, David is an unknown now for the same reasons he will remain one for all time.
He’s a fucking moron. He was, though, annoying enough to gain his 15 minutes of mediocrity.
Now that it’s over, it’s over. He won’t be getting attention from AVfM again.
PE
And now for the debate.
David Futrelle of the blog Manboobz has agreed to enter a debate on the subject of domestic violence with me here at A Voice for Men. Since Mr. Futrelle maintains a blog in which he asserts that MRA’s have pretty much everything wrong, and in which he specifically claims he will, concerning MRA’s, “dismantle their rickety logic and dubious statistics,” it should follow that he will do just that on the subject of DV, starting right now.
During the brief negotiations it was decided that my excellent centerpiece article on domestic violence, and the research it was based on, will serve as the object of his dissent. For readers convenience I am posting the video version of that article and the research links here as well.
RESEARCH SOURCES
CDC Report- American Journal of Public Health
Martin Fiebert’s Annotated Bibliography
John Archer: Sex Differences in Aggression in Real-World Settings: A Meta-Analytic Review
NOTE: Access to Dr. Archers research is fee based!
Abstracts- If you want the complete studies, you have to pay.
Michelle Carney, School of Social Work, Tucker Hall, University of Georgia. Fred Buttell, Tulane University. and Don Dutton, University of British Columbia, Canada
Quote from abstract: Particular attention is paid to the cultural influences that shape our conceptualization of “domestic violence” and the fact that empirical research suggests that domestic violence has been falsely framed as exclusively male initiated violence.
-
As I stated in the article and video, the main assertions I am putting forth about domestic violence are generally as follows.
1. All domestic violence not in self defense is wrong.
2. Sex is not at all predictive in either perpetration or victimization of DV.
3. Men are unfairly labeled as default perpetrators by the domestic violence industry, and ignored as victims, as can be easily supported with an examination of laws like VAWA and the dominance of female only DV services (funding).
4. Finally, that feminist ideologues and feminist organizations are actively involved in keeping things this way, as evidenced by organizations like NOMAS, who joined an amicus brief to shut men out of services for domestic violence in California.
-
Mr. Futrelle has 48 hours to respond to this by emailing his response to me, which I will post in it’s entirety. There is no word limit, and Futrelle may respond to any of the preceding four points, or anything else he chooses directly from the video or article.
The debate will terminate after five exchanges.
———————————————————
David Futrelle, of the blog Man Boobz, [http://manboobz.blogspot.com/] replies:
Paul, you have delivered up a fairly standard-issue MRA argument on Domestic Violence, from your pro forma anti-feminist jabs down to the almost ritual invocation of Martin Fiebert’s sacred Annotated Bibliography.
Like most such efforts, your argument depends on a highly selective reading of the scientific literature on DV, virtually ignoring a huge number of studies — literally several thousand — that directly contradict your conclusions. [MK] You’ve ignored the serious methodological flaws of the studies you cite, and drawn conclusions from the research that the researchers themselves have stated explicitly are completely false. Your grand conclusion, that “domestic violence has nothing to do with what sex you are” could not be more wrong.
Let’s deal with the first two points first.
Anyone looking into the vast literature on the subject will be struck at once by the radically different conclusions researchers have drawn from their data.
One group of studies, the one that you relied on almost exclusively, advances an idea called “gender symmetry.” That is, they seem to show that men and women start fights, and land blows, in roughly equal percentages.
A second, and much larger, group of studies, finds men responsible for the overwhelming majority of DV. According to a nationwide survey conducted by the National Institute of Justice and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, some 22% of women said they had been assaulted by a current or former intimate partner at some point in their lives; only 7% of men said the same. [NIJ]
And that may actually understate the imbalance: indeed, one Department of Justice survey found that 95% of the victims of DV were women. These studies also find that women are injured far more frequently, and far more severely, by DV: one study of domestic disturbance calls involving injury found that women were injured 94% of the time; men, only 14% of the time. [APA]
There’s a good reason why we should take these studies more seriously than the ones you cited. Most of the “gender symmetry” studies are surveys conducted using a methodologically flawed research tool called the Conflict Tactics Scale, originally developed by researcher Murray Straus in the 1970s. Indeed, the vast majority of the studies examined in the John Archer meta-study you mentioned used the CTS. [MK]
Researchers using the CTS ask survey respondents about an assortment of specific acts of violence. What the CTS doesn’t ask about are the causes, contexts, or consequences of these acts of violence.
As a result, one critic notes, the CTS “equates a woman pushing a man in self-defense to a man pushing a woman down the stairs. It labels a mother as violent if she defends her daughter from the father’s sexual molestation. It combines categories such as “hitting” and “trying to hit” despite the important difference between them. Because it looks at only one year, this study equates a single slap by a woman to a man’s 15 year history of domestic terrorism.” [MYTH]
This problem is exacerbated by the lack of attention given to the motivations behind the violence. While both men and women use violence to express anger, a number of studies show that men are far more likely to use domestic violence to control their victim, to “show who is boss.” Other studies that look at motivation find that much female “violence” is in fact self-defense. [APA]
There are other serious problems with the CTS as a measure of DV. The first version of the questionnaire left out sexual assaults by current or former intimate partners, which according to the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) make up nearly 20% of all spousal assaults; such assaults are overwhelmingly committed by men against women. [MK] And the CTS also ignores violence that happens after partners separate, another critical omission, because violence tends to escalate, sometimes quite dramatically, after a separation. The NCVS found that separated women are 8 times as likely to face violence from an ex-partner than married women are from their husbands. [MK]
Researchers who use the CTS and similar surveys have acknowledged that their surveys provide only a limited look at DV as a whole, and that they do not capture much of the most serious kinds of abuse.
Unfortunately, the Men’s Rights Activists who have seized upon these surveys as evidence that women are equally abusive as men, ignoring these crucial caveats.
As a result, the researchers most involved in developing and refining the CTS over the years have explicitly denounced the opportunistic use of their findings by MRAs and others with an axe to grind against feminism. Murray Straus, for example, has noted that “the statistics are likely to be misused by misogynists and apologists for male violence.” [MF]
And you may recall Richard Gelles; he was one of the original developers of the CTS and has been one of the loudest proponents of the “gender symmetry” argument. You quoted him in your post to buttress your points. But he has been as scathing towards the MRAs who misrepresent his research as he has been to those who originally greeted his research with threats:
“The statement that men and women hit one another in roughly equal numbers is true, however, it cannot be made in a vacuum without the qualifiers that a) women are seriously injured at seven times the rate of men and b) that women are killed by partners at more than two times the rate of men….
[W]hen we look at injuries resulting from violence involving male and female partners, it is categorically false to imply that there are the same number of “battered” men as there are battered women. Research shows that nearly 90 percent of battering victims are women and only about ten percent are men… The most brutal, terrorizing and continuing pattern of harmful intimate violence is carried out primarily by men. [FAQ]
Straus, meanwhile, urges those citing his research to remember that women suffer far more from the consequences of abuse, and that because of this the “first priority in services for victims and in prevention and control must continue to be directed toward assaults by men [MS]
So, Paul, do you still think that “domestic violence has nothing to do with what sex you are?”
The point of all this is not to deny that men suffer from DV. They do, and though a much smaller percentage of men suffer from serious abuse than women, the suffering they endure is every bit as real. Men don’t have to suffer half of all serious abuse for their suffering to count; there is no need to exaggerate to make the point that we as a society need to take abuse directed at men more seriously.
The question is what is to be done about it. And it is here that the Men’s Rights movement in general, and you in particular, Paul, have failed completely, in many ways making the problem even worse. The solution to DV against men is not to publish articles with titles like “When is it OK to Punch Your Wife,” filled with explicit fantasies of male retribution against women. [EL] The solution to female violence is not more male violence.
And it is not to send angry MRAs to harass the donors to a DV shelter with phone calls in an attempt to get them to stop funding the shelter, as Glenn Sacks did to The Family Place, a DV shelter that ran some ads he deemed “misandrist.” Even if the ads were “misandrist” — and I don’t think they were — how is trying to make life harder for female victims of abuse possibly going to help male victims of abuse? [ALAS]
Shelters for women did not fall from the sky. They were not set up by a feminist matriarchy. They exist because individual women activists — and some men, but mostly women — built them, over much opposition, over the course of several decades, starting at a time when almost no one took DV against women (or men) seriously. Most shelters today run on shoestring budgets, and face the constant threat of violence from men angry at the women sheltered in them. Most, while not set up to handle male victims, try to help as best they can; the Family Place, the shelter targeted by Sacks, gives male victims vouchers for hotel rooms so they have a place to stay. [ALAS]
My challenge to the MRM is simple: if you really want DV shelters for men, and aren’t simply interested in scoring rhetorical points against feminists, build them. Don’t complain that feminists aren’t fighting your battles for you. Get off the Internet, get your hands dirty, and actually make a difference.
Sources:
Specific sources for information and quotes, in the order in which they appear in the essay.
[MK]“Gender Symmetry” in Domestic Violence: A Substantive and Methodological Research Review, by Michael S. Kimmel, “VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN, Vol. 8 No. 11, November 2002
http://www.xyonline.net/sites/default/files/Kimmel,%20Gender%20symmetry%20in%20dom.pdf
[NIJ] Selected Research Results on Violence Against Women (National Institute of Justice)
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/nij/topics/crime/violence-against-women/selected-results.htm#tjaden
[APA] Are Physical Assaults by Wives and Girlfriends a Major Social Problem? A Review of the Literature, by DANIEL G. SAUNDERS, VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN, Vol. 8 No. 12, December 2002
http://www.biscmi.org/aquila/Violence%20by%20women–Saunders.pdf
[MYTH] The Myth of the “Battered Husband Syndrome, by Jack C. Straton, Ph.D.
[MF] Claims about husband battering. by Michael Flood, DVIRC Newsletter, Summer 1999, Melbourne: Domestic Violence and Incest Resource Centre
http://www.xyonline.net/content/claims-about-husband-battering
[FAQ] FAQ: But doesn’t evidence show that women are just as likely to batter their partners as men?
[EL] When is it OK to Punch Your Wife, by Paul Elam, The Spearhead, September 14, 2010
http://www.the-spearhead.com/2010/09/14/when-is-it-ok-to-punch-your-wife/
[ALAS] Alas, a Blog: The Family Place To MRAs: “Instead of bashing women’s organizations, stand up and help somebody yourself.”
Other sources consulted:
REFERENCES EXAMINING ASSAULTS BY WOMEN ON THEIR SPOUSES OR MALE PARTNERS: AN ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY, by Martin S. Fiebert
http://www.csulb.edu/~mfiebert/assault.htm
DIFFERENTIATION AMONG TYPES OF INTIMATE PARTNER VIOLENCE: RESEARCH UPDATE AND IMPLICATIONS FOR INTERVENTIONS, by Joan B. Kelly and Michael P. Johnson, FAMILY COURT REVIEW, Vol. 46 No. 3, July 2008
Prevalence, Incidence, and Consequences of Violence Against Women: Findings From the National Violence Against Women Survey, by Patricia Tjaden and Nancy Thoennes. National Institute of Justice Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: Research in Brief, November 1998
http://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles/172837.pdf
Measuring the Extent of Woman Abuse in Intimate Heterosexual Relationships: A Critique of the Conflict Tactics Scales, by Walter Dekeseredy and Martin Schwartz, VAWnet February 1998
http://new.vawnet.org/category/Main_Doc.php?docid=388
Domestic Violence Factoids, Richard J. Gelles
http://www.mincava.umn.edu/documents/factoid/factoid.html
Straus, M. A. (1997). Physical assaults by women partners:A major social problem. InM. R. Walsh (Ed.), Women, men and gender: Ongoing debates (pp. 210-221). New Haven: Yale University Press.
http://pubpages.unh.edu/~mas2/VB33.pdf
Processes explaining the concealment and distortion of evidence on gender symmetry in partner violence, by MA Straus – European Journal on Criminal Policy and Research, 2007
http://pubpages.unh.edu/~mas2/V74-gender-symmetry-with-gramham-Kevan-Method%208-.pdf
Differences in Frequency of Violence and Reported Injury Between Relationships With Reciprocal and Nonreciprocal Intimate Partner Violence, by Daniel J. Whitaker, PhD, Tadesse Haileyesus, MS, Monica Swahn, PhD and Linda S. Saltzman, PhD; May 2007, Vol 97, No. 5 | American Journal of Public Health
[Cited by Elam as CDC Report- American Journal of Public Health]
http://ajph.aphapublications.org/cgi/content/abstract/97/5/941
Sex Differences in Aggression Between Heterosexual Partners: A Meta-Analytic Review, by John Archer Psychological Bulletin 2000, Vol. 126, No. 5,
http://feminism.martinsewell.com/Archer2000.pdf
Homicides and Intimate Partner Violence : A Literature Review, by Lorena Garcia, Catalina Soria and Eric L. Hurwitz, Trauma Violence Abuse October 2007 vol. 8 no. 4
http://tva.sagepub.com/content/8/4/370.short
Female Perpetration of Violence in Heterosexual Intimate Relationships : Adolescence Through Adulthood, by Jessica R. Williams, Reem M. Ghandour and Joan E. Kub, Trauma Violence Abuse October 2008 vol. 9 no. 4
http://tva.sagepub.com/content/9/4/227
_________________________________
Elam Response- Part 1
Given that the terms of this debate allow me 48 hours to respond, I have decided to post my response in two parts. I think it is necessary because there is a problem here – an egregious one – that requires individual attention.
That problem, David, is that you are coming to the table to debate scholarly investigation of a social problem relying almost exclusively on opinions and conclusions, not of legitimate academicians, but of political ideologues with a rigid and predetermined view of the issue. Those ideologues do not seek truth, but only to mold selective data into conformity with their political agenda.
That fact compels me, before proceeding with anything else, to address this problem with credible proof of its existence, providing a compelling rationale as to why it (they) cannot be trusted to provide anything untainted by bias.
This ideological rigidity is fine for the sake of some internet debates, David, but sets a dangerous standard for social research and public policy, which is, after all, what we are ultimately discussing.
Let’s begin with an important, if rudimentary, understanding of feminist theory as it applies to domestic violence.
The pillar of feminist perspective about domestic violence is that it is an extension of patriarchy, and patriarchal dominance through physical intimidation in the home – exclusively by husbands against their wives. (Dobash & Dobash, 1979; Loseke & Kurz, 2005)
I will use only the preceding references for this assertion unless you contest the idea that feminist doctrine hinges on the patriarchal model of domestic violence and that it serves as the primary lens through which all research and review is seen. If you won’t stipulate this, I will provide ample additional evidence for it in my rebuttal to your next post. But if you accede that point, then you must also admit to the following:
The patriarchal theory of domestic violence absolutely mandates that research conclusions point to male on female violence only, or the theory that said violence stems from patriarchal power falls apart completely.
And so too would a lot of funding, from VAWA, to university departments, to DV shelter budgets across the western world. We must never forget that there is a huge financial interest in feminist hegemony over the DV issue.
This is the Achilles Heel of feminist “scholarship” on domestic violence, and quite frankly yours in this debate as well. It is a corner that I will assert right now that you cannot “unpaint” yourself out of, unless you acknowledge the bias of your current sources, then seek out, and provide, others.
The only thing I need do for this part of my response is to demonstrate that your sources are indeed gender ideologues and activists, bent on perpetuating the patriarchal model, which is quite simple and easy. And of course I can offer that while I am an activist, none of the studies I offered in my original article or video were conducted by anything other than academicians without a known political agenda.
The first bit of evidence that I offer as to the activist nature of your offerings is the fact that this is what they say about themselves.
First, you cite the National Organization for Men Against Sexism (NOMAS), an organization with ongoing affiliation with Michael Kimmell, yet another one of your sources. If you go to their website, you will find that their description, placed on the header of their home page, is Pro-feminist, Gay Affirmative, Anti-Racist, Enhancing Men’s Lives.
Their Statement of Principles is headed, in large red font, with
The National Organization for Men Against Sexism is an activist organization of men and women supporting positive changes for men.
In addressing men’s roles in advancing their cause, Brian Klocke of NOMAS writes the following:
“As suggested by Alison Jaggar and others, men must first learn the text of feminist theory. This learning must not only involve the traditional reading of seminal works in feminist theory by feminist authors but must also involve a learning of social and political experience from a feminist perspective. [bold text mine] Men should consult with feminist women when writing about feminist theory. Men should also support more authorship of feminist theory by women and challenge other men to see feminist theory as a legitimate and necessary practice that challenges men to end patriarchy. Above all, men need to engage with feminist theory and practice, letting it work on them, in order to liberate all genders and build a society constructed on justice and nourished by love.”
The activities of NOMAS clearly demonstrate their sincerity about maintaining a purely feminist first, anti patriarchal perspective of domestic violence vs. a paradigm that would foster outreach to all victims. In 2005 they joined an amicus brief in the Blumhorst case, in order to prevent the allocations of any monies in the state of California for the provision of support services to male victims of domestic violence. They don’t want a dollar of tax money to go to male victims, or for that matter, for the system to even recognize they exist.
Somewhat outside the realm of DV, but highly germane to the issue of academic integrity has been the reaction from Michael Kimmel, on behalf of NOMAS on the issue of the emerging field of Male Studies, which intends to study the condition of the human maleoutside the sphere of influence of feminist ideologues.
I personally wrote NOMAS president Robert Brannon about this, with questions about their organization and an informal invitation to support the Male Studies initiative. The response I got was from Michael Kimmel, who sent me a rather curt, dismissive email indicating that he and his associates were already in control of this field of study, as though the intellectual pursuit was their property.
Can you imagine that? What sort of academician assumes ownership of an entire discipline, and rules out potential research, collaboration and support, sight unseen, simply because he knows the individuals involved don’t align themselves with his personal sexual politics?
Allow me to answer that for you. It would be the same academician whose critique of CTS you rely so heavily on in your rebuttal; an academician who has lost all pretense to objectivity and academic integrity.
And that would be fitting with NOMAS in general. Another one of their members, Barry Goldstein, J.D., co chair of the NOMAS task force on child custody, had his law license suspended and was ultimately disbarred for perpetrating a fraud on a court.
And the circumstances of that fraud? He lied repeatedly to a court about evidence in, you guessed it, a domestic violence case against a man.
Goldstein can still be found listed on the leadership page for NOMAS.
Many of the others you mentioned, while maybe not as proprietary as Kimmell, or criminal as Goldstein, nonetheless emerge as ideologues of the same camp with the same political motives. Below are their names as links that demonstrate feminist ideological roots.
Jack C. Straton, Ph.D (NOMAS Member)
You have been provided, David, with ample studies, clearly conducted by persons without a political attachment to their work (at least you have not established such an attachment) and you need to respond in kind or your entire position becomes a sham.
Critiques of surveys, or of the CTS, are fine and needed to make your point, and I will indeed address those critiques, and more adequately than you will likely care for, within the deadline on my next post, as well as the DOJ stats, etc. But it needs to be clear from the beginning, you are putting Greenpeace on trial and trying to stack the jury with whaling execs. I won’t let it pass without calling you out on it.
Get some real research, David, and some untainted, credible critique. And if, perhaps, you have a hard time finding anyone but gender ideologues that are challenging the soundness of the research in question, then you will have stumbled on yet another reason to rethink your position.
__________________________
Futrelle responds:
So, Paul, instead of actually responding to anything substantive, you:
*attack feminist scholarship that I didn’t actually cite
*rehash a tiff you had with one of the experts I quoted
*attack someone else completely irrelevant to the debate at hand because he happens to belong to an organization the the guy you had the tiff with also belongs to
*list a bunch of researchers that I do actually cite, but that you’ve somehow decided are evil ideologues and not to be trusted, without actually examining any of their work, simply because they have described themselves as “feminists.”
I guess your modus operandi is simple: when you have no ammunition, you start flinging bullshit.
Let’s run through the actual substantive disagreement underlying our debate.
You claimed that with regard to Domestic Violence “women are half the problem.”
I showed you, clearly and simply and logically, why this is not so. I made arguments. I offered evidence, from government surveys and peer-reviewed academic journals, backing this up.
Not only this, but I offered evidence of this from THE VERY PEOPLE YOU CITE to support your argument. They, too, say that male violence towards women is a bigger problem than women’s violence. They, too, recognize that the Conflict Tactics Scale (CTS) that they use in their research has limitations, particularly when it comes to making sense of the actual impact of abuse.
Fact is, there is NO credible researcher in the field who thinks “women are half the problem.” Not one. The people who invented the CTS scale don’t think that’s the case because, even if women hit half the time, they do far, far less damage than men, and cause far fewer injuries.
Let’s try a quick quiz: Who said the following?
Women are seriously injured at seven times the rate of men and … women are killed by partners at more than two times the rate of men….
[W]hen we look at injuries resulting from violence involving male and female partners, it is categorically false to imply that there are the same number of “battered” men as there are battered women. Research shows that nearly 90 percent of battering victims are women and only about ten percent are men… The most brutal, terrorizing and continuing pattern of harmful intimate violence is carried out primarily by men.
Was it: Michael Kimmel? Barry Goldstein? Daniel G. Saunders? Jack C. Straton? Michael Flood? Michael P. Johnson? Patricia Tjaden? Nancy Thoennes? Walter Dekeseredy? Martin Schwartz? Andrea Dworkin?
The correct answer is: None of the above! The person who said it was a fellow named Richard Gelles.
So who is this Richard Gelles? Here’s a short bio of him I found online:
Richard Gelles is currently a dean at the University of Pennsylvania and holds The Joanne and Raymond Welsh Chair of Child Welfare and Family Violence in the School of Social Policy & Practice.
He is an internationally known expert in domestic violence, and was influential in the passage of the Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997.
He certainly sounds like someone whose opinion might be worth paying attention to, doesn’t he? I guess you already knew that, given that I’m quoting your description of him.
Question 2: Who said:
[Women are] physically injured to the point of needing medical attention seven times as often as husbands, they suffer psychological injury at much higher rates … [The] first priority in services for victims and in prevention and control must continue to be directed toward assaults by men.
Was it: Michael Kimmel? Barry Goldstein? Daniel G. Saunders? Jack C. Straton? Michael Flood? Michael P. Johnson? Patricia Tjaden? Nancy Thoennes? Walter Dekeseredy? Martin Schwartz? Andrea Dworkin?
I guess you probably figured out that was another trick question. It was Murray Straus, one of the three researchers who, along with Gelles and Suzanne Steinmetz, was most responsible for the whole “gender symmetry” thing.
Oh, but you know that, because you mentioned him in your post — though you spelled his name incorrectly. (It’s Straus. One “s” at the end, not two.)
As for the rest of your nonsense:
You reject the work of Michael Kimmel, because, as far as I can tell from your crazy convoluted account, he said in an email that Men’s Studies as a discipline has existed for several decades? Guess what! It HAS existed as a discipline for several decades. You may not like the ideological tendencies of some of those involved in it, but is has existed. I thought his note to you was quite polite, actually.
I’m not sure how any of this is relevant to our debate, or how this might somehow invalidate the findings of the article of his I cite. And neither do you, I bet, because you show no evidence of actually having read the paper in question.
And the others? I clicked on your links. Apparently they are indeed … feminists.
So that’s all it takes for you to reject their work without even looking at it? Work that has been published in actual peer-reviewed journals?
If you really think what they’re putting out is feminist propaganda, why not take it up with the editors of, say, Family Law Review, or Trauma, Violence & Abuse? Oh, but then you’d probably have to actually read the articles. Also, the editors would probably laugh and hang up the phone. Because “s/he’s a feminist!” isn’t much of an argument.
I don’t know if you know this, but not all feminists are like Andrea Dworkin. They don’t all think the same things. They don’t all hate men. (You may not believe this, but very few of them do.) They don’t eat babies.
Lots of people, of various ideological persuasions, describe themselves as feminists. Some Gallup polls over the last few decades have found as many as 30% of Americans describing themselves as feminists. Hell, Sarah Palin has described herself as a feminist. (Of course, she’s also described herself as a grizzly bear, but that’s a whole other topic.)
And guess what? Murray Straus, the guy who invented the CTS, and who is responsible more than any person for the notion of “gender symmetry” in DV … is also a feminist.
Let me repeat that: The guy who designed the research tool that underlies all the research you’ve cited to buttress your argument … describes himself as a feminist. Oh, sure, he’s no fan of the feminists who’ve attacked his research, not by a long shot; he’s absolutely scathing towards those particular feminists. But he still calls himself one, and he’s appreciative of what feminism has done in fighting domestic abuse. As he puts it:
[I]t is important to recognize the tremendous contribution to human relationships and crime control made by feminist efforts to end violence against women. This effort has brought public attention the fact that PV [partner violence] may be the most prevalent fom1 of interpersonal violence, created a world~wide detem1ination to cease ignoring PV, and take steps to combat PV. It has brought the rule of law to one of the last spheres of life where ‘self-help’ justice … prevails by changing the legal status of domestic assaults, by changing police and court practices from one of ignoring and minimization PV to one of compelling the criminal justice system to attend and intervene. In addition, feminists have created two important new social institutions: shelters for battered women and treatment programs for male perpetrators.
(The source for that, and for him calling himself a feminist? One of the articles by him I cited earlier. You can find out which by actually reading them.)
So if you’re going to throw out all the research I have cited that has been done by self-professed feminists, you’re going to have to throw out his work as well.
Now if instead you want to reconsider, and actually offer a real critique of the studies I’ve cited instead of dismissing them out of hand, then we might have an actual debate. “Feminists bad!” is not an argument.
First, though, you might want to address the fact that the researchers you tout as the best in the field have explicitly stated that their work should NOT be used to claim that women are “half the problem” in DV, that women on average are injured much more often and much more seriously than men, and that the bulk of the resources should be directed towards women victims.
Once you’ve done that, perhaps we can have a serious debate over the other research I have cited, one that involves an actual discussion of their claims and their methodologies.
Do I expect you to actually address these substantive points? No. I don’t think you’re interested in an actual debate, because on some level you know your position is in fact untenable, and is not supported even by the research that you yourself cite.
But perhaps I should have guessed as much from someone whose response to Domestic Violence Awareness Month is to make tacky jokes about “Bash a Violent Bitch Month,” replete with detailed descriptions of said bashing:
I mean literally to grab them by the hair and smack their face against the wall till the smugness of beating on someone because you know they won’t fight back drains from their nose with a few million red corpuscles.
And then make them clean up the mess.
Paul, I think it’s time for you to clean up your own mess.
————————————————
Elam Response:
A few quick items. First to this from my recent article:
“I mean literally to grab them by the hair and smack their face against the wall till the smugness of beating on someone because you know they won’t fight back drains from their nose with a few million red corpuscles.
And then make them clean up the mess.”
And now, David, for the part of the article that you intentionally left out.
“Am I serious about this?
No.”
Just thought I would include that since you don’t seem to understand satire, or the literal, it seems.
Then there is this, from you:
“First, though, you might want to address the fact that the researchers you tout as the best in the field have explicitly stated that their work should NOT be used to claim that women are “half the problem” in DV, that women on average are injured much more often and much more seriously than men, and that the bulk of the resources should be directed towards women victims.”
First, where it concerns the incidence of violence, women are indeed half the problem, or more! The research I offered to that effect still remains, and you have not debunked a single study just because you parroted some other ideologues critique of the method of gathering information.
If you want to debate the severity of injury, that is always possible, but this debate is a about incidence. Given that we all operate that all domestic violence is wrong, injurious, dysfunctional and an overarching social issue, we must address the issue of all violence, not just narrow it down to the kind that suits your purpose for this debate.
Or are you proposing that the only violence we address is where there is an injury sustained?
And lastly, this:
So, Paul, instead of actually responding to anything substantive, you:
*attack feminist scholarship that I didn’t actually cite
*rehash a tiff you had with one of the experts I quoted
*attack someone else completely irrelevant to the debate at hand because he happens to belong to an organization the the guy you had the tiff with also belongs to
*list a bunch of researchers that I do actually cite, but that you’ve somehow decided are evil ideologues and not to be trusted, without actually examining any of their work, simply because they have described themselves as “feminists.”
Ah, no. What I have done is reveal the fact that the authors of your sources are biased, in fact that all gender ideologues are biased, and that their reaction to any non patriarchal, and thus not exclusively male model of domestic violence is predictably negative. It is called research bias, and it is fair game here.
Remember this?
*attack feminist scholarship that I didn’t actually cite
One of your most prominent sources was from your main squeeze Kimmel. Your claim here about attacking scholarship you didn’t cite is bogus.
Now, regarding the critiques of CTS specifically, and aside from the fact that your “source,” Michael Kimmel, is clearly biased, yes, there are some limitations and difficulties with the information gathering. That has been pointed out by Gelles and Archer, so there is no secret about it. But let’s take a closer look at the objections you raised. Or at least for what you are passing off as objections.
You say:
As a result, one critic notes, the CTS “equates a woman pushing a man in self-defense to a man pushing a woman down the stairs. It labels a mother as violent if she defends her daughter from the father’s sexual molestation. It combines categories such as “hitting” and “trying to hit” despite the important difference between them. Because it looks at only one year, this study equates a single slap by a woman to a man’s 15 year history of domestic terrorism.”
This is about as poor an example of the problem with CTS that can be found. Let’s try that statement with simple sex reversal.
As a result, one critic notes, the CTS “equates a man pushing a woman in self-defense to a woman pushing a man down the stairs. It labels a father as violent if he defends his son from the mother’s sexual molestation. It combines categories such as “hitting” and “trying to hit” despite the important difference between them. Because it looks at only one year, this study equates a single slap by a man to a woman’s 15 year history of domestic terrorism.”
I am sure you don’t get this David, but both of these descriptions are equally valid. The only problem you can come up with is if you enter the analysis, as your quoted reference here clearly did, assuming that the male MUST be viewed as the default perpetrator.
Your first (borrowed) observation about CTS is a complete fail.
Now for the next.
This problem is exacerbated by the lack of attention given to the motivations behind the violence. While both men and women use violence to express anger, a number of studies show that men are far more likely to use domestic violence to control their victim, to “show who is boss.” Other studies that look at motivation find that much female “violence” is in fact self-defense.
This is simply a distinction without a difference as it applies to this debate. We are not here arguing the motives for violence, but the incidence, especially in regards to sex distribution. Many of the studies cited by Archer and Fiebert also found that much of men’s “violence” was in self defense. Unless you are prepared to demonstrate that female violence in self defense is significantly more frequent than men’s, then you have actually said nothing with this.
Oh, and regarding the incidence of “who is the boss” type violence, Archer had he following to say:
“It is the alternative, supposedly context-sensitive concepts that lack clarity and operational definitions: It would not be worth reviewing the area, let alone undertaking a meta-analysis, if the only categories were those such as battering, psychological terrorism, and social disempowerment, advocated by White et al., because their meanings are imprecise and hence could vary from study to study.”
In other words, David, you can’t even qualify any standard that adequately defines violence that is from a perpetrator showing the victim “who is the boss,” much less that can be replicated from study to study. It is an utterly useless concept.
FAIL Part Deux.
Again, the motives for violence were never the focus of my article or video, except in the case of self defense, and thus not germane to this debate. But hey, you opened a door to another crappy idea on your part, so I was glad to take it.
We are also reminded by Archer that feminists are significantly less concerned with CTS in studies when they are the ones using it:
“White et al. (2000) made a number of familiar criticisms of the CTS, a measure that they have used in their own research (White & Koss, 1991), as indeed have some feminist researchers when only male perpetration or female victimization is involved (see, e.g., DeKeseredy & Schwartz, 1998).”
And finally you offer this:
There are other serious problems with the CTS as a measure of DV. The first version of the questionnaire left out sexual assaults by current or former intimate partners, which according to the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) make up nearly 20% of all spousal assaults; such assaults are overwhelmingly committed by men against women. [MK] And the CTS also ignores violence that happens after partners separate, another critical omission, because violence tends to escalate, sometimes quite dramatically, after a separation. The NCVS found that separated women are 8 times as likely to face violence from an ex-partner than married women are from their husbands. [MK]
While adjustments have been made (the first version of the questionnaire) to compensate for some problems, there is actually some merit to this last block of crits. And it is hardly uncommon. The shortcomings of methodology are a constant in research, and to my knowledge there has never been any studies immune to this type of critique. But the question is, do these possible shortcomings constitute any sort of concrete reason to dismiss the entire body of research?
Are we going to reject the results of hundreds of studies entirely because they did not include violence after the relationship was over?
It is a subjective question, one on which the readers of this debate will simply be left to their own decision. But it seems clear to me that if we must dismiss on these grounds that there is hardly a shred of research on DV that we can count on reliably. And if that is the case, it actually does your argument much more harm than mine, as you would be stuck with proving that women are abused at all.
But it may be helpful now to examine some of the methodological shortcomings in feminist research, though after that examination readers my conclude as I have, that the expression “feminist research” is an oxymoron.
I do encourage readers to read the following carefully. It is a devastating indictment of what is going on in the world of feminist research. and it forms the backbone of the twisted world view that Futrelle is here to push. We are not talking about the ordinary concerns of the methodological soundness, as one might find with say, CTS. Rather it addresses coercion, intimidation, deception, misrepresentation and outright fraud. And it further refutes much of the critique against CTS.
From the findings of Murray A. Straus and Katreena Scott, Gender Symmetry in Partner Violence: The Evidence, The Denial, and the Implications for Primary Treatment and Prevention, we have a list of the 7 most egregious practices in feminist DV research. To be fair, we can’t even call them flaws in methodology. What they are is a representation of systemic and pervasive fraud, justified and practiced with histrionic brio in the name of outcome oriented activism.
|
With the exception of addressing the DOJ stats, which I will do in my next post, it is clearly time to move past the research. The case has been made on two key issues here. One, there is no successful refutation of the valid research that supports the conclusions in my original article and video. Futrelle attacked on the grounds of flawed methodology, tried to shift the argument from incidence to severity, and relied on personal insults. In the end he has only succeeded at demonstrating that he is an ideologue, not interested in the amelioration of domestic violence, but in furthering the politics of misandry, at the despicable expense of men, women and children caught up in this social illness.
Second, it has been more than established here that he just another part of a culture of unprincipled activists that are seeking to attack and undermine both research and researcher, because that research is now exposing lies they have been fostering for so long. Additionally, we are now on the slow road to those distortions of reality being corrected, something these people will fight to the end for ideological and financial reasons.
The important thing in my mind at this point is to identify and explain what is really happening with these activists, people like Futrelle, who can look at all this information and dismiss it in favor of maintaining a false set of beliefs.
We need to ask why, when male victims of DV are a well documented fact of life, would these people seek to deny they exist and even take whatever action necessary to ensure that help is unavailable to them or to their chidren.
The answer to that, at least in my opinion, is groupthink. Futrelle and the others have had their capacity for critical thought, their human compassion and indeed their personal integrity compromised because rather than exercise common scrutiny when examining information, they have become a part of a collective of non thinkers with tunnel vision; a simple cell in a groupthink brain. It is a seriously debilitating condition with significant individual and far reaching social implications.
It is the same phenomena that allowed masses of people to justify slavery in their minds, countless wars, the collective festering and mindless hatred in 1936 Berlin, and many other forms of social malady.
More on this as we continue to peel back the layers of deception from Futrelle’s mindset in the next post.
————————————————————–
Futrelle Responds:
Your reply to me is once again an exercise in missing the point.
Let’s rehash the debate, such as it is, so far:
You: A large number of studies show that women hit men as often as men hit women, therefore women are half the problem.
Me: Those studies have serious methodological flaws, and do not address the context of consequences of DV. Women are injured far more often and severely than men. These facts are readily acknowledged BY THE VERY PEOPLE YOU CITE TO SUPPORT YOUR ARGUMENT. Because of that THE VERY PEOPLE YOU CITE TO SUPPORT YOUR ARGUMENT do NOT think women are “half the problem.”
You: Some of the studies you cite are from known feminists, therefore I will dismiss them without even reading them. Also, Michael Kimmel once sent me an email I thought was really rude, and someone in an organization he also belongs to did some bad shit.
Me: Huh? Did you not hear me when I pointed out that THE VERY PEOPLE YOU CITE TO SUPPORT YOUR ARGUMENT state quite plainly that women are injured far more often and far more severely than men? And that, because of this, THE VERY PEOPLE YOU CITE TO SUPPORT YOUR ARGUMENT do NOT think women are “half the problem?” Also, “feminists=bad” is not much of an argument.
So that’s the story up until your latest post. So let’s dig into that one.
First, I will just point out the obvious once again: You STILL have not dealt with the fact that THE VERY PEOPLE YOU CITE TO SUPPORT YOUR ARGUMENT do NOT think women are “half the problem.” You can say whatever nonsense you want about the evils and the biases of feminist research, but unless and until you deal with this simple fact, you have not offered a rebuttal to my main point. No amount of rhetorical obfuscation can conceal this point, not even equating me with slaveholders and/or Nazis, as you do in your conclusion.
So let’s go through this again. The flaws in the Conflict Tactics Scales (CTS) I have mentioned are readily admitted to by those who use the tool, and by Straus and Gelles, TWO OF THE PEOPLE YOU CITE TO SUPPORT YOUR ARGUMENT. They acknowledge that the CTS:
*Does not address the context or consequences of the violence.
Proof? Here’s Murray Straus, who invented the CTS, and who is ONE OF THE PEOPLE YOU CITE TO SUPPORT YOUR ARGUMENT, frankly acknowledging this fact, in precisely those terms: “The number of assaults by itself . . . ignores the contexts, meanings, and consequences of these assaults.” [quoted in APA cited above]
Straus also says:
Female assault rates based on the Conflict Tactics Scales (CTS) can be misleading because the CTS does not measure the purpose of the violence, such as whether it is in self-defense, nor does it measure injuries resulting from assaults.
[From Straus, 1997, cited above]
When Straus set out to specifically research injuries suffered by both partners, he found that man-on-woman violence caused many times the number of injuries as women-on-man violence. This is him again, speaking of himself in the third person as is sometimes the case in academic research:
Stets and Straus found a rate of 3 percent for injury-producing assaults by men and 0.4 percent for injury-producing assaults by women. Somewhat lower injury rates were found by Brush for another large national sample-l.2 percent of injury-producing assaults by men and 0.2 percent for injury-producing assaults by women. An “injury adjusted” rate was computed using the higher of the two injury estimates. The resulting rate of injury producing assaults by men is 3.7 per 1,000 (122 X .03 = 3.66), and the rate of injury producing assaults by women is much lower-O.5 per 1,000 (124 X ,004 = 0.49). Thus the injury adjusted rate for assaults by men is six times greater than the rate of domestic assaults by women.[Straus, 1997]
Other problems of the CTS:
*It does not deal with the most severe forms of violence, which Gelles himself plainly acknowledges are mainly caused by men. I have quoted him twice above on this topic; I will not bother to quote him again.
As for the study you mentioned that found that, within their sample, 70% of the violence in relationships where only one partner was violent was caused by women, here is one critical take on the study that highlights this issue. The questions on the survey, the critics write:
do not capture all forms of violence that occur between relationship partners, including many of the more severe forms of partner violence … Questions about emotional, verbal, psychological, or sexual aggression were also not included. Similarly, only a single item assessed injury to victims and it focused on injury frequency and excluded injury severity and whether medical attention was needed or sought. Thus, it is unclear whether the data presented here would be similar had the violence and injury assessment been more thorough or if different forms of violence had been measured and analyzed separately. [CDC2]
Who are the critics here? You should know: it’s the authors of the study themselves, in their writeup of their own research.
Further, the CTS:
*Ignored sexual violence, a major component of violence between intimate partners, and again a form of violence dominated by men. (While the CTS has been revised, many of the older studies cited by Archer and Fiebert used the original form)
*Does not deal with violence that occurs AFTER separation. Numerous studies show that violence can escalate, sometimes dramatically, after separation. This is a major limitation of the CTS, as this sort of violence can be especially brutal. One study reports:
A higher percentage of women than men are physically abused, harassed, and stalked after the relationship ends. In a random U.S. survey, 4% of the women and 0.5% of the men reported being stalked by a current or past partner (Tjaden & Thoennes, 2001). In a random survey of the Canadian population, 24% said that violence became worse after separation,
37% said it stayed the same, and 39% said it occurred for the first time (Statistics Canada, 2001).Women in this study were significantly more likely to be severely victimized: 60% of women and 25% of men required medical attention. The results of the National Crime Victimization Survey show that violence against separated women is more than 8 times higher than rates for married women (Bachman & Saltzman, 1995).[APA]
As for the most severe form of violence — murder — one survey notes, “homicide rates are higher for women who have separated from their partners than for women in intact relationships … and this heightened risk of homicide following a separation is not found for men.”
[Source: the Kelly and Johnson paper I cited above.]
So this is a very serious limitation of the CTS research. You ask: “are we going to reject the results of hundreds of studies entirely because they did not include violence after the relationship was over?”
My answer is no. Are the studies conducted using the CTS worthless? Not at all. They just have limitations. In addition to not taking into consideration post-separation violence, there are two other very serious limitations: they don’t do a good job of capturing the more serious kinds of violence in relationships, and they don’t measure injury rates. Therefore they cannot be relied on to provide a comprehensive answer to the question “who abuses more?”
One last point:
I absolutely DO NOT agree that the DV debate is about whether or not men or women strike one another “equally”, at least according to a survey method that ignores or obscures many of the more severe forms of violence, and does not measure the CONSEQUENCES of this violence.
In the end, I think that it is precisely this, the consequences of the violence, that matter most. The severity of the violence is critical, and so is the intent. If someone, male or female, slaps their partner lightly on the face in the heat of an argument, that’s unquestionably a bad thing, but it is not as bad as if that person beat their partner black and blue. Both are counted as “violent” by the CTS, but there is a world of difference between these two kinds of violence. These sorts of distinctions matter.
And again, THE RESEARCHERS YOU CITE TO SUPPORT YOUR ARGUMENT agree that men cause far more injuries than women, both physical and psychological. Yes, some women are extremely violent batterers. Yes, domestic violence against men, even when it doesn’t result in injuries, should be taken seriously. But most of the victims of the most severe violence, as Straus and Gelles have both plainly stated, are women. I cannot see how you can possible conclude that women are “half the problem.”
As for Straus’ complaints about the reactions of some feminist researchers to his work: Does he have a good reason to be angry? Yes. Do his complaints mean that all research conducted by feminists should be dismissed out of hand? Absolutely not. (Besides, as I pointed out earlier, Straus still considers himself a feminist, and you’re certainly not rejecting his work.) Do his complaints apply to any of the specific research I have cited in my posts here? No. Do these complaints somehow change the fact that THE VERY PEOPLE YOU CITE TO SUPPORT YOUR ARGUMENT believe that women suffer far more from DV than men? No.
If you want to make the case that any of the specific research I have cited is simply feminist propaganda, you cannot just assert this. No matter how often you repeat this specious argument, the fact that some feminist research is tainted by ideology does not mean that ALL or even much research by feminists is so tainted.
In this post, you do actually make several specific arguments about specific research. You note that the genders could be reversed in the quote I used about how the CTS “equates a woman pushing a man in self-defense to a man pushing a woman down the stairs, etc” and it would still be true. Of course, but as I’ve repeatedly pointed out, both Straus and Gelles acknowledge that women suffer far, far more severe violence than men, so that in the vast majority of cases in the real world, the more severe abuse described in that quote will in fact apply to male perpetrators and female victims.
On self-defense, again, studies vary, but as you will see below, Straus and Gelles believe that women are far more likely to strike back in self-defense.
On “who’s the boss” violence: Yes, there are some conceptual differences in how best to measure this, but the studies that we do have find men much more likely to use violence to control their partners. In the world of social science research, this is hardly a FAIL, as you put it. It simply means we need more and better research. Of course, we ALWAYS need more and better research. If you know any studies that find the opposite, I’d like to see them.
I will end with a quote from an article co-authored by Straus and Gelles that I find particularly illuminating. Again, to remind you, these are the GUYS YOU CITE TO PROVE YOUR POINTS:
Perhaps the most controversial finding from our 1975 National Family Violence Survey was the report that a substantial number of women hit and beat their husbands. Since 1975 at least ten additional investigations have confirmed the fact that women hit and beat their husbands. Unfortunately the data on wife-to-husband violence has been misreported, misinterpreted, and misunderstood. Research uniformly shows that about as many women hit men as men hit women. However, those who report that husband abuse is as common as wife abuse overlook two important facts. First, the greater average size and strength of men and their greater aggressiveness means that a man’s punch will probably produce more pain, injury and harm than a punch by a woman. Second, nearly three-fourths of the violence committed by women is done in self-defense. While violence by women should not be dismissed, neither should it be overlooked or hidden. On occasion, legislators and spokespersons . . . have used the data on violence by wives to minimize the need for services for battered women. Such arguments do a great injustice to the victimization of women. [quoted in MK]
Speaking of which: Your “Bash a Violent Bitch Month” nonsense. I plainly referred to it as a joke. That doesn’t really make it any more acceptable, nor does it suggest to me that you take violence against women very seriously.
————————————————–
Elam: Last response
Note: His Majesty King David got mad at being held to the same standards as others and walked on the debate. Either that or he just got scared and ran. Boobz is out, and the cause goes on all the better for it.
Futrelle begins, with apparently enough anger to melt his cap lock key in few places, by asserting yet again that he thinks I am not paying enough attention to his objections to the studies I offered as evidence of gender symmetry in domestic violence. Says Futrelle:
Those studies have serious methodological flaws, and do not address the context of consequences of DV. Women are injured far more often and severely than men. These facts are readily acknowledged BY THE VERY PEOPLE YOU CITE TO SUPPORT YOUR ARGUMENT. Because of that THE VERY PEOPLE YOU CITE TO SUPPORT YOUR ARGUMENT do NOT think women are “half the problem.
Here David simply takes a normal part of post research scrutiny – critique of methodology – and attempts to entice us to play make believe with him that the methodological flaws were so severe as to render the entire body of several hundred studies useless and untrustworthy. He does so citing statements by the researchers themselves.
I think this confuses David because he may not be accustomed to seeing routine academic accountability. He concludes that because Gelles, Straus, et al, pointed to aspects of their work where they observed in hindsight an opportunity for improvement, that they were actually disavowing and discrediting their own results. They were not. They were simply practicing the good ethics of principled researchers. But now Futrelle is attempting to spin that into a sweeping and disingenuous dismissal of their results.
But of even more apparent concern to David is the fact the researchers collectively agree that women are injured more frequently and severely when IPV occurs. He is presenting this common sense observation as some sort of mandate to accept that women are not equally responsible for IPV, even though he acknowledges they initiate at least half of it.
And this is where David’s ignorance leads him directly into intellectual quicksand.
It’s the whoever gets hurt the most is the rightest, position, which is about as thoughtful as, well, say, claiming that domestic violence is all men’s fault, simply because women are less capable combatants.
Serious injury as a result of DV represents a very small portion of DV victims, with the majority being female. But DV that does not result in physical injury does not equate to DV that has no consequences. Indeed, the consequences of “non injurious” DV, the kind that occurs with gender symmetry, can be harmful enough to the adult victim, but catastrophic for children who, due to gender politics, become collateral damage.
Children and teenagers who witness violence at home are at significantly greater risk of emotional, social, behavioral and academic difficulties. They are also at much more risk of being abused by the offending parent. Children are negatively impacted by the role modeling of parents who use violence in problem solving and tend to end up either being either violent or abused as adults themselves.
Children who experience early school failure, conduct difficulties, social withdrawal and other similar problems are much more likely to continue a pattern of dysfunctional behavior, which can lead to drug use, truancy, teen pregnancy and criminality.
None of this is contingent on whether the violence they witness is physically injurious.
This is one of many reasons you have heard, and correctly so, the mental health system mantra that all violence is wrong.
Failure to comprehend this, which David glaringly demonstrates, forms a faulty, female centric mentality common to a good many service providers and profiteers in the domestic violence industry.
Can you possibly understand that, Mr. Futrelle? This is not just about women. It is not about who can be first to produce a visible bruise. And as long as people like you take the unconscionable position of playing gender politics with identifying victims and perpetrators, it will be at the unnecessary expense of those who have already been harmed the most.
Accurate assessment of the abusive environment is essential to needs identification and appropriate intervention on violent households.
Now, again, Mr. Futrelle, it has been acknowledged that women are injured more often and more seriously in the course of IPV incidents. That was never in dispute.
But you are seriously coming here to argue that we should all but ignore everything else and blindly dedicate the overwhelming share of our understanding and our resources to women because a comparative fraction of them turn up with more bruises, often as a result of mutual combat?
The very thought of it is obscene.
Next, I turn to what I think is an incredibly avoidant and shallow reaction to the damning evidence regarding the seven most egregious research practices by feminist ideologues involved in DV research, as written by Straus.
First, I will just point out the obvious once again: You STILL have not dealt with the fact that THE VERY PEOPLE YOU CITE TO SUPPORT YOUR ARGUMENT do NOT think women are “half the problem.” You can say whatever nonsense you want about the evils and the biases of feminist research, but unless and until you deal with this simple fact, you have not offered a rebuttal to my main point. No amount of rhetorical obfuscation can conceal this point, not even equating me with slaveholders and/or Nazis, as you do in your conclusion.
I also find it confusing, almost comical that Futrelle is at this point almost rabidly hammering away at the idea that I should heed the words of the very researchers whose research he has dismissed with near equal vehemence.
To the DOJ study in a moment, but first, what I said about feminist research was not nonsense. It was valid, documented, highly relevant and points to no less than rampant corruption in the academic community you so depend on for your information.
To add to that (as if I really needed to), I am going to include here a stellar video made by Tom Golden, LCSW. It is an exemplary piece of work, painting a clear picture of the multiple ways that scholarly pursuits have become fraught with sexual politics, and why, as a group, we need to be very mindful of what lies under the surface of claims made by all ideologues regarding violence against women.
Nonsense, Mr. Futrelle? Well, perhaps, but it is not coming from me.
Almost all the rest of David’s post was continued hammering at CTS, which has exceeded the level of dead horse beating a few times over at this point. It is stipulated that CTS, like all research devices, has shortcomings. That being said, I have also demonstrated that this does not justify the Chicken Little scenario that Futrelle is so feverishly shooting for.
I stand completely by my original assessment. Domestic Violence- Women are Half the Problem.
And the DOJ study doesn’t alter that fact either.
Before I dig into that study too much I first need to reveal that it has a serious problem up front.
It’s a CTS based survey study. That is right, I kid you not. The one supposedly non ideologically influenced offering that David and has touted – as though it were some sort of anti-MRA Kryptonite – uses the same basic methodology for gathering information as the studies that David has been trying so fervently to discredit.
Tell me David, is this where I get to copy and paste all your redundant, repetitive and regurgitated objections to CTS, and then just dismiss the DOJ without an honest examination?
Never mind. I won’t do it. Call it a values thing. Besides, there are plenty of other reasons to take the study to task.
First of all, this one could very easily have been the object of one of Tom’s videos.
We get kind of a hint in the beginning, to wit:
Violence against women first came to be viewed as a serious social problem in the early 1970s, in part because of the reemergence of the Women’s Movement. In unprecedented numbers, scholars trained in such diverse disciplines as philosophy, literature, law, and sociology began to examine violence against women in the context of a feminist ideology. Despite the resulting outpouring of research on violence against women, particularly in the areas of rape and intimate partner violence, many gaps remain in our understanding of violence against women.
Yes, in this the very first paragraph of the study, they identify not as academicians, but feminist ideologues. With a profound lack of erudition that can only be rooted in hubristic hegemony, they inform readers from the beginning that this is a political action. Straight from jump.
OK, though, since we have established during the course of this “debate” that this is nothing less than we should expect from these people, let’s take a brief, very brief look at what they do have. Thankfully, what they have is well presented so it takes little effort to get the picture.
First, here is a chart of lifetime incidents of rapes and assaults by sex.
Click for full size
As you can see, with the expected exception of rape, when it comes to the experience of being assaulted, across the board it appears that men have it a good bit worse than women on average.
Now, let’s take a look at the incidence of intimate partner violence during the participant’s lifetime.
Click for full size
As you can see, at the top of the list women were more than three times as likely as men to have been the victim of IPV when considering all forms of assault.
And as you go through the breakdown of different types of assaults, everything from pushing and shoving to being shot, the numbers consistently point to women being at greater risk.
Case closed right?
Wrong. To their credit they did factor weigh for under reporting. To their disgrace they did not figure it in to the graphs. What they did provide, very visibly, was the following:
Click for full size
And so there you have it. A rough sketch of the math will lead you to a very familiar situation.
Domestic Violence- Women are half the problem.
But the real kicker comes in with the headline, as follows:
Click for full size
And there you have it. The data, as always, points to the same thing. But the conclusion; the energy; the focus and concern goes only to women.
Just like we heard and saw from Tom Golden. Just like we see in the corrupt and dishonest actions of feminist researchers; just like we see from organizations like NOMAS; just like we see in legislation like VAWA, and just like we hear from a narcissitic little shit like David Futrelle. No matter the truth, no matter the consequences, or even if it is our children that suffer them, women are vics, men are perps. Your guilt is in your nutsack, your privilege in your pussy, and you’re a hater, demonizing women and wishing them ill if you dare to say otherwise.
I have one more piece to write on this subject. I am going to take a couple of days off and then I am going to go to work on it.
What could come out of this, no, what should, is more than just pointing to the problem and calling foul. We need ideas, real ones, that offer us a path to start walking should the day ever come that we can just reach out and help people who need it, regardless of their sex, and in defiance of the really horrible people that have taken a serious social ill and turned it into an ideological freak show.
What I come up with may well just sit and gather cyberdust as we continue endlessly on this insane but commonly traveled road. It may even deserve to.
But I want to try. After all, isn’t that what we are supposed to do with the impossible?
Our best, I mean.
Tags: David Futrelle, Debate, Domestic Violence, Paul Elam
414 Posts in Total
Data gleaned from Paul’s exceptional vid (above):
Center for Disease Control Atlanta May 2007 cited: in hetero-relationships where DV is present (24%) 70% of sole perpetraters are female.
John Archer, psychologist, Professor and head of the Aggression Research Group, Lancashire U.K. analyzed 100 DV studies. Conclusion? – females more likely to be the DV initiators and frequent aggressors in hetero-relationships.
Martin Fiebert, Professor of Psychology Cal. State analyzed 249 scholarly DV investigations. Conclusion? – females as or more physically aggressive in hetero-relationships and frequently employ weaponry to inflict serious damages than are men.
Richard Gelles, world recognized family and DV researcher and Dean at U. of Penn., along with 2 other esteemed social investigators/researchers were recipients of not only personal attacks on their characters but death threats for their DV conclusions – females as equal aggressors to men in hetero-relationships. Let us not ever forget the death threats.
No, Paul. It isn’t just you who finds it odd that those who instigate and perpetrate more relationship violence simulataneously insist upon portaying themselves as innocent and peaceful (or else, I suppose).
I recall the days where taunts of “neandertal” were heaped upon those who questioned unexaminied feminist assertions of DV. It’s obvious who the real un-evolved and challenged are. This regressive feminist ‘leadership’ resulted in such a waste of capital and human potential, plus birthed an unnecessary distrust and vitriol between the sexes. It’s time to turf such incompetence out of prominence.
A footnote here: Futrelle and I both have agreed to stay out of the comments area for this debate.
Perhaps you would like to share this, too.
http://jezebel.com/gossip/domestic-disturbances/have-you-ever-beat-up-a-boyfriend-cause-uh-we-have-294383.php
Check out the comments for that piece, too; lots of juicy morsels from self-identified feminists.
Gosh, I never knew domestic violence was so acceptable and funny.
Domestic violence is not falsely framed as exclusively male initiated violence. Everyone knows that some men are also victims of domestic violence. Severe levels of violence and murder are primarily perpetrated by men though. Those who work in the medical field, social services, and the criminal justice system know this all too well. I believe what I see before I would believe studies by people who aren’t in the trenches dealing with this nonsense of domestic violence.
@Christian.
“Severe levels of violence and murder are primarily perpetrated by men though. Those who work in the medical field, social services, and the criminal justice system know this all too well.”
I have three medical doctors in my family and I have worked in many hospitals as an orderly and theater technician for many years.
The numbers are even – in fact the very worst cases of violence I have witnessed have always been against men by their partners.
My father and both my brothers say the same thing.
If you assert something to an audience and it is simply not true then all it takes is one person with first hand knowledge to point out the misdirection of truth you nasty odoriferous C-U-N-T .
Nomination for best reply.
Quintessential on that last remark.
@christian
You’re just like those people who look at me like I’m retarded when I bring up abiotic petroleum origins and just choose to believe what they have been spoon fed rather than researching the truth. They sit and listen to the party line and have been trained like good little goons to attack anyone who opposes it. You didn’t even provide any proof of your criticism; it is just an ad hominem attack on the researchers.
Domestic Violence has for years been termed Violence against Women. Please explain to me how that does not frame it in a lopsided way as opposed to a term like DV or Violence against People?
BTW, I do not put forward a biotic oil as a truth but rather a theory that is just a logical as the biotic oil theory which was hypothesized by a scientist in the 18th century. It is neither here nor there, but I just wanted to use an example of how our system indoctrinates thinking and how hard it is to break that thought process.
@Christian
The people in the trenches wrote:
“Transforming a Flawed Policy – A call to revive psychology and science in domestic violence research and practice”
http://www.nfvlrc.org/docs/DuttonCorvo.policypaper.pdf
Anybody in this field knows that there are a lot of politically motivated social policies, rather than psychology and science.
And please tell me one level of violence/murder that men are primary perpetrators (besides rape). I bet I can prove you wrong!
In a 2009 BBC radio program Michelle Elliot described how someone was locked up in a mental institution for 40 years because of a claim of abuse by a woman. 40 friggin’ years! Elliot believes about 75% of professionals are in denial and attributes the denial to professional and ideological territoriality. These professionals have built careers around claiming that men and only men abuse (or assault and batter–I’m sure this attribution can also be made) and changing their opinions will cast their expertise in doubt.
witman
Strangulation is one level of violence that men are the primary perpetrators of. And, of course, murder itself…of both men and women. You can’t prove me wrong on either one. You can come up with some crap and say say you have, but I know better.
“Strangulation is one level of violence that men are the primary perpetrators of.”
And genital mutilation is one level of violence that females are primarily perpetrators of. The difference? No one laughs at a woman who was strangled to death by an abusive husband.
Paul, good reference points, but with one glaring omission.
If child abuse is domestic violence (which it is), and if women are the primary abusers of children (which they are), so it follows that the children that go on to become abusive adults most likely first learned abuse from their primary nurturer… who are most likely to be women.
Why is it that both feminists and MRAs consistently overlook this major insight? Well, the feminists I can understand – they are liars with an agenda. But MRAs?
Here is the problem with David and why he can’t be taken seriously. If a 27 year old woman had a mother who she loved, and that mother she loved was taken away from her violently and callously by a father who she despised, David would have endless empathy for her situation, and would understand why that woman might hate all men.
Of course if the situation were reversed and it was a 27 year old man. And instead of the mother being killed violenty and thoughtlessly it was the father, David would tell that man what happend was a statiscal anomaly, and that hating an entire sex based on the actions of one person is not fair.
It happens Dave, and I have to live with it the rest of my life. So everytime you side with women on pretty much every issue, and talk shit on men who believe this country has gone off the deep end in it’s treatment of them, just remember that a lof of these guys have been seriously hurt by women in their lives, and guys like you who sell out their own gender are just rubbing salt into the wound.
Andrew I am sorry for your Loss I am a 27 year old Man Living with my Mentally ILL mother who shrieks and screams all the time (part of her illness) and my Kanners syndrome (Autistic, Metally challenged, Schizophrenic) sister and there are times where I wan’t to Kill them both but I don’t because I AM NOT LIKE THAT.
Life has been a real asshole to me in ways NO-ONE COULD IMAGINE!!!! anyway if you would like to contact me it’s fr33kSh0w2012@yahoo.com.au Yes I’m an Australian
Another New World Order weapon giving power to emotionally uncontrolled women against men in order to destroy patriarcal families and promote birth control. This is evil and cynically confusing, as real cases of abuse or rape are not taken seriously, being just an instrument of control and emasculation. Ironically, women usually chose distant and selfish men, ignoring the good ones, and the abusive ones they seldom accuse of anything because they feel attracted to them, judging selectively.
This isnt the same christianj from the spearhead is it?
I expect manboob’s answer to be a lot like christian’s here.
“Domestic violence is not falsely framed as exclusively male initiated violence. Everyone knows that some men are also victims of domestic violence. Severe levels of violence and murder are primarily perpetrated by men though.”
Yeah, and all this is true because Andrea Dvorkin said so and there’s no doubt that she was fair and just, and she knew a lot more about this than all the independent researchers combined. And Valerie Solanas came to the same conclusions! How dare these phony academics question the sacred feminist viewpoint???
[sarcasm off]
And what about the specifically female types of violence, like indirect or relational violence? It’s a well known fact that women often use indirect methods to hurt people. Women use “tools” like other men or the government. All this should be added to the reality that they are just as physically violent as men.
Snark, thanks for the link. It would be interesting to see manboobz arguing with jezebelers…
My explanation for violence from women is the borderline personality organization – The inability to regulate emotions. I supposed this is possible in all genders, but it is generally the reason why women escalate their emotions beyond yelling into provocation and then finally into violence. Perhaps, if I had known about this phenomenon a decade ago, then I’d be more understanding. The sad reality is now, I don’t give a crap if she’s got an emotional problem. Those days of “working it out” are long gone. That is now her problem.
Geesh,
Ande I thought it was me and my inability to keep from pissing people off until they couldn’t help but to paste me. Enlightening stuff.
@christian
Sources?
“Snark, thanks for the link. It would be interesting to see manboobz arguing with jezebelers…”
I agree, that would be interesting. But it is, I fear, unlikely to happen. Arguments tend to occur between people who have different points of view.
I love the attitude of: The researchers results don’t agree with the conclusions that I have drawn, therefore the researchers are incompetent.
Another point, as has been pointed out, physical child abuse is domestic violence when committed by a parent, sibling, or someone else living with the child. Women commit the great majority of child murders, though feminists, of course, excuse those murders with statements like “Women commit most child murders because women spend more time around children than men do.” As though being around children causes one to murder children. Talk about blaming the victim!
To be quite frank, I don’t find this issue of domestic violence to be particularly complicated.
Current laws pertaining to assault and battery are, and have always been sufficient.
There should be NO domestic violence laws. Period.
Male physical force has always been one of the social control mechanisms necessary to enforce good behavior from women. That DV laws outlaws male physical force is one of the main reasons we see our women out of control today.
Sounds like you have a lot to deal with as well Peter. The women in our lives have made it very difficult for us. Hopefully things will get better for the both of us. Good luck.
“There should be NO domestic violence laws. Period.
Male physical force has always been one of the social control mechanisms necessary to enforce good behavior from women. That DV laws outlaws male physical force is one of the main reasons we see our women out of control today.”
I wonder how many MRA’s agree with Binxton’s opinion on this? How far can one really go to enforce good behavior from women and get away with it?
Domestic Violence is a huge problem for our military.
VAWA laws put into action that any man found guilty of DV cannot own or possess a firearm.
Which means a career soldier, 10 years in and at the top of his/her game if found guilty cannot serve in the military.
The entire time I was in the military I was stationed on a fairly small post. We had roughly 10,000 soldiers and their families on my post. I cannot think of hearing about one incident of a soldier on my post being court martialed for some form of DV.
I do however remember the hysteria about it from Army Policies and the Military Police. Friends in my platoon and/or company who were married would comment on being disturbed by the MP’s. They would mention that if they:
-Raised their voices
-Had an argument
-Had the volume too loud on their T.V. while watching a movie with a scene of a woman screaming.
-Hving rough consensual sex with their spouse
-Play Wrestling yes you heard me right, my friend had the MP’s interview his wife and look around his house because they were Play Wrestling.
These stories were played out time and again and I have heard them so many different times it became a bit of a cliche’. I knew as soon as someone started a new story how it played out in the end.
I also noticed that if the couple in question were having an argument they would take the man away. His chain of command would be notified and he would spend the night in the single soldiers barracks in an empty room.
Humiliation anyone? There are no secrets in the military, everyone would know why male soldier A isn’t going home for lunch the next day at work.
I have often wondered if the female were in the military and the male a civilian if they would do the same thing. However I have only met two couples like that in my five years in. I can tell you that the general feeling between the guys in my unit that this happened too was that they would take the man away in every situation.
On another note, half our post was deployed at a time. While a soldier is deployed the spouse decides if she wants to stay on the base in their apartment/house or go somewhere else for the duration.
Most men in our current culture know what the walk of shame is after a night of partying. Our spin on it was that the walk of shame is walking back to the single soldiers barracks from married housing, hungover, in last nights clothes, while children are playing on playgrounds because you tore up someone’s wife last night.
These women would go out partying to singles bars pick up men or start a real relationship while their spouse/boyfriend was deployed. The majority of spouses did not do this and are good people worried for their loved ones. However enough of them did that it became a running joke.
I have seen on more than one occasion of a woman going so far as to not only cheat on her husband but let the man drive her husbands vehicle, wear his clothes and live at his house that he payed and is still paying/working for.
I have seen on more than one occasion of a man finding out about the infidelity because one of his children told someone that mommy has friends over and they go to her room to play games.
Adultery is a crime in the military, so technically if you cheat while you are in the service you commited a crime. Most soldiers who do get caught get a field grade article 15, they lose rank, pay, and get 1-45 days extra duty and restriction(think cleaning/mowing after work and on the weekends until midnight for 45 days). I said that to say this:
On more than one occasion I have seen a man find out about his wifes infidelity because some poor lower enlisted soldier signed her into his barracks not knowing she was married. He is given an Article 15, and the lucky husband gets to find out that his wife is cheating on him.
On more than one occasion I have seen a woman turn her home into a flop house with different people coming and going and nightly and/or weekly parties and drunken sex.
I said all of that to say this, in not one of those infidelities did I hear of the man laying a hand on his wife for her very embarassing (remember no secrets) cuckolding. I have seen male soldiers physically attack the male who slept with his wife.
On another note I hurt myself one time. I was drunk and walking up the steps to my apartment. I fell and somehow managed to give myself a black eye. I remember showing up to Drill (I joined the Guard when I got out of Active Duty) and almost everyone in a relationship in a half joking manner asked if my old lady did it. My response was exactly what happened to which the reply was always that its okay and they would tell a story of either their current or former wife/girlfriend who hit them one time. They would say things excusing the behavior, like “oh shes a feisty one” or “she would kick my ass” etc.
I am 6’0 feet tall and I weigh 250 pounds. I have been extremely athletic these past 6 years. I am also a submission wrestler and an amateur boxer. I have been told I look mean even when I am perfectly okay even happy. One time going to my colleges computer labs a young woman was right behind me. Doing what I do when anyone is behind me and because her hands were full I held the door open, something I would do for anyone. This woman was about 5’4 and 110 pounds soaking wet. She told me she doesn’t need any man to hold the door for her(something to that effect) and kicked me in the shin.
The problem I see with female violence has its roots in Chivalry. Men are taught never to hit a woman and women know that. That woman believed that she could kick me with the intention of hurting me and there would be no repercussions. As men we know that if we strike another man we can usually expect that man to retaliate.
So why is it that a petite woman, who obviously has some intelligence because she is in college attack me? Finding the answer to that would go a long way towards domestic violence prevention for both men and women.
P.S. No I did not hit her back, I don’t feel like explaining to the campus police why I layed out a petite woman.
I will look in-depth into the origins of female violence using sociobiology (in PC speech, evolutionary psychology) and get back with a post in a week or two. At the moment I’m looking into the marxist-feminist inspired decline in the quality of modern art and architecture. I’ve been wanting to write an analysis of female violence for some time.
The problem of female on male violence occurs a lot.
Twice I turned up to work with black eyes and made jokey explanations. I have seen similar situations with many other people of my acquaintance. I have a lot of experience of this.
Once a man defends himself or reports assault by a female partner it is the end for him.
I’ve read the Jezebel piece and I have to say, these bitches are both fucked up and delusional. They go attagirl and yougogrrrrl nobodyfuckswithwimminz!!!! and they don’t even realize that the boyfriends they punched or tried to strangle or stab with scissors very likely chose not to escalate. IMO, the grrrlz should thank their lucky stars instead of going rah rah rah. But then again, one day they’ll probably hook up with the real badboy they tingle for, and then they won’t be able to cheer on Jezebel. Not anymore, hopefully.
Also, I forgot: the ladies really seem to enjoy and love the idea of violence, as long as they’re on the giving end.
The Jezebel piece needs to be posted everywhere. This is the kind of thing that will absolutely ruin feminism. Save the page to your computers as well in case they take it down.
Marco wrote,
“Also, I forgot: the ladies really seem to enjoy and love the idea of violence, as long as they’re on the giving end.”
Watch how women react at an MMA or boxing match if you want to see how much they really enjoy violence.
“Also, I forgot: the ladies really seem to enjoy and love the idea of violence, as long as they’re on the giving end.”
When controls on women are lifted, they become feral. We are seeing the worst behaviors by women played out because the restraints that traditionally kept them in check have either been loosened or lifted completely.
We see this phenomenon very clearly with domestic violence laws. Whereas in the past, women generally behaved better when a man slapped her across the face, today male physical force is criminalized, thus giving women greater licence to behave badly.
There’s only one reason not to hit women today, and that reason is the law. But even if DV laws were wiped off the books, men need not use physical force every time a women misbehaves. Sometimes all it takes is a look or a word.
OTOH if we are honest, objective men, then we cannot deny that the superior physical force we men possess is necessary to balance out the superior verbal skills employed by women.
@Falsely Accused Soldier
Man that is real shitty. It sucks so much that after being the ones exposed to brutality and hell in war your actually expected to be more civil than your counterparts at home… if anything it should be the other way around, I should be more accountable for violence that I commiy since I’ve been treated better. I’ve haven’t needed to be aggressive in the same sense you have so what excuse would I or any wife of a soldier ever have to becoming violent. While nobody should committee DV I find it most offensive for someone to do it from a protected position towards someone who has served their country.
More and more I’m getting the idea that there is a huge lack of honor in the military, not the individuals and units but the large structure. Someone is freaking supposed to have your Guy’s back; essentially you have enemies to fight abroad and empowered enemies at home. If I’m understanding you correctly the military fully gives into to feminist PC and just loads on more burden to you guys. Then there’s my friend who is in the military and he said the military (instructors) made a joke out of the anti-suicide class, horrible disrespect. So only certain victims matter, so sad the instructor the instructor and those higher up didn’t take it serious. Then my friend also said the military base put a bunch of other restrictions on the soldiers treating them like children, so they wouldn’t cause any trouble in town. So basically you sign an agreement, go abroad, be responsible for million dollar equipment, put your live in jeopordy, responsible for the lives of others, all in servitude and you get disrespect back at home. Wow…
@Binxton I don’t understand your posts. In no way does the MRA movement condone the use of violence except in reciprocal self defense. By Reciprocal I mean using the same force being applied to you to legally defend yourself.
There are several reasons not to hit a woman unless it is self defense.
#1 It isn’t right to physically assault anyone without legal or moral due cause.
#2 It isn’t right to make an intimate partner “act right” with physical means. Just like you shouldn’t need a “look” or a “word”. I don’t associate myself with anyone in an intimate relationship that I have to constantly “keep in check.”
#3 Holding the threat of violence over someones head in a relationship is emotional terrorism and turns that person into a hostage.
Furthermore we are seeing women act like men all across the board. I should say we are seeing them act like human beings in our society with our social conditioning(I am speaking of Western Society).
If you notice in a majority of these objective studies one figure keeps popping up.
That figure is “Roughly 50 percent.”
-Roughly 50% of domestic violence is perpetrated by females.
-Roughly 50% of rape accusations are false.
-Etc.
I don’t know where you are coming from with the superior physical violence VS. superior verbal skills. Yes men are bigger than women are, yes in the bronze age we could rape the women, slaughter the men and throw the babies from the city walls. However I don’t live in Mesopatamia and the year is 2010 and I live in the US.
Men and women both have amazing verbal skills. I wouldn’t say one is superior to the other.
What we are suffering from now is an equal rights movement that has gone too far and social stigmas, orders and codes that still exist from a time when that group was not equal and required protection.
Well, I heard non-MRAs would be allowed to post in the comments for this debate rather than the “For Feminists and Manginas” place only, so I decided to wander back here to ask a question:
I’m not real good at statistics, so I won’t critique Mr. Elam’s or Mr. Futrelle’s arguments in-depth, but I just wanna know something about this:
“My challenge to the MRM is simple: if you really want DV shelters for men, and aren’t simply interested in scoring rhetorical points against feminists, build them. ”
Is there any reason we *can’t* do that? Judging from some of the stories I’ve heard here and elsewhere, a shelter for men doesn’t sound like a half-bad idea. I don’t know of any legal obstacle to making one, though I could be wrong, which is why I ask. If somebody got serious about making a refuge for abused men, or guys who need to get away from their wives/girlfriends/whatever for whatever reason, I know I’d donate quite some money (at least) for the cause. And it seems to me like it could be a lifesaver for many men out there–literally, in some cases.
“Scoring rhetorical points against feminists” is a perfectly valid and worthwhile occupation.
(Just for the record.)
Excellent, excellent piece, David. Well researched and well done. Congrats! Can’t wait to see your next contribution.
Has anybody noticed this?
“some 22% of women said they had been assaulted by a current or former intimate partner at some point in their lives; only 7% of men said the same. ”
How can Futrelle take this at face value, knowing that men are socialized in a manner that does not permit them to admit that they are abused by their partners or to seek any sort of support?
so much bulk. so much bulk.
“one Department of Justice survey ”
“One group of studies”
” one critic notes,”
how many paragraphs do you need for just the one?
If anything, this extremely bulky response demonstrates the importance of bulk in bad arguments when there’s a time limit. It’d take decades to refute this much nonsense. Bulk is ever so important when you know you don’t have the substance to hold your own.
LET’S NOT FORGET THAT 93% OF DOMESTIC ASSAULTS BY WOMEN ON HUSBANDS AND BOYFRIENDS GO UNREPORTED!!!
(It’s true because I say so. How are you going to disprove the absence of a fact? Huh? Huh?)
“My challenge to the MRM is simple: if you really want DV shelters for men, and aren’t simply interested in scoring rhetorical points against feminists, build them. ”
Because the (rather dated) statistics would lead one to believe DV shelters are busting at the seems with battered women; that there’s a nationwide epidemic of men beating women every day every where. It’s this hysteria that feminists propogate.
In reality DV shelters have become de facto homeless shelters for women in “life transition”. Many are destitute illegals with babies whose husbands went back to Mexico, drug addicts and women who were kicked out of wherever else they were living and have no where else to go. Not to say there still aren’t cases of drunken fools beating the crap out their wives or girlfriends, but it’s much less frequent than they want you to believe.
The core MRA issue here is that men and women are NOT being treated equally under the law, because women supposedly don’t hit men.
@Wanderer
Yes there is. The reason is simple. The feminist lobby is blocking these attempts. Most shelters receive federal and/or state funding. The few attempts to obtain funding for male shelters were blocked by feminists claiming that to fund these male shelters would deprive funding for “deserving” female-only shelters.
But yet and the same, not even legal injunctions can make the female shelters aid male victims. Of the four US shelters that have been ordered by the courts to give succor to male victims, only one has unequivocally complied. The other three are tying up their rulings in appeals while continuing to discriminate against men in need.
Read this article to see what I mean: http://www.lfpress.com/comment/2010/10/15/15706731.html
@Wanderer I would tell you to google Erin Pizzey.
She opened the first domestic violence shelter in the United Kingdom in 1971.
She noted that about half of the women who came to her were as violent or more violent than the men they left.
She noted that about the time she opened the shelter came the advent of second wave feminism. She is quoted as saying:
“The feminist movement’s agenda was to declare all men as potential rapists and batterers. Under cover of the shelter movement which gave them funding and accommodation to wage their gender war against men, they began to disseminate misleading information. Legislation against fathers was put into place and family courts became hostile to men”
Because of her views her family was harassed, death threats were made and her dog was murdered. She went into self exile and returned to Britain in the 1990′s.
So why don’t men, specifically MRA’s open DV shelters for men of their own?
Because it would be wrong.
DV shelters on the most part receive public funding. If it is publically funded than one would expect that both men and women should receive services.
Just rummaging through Futrelle’s “scientific” argument. This straight from Wikipedia on the Conflict Tactics Scale:
[M]any feminist scholars reject the CTS because studies using this instrument find that about the same percentage of women as men assault their partners. This contradicts the feminist theory that partner violence is almost exclusively committed by men as a means to dominate women, and is therefore prima facie evidence that the CTS is not valid.
The reference for that quote can be found here:
http://pubpages.unh.edu/~mas2/CTS44G.pdf
@ Demosthenes
Really? I thought it’d be something like that. Pretty low…yet another reason I don’t consider myself a feminist. However, if public funds are problematic, what about private ones? Religious charities or anything like? There’s gotta be someone out there, or enough people out there, who have enough money on their own or collectively that they can do something for men without the state involved.
@ Falsely Accused Soldier
You raise a good point, my friend. However, like I said to Demosthenes above, would private funds, perhaps through an organization for men or something, be a plausible alternative?
@Wanderer Erin Pizzey also opened up male shelters.
She noted that the private investors who opened their wallets for female shelters refused to help fund male DV shelters. She had alot of problems finding funding for a male only shelter.
Also the source of private funding itself is shaky especially in a recession. When Erin Pizzey opened the first DV shelter it was all private funding. In fact authorities at first considered it a nuisance. It wasn’t until later that DV shelters were primarily publicly funded.
In fact DV has become an industry in and of itself. With salaries, retirement, paid vacation and in some cases guaranteed work hours I.E. your shift is from 8-4 and you go home at 4.
“a methodologically flawed research tool called the Conflict Tactics Scale, originally developed by researcher Murray Straus in the 1970s.”
Straus 2007, CONFLICT TACTICS SCALES
The CTS is both the most widely used measure of family violence and also the most widely criticized. Extensive critical examination is appropriate for any widely used instrument because, if the instrument is wrong, then a great deal of research will also be wrong. In the case of the CTS, however, the most frequent criticisms reflect ideological differences rather than empirical evidence. Specifically, many feminist scholars reject the CTS because studies using this instrument find that about the same percentage of women as men assault their partners. This contradicts the feminist theory that partner violence is almost exclusively committed by men as a means to dominate women, and is therefore taken as prima facie evidence that the CTS is not valid. Ironically, the fact that the CTS has provided some of the best evidence confirming the link between male dominance and partner violence and other key aspects of feminist theory of partner violence (Coleman and Straus 1990; Straus 1994) has not shaken the belief that the CTS is invalid.
Another irony is that despite these denuncifications, many feminist researchers use the CTS. However, having used the CTS, they reaffirm their feminist credentials by routinely inserting a paragraph repeating some of the erroneous criticisms. These criticisms are then cited in other articles as though they were empirical evidence showing the invalidity of the CTS, whereas there is only endless repetition of the same invalidated opinions.
PROCESSES EXPLAINING THE CONCEALMENT AND DISTORTION OF EVIDENCE ON GENDER SYMMETRY IN PARTNER VIOLENCE
In this paper, Murray A Strauss lists the different ways in which feminist activists deliberately distort and conceal evidence in order to create the false impression that men are more violent to their partners than women.
http://pubpages.unh.edu/~mas2/V74-gender-symmetry-with-gramham-Kevan-Method%208-.pdf
Strauss’ CTS has been modified since it was first developed and it is still widely used for DV research.
There’s a lot of things to respond to, but even if men were a smaller percentage of victims, it doesn’t make sense to have social policies that treat all women as victims and all men as perpetrators. It doesn’t make sense to stereotype men and treat all DV as government protection against the most severe forms of violence.
Many of the current social policies on DV are politically motivated and not scientifically motivated.
True enough, but Ms. Pizzey worked before the Men’s Rights Movement, and the Internet. With the organization and technology you guys have today, it seems more plausible to be able to get enough folks working together to pool up enough cash to get something started, even with the recession.
With regard to David Futrelle’s faith in DV shelters, Erin Pizzey, the original founder of the concept, has a rather different interpretation.
Without checking the verity of David’s references and his interpretations, let’s for the sake of argument assume that these are correct. IF they are correct then there are issues that I have raised before that also need to be factored into the DV industry:
1) Does anyone remember my Spearhead post on why many women choose thugs? Many women like thugs. They like the rough stuff. How do we legislate to stop women from liking the rough stuff, liking thugs, and fantasizing about rape?
2) Children first learn violence from their primary nurturer. And given that women are the primary abusers of children, this should come as no surprise;
3) Chivarly establishes practices and taboos that direct expectations and behavior. We know that men and boys live within cultures that, within the context of brainwashing compelling them to pedestalize women as standard practice, regards it as one of the worst conceivable taboos for a man to ever hit a woman. Heaven forbid! And yet, women slapping men is a routine staple of romance and drama. The only context in which I see women being abused by men as entertainment is in movies where the abuser is a thug picking on a victimized damsel, and the thug becomes the object of pursuit in the storyline. This begs the question… which fiction is correct? That of the chivalrists, or that of the feminists? Are men chivalrists or are they thugs? I don’t get it. How can cultural myths be so starkly opposite?
Bottom line? If we can dismiss the authentic misgivings of DV pioneers like Erin Pizzey, if we accept David’s argument that MRA’s interpretations are biased and self-serving, then we have other parameters that either don’t make sense, or can be factored in as a consequence of women’s own proclivity to bully children, fantasize about rape, and/or to choose thugs.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlFAd4YdQks&feature=related
Any questions?
@Wanderer
It still doesn’t change the fact that DV shelters are on the most part publicly funded and therefore should cater to both men and women equally.
Think about this, lets say my wife pissed me off, I mean like I am really really angry. In my anger I wait until she falls asleep, I grab the biggest kitchen knife in the house and I cut her clitoris off.
I’m not done yet!
I then without saying anything to my partner who is writhing in pain and bleeding leave my house and get in my car. While passing a field I toss my wife’s severed clit into a field.
As fucking nasty as that is what do you think would happen to me legally? I would be locked up, spat upon, tortured in jail and prison by my fellow inmates and probaly be on the sexual offender registry.
Lorena Bobbit did all that and she walked. People laughed, women’s group like NOW lionized her and people made sick jokes about it.
Those are the societal issues men deal with. If you would laugh that my wife cut my penis off and tossed it out of the car what would you think about me if my woman abuses me emotionally or physically?
Futrelle’s response is the typical feminist goalpost-shifting nonsense. It goes like this:
Feminists says “All men are pigs.”
MRA says “what about the men who gave up their lives on the titanic so the women could live? What about men who serve in other countries so women in the U.S. can be free?
Feminist says “You have a small dick and you’re a MISOGYNIST!” then walks away, redefines the word “pig” and comes back, again saying “All men are pigs.”
The cycle begins again.
When MRA’s can scientifically prove that females are just as violent as men, feminists, as Futrelle is doing here, redefines the word “violence” to mean something that women don’t do as much. When a man is pushing a woman, but nothing else, feminists says “ALL violence is unacceptable, he’s ABUSING HER!”. When a woman is pushing a man, and he responds by punching her (because she has just attacked him, she is ABUSING HIM), the feminists come along and say “We have to consider the CONTEXT, only SOME forms of violence are abuse.
Futrelle is a sneaky rat, he thought he’d slip that one past us, but I’ve seen this before.
Working with Violent Women
by Erin Pizzey
http://www.batteredmen.com/pizzey.htm
Erin Pizzey was the founder of a women’s shelter in Chiswick, England, the first modern battered women’s shelter in the world. She found that of the first 100 women who came to her shelter, 62 were as or more violent than the partners they tried to escape from — only to return to their partners time and again because of their addiction to pain and violence, violence that they persistently did their best to bring about.
While the family remains together, however miserable that ‘togetherness’ might be, the terrorist maintains her power. However, it is often the separation of the family that promises to rend the terrorist’s domain and consequently to lessen hr power. Family dissolution, therefore, often is the time when the terrorist feels most threatened and most alone, and, because of that, most dangerous.
The terrorist, and the terrorist’s actions, know no bounds. (The estimation of the extent of the terrorist’s ‘boundlessness’ presents the greatest challenge to my work). Intent only to achieve the goal (perhaps ‘hell-bent’ is the most accurate descriptive phrase) the terrorist will take such measures as: stalking a spouse or ex-spouse, physically assaulting the spouse or the spouse’s new partners, telephoning all mutual friends and business associates of the spouse in an effort to ruin the spouse’s reputation, pressing fabricated criminal charges against the spouse (including alleged battery and child molestation), staging intentionally unsuccessful suicide attempts for the purpose of manipulation, snatching children from the spouse’s care and custody, vandalising the spouse’s property, murdering the spouse and/or the children as an act of revenge.
I work with domestic violence victims. I can tell you that many domestic violence programs offer counseling, safety planning, and court advocacy services to men. They will also shelter men, but generally not with the women. Instead, they pay for hotel rooms. Most men who call shelters for help have money though so don’t need that service. What they need most, like women, is information on how to stay safe and to know what their options are. In my area, the program’s court advocates meet with every victim in the court, male or female, before they see the judge. This is done because officials are trying to identify the high risk cases in order to prevent homicides. Because there have been a lot of friggin’ domestic homicides here! 13 in the last 3 years! And those are the ones that succeeded in killing. There have been many more attempts. There is nothing easy about working with domestic violence crime. It sucks working with the families of these dead victims, but damn, someone has to do it. It sucks when you get a high risk case and are not so sure the person can really make it out alive. These programs help men in another way as well. They take numerous crisis calls from men who are asking questions on how to help their children, parents, siblings, friends escape abuse. There are certain people who like to talk about abuse shelters but know nothing about how they really work. Here are a few more truths about shelters. Government funding generally covers about 1/3 of what it takes to run one. Most people employed by shelters are social workers, counselors, and criminal justice professionals. There are no dv shelters in my state that is a “homeless” shelter. And finally, there is undeniably a lot of violence in our society. Working with victims of violence, male or female, is not an easy job and the pay is shitty for most positions. And it stinks how much people who do this important work get slammed on these MRM websites.
“Most shelters today run on shoestring budgets, and face the constant threat of violence from men angry at the women sheltered in them. Most, while not set up to handle male victims, try to help as best they can; the Family Place, the shelter targeted by Sacks, gives male victims vouchers for hotel rooms so they have a place to stay. ”
There’s a lot of places that “weren’t set up” to handle female athletes, female workers, or female soldiers, but they had to take the women in anyway, because, according to you, it was sex discrimination not to. Ergo, according to that definition of “discrimination”, it is discriminatory to take women in, shelter them and protect them but to give men a voucher for a hotel room and say “you’re on your own,bud.”. They aren’t “trying to help as best they can”, they are saying to the men who were victims of domestic abuse, “You have a penis, so you don’t deserve protection from abuse.”. Apparently, you think it’s ok to physically abuse someone as long as they have a penis.
Researcher: What Happens When Abused Men Call Domestic Violence Hotlines and Shelters?
http://glennsacks.com/blog/?p=3939
Of the abused men who called domestic violence hotlines, 64% were told that they “only helped women.” In 32% of the cases, the abused men were referred to batterers’ programs. Another 25% were given a phone number to call that turned out to be a batterers’ program. A little over a quarter of them were given a reference to a local program that helped.
Overall, only 8% of the men who called hotlines classified them as “very helpful,” whereas 69% found them to be “not at all helpful.” Sixteen percent said the people at the hot line “dismissed or made fun of them.
“They laughed at me and told me I must have done something to deserve it if it happened at all.”
“They asked how much I weighed and how much she weighed and then hung up on me…I was told by this agency that I was full of BS.”
Twelve percent of the hotlines accused the man of being the batterer or responsible for the abuse.
“They told me women don’t commit domestic violence — it must have been my fault.”
“They accused me of trying to hide my “abuse” of her by claiming to be a victim, and they said that I was nothing more than a wimp.”
Of the men who sought help by contacting local domestic violence programs, only 10% found them to be “very helpful,” whereas 65% found them to be “not at all helpful.”
“They just laughed and hung up the phone.”
“They didn’t really listen to what I said. They assumed that all abusers are men and said that I must accept that I was the abuser. They ridiculed me for not leaving my wife, ignoring the issues about what I would need to do to protect my six children and care for them.”
FAS,
I agree 100%. Another thing we could do is lobby our congressmen/politicians (send letters, protest, whatever) to ensure public funds are allocated for male victims of DV as well. There are probably other forms of activism which would work too (I’m somewhat new to lobbying as well, haha).
Very odd opinion by Erin Pizzey. While some abuse victims may have a lot of problems, those listed generally aren’t the problems they have. Besides that, victims, male and female are often embarrassed to have “domestic violence” problems and there is a stigma to going to a dv shelter. Many who really need it won’t go at all, and as a result, lose their lives. Most who go to shelter do not return to their abuser. Some do. But most are ready to change their lives by the time they call a shelter program.
@Chris You misunderstood the earlier posters comments on DV shelters being somewhat of a transition home for destitute women.
Let me get to a point by laying some groundwork.
I.E. A woman can claim she was abused by her spouse to obtain shelter. A DV shelter must accept her word on the matter however questionable her claims may be or open themselves to civil action(a little known fact is that non US citizens can start a civil action).
Where are your sources?
I contributed my sources. I mentioned and quoted Erin Pizzey directly, I also said google her if you feel I mislead you in any way. I also offered my own experiences regarding DV in a long long earlier post. As long as your David Futrelle’s post in rebuttal to Paul Elam.
If you are accepting Federal Funding then be expected to be equal in shelter to the sexes.
13 DV killings in the last 3 years! In the time I was honorably discharged from active duty and now there have been 7 false rape accusations and not one rape brought to trial at my college campus. I have been off of active duty for about 10-11 months.
@falsely accused soldier
Yes, sometimes shelter employees get cases and have doubts as to the legitimacy of their claims. However, I don’t know about other states, but in my state, shelters do not have to take in every person who claims to be abused and wants shelter. They are asked if they are in danger and if they say no, then they do not qualify for shelter. Sometimes, after talking to them, employees will hear red flags and suggest they come to shelter but if they don’t want to, they don’t have to. If they say they are in danger and a shelter takes them in and it is determined that they are not in danger, then they are helped to find another alternative and are discharged. I suppose a civil action is possible, but I would imagine that would only occur if a person was denied shelter and was seriously injured or killed. If a person claims to be abused and needs help finding a place to live, social workers help them do that through counseling outside of the shelter. Less than 25% of persons our program works with needs shelter. And the fact is, that there are many forms of abuse and many abusers, but most abusers are not lethal.
As far as sources, I’ve worked in the field of domestic violence since 2001. What I’m saying here is not someone else’s experiences or a study, it’s my own experiences and observations.
I agree that there should be good shelter alternatives for men. I’m not sure what the best solutions are but I don’t think co-ed shelters are the best alternative. It would have to be estimated how many men are at the danger level as that is what determines whether they get shelter or not. At least in my state.
I don’t work with rape crimes or false rape claims. I have my hands full already with other crimes. False rape claims are terrible, but it doesn’t negate the devastation of the 13 murders here in my neighborhood.
What Murray Straus himself has to say about “Processes Explaining the Concealment and Distortion of Evidence on Gender Symmetry in Partner Violence” you can read it here:
http://www.menshealthaustralia.net/files/Gender-symmetry-with-Graham-Kevan.pdf
It’s a history of lies, ideologically driven research, willfully propagated falsehoods, defamation and the threatening of researchers like Murray Straus himself by feminist ideologues.
A good read for you, Mr. Futrelle and a shame for the DV-industry.
Alexander Roslin from Germany, the same lies, the same propaganda, the same feminist ideology here in my country as all over the western world.
It must be stopped.
Mr. Roslin, I think Mr. Futrelle has already read that. The exact same paper is in the link he mentioned:
http://pubpages.unh.edu/~mas2/V74-gender-symmetry-with-gramham-Kevan-Method%208-.pdf
I then without saying anything to my partner who is writhing in pain and bleeding leave my house and get in my car. While passing a field I toss my wife’s severed clit into a field.
Mr. Futrelle, you need to respond to this.
one Department of Justice survey found that 95% of the victims of DV were women. These studies also find that women are injured far more frequently, and far more severely, by DV: one study of domestic disturbance calls involving injury found that women were injured 94% of the time; men, only 14% of the time.
Mr. Futrelle, we already knew that. Women get injured in DV far more than men. Men are stronger than women. But that is not the issue. The issue is WOMEN INSTIGATE DV AND HIT MEN IN EQUAL PROPORTION.
I’ll repeat: WOMEN INSTIGATE DV AND HIT MEN IN EQUAL PROPORTION.
This is what you need to address. Also, most men will not report DV, due to embarrassment.
This is an excerpt from Warren Farrell’s blog, on DV:
Most people still assume domestic violence is more likely to be perpetrated by men, despite the overwhelming evidence that it is perpetrated slightly more by women. When I presented this data in this book, the valid questions this raised were so numerous that I was motivated to answer each of them in Women Can’t Hear What Men Don’t Say and add an appendix of the fifty studies documenting this conclusion. The misconceptions are so fundamental that mandatory arrest laws were created with the assumption they would lead to the arrests of almost all men. But when police saw the evidence and didn’t have the option of ignoring the arrest of the woman, the mandatory arrest laws resulted in a marked increase in the number and percentage of women arrested.
Did you get that, Davey-boy? An appendix with 50 studies documenting that women INSTIGATE OVER HALF OF ALL DV, YOU DUMB MOTHERFUCKER.
Here’s the link: http://www.warrenfarrellblog.com/warren-farrell/william-farrell-the-myth-of-male-power/
Warren Farrel used to work for now, he’s a PHD, and well respected, so please, don’t weasel out. This debate is supposed to last for one week. DON’T WEASEL OUT, FUCK-FACE!
Don’t come back with the result of DV. We already know women get injured more than men, DUH. Men are bigger than women.
When you make your comeback, you need to answer the charge that women INSTIGATE OVER HALF OF ALL DV.
It’s called an abusive relationship.
According to a nationwide survey conducted by the National Institute of Justice and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, some 22% of women said they had been assaulted by a current or former intimate partner at some point in their lives; only 7% of men said the same.
Because as I already said, men UNDER-REPORT FOR REASONS THAT ARE OBVIOUS. You really are an ass-clown, Davey-boy. Fucking mangina. Disgusting.
Indeed, the vast majority of the studies examined in the John Archer meta-study you mentioned used the CTS.
Prove it. You just made an assertion, now prove it. Not only do you need to prove it, you need to provide sources.
The statement that men and women hit one another in roughly equal numbers is true, however, it cannot be made in a vacuum without the qualifiers that a) women are seriously injured at seven times the rate of men and b) that women are killed by partners at more than two times the rate of men….
No shit. You really haven’t said fuck all that we didn’t know, Davey.
What you need to come back with is, why do you give women a pass for throwing a frying pan at their husband’s/partner’s head? What shall men do? Wipe the blood off their skulls and say, “Sorry dear”? The point is, as Paul has stated, women are half the problem.
But hey, thanks a lot, pal. You’re a swell guy. Way to go. Good looking out for your brothers!
@ Wanderer
“Mr. Roslin, I think Mr. Futrelle has already read that. The exact same paper is in the link he mentioned:
http://pubpages.unh.edu/~mas2/V74-gender-symmetry-with-gramham-Kevan-Method%208-.pdf”
Do you really believe, that Mr. Futrelle had read it?
I don’t.
Perhaps he has read it but misunderstood the paper?
Therefore here another quotation from Murray Straus for the autograph book of Mr. Futrelle.
” We need make the same ‘big deal’ about violence by women as we do about men who behave violently”
This you can read here:
“Survey finds male abuse approval”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/glasgow_and_west/5092100.stm
Where are the courses to teach our female students not to kick, slap, push and hurt their male fellow students?
Where?
Manboobz, one of your statements is as follows:
“Anyone looking into the vast literature on the subject will be struck at once by the radically different conclusions researchers have drawn from their data.”
Many of the studies that you cite used flawed methodology as well. They use what is called “Clinical Samples” or samples that are not representative of the larger population. In the case of Domestic Violence, the clinical samples often used are police reports, domestic violence centers that provide direct services, or hospital emergency rooms.
That creates a problem when forming conclusions, since there is an inheritance bias in such samples, that makes them by definition, not representative. These locations are staffed heavily with ideologues that have been relentlessly trained to view victims of violence through the feminist lens. The instruments (i.e., questionnaires, or interview methods). Thus you only get answers to the questions that you ask. And if you don’t ask, then you never know.
An additional problem is these data gathering sites are likely to inflate female reporting while discouraging male reporting. Why? Men are also quite likely to not call the police or go to a hospital before and during a disturbance for obvious reasons of fear of arrest themselves, or at the very least, ridicule. And at DV shelters, they are not always, but very often, simply turned away. Thus these sites are quite unlikely to get at the male side of the issue, unless it is only as perpetrators, and not victims.
An illustration of the problem is attached. The right outer quadrants are those that are likely to get the kind of data that you cite on male perpetration and female victimization.
The left outer quadrants represent the stories that rarely (if ever) get told: Male victims, female perpetrators. The center section, is obviously an illustration of incidents when the violence is mutual.
One of the salient advantages of using survey approaches as is typical of the Conflicts Tactics Scale, is that it does not depend on clinical samples. It covers ALL of these quadrants via random sampling.
The problem is that the laws get based on data that very badly biased by staff, and sampling methodology. The end result is the one we have now: Male victims getting virtually no recognition, and only blame.
Dutton, Frieberg, and Strauss are quite explicit about this in many of their published writings. But I guess you didn’t read close enough to see that.
Also, they are certainly no MRAs. But neither are they feminist ideologues. They have publicly distanced themselves from ‘the radical fringe’ on both sides, to maintain their objectivity, as most responsible researchers are expected to. They did this because they HAD TO.
[file]http://avoiceformen.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/Clinical Samples- The Problem.pdf[/file]
Damn. The .pdf file isn’t appearing…
That’s why those SAME people did a follow up with the CTS2. That second study actually came out with the result that women are as likely to initiate domestic violence, not in self defense as we were lead to believe. Spending that much space, or any space for that matter, on the first study is flat out dishonest and shows desperation. You resorted to arguing with a study but you were not arguing with anybody… we would all use the second vastly improved study over the first. Did you also know that in that study both the men AND the women gave similar rates of DV for men and women. Trust me there are even much rigorous studies that also reproduce the same results, all of which are peer reviewed and up to scientific stardards.
All those studies are consistent with every thing that follows for various known reasons. Men report their victimization less. Men are also less likely to conceptualize being victims of DV even if you ask them. In order to get the truth you need to ask what specifically happened to them. (YOU CAN GIVE A SPECIAL THANKS TO FEMINISTS FOR THAT). And women are more likely to be seriously physically injured by domestic violence than men (though many men are seriously injured by women). In light of such the studies are not unreasonable in any way other than your own bias.
‘So, Paul, do you still think that “domestic violence has nothing to do with what sex are?”‘
Do you have a problem with reading comprehension? Paul said this “Sex is not at all predictive in either perpetration or victimization of DV.” That is entirely true. He is saying that women PERPETRATE DV at rates equal to men and that men are VICTIMIZED as often as women are. He is crushing the myth that women only hit in self defense and that women are not HALF the problem. I will turn this on you once again. Until we all accept that we cannot have a serious talk on DV. If you want seriously want drastically reduce DV towards women you have to address women’s participation in DV.
Oh and women are victims ofs DV if they are ever struck. There is no criterion that they must be brutally beaten. And That makeshift sense because nobody should have to stand for physical abuse. But all of the sudden you want to raise the bar for men and only talk about those seriously injured… your misandry is plain to see. Again, physical abuse severe or not is wrong and that is what we always said to women (do DV shelters deny women without broken bones?). You also seem to forget that there are very many men who are also brutally victimized and killed by women. We simply want a male victims to get every bit of support whichever women already are afforded.
“My challenge to the MRM is simple: if you really want DV shelters for men, and are simply interested in scoring rhetorical points against feminists, build them. Don’t c that feminists aren’t fighting your battles for you. Get off the Internet, get your han and actually make a difference.”
Don’t you dare make a comparison to initial advocacy for women or trivialize the barriers Feminism (and feminist DV shelters) poses for the advocacy of male victims of dv. The difference between men’s struggle for support and women’s past struggle is that there have already been DV shelters for DECADES. Men are being denied what has already been deemed as something very important in the name if human rights and dignity. Furthermore men’s character has been attacked as being the sole abusers by the very source that is denying them any bit of justice.
@Chris October 23rd, 2010 -03:47
“Most men who call shelters for help have money though so don’t need that service.”
That is an incredibly flawed statement, if your even suggesting that men are served. Aside fro.well the problem abuses men face by our system men are far less likely to recognize victimization or even do anything about it is the Do recognize it. Men aren’t served from the get go because according to the domestic violence industry men are not victims. (Thankfully more men are starting to report though).
I don’t know which men are calling you but domestic violence rates increase with people of low income. Its not hard to guess that people of low income going through DV and possibly courts for children and divorce might need a shelter because they can’t afford a hotel. Maybe those men who need the shelters most (but they all should have the same support as women) aren’t calling you guys but That would just bring it back to my original point.
Doesn’t most of this data about how violent men are rely on whether or not you believe most police officers responding to DV calls try their best to find out what actually happened? With the rampant police corruption in this country, and my own personal experience, it’s hard to have much faith in the boys in blue these days.
So I guess my question for David is this. You believe that when the Police respond to DV calls most of them are doing the best job they can, and usually make the right call about what happened. Correct?? If this is the case, my next question is how do you feel about how negatively a large portion of minorites in this country feel about police officers?
For a guy as liberal as you are I’m interested in your answer.
It just seems to me that while there are good police officers in this country, a good portion are corrupt, or white knights. And in cases of DV, a police officer who is a white knight is not so good if you’re a man.
Well, after seeing Futrelle’s first reply … I don’t think Paul is in any trouble.
“National Institute of Justice and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, some 22% of women said they had been assaulted by a current or former intimate partner at some point in their lives; only 7% of men said the same.”
In today’s sexual marketplace, women seek out thugs and bad boys. They actually look for violent streaks in their partners as a sign of fitness. Men are simply not that stupid; unless there are compelling reasons for a man to stay (e.g. children), men are wise enough to i. not go for violent women and ii. get the hell out of dodge if she turns violent.
The root of this issue (and the broader dv area) is that its considered bad form to criticise the behaviour of the ‘victim’. Therefore, even if the woman does something as monumentally stupid as repeatedly chasing violent thugs, society is unwilling to chastise her for this or assign cause-and-effect to what she does.
One of the central planks of Futrelle’s argument seems to be that whilst men and women may well indulge in the early stages of dv, when it comes to injuries etc men hurt women (because they’re simply stronger than women, another fact that is almost a taboo subject these days). What this doesn’t really convey however is the way that such an exchange typically pans out. A woman is likely to initiate and escalate a typical confrontation (from verbal to light physical assault, and sometimes on to heavier use of force), whilst the man typically engages right at the end in a quick use of force to end it (and many times, the man will have tried to walk away but will have been chased down by the enraged woman who prevents his departure). That the man lost his temper is not something to be congratulated; but to completely deny the woman’s part in such a dance is ridiculous.
Ultimately, it looks to me like Futrelle is trying to change the nature of the debate.
The key point I think Elam is making is that men and women initiate dv equally. In a sense, there is a kind of equality of opportunity for this, and you can’t single out either men or women as being bigger offenders. This is supported by the studies cited.
Futrelle does not appear to be denying this, but instead changes the argument to one that says, if the end result is that women get hurt more, then dv is a male on female issue rather than 50-50. The fact that women get hurt more than men is again supported by studies (and is in fact glaringly obvious to anyone who accepts the reality that men are much stronger than women).
Now imagine a situation where someone decides it will be fun to play in traffic, and starts dancing in the middle of a busy road. If we look purely at the outcome (they get run down, broken limbs or possibly even killed) then we might say, car drivers are evil; they run down people without any risk to themselves. But this is nonsense; the person stepping out into the road has chosen to do so, betting on the fact that most car drivers will do their utmost not to hit them. Similarly, women seem to bet on most men being extremely unwilling to raise a hand to them in anger.
When this strategy goes bad, we blame the equivalent of the car driver rather than the idiot dancing in the road. Whats even worse is that many women even seek out the most violent men they can find as it turns them on, and then wonder why they end up as a dv statistic.
As women continually fail to change their behaviour, the dv net is made larger and larger in an attempt to stop the inevitable. In the example above, at some point, if we stop anyone driving a car because they might hit some idiot dancing in the road, then is that a good outcome? Yet the extension of dv to psychological abuse, or verbal haranguing, is such a step. It plays on the outcome card, i.e. that women are more likely to get hurt if they decide to fight a man who is much stronger than them, and uses it as an excuse to proscribe any behaviour that the man engages in that the woman finds questionable (such as feebly answering back when she’s in full torrent verbal-abuse mode).
And the worst thing about this attitude? Men become invisible victims in the cases where they don’t fight back or leave. Society simply denies them victimhood, as that narrative is reserved for women. But people like Futrelle and other feminists probably consider this as acceptable losses in the battle to ensure that women can do whatever they like without having to be accountable for their actions.
But it’s exactly “context” that feminists get wrong. For instance, feminist DV activist, Danny Blay, wrote recently that:
“Unfortunately for us, men from all walks of life, socio-economic status, geography, education levels and prior experiences are pretty much equally likely to use violence towards family members.”
He is rejecting here the idea that there is any context to DV committed by men. But his claim is entirely false. It is not true that all men are “equally likely” to commit DV.
Take, for instance, research on femicide – the killing of women by intimate partners:
“James and Carcach (1998) suggest that almost 85 per cent of victims, and a little over 90 per cent of offenders, belong to what can be described as an underclass in Australian society.
“Similarly, in a study of homicides that occurred in New South Wales between 1968 and 1981, it was found that marital violence resulting in death only very rarely occurred in the professional, semi-professional and managerial classes (Wallace 1986).”
When it comes to other forms of DV research shows that there are stressors which greatly increase the chance of DV. For instance, research by Anglicare Victoria found that:
“More than four out of five family violence cases also involve mental illness, financial hardship, alcohol abuse or housing difficulties.”
Why won’t feminists admit this kind of context? Why do they cling to the idea that all men are equally liable? Why won’t they accept that there are very clear and distinct stressors which are connected to DV?
Because of what fits the theory – namely feminist patriarchy theory. According to this theory men as a class use domestic violence to uphold an unearned privilege taken at the expense of women. The theory predicts that men in general will use DV for this purpose, so this is what feminists run with.
Sources: Danny Blay (see comment 1.03 pm) http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/man-trouble-20101017-16p2a.html?comments=75#comments
Femicide research: http://ozconservative.blogspot.com/2008/11/defence-for-gilmore.html
Stressors: http://ozconservative.blogspot.com/2008/11/kate-gilmore-hopes-we-have-forgotten-94.html
That was fairly predictable, criticizing the CTS and citing advocacy research as if it were genuine scientific research. Strauss responds to the unfounded CTS criticism here..
“Despite repeating this criticism for 25 years in perhaps a hundred publications, none of
those publications has provided empirical evidence showing that only conflict-related
violence is reported. In fact, where there are both CTS data and qualitative data, as in GilesSims
(1983), it shows that the CTS elicits malicious violence as well as conflict-related
violence. Nevertheless, because there are at least a hundred articles with this statement in
peer reviewed journals, it seems to establish as a scientific fact what is only an attempt to
blame the messenger for the bad news about gender symmetry in PV.”
http://pubpages.unh.edu/~mas2/V74-gender-symmetry-with-gramham-Kevan-Method%208-.pdf
As for ” the challenge”, he proposes a nonsensical solution, the idea that victims should be divided and helped on the basis of their sex by competing groups is absurd.
This kind of argument is one reason I am kind of upset with feminism. And I say feminism, because I believe that is a widespread opinion not only David ones. I came first across this kind of argument on Barry Deutsch’s blog, which also heavily featured Michael Kimmel. This one is linked on the popular feminism101 blog. That blog is featured on popular feminist sites such as feministing or our own r/feminism. Sadly, this position heavily influenced the official opinion about DV. Take the National Coalition to end Domestic Violence, they had a recent event with NOMAS (a group Kimmel is involved with) teamed up with Ms magazine in the past and are credited with the Domestic Violence Awareness Month. Some words about Kimmel, he is involved with gender studies and might give an answer to the questions why MRAs want male studies instead of adopting the feminist view when it comes to studying men, but that is another discussion.
The argument by Dave is similar to the data that can be found on the NCADV site which is, contrary to what he is claiming, a really selective view of the date. Let us start with violence against women. When we talk violence against women, there is one study we use almost every time. It is the National Violence Against Women Survey. Even though the DoJ has its own very large study, the National Crime Victimation Survey, they still use the NVAWS. Why is that so?
Domestic violence as well as rape is a tricky subject. Crime Surveys like the NCVS ask if a crime happened. Sadly, most abuse victims, don’t see their victimisation as a crime. This is even more true for men. Therefor studies are used that ask for behaviours that fit the definition of abuse/rape. So if you search for violence against women you will be directed to the NVAWS. The NVAWS also found that about 40% of DV victims in the year of the survey are male (there are methological reasons why it differs from studies that find a 50/50 value even though the methology is similar. I will talk about that if people are interested in why). To take a look at the statistics of the National Coalition against Domestic Violence again, they feature the number of victims from the National Violence against Women Survey, yet drop the 40% that are male victims and get a crime survey with a ratio of 85% female victims, to maximize female and minimize male victims. Or to say it that way, they counted women as abused victims that said they have been hit, yet only counted men that said they have been a victim of criminal abuse by their partner. Dave is pulling the same stunt here:
“one Department of Justice survey found that 95% of the victims of DV were women. These studies also find that women are injured far more frequently, and far more severely, by DV: one study of domestic disturbance calls involving injury found that women were injured 94% of the time; men, only 14% of the time.”
Of course using only those crime studies we would also come to the conclusion that far less women (I believe it was 10 times less women) were victims of DV. And that is the hypocrisy. Of course if men are less likely to believe they can be victims of DV you will find even find far less men in crime surveys. But that is besides the point, they don’t even use these surveys to count female victims, why should we use them to count male victims.
To follow the script (I have been in such discussions before) Dave will attack the CTS:
“Most of the “gender symmetry” studies are surveys conducted using a methodologically flawed research tool called the Conflict Tactics Scale, originally developed by researcher Murray Straus in the 1970s. Indeed, the vast majority of the studies examined in the John Archer meta-study you mentioned used the CTS. [...] the CTS “equates a woman pushing a man in self-defense to a man pushing a woman down the stairs. It labels a mother as violent if she defends her daughter from the father’s sexual molestation. It combines categories such as “hitting” and “trying to hit” despite the important difference between them. Because it looks at only one year, this study equates a single slap by a woman to a man’s 15 year history of domestic terrorism.” [...] While both men and women use violence to express anger, a number of studies show that men are far more likely to use domestic violence to control their victim, to “show who is boss.” Other studies that look at motivation find that much female “violence” is in fact self-defense.”
We shouldn’t tell David that the National Violence Against Women Survey which he also cites uses the CTS as well. Besides that, it is a common feminist argument. What feminist though ignore is the development of the CTS. Sure there where valid concerns when this tool was introduced in 1970, that is the reason a lot of surveys use the new CTS2 or a modified CTS system. So many of the myths are not found to be true. For instance:
* Self-defense accounts for only 10-20% of female partner aggression
* A study of causes of domestic violence found that 12 of the 14 reasons applied to both men and women
* A need for control is not a common cause of domestic violence, and when it is, women are as likely as men to be controlling.
* About 40% of injured DV victims are male
(http://www.mediaradar.org/docs/RADARreport-50-DV-Myths.pdf) (http://feck-blog.blogspot.com/2010/01/domestic-violence-data-summary.html)
In short, women have similar motivations to abuse their partner and many men are injured.
Also a bit out of date are the comments of Gelles:
And you may recall Richard Gelles; he was one of the original developers of the CTS and has been one of the loudest proponents of the “gender symmetry” argument. You quoted him in your post to buttress your points. But he has been as scathing towards the MRAs who misrepresent his research as he has been to those who originally greeted his research with threats:
“The statement that men and women hit one another in roughly equal numbers is true, however, it cannot be made in a vacuum without the qualifiers that a) women are seriously injured at seven times the rate of men and b) that women are killed by partners at more than two times the rate of men….
[W]hen we look at injuries resulting from violence involving male and female partners, it is categorically false to imply that there are the same number of “battered” men as there are battered women. Research shows that nearly 90 percent of battering victims are women and only about ten percent are men… The most brutal, terrorizing and continuing pattern of harmful intimate violence is carried out primarily by men. [FAQ]
The “seven times more likely to report being injured” has been cited very often. It is based on a wrong assumption though. The source of this information was a question in the National Family Violence Survey:
“In the last 12 months has either of you been hurt badly enough as a result of a convlict between you to need to see a doctor?”
The question is, is saying “women are 7.5 more times more likely to report they needed to see a doctor” the same as saying “women are 7.5 times more likely to be injured than men who are assaulted by their wives”.
The researcher Fontes (Fontes – Telling the truth about DV – 1998) asked Straus and Geles the same question.
Gelles answer was the following:
“… neither Professor Staus nor I can answer this question, since we did not measure injury apart from a need to see a doctor.”
All agreed that the survey gave no answer on the question if women are 7.5 more times more likely to be injured by domestic violence.
The question is,
“If a woman and a man sustain the exact injury, will both be just as likely to report they needto see a doctor? Or will one gender be more likely to seek professional medical attention for injuries?”
That women are more likely to see a doctor is a fact known by most. As a lot of injuries resulting from Domestic Violence are minor injuries:
British Crime Survey (1996):
Bruising 35% of all cases
Scratches 18%
Cuts 9%
Broken bones 2%
National Violence Against Women Survey:
66.6% of all injuries were scratches and bruises
this could mean women were more like to visit a doctor in such cases. Murray Straus says about 33% of injuries are sustained by men. Psychologist John Archer researched 82 studies and found that of all persons who suffer an injury from partner aggression, 38% are male. (John Archer: Sex differences in aggression between heterosexual partners: A meta-analytic review). Schwithal published his analysis of 70 international studies in his book and found that 43.4% of victims suffering injuries are men.
I am running out of time for now, but would like to add the following. The claim that there are thousands of studies that contradict the findings of CTS studies is likely wrong and I couldn’t find any citation in the piece by Kimmel (he said numerous). A lot of what he says is quite outdated as well. Including the age old citement by Gelles, ignoring the evolution of the CTS, acting like the National Violence against women survey is not a CTS study and and and. Look at this
“Researchers who use the CTS and similar surveys have acknowledged that their surveys provide only a limited look at DV as a whole, and that they do not capture much of the most serious kinds of abuse.”
Every survey and study only provides us with a limited look at DV as a whole and every study has a problem to capture the victims.
“CTS is the best available instrument to measure intra-family violence” because of “stable factor structure, moderate reliability and concurrent validity and the strong evidence of construct validity”(Straus -The conflict tactic scale and its critics: An evaluation and new data on validity and reliability – 1990)
“Like all tests and scales, the CTS is not perfect. Nevertheless, numerous reviews by sholars, who do not hava a vested interest to shoot the messenger for the bad news, agree that the CTS is the best available instrument [...] no other scale meets this standard” (Straus – Physical assaults by women partners: A major social problem – 1997)
Anyhow, I wrote about a similar post before and already included some answers from a blogpost of mine, this might be interesting:
http://feck-blog.blogspot.com/2009/08/re-are-men-equal-victims-part-1_26.html
http://feck-blog.blogspot.com/2009/08/re-are-men-equal-victims-part-2.html
Damn, never wrote part 3…
Possibly the dialogue we MRAs should be having is with folks like Feckless here rather than with people like Futrelle. I’d welcome anyone else’s thoughts on this suggestion.
@ David
Another flaw in your argument is in the number of insecure assumptions you make. The most important of these is that the original data on DV is correct and that ‘peer review’ is a legitimate qualifier of DV research papers. Neither of these is secure when you consider how much research into DV is funded specifically to rationalise prove the validity of women’s feelings concerns. Every university grants committee knows that gynocentrically stylising research around validating women’s feelings is the shortest path to fiscal success. For example, if a research proposal is about disappearing honey bees in Botswana it’ll probably get $5000 in funding, but if it’s about the cultural implications of the disappearance of honey bees to Botswanan women, it’ll probably get $50000. If you say to researchers there’s money on the table to prove this stuff, they will dutifully go ahead and do so. Statistics can be made to tell any story a researcher wants if s(he’s) motivated enough.
The gynocentric stylisation of DV research is a distortion of an important area of sociology. DV researchers need there to be a problem in order to get funding. They have a vested interest in stretching definitions or embellishing reports of abuse because then money will flow to their area of research. One thing a gynocentric DV researcher seeking funding shouldn’t say is that violence against men might be as big a problem as violence against women. In fact, all it takes is one core article in those you’ve cited to be under this influence and the house of cards comes tumbling down. You simply can’t rely on academic material to state the DV problem clearly. Of course, you can argue your case in non-academic terms, but you’d need a lot more empathy towards men than you clearly have.
Other insecure assumptions you’ve made are that:
a) Women don’t lie about DV;
b) DV counsellors don’t exaggerate or embellish;
c) Peer-reviewers are morally autonomous.
All it takes is one of these assumptions to be wrong and your argument fails.
You also haven’t taken into account men’s feelings about DV, which aren’t usually discussed in scientific papers. This is by far the more important aspect of the MRM so if you leave it out, as you have, you can’t hope to debate Paul effectively. Paul does this masterfully on a daily basis and we are all better men for his ministrations. Because you don’t even begin to consider men’s feelings Paul won this debate before you typed your first word.
“Possibly the dialogue we MRAs should be having is with folks like Feckless here rather than with people like Futrelle. ”
Absolutely.
Feckless is arguing in good faith,”laying the cards on the table”, so to speak.
Futrelle is attempting to hoodwink people with an intricate semantical 3 card monty because he is simply selectively citing research done by feminists with an axe to grind that was originally itself an intricate semantical 3 card monty,cherry-picked to lead the reader to the conclusion pre-established by the researchers.
That conclusion, boiled down to its essentials is that all men are dangerous abusive thugs. Everything else is smoke and mirrors, designed to have us nodding along as the female chauvinists don their brown shirts and proudly goosestep for us, chanting their fascist pseudo-scientific drivel. You could drive a Mack truck through the holes in this feminist “science” that claims to show that men are “Neanderthals”.
We should view feminist research the same way we view the arguments of those of times past, who used skull sizes to demonstrate that blacks or Jews or Slavs were a separate species or more closely related to monkeys, the fact that no one has refuted THIS particular nonsense in the same way yet just demonstrates how far we as men are willing to bend to accommodate the desires and whims of females.
I consider these links below as legitimate sources regarding domestic violence.
http://pn.psychiatryonline.org/content/42/15/31.2.full
Men Shouldn’t Be Overlooked as Victims of Partner Violence by the American Psychiatric Association
Just one sentence out of this research:
Women often the aggressors:
Regarding perpetration of violence, more women than men (25 percent versus 11 percent) were responsible. In fact, 71 percent of the instigators in nonreciprocal partner violence were women. This finding surprised Whitaker and his colleagues, they admitted in their study report.
—–
You might also refer to
http://ajph.aphapublications.org/cgi/content/abstract/97/5/941
American Public Health Association
This link will explain to you in detail how this reseach above was done and I copy/paste one sentence out of its result.
…..in relationships with reciprocal violence it was the men who were injured more often (25 percent of the time) than were women (20 percent of the time). This is important as violence perpetrated by women is often seen as not serious….
—–
MRAs never deny that violent men exist.
But there are also PLENTY of violent women.
To claim all men are violent and all women are poor helpless victims is a baseless feminist lie.
[img]http://avoiceformen.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/women_aggressors.png[/img]
My 2 cents on my own blog, a rather lengthy piece:
http://deansdale.wordpress.com/2010/10/23/the-big-debate/
Deansdale has killed Futrelle.
@Snark
That would be kind of a circlejerk as I am an MRA as well.
Anyhow, time on the weekend is rare and I wanted to add something to the last bit:
“if you really want DV shelters for men, and aren’t simply interested in scoring rhetorical points against feminists, build them. Don’t complain that feminists aren’t fighting your battles for you. Get off the Internet, get your hands dirty, and actually make a difference.”
I have seen this before (thinking about Barry Deutsch here) and I can only shake my head in disbelief. For once, DV shelters weren’t entirely built by women or feminist. And more importantly, funding. For shelters you need funding, state support. Now men pay taxes and shelter get financed via VAWA, but when men need help they don’t get the same service or are turned away. Open discrimination. Not even the “Domestic Violence Hotline for Men and Women” recieves funding due to the fact that they actually serve men. It is easy to say “built your own damn shelters poor menz”, but kind of a chepshot when you consider the circumstances.
“That would be kind of a circlejerk as I am an MRA as well.”
I appreciate that you support Men’s Rights, but as far as feminism is concerned, I do not believe it possible to be both.
@codebuster
I do remember you saying something like that before and it is a very good analysis. It is important to note that women are the more likely child abusers thus teaching their kids mistrust and violence which fuels DV. Women are need to make more responsible choices in which men they want to be around, especially if they have kids.
However, the point Paul is making is where we need to push the hardest. Women don’t just make bad choices they really are initiating violence and men really are victims. We don’t need to resort to arguments against female type of irresponsibility (even though you do make a goddamn point). I’m guessing you might not have watched the video but you should. You will probably get the impression that the analysis is very fair minded so to speak.
This meta-analysis and annotated bibliography from Fiebert is something that every mra should have at his or her disposal. Here is an excerpt:
‘SUMMARY: This bibliography examines 275 scholarly investigations: 214 empirical studies and 61 reviews and/or analyses, which demonstrate that women are as physically aggressive, or more aggressive, than men in their relationships with their spouses or male partners. The aggregate sample size in the reviewed studies exceeds 365,000.’
I would also recommend visiting this page at the men’s activism site. It gives alot of useful links including a REALLY good site on DV.
I’ve read most of this thread, and one thing is glaringly obvious to me:
The average MRA that comes here regularly knows far more about both sides of the DV argument than our advocate on the feminist side.
Paul could simply copy and paste any of a half dozen (or more) of the more detailed posts put up in the last 12 hours to counter every assertion.
Mr. Futrelle, you are completely unprepared. You brought a spork to a gun fight.
”As for ” the challenge”, he proposes a nonsensical solution, the idea that victims should be divided and helped on the basis of their sex by competing groups is absurd.”
This. Good God this!
Futrelle can’t seem to make up his idiot mind. By saying that we should build our own shelters he is saying that he sees it as the responsibility solely of men and male advocacy groups to accomplish the things we desire. Basically he does not hold feminists to their own propaganda of ”equality”, he just accepts that they are a female advocacy group whose job it is to secure maximum benefits for women and funding for women’s causes, regardless of the cost or consequences for men.
He also implicity accepts that the MRN has is perfectly within it’s moral rights to advocate for men with similar disregard for fairness or equality, so I can’t understand what he is complaining about.
Of course he is totally in denial of just how vehemently feminists will and do oppose ANY attempt by men to form a credible counterbalance to feminism, (which isn’t even the MRM, to be a mirror image of feminism it would have to be unqualfied male advocacy in the same way feminism is unqualified female advocacy). We all know what the deal is, feminists (correctly) identify the fact that funding to help male DV victims would reduce the pool of availible funding for females, and as feminism is unqualified female advocacy is MUST resist this.
According to the MRA argument shelters for children, under 18 that get government funding should take everyone, no matter the age. Until I see proof from mra’s that they have tried to build DV shelters for men and the evil feminists prevented them(sic), I will continue to belive they are full of shit on this issue.
@Snark
Feckless is a long time, and very good MRA.
http://antimisandry.com/chit-chat-main/fecks-warcraft-file-450-links-16039.html
I have read a lot of the responses in the post and as much of David’s rebuttal as I could take. I noticed a trend with feminists and even women because I have argued with my own mother on this issue. They admit that men are abused because they realize they would sound stupid if they didn’t say that but then they do everything in their power to tone it down. It’s such a small number or but what about all the women that are suffering? The main point should be that suffering is wrong no matter how small the minority. I often don’t want to turn it into a race issue but I’m going to anyway. Not even 50 years ago an African American man even as young as ten could be lynched for even looking at a white women the wrong way. For any of you that forgot what a lynching was the victim was tortured tarred and feathered then hanged. White people turned it into a spectator sport and would even have picnics to observe a lynching. I bet the woman that accused them would have no problem going to see it. The main reason a lynching could occur was a woman.
All a white woman had to do was even mention it and it would incite a mob that would destroy any innocent black man in the way. Civil rights activists fought really hard to stop this awful act and for a long time the offender’s would only get a slap on the wrist. More importantly the woman could admit after the charred remains of the man she accused was taken away that he never touched her and she could get away with it. The reason why I bring this up is because I now feel like a different kind of lynching is occurring today. One that is less direct and more sinister. Once again it has gotten to a point were all it takes is one woman of any race crying foul and the man she accuses is subject to a public lynching of his career and reputation. Just like Paul and all MRA’s I’m not denying men commit D.V. What I’m saying is just like in the last century this mob mentality is never the answer, because it can and will destroy innocent lives in the process.
What’s David’s answer to this? stop whining and fix the problem yourselves. Just like most feminist these days he seems to forget the main reason why feminism even got off the ground was because men helped and allowed it. So he claims it’s not the responsibility of feminists to help stop this? What a stupid thing to say. It’s really hard to go back in history and find a powerful feminist that didn’t have a man’s money backing them up. So until the mass media and people like David stop saying that only men cause D.V. and MRA’s are crazy for suggesting women are just as much to blame. I feel all their doing is prepping the torches and pitch forks for the continual lynching of the western male.
@Jaytheman –
You’re not the first one to notice the similarity between the lynchings of the past, and the attitude directed towards (usually, but not always) men that speak up against feminist DV indoctrination.
@Smark
Ahem, I am certainly not a feminist. What made you think so?
@ Fmeckless,
Yeah, I realised this after I checked out your blog.
It was this phrase:
“That blog is featured on popular feminist sites such as feministing or our own r/feminism.”
Our own r/feminism? Made it sound like you were a feminist. Or rather – that you may have had the misconception that you were one. LOL!
Ah sorry, I wrote the original on reddit. r/feminism is our own feminism subreddit. Redditors will understand. *Sigh* really should have proffread.
Jaytheman wrote: “What’s David’s answer to this? stop whining and fix the problem yourselves.”
This is the depths of hypocrisy. I remember quite clearly when second wave feminism started and I remember how it grew. The feminists shouted that feminism was for the benefit of men and women equally, even as they fought to get all-women shelters and huge increases in funds for breast cancer research and treatment with no comparable shelters for men or increases in funds for prostate cancer research and treatment.
Men are only now demanding equal treatment. And so, do the feminists say “Fine. We’ll be true to our word and help you get equal treatment”? No. They say, “Do it yourselves.”
Hypocrites.
Anti Idiocy, that is only half the story. They do not just say “do it yourselves.” When we do actually try to build something for ourselves, they do everything in their power to tear it down.
@David
1. The American domestic violence homicide data shows that the number of male victims has decreased by some 60% over the past 30 years whereas the number of female victims has decreased by only some 15% – suggesting that the domestic violence policies have saved more men from death than women.
30 years ago, domestic homicides were roughly the same for men and women.
This surely suggests that the policies are not working.
Why?
Quite simply, because aggressing women no longer need to kill. They can get the police to do the violence on their behalf.
Men do not have this option; so they carry on killing.
2. Notice that the environment (e.g. the highly anti-male laws) always seem to be missing from the equation when it comes to discussing WHY men might become violent.
3. The term ‘domestic violence’ has a much broader meaning these days; so why confine this debate to research that only looks at physical assault?
Under the broader definitions, women perpetrate acts of ‘domestic violence’ whenever they make false accusations of domestic violence, sex-assault, child molestation or rape; when they kick a man out of the house; when they deny him access to his children; when they lie about paternity’; when they lie about using contraception; when they goad another man into behaving with violence on their behalf etc.
And also when they THREATEN to do any of these things.
All these are acts of very serious abuse?
But do they get counted in the **statistics** of ‘domestic violence’?
Nah.
Do male victims of MALE domestic violence count in the statistics?
Mostly, No.
What about those thousands of men who commit suicide every year as a result of domestic problems that are caused by their partners?
Do these count as domestic violence victims?
Nah.
What about all those men who are wrongfully convicted of domestic violence and punished because of their partners’ lies and distortions.
Does this count as domestic violence?
Nah.
Under the broader definitions, men are, clearly, more often the victims of domestic violence than are women.
4. “your argument depends on a highly selective reading of the scientific literature on DV”
The research on domestic violence that you have mentioned is not ‘scientific’.
Let us not pretend that it is. There is nothing ‘scientific’ about it.
Worse; the researchers themselves are totally untrustworthy, because they have a huge vested interest in finding what they find.
And they are also likely to be subjected to significant professional mistreatment should they fail to toe the feminist line.
5. The notion that women are going to give truthful answers on questionnaires on matters concerning a highly-politicised subject like domestic violence is laughable.
It is the equivalent of asking Germans in the 1930s whether or not their neighbouring Jews smelt badly and/or stole things from the back yard.
6. If feminists really wanted to reduce the amount of physical assaults against women, then they would argue that men should be given other avenues (i.e. more legal powers) with which to deal with them – as indicated in 1. above.
At the end of the day, I am not at all surprised that men kill and batter women more often than vice versa.
Change the laws and the procedures so that they favour the men, and you’d see a big change.
7. “Get off the Internet, get your hands dirty, and actually make a difference.”
I’m sure that you would love to see us all disappear from the internet – but it ain’t gonna happen.
Would you have told the media feminists to do the same thirty years ago?
“Get out of the newspapers and get off the TV screens and get your hands dirty.”
I don’t think so.
Finally, I don’t really care what the statistics show.
If somebody needs help, then they need help; man or woman.
Trouble is; there is not enough help for the men. On the contrary, current policies make matters worse for them.
And this, we need to change.
Which we will.
And, further, people seem to find it very acceptable to hit men these days, but not women.
As a result, men are less likely to see acts of violence against them by their partners as being acts of ‘domestic violence’ when they fill in their questionnaires.
After all, a woman hitting a man is not ‘violence’ in the eyes of many people.
Conversely, women have been trained over the years to see ‘abuse’ in the most trivial of circumstances. They are bound, therefore, to over-report domestic violence on their questionnaires whereas men will under-report it.
All in all, therefore, the official ‘research’ is invalid from the outset because you have no reliable and objective way of measuring what the researchers claim to be measuring.
I recommend my piece, …
http://www.angryharry.com/esdepressedfemales.htm
David’s argument that women initiate DV as often as men, but because they do less damage that female initiated DV is not serious is spurious.
If women did not initiate violence men could not retaliate.
@feckless
You quoted this gem,
“Most of the “gender symmetry” studies are surveys conducted using a methodologically flawed research tool called the Conflict Tactics Scale, originally developed by researcher Murray Straus in the 1970s. Indeed, the vast majority of the studies examined in the John Archer meta-study you mentioned used the CTS. [...] the CTS “equates a woman pushing a man in self-defense to a man pushing a woman down the stairs. It labels a mother as violent if she defends her daughter from the father’s sexual molestation. It combines categories such as “hitting” and “trying to hit” despite the important difference between them. Because it looks at only one year, this study equates a single slap by a woman to a man’s 15 year history of domestic terrorism.” [...] While both men and women use violence to express anger, a number of studies show that men are far more likely to use domestic violence to control their victim, to “show who is boss.” Other studies that look at motivation find that much female “violence” is in fact self-defense.”
From the same evidence I could conclude:
“equates a man pushing a man in self-defense to a woman pushing a woman down the stairs. It labels a father as violent if he defends his son from the mother’s sexual molestation. It combines categories such as “hitting” and “trying to hit” despite the important difference between them. Because it looks at only one year, this study equates a single slap by a man to a woman’s 15 year history of domestic terrorism.” [...] While both men and women use violence to express anger, a number of studies show that women are far more likely to use domestic violence to control their victim, to “show who is boss.” Other studies that look at motivation find that much male “violence” is in fact self-defense.”
Davids arguments, like much of Feminism are not the slightest bit scientific, it is all pure rhetoric.
“A second, and much larger, group of studies, finds men responsible for the overwhelming majority of DV. According to a nationwide survey conducted by the National Institute of Justice and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, some 22% of women said they had been assaulted by a current or former intimate partner at some point in their lives; only 7% of men said the same. [NIJ]”
Given the portrayal in the media of all violence against women as a crime, while violence against men is often considered justified or funny, is it surprising that men might consider DV against them as not being a crime.
Assault is a crime of violence against another person. The test of assault is not whether someone hit you, rather, that if someone criminally hit you.
This study is as much about the different perceptions of DV as it is about the incidence. Note also that it was a study about violence against women, not about DV.
Ah…so only Elam approved research is allowed. Interesting.
I’m fairly certain that the, as close as you can get “official” numbers with studies involving asking only women wether they hit 4.2% or were hit 2.4% are fairly correct.
The answers given as to why they “hit” their mates ranged from “they liked the make up sex” or “I knew he wouldn’t hit me back” to “I just wanted him to acknowledge me”.
We know from literally all studies of any credibility that non-recipricol DV (one person doesn’t hit back) a woman commits this crime at a rate of 2 to 1. This stems from childhood, education, media and government propaganda. Every little boy is “taught” to never hit a girl from his parent’s and all the above institution’s, yet when have you ever heard anyone telling a little girl to never hit a boy?
If a woman hit’s a man and he strikes back will she take more damage? Of course. This however does not excuse her from instigating violence. This is the entire problem in today’s society. A man is held accountable for his action’s and a woman is not. Women literally get away with murdering a spouse by just claiming she “felt” threatened, while not having so much as a hangnail for an injury.
I also have looked at the information given from both sides (though I will go over it again slowly) – and arrived at conclusions similar to John above. the fact is that any feminist-orientated interpretation of studies is always selective in INTERPRETATION – I particularly place value on the comment above about equating 15 years of domestic terrorism to one slap – and calling the kettle black for that one slap.
I am also never happy with any interpretation that adopts extreme cases, such as pushing someone down stairs (a rare event), and then compares them to miniature cases, such as a tiny slap, and thus seeking to say the one rare event in countless thousands is worse in volume and impact than the thousands of slaps, punches, throwings and even knifings and shootings of the other (women’s) side, and even suggesting, by default in not clearly specifying the circumstances, they are part of the same engagement.
This is emotionalism – not science.
This manboobs really hates men.
I wonder if he sat at his mothers knee taking in all her version of events.
I think all the worst men I have ever met, have all had one thing in common, no father.
Violent men and dominating men to me, – behave like woman.
No honor absolutely no sense of truth, and no sense of anything above themselves – like many woman.
Alpha males, judges and other super rich powerful men, I see as having female qualities too. Greed selfishness and ruthlessness.
Like illegitimate boys, the female roll-model-men – are always first to defend a woman’s honor against men with violence or treacherous deceit.
I consider men without male roll models as illegitimate. Woman-made-men.
They hate themselves as males but hate the rest of men even more.
Woman love these arseholes, because they do their bidding.
Feminist doctrine and female narcissistic malice are the base for manboobs attitude’s towards men.
For me what I went through in childhood and my experiences with feminists and woman in the workplace, this is what has shaped my attitudes towards woman, not a hate doctrine of the malignant privileged.
I still have nightmares about what I went through as a boy, at the hands of a feminist bitch, who continues to be rewarded and admired to this day by woman and cowering manginas.
Rod
At the end of the day manboobs is just another mangina who wants to get laid at the expense of the rights and dignity of all men including himself.
“I consider men without male roll models as illegitimate. Woman-made-men.
They hate themselves as males but hate the rest of men even more.”
Well that’s not necessary. If you consider them illegitimate, you have to throw half of the MRAs out on the window.
“Women-made -men”, it can work two ways minimum: one is what you wrote, and the other is, who recognised what happened to him in childhood.
The self- hate is true, though.
Manboobz used a line that just pisses me off more and more every time I read it:
“Don’t complain that feminists aren’t fighting your battles for you. ”
Feminists have waged gender war under a big huge banner of equality from the very beginning but, in the rare event that they can admit that there is a gender inequity that privileges them they make derisive comments about men fighting their own battles. What happened to just being for gender equality? What about all the men who fought women when they had legitimate complaints like not having the right to vote? Everything feminism has achieved it has been alongside or on the backs of men. They have, with lots of help from men, constructed a whole infrastructure on gender issues but when an issue is shown to favor women and harm men they tell men to piss off and build their own movement (which they will ridicule every step of the way.)
Correction in above post, should be “What about all the men who fought FOR women…”
Paul, what is this bullshit? I never agreed to multi-part responses. I don’t want your “part one” sitting out here for 24 hours without an opportunity to respond.
I have written a response and I expect to see it posted BEFORE your “part two” goes up. If I do not see my post up by Sunday afternoon, it will go up on my website. Please contact me ASAP to let me know what you plan to do.
This is actually the second time you have unilaterally changed the terms of the debate that we publicly agreed to — it’s all there on my website if you want to check. I went along with the first change (5 posts each instead of 2 posts each) but this one, no way.
What I got was that Paul’s “part 2″ simply refers to what he will post in his third response; it will be the second part of what he has talked about in his second response. But it’s not completely clear so I may be wrong.
We’ve arrived to a point where further discussion about the statistics is not necessary. While on the surface it seems Futrelle denied gender symmetry in his 1st response, even most of his sources admit that women initiate DV just as often as men, the only difference being that women suffer heavier bruises. Gender symmetry in DV is a truth which can’t be covered up much longer.
OTOH there’s also not much to debate about the fact that women DV victims go to the police and to the doctor a lot more often than men do. No matter how we explain this, the simple statistical fact will always supply the feminists with ammunition. And to allow them a small victory, we have to concede that – all else being equal, as it is – women do need more medical attention. Both sexes are violent, both are initiating DV, but women are more fragile (so much for the theory that the sexes are the same).
What we men need is not more victim status or more shelters. Why would a men go to a shelter? Because someone is abusing him (and the children) but he can’t get rid of that abusive person because nobody takes him seriously. The police won’t arrest the abuser – quite the contrary, it will most probably arrest him. Nobody will help him. The shelters – funded by his taxes – will laugh at him or tell him he’s the abuser because he has an almighty penis. If he would be taken seriously, he wouldn’t need any shelters at all.
All this is because the DV laws are seriously fucked up. The statistics actually don’t matter that much, because what if the feminist researchers are right (they aren’t, but let’s just suppose)? If the victims of DV are mostly women, what then? Are male victims to be neglected? Are their human rights meaningless? We should help the women but not the men?
Should the laws be unequal and distorted, trampling on some of the victims, just because women are complaining louder?
Is it impossible to make laws that protect men and women equally?
Is it necessary to make sexist and unconstitutional laws that favor one victim over another?
Is it just? Is it fair? Is it right?
All laws should be genderblind. Is VAWA genderblind? Does VAWA protect all victims?
Is VAWA a result of feminist influence on the government? Yes.
Is VAWA unconstitutional? Yes.
Does VAWA show that feminists don’t give a flying fuck about men, and male victims of DV can go to hell if it’s up to them? Yes.
VAWA in itself is proof enough that there are strong antimale influences in the government. That has to be addressed sooner rather than later.
David Futrelle doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell in this debate because no acceptable explanation can be conjured up as to why there are laws out there that protect only one kind of victim while disregarding other victims on the basis of their genitalia. It is literally unacceptable, and yet there it is, right in front of everyone to see. To win, Futrelle would have to argue that VAWA is a good law, which it is not. VAWA proves the antimale bias in government and it justifies the existence of the MRM fighting against it.
Dave is mispresenting the positions of Straus and Gelles and misrepresentating what the MRM wants. I believe the following is with that most MRAs agree with. Read and judge for yourself, this allone probably debunks most of Dave’s points.
Here is an article by Gelles from 1999 – http://www.breakingthescience.org/RichardGelles_MissingPersonsOfDV.php
[...] contrary to the claim that women only hit in self-defense, we found that women were as likely to initiate the violence as were men. In order to correct for a possible bias in reporting, we re-examined our data looking only at the self-reports of women. The women reported similar rates of female-to-male violence compared to male-to-female, and women also reported they were as likely to initiate the violence as were men. [...]
[...] My colleague Murray Straus has found that every study among more than 30 describing some type of sample that is not self-selective (an example of self-selected samples are samples of women in battered woman shelters or women responding to advertisements recruiting research subjects; non-self-selected samples are community samples, samples of college students, or representative samples) has found a rate of assault by women on male partners that is about the same as the rate by men on female partners. The only exception to this is the U.S. Justice Department’s Uniform Crime Statistics, the National Survey of Crime Victims, and the U.S. Department of Justice National Survey of Violence against Women. The Uniform Crime Statistics report the rate of fatal partner violence. While the rate and number for male and female victims was about the same 25 years ago, today female victims of partner homicide outnumber (and the rate is higher) than male victims. The National Crime Victims Survey and National Survey of Violence against Women both assess partner violence in the context of a crime survey. It is reasonable to suppose both men and women underreport female-to-male partner violence in a crime survey, as they do not conceptualize such behavior as a crime.
It is worth repeating, however, that almost all studies of domestic or partner violence, agree that women are the most likely to be injured as a result of partner violence.
Two new studies add to our understanding of partner violence and the extent of violence toward men. First, David Fontes conducted a study of domestic violence perpetrated against heterosexual men in relationships compared to domestic violence against heterosexual women. The “Partner Conflict Survey” sample consisted of employees from the California Department of Social Services. Altogether, 136 surveys were returned out of 200 surveys distributed to employees in four locations (Sacramento, Roseville, Oakland, and Los Angeles). Not only did men experience the same rate of domestic violence as did women, but men reported the same rate of injury as did women.
More recently, a survey conducted by University of Wisconsin-Madison Psychologist Terrie Moffit in New Zealand also found roughly the same rate of violence toward men as toward women in intimate relationships. [...]
Male victims do not count and are not counted. The Federal Violence against Women Act identified domestic violence as a gender crime. None of the nearly billion dollars of funding from this act is directed towards male victims. Some “Requests for Proposals” from the U.S. Justice Department specifically state that research on male victims or programs for male victims will not even be reviewed, let alone funded. Federal funds typically pass to a state coalition against domestic violence or to a branch of a state agency designated to deal with violence against women.
Battered men face a tragic apathy. Their one option is to call the police and hope that a jurisdiction will abide by a mandatory or presumptive arrest statute. However, when the police do carry out an arrest when a male has been beaten, they tend to engage in the practice of “dual arrest” and arrest both parties.
Battered men who flee their attackers find that the act of fleeing results in the men losing physical and even legal custody of their children. Those men who stay are thought to be “wimps,” at best and “perps” at worst, since if they stay, it is believed they are the true abusers in the home.
Thirty years ago battered women had no place to go and no place to turn for help and assistance. Today, there are places to go – more than 1,800 shelters, and many agencies to which to turn. For men, there still is no place to go and no one to whom to turn. On occasion a shelter for battered men is created, but it rarely lasts – first because it lacks on-going funding, and second because the shelter probably does not meet the needs of male victims. Men, for example, who retain their children in order to try to protect them from abusive mothers, often find themselves arrested for “child kidnapping.” [...]
Given the body of research on domestic violence that finds continued unexpectedly high rates of violence toward men in intimate relations, it is necessary to reframe domestic violence as something other than a “gender crime” or example of “patriarchal coercive control.” Protecting only the female victim and punishing only the male offender will not resolve the tragedy and costs of domestic violence. While this is certainly not a politically correct position, and is a position that will almost certainly ignite more personal attacks against me and my colleagues, it remains clear to me that the problem is violence between intimates not violence against women. Policy and practice must address the needs of male victims if we are to reduce the extent and toll of violence in the home.
—————————
I will continue with citations by Murray Straus:
Consequently, my early family violence research was swimming with the feminist tide, even though from the beginning I also emphasized that PV has many causes, not just male dominance. But the emergence of the battered women’s movement made it a tidal wave that overwhelmed the consideration of any cause except “patriarchy” and drowned any evidence of mutual violence (Straus, 1992). In 2006 I finally decided to document the processes used to hide, deny, or distort the evidence on gender symmetry (Straus, 2007c), and to explain the reasons for this massive scientific coverup, sometimes bordering on fraud (Straus, 2007e). – http://pubpages.unh.edu/~mas2/V76%20-Bucking-tide-FV-research-08.pdf
Feminists have been particularly critical of the instrument for allegedly understating victimization of women and overslating violence by women.’ Despite these long-standing criticisms, the CTS continues to be the most widely used instrument for research on intrafamily violence, including use by some feminist critics such as Okun (1986), who employ the CTS for want of a better alternative. Thus, for better or for worse, much of the “knowledge” generated by the large volume of research on “partner violence” is based on (or critics would say, “biased by”) use of the CTS. – http://pubpages.unh.edu/~mas2/CTS4.pdf
Graham-Kevan’s paper fully documents overwhelming evidence that the “patriarchal dominance” theory of partner violence CPV from here on) explains only a small part of pv. Moreover, more such evidence is rapidly emerging. To take just one recent example, analyses of data from 32 nations in the Intemational Dating Violence Study (Straus, 2007) Straus and International Dating Violence Research Consortium 2004) found about equal perpetration rates and a predominance of mutual violence in all 32 samples, including non-Western nations. Moreover, data from that study also show that, within a couple relationship, domination and control by women occur as often as bv men and are as strongly associated with perpetration of PV by women as by men (Straus 2007) Graham-Kevan also documents the absence of evidence indicating that the patriarchal dominance approach to prevention and treatment has been effective. In my opinion, it would be even more appropriate to say that what success has been achieved in preventing and treating PV has been achieved despite the handicaps imposed by focusing exclusively on eliminating male-dominance and misogyny, important as that is as an end in itself.
Graham-Kevan’s paper raises the question of how an explanatory theory and treatment modality could have persisted for 30 years and still persists, despite hundreds of studies which provide evidence that PV has many causes, not just male-dominance. [...] Although there are many causes of the persistence of the patriarchal dominance focus, I believe that the predominant cause has been the efforts of feminists to conceal, deny, and distort the evidence. [...]
US Dept. of Justice publications almost always cite only the National Crime Victimization study, which shows male predominance (Durose et al. 2005). They ignore the Department of Justice published critiques, which led to a revision of the survey to correct that bias. However, the revision was only partly successful (Straus 1999), yet they continue to cite it and ignore other more accurate studies they have sponsored which show gender symmetry. After delaying release of the results of the National Violence against Women for almost two years, the press releases issued by the Department of Justice provided only the “life- time prevalence” data and ignored the “past-year prevalence” data, because the lifetime data showed predominantly male perpetration, whereas the more accurate past-year data showed that women perpetrated 40% of the partner assaults. [...]
The widely acclaimed and influential World Health Organization report on domestic violence (Krug et al. 2002) reports that “Where violence by women occurs it is more likely to be in the form of self-defense (32, 37, 38).” This is selective citation because almost all studies that have compared men and women find about equal rates of self-defense.
The Kernsmith study, the World Health Organization report, and the pattern of selective citation show how ideology can be converted into what can be called “evidence by citation” or what Gelles (1980) calls the “woozle effect.” A woozle effect occurs when frequent citation of previous publications that lack evidence mislead us into thinking there is evidence. For example, subsequent to the World Health Organization study and the Kernsmith study, papcrs discussing gender differences in motivation will cite them to show that female violence is predominantly in self-defense, which is the opposite of what the research actually shows. But because these are citations of an article in a scientific journal and a respected international organization, readers of the subsequent article will accept it as a fact. Thus, fiction is converted into scientific evidence that will be cited over and over. – http://pubpages.unh.edu/~mas2/V74-gender-symmetry-with-gramham-Kevan-Method%208-.pdf
Just as it looks like the man-hating is getting called on the whole DV issue, another front is opening up – that of animal abuse, and it is being presented as solely an issue in which men are culpable. This appeared on the New Zealand Herald’s front page today:
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10682668
The bias against men is unmistakable.
In case you’re not aware, the feminist line is that cruelty to animals is an early indicator of intimate partner abuse, sexual criminality and worse, and that it is an exclusively male problem. Once this idea is mainstreamed, it is only a matter of time before the definition of animal abuse is expanded and other less ideological perspectives on the issue are muscled out of popular consciousness.
@ manboobz
We never stipulated that there could be no division of the posting as I have done here. If you want to do the same thing there is nothing stopping you.
I have 48 hours to respond and that is what I am doing.
As to the number of responses, that was simply miscommunication. And it is one that you are getting your panties in a wad over quite unnecessarily. When I announced there would be 5 exchanges vs the 4 that you recall you could have discussed that with me or insisted it remain at 4. You did neither. All you did was point out the difference but say that 5 exchanges was fine with you.
And if you still want to do it in four it is fine with me. It won’t cause mass hysteria.
No harm no foul so don’t bitch about it now. We started this thing without much discussion at all, just a couple of very brief exchanges in the comments of your blog. If you were concerned about covering every possibility with such rigid zeal, then you could have addressed that up front. You chose not to.
I am not using any manner of posting that is not 100% open to you, so coming the comments to whine is not necessary or appropriate.
In the UK I feel there is more hope than the US. We’re actually starting an honest debate about all this, and feminism is coming in for heavy critisicism.
I think its because our women have become so destructive in the social sphere that it can no longer be ignored.
Even female commentators are admitting there’s a mjor problem with feminism, wether thats because they care about the injustice done to men, or that men in this country are sick to the back teeth of women, and that a backlash is imminent, I think the latter is probably true.
The UK has hope in at least subduing feminism, because to be honest we are a nation of savages. I live here. Men have been savagly treated, and men are starting to treat women savagely in return.
I personally think its the best, and only way. You cant argue with feminists and women, they simply dont want to see sense, and if it takes raising awareness to other men about fasle-rape, DV, female sexual/pyscho-sexual, emotional, pyschological abuse of children, female-violence-by-proxy etc etc etc, thats what we should do. A mass rebellion by men who have been educated by men to see the reality of woman. Most of these men will just MGTOW, which will have a devistating effect on women.
All we have to do is tell the truth, but ruthlessly demonize women the same way they have been ruthlessly demonizing us.
1) Feminism is about hate, – our movement is right about that.
2) Feminism is also fundamentally, the timeless curse of selfish woman, over the lives of men.
(The hand the rocks the cradle rules the world)
3) The female narcissistic malice we recognize, and have become so familiar with, is also its body.
4) Feminism is also about class system/cast system and guaranteed privilege over the existence of others.
5)Feminism is about intimidation, blackmail, lies and greed.
MY POINT: – Manboobs I expect, is from an upper middle class background.
Unlike many men he is articulate in writing, and is what the anglosphere recognizes as being reasonably well educated. Note:(most wealthy people have their sons educated very successfully, by men. Unlike the rest of us)
– What Manboobs will never realize is so many of us grew up in a vacuum with no compassion or care for our well being.
It was drilled into us by our selfish mothers, our families, our schools our histories, our countries and worst of all other men, that men and boys are bad and wrong and must change.
Many of us were indoctrinated this way ourselves.
Why did we change? The f**ken truth that’s why.
Confusion, pain and suffering, from boyginas to manginas, (and against all odds) to men!
We are men. Many of us have spent our lives falling over ourselves trying to prove we are not bad people. Under a continuous fire of accusations of hatred and blame from appalling woman and our corrupt leaders.
Our attempts to prove ourselves, has only led us to be seen as pathetic.
—Manboobs is probably privileged, and keeps his position safe by supporting female privilege.
It would be interesting to see who his mother or main female roll model is.
I bet he deeply sympathizes with her, like many of us have with woman before we were forced to grow up.
And use male logic to question her version of events and her justified outcomes.
Then only to find your private scrutiny of her world around you, is met with an intimate violation of your person. And a villainous rejection of you.
By your long termed and cherished roll model.
You may even find her life’s rhythm of victimhood and justification now includes you – to your unspeakable horror.
The road from mangina to man.
— If you are surprised by your revulsion and disgust at this Mizter Manboobs, don’t be. This kind of self-serving shitter is as treacherous and malignant towards men and boys, as any feminist.
Rod.
#
thehermit
October 24th, 2010 – 07:29
“I consider men without male roll models as illegitimate. Woman-made-men.
They hate themselves as males but hate the rest of men even more.”
Well that’s not necessary. If you consider them illegitimate, you have to throw half of the MRAs out on the window.
“Women-made -men”, it can work two ways minimum: one is what you wrote, and the other is, who recognised what happened to him in childhood.
The self- hate is true, though.
—————————————————————————–
Very sorry thehermit,
I stand corrected!
I galloped away with that not considering most men today.
I have insulted a lot of good men.
My father had no father, it is never the fault of the boy.
Woman blame the father for his absence. Many feral woman drive dads away.
My Dad had a lot of problems many of them because of his mother.
He was a die hard female-sympathizer till the end, despite the fact woman destroyed him and his children again and again.
I am kind of glad I was not his generation, he had no support from other men and wouldn’t have taken it anyway.
Rod
The Q.
You may think there is more hope in the UK than in the US. I perceive some shift in public opinion including comments to MSM websites, radio phone ins – particularly late night on TalkSport and most significantly conversations in pubs and so forth.
However it is worth being aware of this recent speech by the most senior family court judge in the land to the main body representing family lawyers.
http://www.resolution.org.uk/news-list.asp?page_id=228&n_id=132
Look in particular at paragraph 8. Looks like in English courts DV is only a “male problem”.
If this Lord Justice was in this debate he wouldn’t be on our side he would be on Manboobz’ side.
I found one part of his response with merit. I was involved back in the mid 70′s in a very abusive marriage, One that lasted 6 months. I do have knowledge to share. Back then when a man beat the shit out of his wife or women it was accepted as par for the course. I knew more that were then weren’t smacked around. As you know I have seen both sides of this coin gives me perspective some are lacking.
A pregnant woman with a child that was also being abused had little resources available. We were married only 3 weeks when the Holy Shit meter went off.. A neighbor called the police. I had a broken nose & cheek also fractured ribs. I was transported to the hospital. Two officer’s came to talk to me… I wanted him prosecuted. One asked if it was the wise choice since he was after all my husband and the farther of my children Oh that’s right I was pregnant BIG MAN he was. I felt pressure to let it go. There were no DV laws on the books back then.
No resources like today.
Restraining orders were not available though they are useless as tits on a bull.. I went back to a friends home where he followed. When I walked outside to ask him to leave he swung a machete at me..When my friend came out he went after her as well. He was arrested for this because he swung at a stranger as opposed to his wife.
He was prosecuted & allowed to plead to a lesser charge for his assault on me & my child. A 4th degree felony conviction as opposed to attempted murder. The judge did use his discretion & gave him the maximum time allowed by the law.
You are Right Paul when pushed back Bullies are cowards. My brother’s who were much younger had a friend kick the shit out of him he was crying like a baby.
I think the pendulum needed to swing perhaps too far in some cases. Like letting us out of the cave it was much needed. A battle worth having. Now perhaps some fine adjustment is in order. Shelter’s are required if they weren’t they would not exist. This point I think is with merit. A safety net that was once missing is now available. Do some abuse the system ? Of Course but I do not think wide spread..
I know the size issue is irrelevant in your mind think about just me for one second… 5 ‘ 2 ” 110 lbs & pregnant. What kind of fair fight was that. I spent most of it curled up in a ball trying to protect my belly & my twin babies. He was a drug addict perhaps my situation is not typical.
My husband of 25 years has never hit me. I Am the same the man is different & if verbal abuse were the standard for assault I think most of us would be in jail..
While I expect Paul to thouroughly dismantle this “Manboobz” character’s flawed arguments and completely expose the DV Industry’s hypocrisy. I would just like to take a minute to point out a few of the more obvious flaws in Mr. Futrelle’s response.
First, since Mr. Futrelle has opened the door to crtiques of the validity and accuracy of DV research, I submit that any study conducted by the Department of Justice is inherently biased against men and should not be taken seriously by any rational being. We all know that most state and local law enforcement agencies in the US employ what is commonly known as the “Predominant Aggressor Doctrine” to evaluate and determine who is the predominant physical aggressor in a domestic violence situation. Furthermore, we all know that this is really PC speak for “always arrest the male.” I am sure that there are probably several people who frequent this site who have had up close and personal experience with this doctrine. Does anyone honestly believe that the research methodology and statistics of any agency that employs such tactics are objective and unbiased?
Second, if Domestic Violence is predominantly a tool used by males to control females, then why is there such a high rate of domestic violence among lesbian couples?
http://www.musc.edu/vawprevention/lesbianrx/factsheet.shtml
http://www.aardvarc.org/dv/gay.shtml
In fact, some studies indicate that domestic violence is more common among lesbian couples than it is among gay male couples. If female violence is primarily motivated by self-defense, then why is there so much violence among lesbian couples?
Here’s all the proof Paul will ever need.
http://www.csulb.edu/~mfiebert/assault.htm
SUMMARY: This bibliography examines 275 scholarly investigations: 214 empirical studies and 61 reviews and/or analyses, which demonstrate that women are as physically aggressive, or more aggressive, than men in their relationships with their spouses or male partners. The aggregate sample size in the reviewed studies exceeds 365,000.
… and one more thing. With regards to the following comments by Mr. Futrelle:
“Shelters for women did not fall from the sky. They were not set up by a feminist matriarchy. They exist because individual women activists — and some men, but mostly women — built them”
“My challenge to the MRM is simple: if you really want DV shelters for men, and aren’t simply interested in scoring rhetorical points against feminists, build them. Don’t complain that feminists aren’t fighting your battles for you. Get off the Internet, get your hands dirty, and actually make a difference.”
DV shelters and the entire DV industry are heavily subsidized by OUR tax dollars and largely exist because of this support. As a VOTER, a TAX PAYER, a veteran of the US Army and a person who is interested in protecting ALL people from violence and who has actively worked to do so, I would just like to set your mind at ease and assure you that I am actively working to ensure that OUR tax dollars are not squandered on some venture that is based on ideology rather than facts, that openly discriminates against victims because of their gender and that simply creates more problems than it solves.
It’s been clearly pointed out that women and men initiate domestic violence against each other at roughly equal rates. I haven’t been able to read all of this thread by a long shot, but I’m wondering how many people are bringing in violence against children. That is also domestic violence. My bet is that, if all domestic violence is considered, it would be found that women initiate DV more often than men and that women cause injuries, including serious injuries, more often than men.
What’s this guy talking about ‘doing it ourselves, making commitments’ etc.
Isn’t our current tax burden enough? Don’t working men shoulder enough of the responsibility? Instead of us having to create … yet again … how about we just tilt the scales a little bit and have the leftists practice what they preach – inclusion, tolerance?
“He was a drug addict perhaps my situation is not typical. ”
Important sentence, then why should we take your case as a typical DV case? Do you think your story can justify the gender biased laws? No way.
Jackie
You are out of line if you expect men to believe what you write.
Many of us have learned again and again that woman lie,lie,lie and lie again. Real woman’s behavior I have experienced first hand as a boy and man has knocked this horrible fact into me, not hearsay or dogma.
– If I was to see a woman I knew to have been assaulted by a man, I would ask “I wonder what she has been doing to him to deserve that?”
Or if it was serious, I would believe she would have deserved it.
– I think often if there is male violence against a woman the result, can be an indicator of the severity of the sociological abuse, blackmail, humiliation, and mental suffering the man has endured.
The rare times a man does crack, I believe it is reaction not action.
– When I was a young teenager the bitch I was supposed to be in the care of, was trying to push me into committing suicide, with games so clever and cruel I choose not to even look there now. It intensified around the time she was not able to receive welfare payments because I was getting older.
-Woman know what woman do. Men don’t.
You all work as one, your job is to shame men into silence with your alleged horror stories against men, I am not letting this happen.
– You forget many of us have been young under the total control of woman.
Personal I have seen things done by respectable woman often which most men would never believe.
– Everything is technique with woman. Your brains have evolved to control our brains and our bodies. You farm us and our children.
Quite often children are little more the collateral. Used as smokescreens to hide from men, that a woman is often a very dangerous adult.
-Police used to be a lot more aware of dangerous/distructive female behavior.
It sounds to me that you easily had everybody on your side. And for all we know you may have totally destroyed a mans life.
No sympathy here!
Rod
Quote –
Elam Response- Part 1
Given that the terms of this debate allow me 48 hours to respond, I have decided to post my response in two parts. I think it is necessary because there is a problem here – an egregious one – that requires individual attention.
- Unquote
I do not agree with David’s objection with Elam’s giving his answer in parts. As someone who finds the arguments quite difficult to follow at times, the presenting of the arguments in different parts – to deal with them separately – makes the whole thing a lot clearer.
In my personal experience a debater who muddles the arguments by using vague writing, and dumps all the info in one part, does so because his arguments are weak. When a debater is sure of his ground and believes he has a strong case then he makes his arguments as clear as possible. I think David is going to pick a quarrel that will enable him to retreat without admitting defeat.
If women are equal, why is David arguing their case for them. Where are all the female feminists?
@Jackie I am sorry you were abused in that way.
Here comes the part that is going to piss you off.
You chose him.
However older and wiser you are now it still doesn’t change the fact that you chose an abusive drug addict as a husband and a father for your children.
It wasn’t like he woke up one morning and was like “haha, gotcha bitch!” The signs were there all along, like for example his drug addiction.
My whole point with this isn’t to somehow absolve him of any responsibility, he was wrong.
It is to point out a flaw in our society’s way of thinking. That somehow female on male violence is considered a joke or not being worthy of the attention that male on female violence gets. Your situation while being horrible was two very bad incidents that thankfully you were able to get away from.
What about the man who made a bad choice of a woman. He was young and got her pregnant. Like his father and his father before him he tries to “do right by her.” She turns out to be needy, high maintenance and an emotional terrorist when she doesn’t get her way. He ends up getting her pregnant again over the years and she slowly gets worse over the years. He doesn’t know that what she is doing is emotional abuse because the information isn’t out there for him in that manner.
I have seen A LOT of men in that situation.
That is some of what we are talking about with female on male DV. I have seen more than my fair share of pamphlets and tv/radio commercials about emotional and physical abuse to women. I have never seen one about the emotional and physical abuse men might face.
What about the man with the girlfriend who when she gets mad attacks him. He has to physically restrain her everytime. It wasn’t like that at the beginning of the relationship (although there were signs I promise you) when they never argued. So they agree to move in together and that is when the abuse starts. He knows if he leaves she will trash his belongings. He knows this because the neighbors called the cops one time and they took him away. Apparently there is something called a primary offender law in his area which means they take the man away everytime. The police using the only discretion they have left available to them allow him to pack a small suitcase and bring him to a local hotel filing no charges. When he returns he finds his laptop in two pieces and his hockey gear slashed to ribbons. He doesn’t know what to do.
Those are two little vignettes based on true stories of female DV. What my point is is you don’t necesarily have to beat someone within an inch of their life to abuse them.
Ask yourself why its considered a societal norm if a woman witholds sex until she gets what she wants. Why don’t we automatically think “why are you with him if you don’t want to be physically intimate on a fairly regular basis?”
***A quick note here, I am not saying that a man should be able to rape his partner. Nor am I saying that they should have intercourse when one partner isn’t comfortable with it at the moment.
I am talking about a situation where a woman refuses to be physically intimate until he agrees that they spend all christmas day with her relatives instead of his or 50/50.
That is what the mens movement is talking about. About looking at all Domestic Violence equally so real solutions can be made. Before one of those men snaps and we only see one side of the story.
lol @ Futrelle’s complaints:
*attack feminist scholarship that I didn’t actually cite
*list a bunch of researchers that I do actually cite, but that you’ve somehow decided are evil ideologues and not to be trusted, without actually examining any of their work, simply because they have described themselves as “feminists.”
Yes, David. It’s called moving from the general to the particular. What Paul was doing was showing that there is a serious problem with feminist research on this issue, PART OF WHICH you cited.
Also lol @ “You spelled his name wrong. Ha! Score another one for Futrelle!”
I do, however, like his flourish at the end (sincerely):
“Paul, I think it’s time for you to clean up your own mess.”
That was well done, even if it was on the tail end of a stupid point.
David is arguing eristically in the main thrust of his second response. He’s very good at it, and it would slip past a less keen eye! Paul’s argument that feminist researchers aim to reach conclusions that uphold the patriarchal model of domestic violence (which is a truism) is NOT the same as saying that all research, at every stage, is therefore useless.
What it DOES mean is that there is a tendency to corruption as exposed in the seven methods Paul listed just now.
The argument that feminists aim to uphold the patriarchal model is NOT the same as saying that every research tool they develop is corrupted.
Put it this way: if they truly believed that men DO commit 99% (or however much; a large majority) of domestic violence, they wouldn’t need a corrupt research tool, would they? They would believe that honest and accurate research would bear out their claims.
Thus, the research tool they develop will be honest and reliable.
It is only when this honest, reliable research tool DOES NOT support the patriarchal model, that they decide to find problems with it. And there surely are problems with it, as with virtually every methodology. And this is where we get the 7 methods that Paul listed.
But, studies carried out using the research tool, are not simply made invalid; this was never Paul’s argument, but you are sneaky, David, and you made two things appear to be one.
So I guess for David to win this debate he has to prove that the research showing women instigate DV equal to the rate of men is flawed? Or will he just stick with, “I have more studies that counter those studies!”
David is right on one point. Women suffer more physical damage than men in most DV cases. Of course I’m not sure what this means for my dead father, but he is right.
What David fails to understand is that the rates of female on male DV violence are only going to rise in the future. Or maybe he does understand this but will just stick with, “those studies are flawed!!”
Finally, I will say this about Dave, and I hope he is reading this. With more and more studies that will come out on this problem, that will run counter to what you and every other feminist think about DV, well, my only advice is you better step up your rather mediocre game.
David, I wish people such as you would take much more care with the stance that you appear to prefer with the opposition to men, fathers, who have experienced societal misandry when trying to protect themselves and their children from violence perpetrated by their wives. All three of my children would absolutely cream you if you were to debate them with your faulted beliefs. You could never convince them that their father was violent each time their Mother attempted to kill them, and their father tried in vain to get help from a system that is corrupted by feminist bigotry. You could never convince them that their mother’s attempts to poison their father are the result of male wrongdoing. You could never convince them that their mother’s plotting to use their father’s rifle to murder him is anything but the result of female violence. You would have an excrement show in Hades if you tried to convince my children that female violence is minor, or harmless, or isn’t really violence, or isn’t as serious as male violence or is the fault of male behaviour. They know from real experience that your stance is simply the perpetuation of that faulty feminist bigotry that allowed their mother to continue her attempts to kill them and their Dad.
My two daughters almost spit at the mention of feminism or the Women’s Refuge, and rightly so. It is attitudes such as yours that perpetuate female violence towards males and female violence towards men’s children and the societal misandry that prevents any assistance being made available to fathers and their children who are unfortunate enough to experience what my children and I did.
Incidentally, my ex-wife was never charged with any crime. I finally divorced the crazy hag and spent more than two years and too much money gaining full custody of my children. Please tell me which of your studies contains those statistics? Shame on you and your contribution towards child abuse!
How to prove academic corruption? If you’re conservative you believe academia is 95% pro-feminist and therefore approach research with a biased agenda. If you’re liberal you think everything they do is legitimate and above question, because they’d never be dishonest enough to skew or cherry pick their research. Afterall, they have Phd’s!
What denotes “credible” data is what these debates devolve into.
David and Paul might want to take to the field together and do research on their own. Visit several DV shelters and see what’s going on…that is if they’ll let men enter any of them.
Why would you have a debate on domestic violence where you can only discuss one aspect of the subject? Was that the original agreement?
This Futrelle guy is like a pile of dogshit. Dogshit sits all by itself, fetid and foul. Dogshit’s greatest wish is to become a mess on your shoe because then you have to deal with dogshit. “Finally, somebody is paying attention to dogshit!” Even if it’s only for the amount of time it takes to scrape dogshit off your shoe.
I hope that when this exchange is over, we will not pay Futrelle any more attention. We should do what anyone else does when they see a pile of dogshit. Step around it and not give it another thought.
@ Jackie
“Back then when a man beat the shit out of his wife or women it was accepted as par for the course.”
I have no sympathy for you or what you claim as “knowledge to share”.
The lack of services at that time does not represent by any means a wide spread outlook that you describe as “par for the course”. DV has never been socially acceptable, contrary to what you imply. As with most if not all females of your ilk, it would be interesting to know the whole story, that includes your participation in fomenting such violence. When we start hearing that, that is when we will be one step closer to ending it for others. But obviously you don’t go that deep, it’s just about you. Taking responsibility for your part just doesn’t go with the lipstick and handbag, which is “par for the course”.
Excellent response Paul. The importance of the present DV industry being in lock step adherence to its “women victim men perp” ideology is clear for anyone to see as is their obvious lack of compassion for men and boys. Your clear illustration of this along with the concerted decades of efforts of deception and at telling a fraction of the truth and expecting others to swallow it as the whole is also critical. Well done. These questions must be answered first otherwise it would be like arguing with the KKK over their research on Blacks. The huge bias and bigotry must be identified first and you have done a good job at that. Thank you.
“It is a devastating indictment of what is going on in the world of feminist research.”
A movie of the past year called Expelled had similar premise – that academia is overwhelmingly liberal, if not overtly Marxist. Only certain views are allowed on campus, and the unpopular ones are forbidden, or placed in free speech gulags.
I think another similar movie was called Indoctrination U.
In my case, a bachelor’s degree in Environmental Studies (1987 – 1993) left me with a massive vacuum in my education: no solid grasp of economics. We were put out into the workforce with only idealism to guide us. Almost twenty years later, and the bureaucracy has bloated, national debt is looming, and ‘global warming/carbon credit trading schemes’ has been idealism writ large.
Wayne
What turns my stomach about these feminists and this Manboobs male feminist, is the total lack of experience of suffering in their own lives. Everything to the most outspoken feminists is academic and theoretical. To suffer under a lying cruel bitch drunk on power for years, and have every other person care only about her welfare speaks for it’s self.
The fact that feminists are lying and know they are lying will never resolve real peoples suffering.
Paul has this fundamental understanding. For me the shared pain of injustice from men I respect concerning these sickos, helps me.
I think many men like me definitely in my own past, almost lost my mind over it.
Pushed over the edge with no help. Thank god we now have the men’s movement.
This is why the careless input from persons like the Jackie woman must be jumped on. Angry Harry is another favorite MRA of mine, with a deep understanding of the damage being done to all of us.
Rod.
@Chris
I truly don’t understand why they would debate in the first place.
There are alot of key concepts here, but to boil it down to brass tacks:
Women are more severely injured by DV than men.
I would accept that on face value without any study being done.
I’m a big man, I have been boxing and doing Judo for 6+ years now. I know from firsthand experience from teaching both disciplines to women that a very small man will hit catastrophically harder than a woman even if they both are of average body fat and DON’T excercise.
The question however isn’t who gets hurt more but do females commit the same amount of DV as men?
The answer to that question is both simple and complicated at the same time.
Females do commit as much DV as men its 50/50.
However the complicated part is they do it in different ways.
I said this in an earlier post:
-Quote-
Ask yourself why its considered a societal norm if a woman witholds sex until she gets what she wants. Why don’t we automatically think “why are you with him if you don’t want to be physically intimate on a fairly regular basis?”
***A quick note here, I am not saying that a man should be able to rape his partner. Nor am I saying that they should have intercourse when one partner isn’t comfortable with it at the moment.
I am talking about a situation where a woman refuses to be physically intimate until he agrees that they spend all christmas day with her relatives instead of his or 50/50.
-End Quote-
Why when Lorena Bobbit cut off her husbands penis did it become a joke? Why didn’t she do any time in prison? What would happen to you if you became angry at your wife, waited until she fell asleep and cut one of her breasts off. Leave while they are bleeding and writhing in pain. Then casually toss it out your car window. Do you think you would walk?
That is the question isn’t it, what in our society makes it acceptable, a joke even.
Think about the legality of VAWA. I am a criminal justice major and a big premise of policing is discretion.
I am not saying that 30-40 years ago DV wasn’t talked about or marginalized by police. That changed with second wave feminism and the issue of DV was brought to light. Today if allowed too I know of none of my classmates who would
You know what I just realized something.
I could type all day long and provide rational argument after another. Nothing will change the fact that you don’t care about any of the men who have been hurt physically, financially and emotionally by DV.
You don’t care about men, but I willl tell you this. It will bite you in the ass in the end.
Elam’s response is rock solid, and I cannot fault it. However, there’s one sticking-point that Paul appears to have let David get away with (unless I missed it somewhere).
Including a quote from Murray Straus, Futrelle asserts that Straus calls himself a feminist. What is the date of this quote? There was a time that many among us (in the MRA and MGTOW) considered ourselves as supportive of feminism, for one reason or another. Certainly, back in the days that Straus was at the leading edge of his kind of research, it would have been a tactical necessity to align with feminists, at least officially, for the mere sake of obtaining funding. Anyone admiting to being hostile to the feminist agenda would have been laughed out of academia. Conducting truthful research in the interests of feminism was a suitable strategy, even if, in the end, it would be to the detriment of the feminist agenda.
Does Straus still regard himself as a feminist in this day and age? Sorry, but people calling themselves feminists back in those days doesn’t count. It was too dangerous to be anything but.
Of course it is still possible that Straus still regards himself as a feminist. This does not weaken Paul’s argument, but merely suggests that perhaps not every feminist is a fraud through-and-through. But at least knowing the date of the quote would help us put David’s quoted reference into persective, and maybe establish the extent of the baselessness of David’s argument.
@codebuster Straus makes the comment in:
http://pubpages.unh.edu/~mas2/V76%20-Bucking-tide-FV-research-08.pdf
It is 23 pages long in which Straus explains his problems with academia. In which his gender symmetry and child abuse studies were shunned because they went against the idealogy of feminism and parenting groups.
It is a really interesting read, in which he tells the story of his youth, schooling and the places where he worked in academia and what his experience was working there.
It also covers what he feels is wrong with the Conflict Tactics Scale that he invented and how he feels it is one of the best tools available. He also covers how in the 70′s he was highly quoted by feminists and how that all changed with his gender symmetry studies.
The full quote is this:
Nevertheless, these attacks hurt because, as I
said, I consider myself a feminist, and a commitment
to equality in all aspects of society,
including between men and women, has been a
part of my social heritage, beliefs, and behavior
all my life. Because my critics find that hard to
believe, I will mention some relevant publications
and a personal incident. At the personal
level, a small example occurred when I arrived
in Ceylon(now Sri Lanka) for my first full-time teaching position
in 1949. A reporter came out to the boat to
interview me, even before it docked. The front
page story the next day said, “Local Husbands
Please Note” (Ceylon Daily News, November 19,
1948). The reporter had found me in the laundry
room ironing my wife’s dress. Many men in
that era would have been embarrassed. I felt
proud to be setting that example.
End Quote
The man was 82 years old at the time of publishing this article. What Futrelle did was take it out of context. Straus meant he was commited to the ideal of equality between the sexes.
Brother, I think the quote is from this paper that Mr. Futrelle cited earlier:
http://pubpages.unh.edu/~mas2/V74-gender-symmetry-with-gramham-Kevan-Method%208-.pdf
“At the same time, it is important to recognize the tremendous contribution to human relationships and crime control made by feminist efforts to end violence against women.”
It’s on page 228, and was published in…2007, I believe.
@Wanderer Yes but thats not what is in contention.
What is in contention is context.
Feminism did grant women equal rights as men in most western countries. By Equal Rights I mean Equality of Opportunity. There are very few things a woman can’t “be” in the US. The only one I can think of is the MOS’s(jobs) in the army that are considered combat and restricted to women. There are roughly 10 of them I.E. Combat Engineer(Sapper in the British military), Infantry, Special Forces, Tanker, Forward Observer(calls in airstrikes/artillery is specially trained to do so and embedded in combat units where needed).
The problem is Feminism went too far and Equality of Opportunity became Equality of Outcome and “the glass ceiling” nonsense.
Feminism did do a hand in bringing to light DV in a spectacular way, however the DV movement was already on its way before it came along.
However what Futrelle tried to do was say truthfully that Straus said he is a feminist. Straus also said feminism has done great things for women. However Straus also scathingly denounces feminism for not accepting any other analysis of DV other than Patriarchial Theory. He said he was a feminist because to him feminism means equality of the sexes. In his quote about ironing his wifes laundry he means he is not opposed to doing housework, even if people at the time thought it embarassing.
I don’t believe I have taken that out of context because I read the whole article, its language, tone and the central idea suggest to me that that is what he meant.
I agree, I agree, my friend. I was just linkin’ Codebuster to where the quote came from, cause he asked
“And to allow them a small victory, we have to concede that – all else being equal, as it is – women do need more medical attention.”
WRONG!
Women go to the doctor more than men PERIOD. Hell, feminists themselves admit as much and IT FORMS THE CENTRAL PLANK OF THEIR ARGUMENT ABOUT WHY THERE IS MORE FEMALE-CENTERED MEDICAL RESEARCH THAN RESEARCH INTO DISEASES THAT PRIMARILY AFFECT MEN.
I capped that because you need to READ IT. Then RE-read it. Read it over and over.
The fact that women go to the doctor more than men is NOT PROOF THAT WOMEN ARE MORE SERIOUSLY INJURED. For example, we could also say that breakups make women more hungry than men because they eat a lot of ice cream after a relationship spat. OF COURSE THEY DO! Who thinks food is for comfort? WOMEN DO. Women also think the doctor is for everything from sniffles to hurt feelings. Men believe going to the doctor is what you do when you’re DYING and you need IMMEDIATE MEDICAL ATTENTION.
Women go to the doctor just for the hell of it.
This is a verified fact. Women go to the doctor more PERIOD.
I’m gonna post this here again:
Here’s all the proof Paul will ever need.
http://www.csulb.edu/~mfiebert/assault.htm
SUMMARY: This bibliography examines 275 scholarly investigations: 214 empirical studies and 61 reviews and/or analyses, which demonstrate that women are as physically aggressive, or more aggressive, than men in their relationships with their spouses or male partners. The aggregate sample size in the reviewed studies exceeds 365,000.
Does Paul read the comments because this seriously needs to be put in the debate.
@Nergal
No one is arguing with the fact that women go to the doctor more than men.
However that is one of many differences between the men and women. Something that feminism has hidden.
I won’t penalize women for seeking medical treatment more than men do.
Part of being an MRA is realizing that there are differences between men and women. Women do seek medical treatment more often than men do. We also know that more money is put towards womens health than mens. I.E. Breast Cancer gets more funding than all of male only cancer combined x2.
Women are more severaly injured in DV. The research supports that and so does common sense.
However the debate(right now) is about the Incidence of DV. Women commit DV at the same rate as men do FACT.
“David Futrelle” argues like a provocative feminist woman, or perhaps I should put a group of feminist women.
Note the personal abuse, the petty point scoring, the personalised arguments, and the lack of any real evidence or examination of the issues under discussion.
There is also the (supposedly) witty sarcasms, and the (supposedly) funny rudeness while ignoring hard points backed up real evidence. So typical of the misandrist feminist woman.
Then there is the distraction ploy into the subject of who is and what is a feminist. Completely irrelevant to the subject of domestic violence (being careful to avoid the abuse – both emotional and physical – of women against children of course)
Examples –
Quote –
rehash a tiff you had
you’ve somehow decided are evil ideologues
you start flinging bullshit
As for the rest of your nonsense
- Unquote
I hope that Elam does not allow this provocation to distract him from the central non-personalised issues that the debate is suppose to be about and that I personal am interested in.
I found his reply very effective in that it is clear and sensible, and at present, as a detached viewer with an open mind, I feel his arguments are the correct and true ones.
I wonder if Futrelle is a woman disguised as a man or perhaps a woman in the making. His/her words have the whirr of the hamster wheel about them.
Remember this?
http://mensnewsdaily.com/2010/04/22/mens-studies-foremost-authority-opts-for-castration-literally/
What right-thinking man advertises his intellectual wares as ‘manboobz’? Sounds like wishful thinking at the very least.
Did anyone ever think this moron was going to do anything other than bleat out some appeal to emotion fallacy arguments like “b…b-but men are physically stronger and can do more damage” while ignoring hard facts, empirical data and real research.
Honestly.
#
Alphabeta #2987
October 25th, 2010 – 10:09
I wonder if Futrelle is a woman disguised as a man or perhaps a woman in the making. His/her words have the whirr of the hamster wheel about them.
————————————-
Alphabeta,
I was considering the exact same thing after reading Paul’s incredibly accurate, detailed reply.
At this point: I suspect the the sarcastically named Manboobz is a group of young ‘educated’ woman.
– note: {Often I have found that mediocre woman always work in groups. Woman who have higher abilities tend to work independently from the protective huddle.} (Who bravely hide from accountability or challenge)
– My respect for Paul Elam and his passionate and rationale skills to intellectually ‘clear the muck’ – unfortunately, this level of skill is beyond my abilities. – (Doesn’t stop me trying tho!)
– Some men wondered why Paul was wasting his time with this tit.
{This painstaking effort to force the light of truth into the all encompassing (dark puckered arsehole) ‘This feminism on us’}.
– I think Paul’s efforts are not for Manboobs, they are for us, and the much larger numbers of men who are, and will be coming through to join us.
{Reminds me, of one man sword in hand, stabbing at the million headed behemoth. Cutting off the heads he can reach, so it will in time, retract itself from civilization and slide back in to its primitive cruel, and limited matriarchal lair}
Rod.
Another 2 cents from me
http://deansdale.wordpress.com/2010/10/25/the-big-debate-p3-let-the-mudslinging-begin
I won’t post it here since it’s another wall of text… consider yourself warned
Out of respect for Paul I’ll post the text here too.
***
I’ll analyze David Futrelle’s second answer in this post.
“So, Paul, instead of actually responding to anything substantive, you”
Well, David, in your first response you were talking about Paul’s sources, stating they are not credible. He did the same now, so how can you accuse him of “not responding to anything substantive”?
“I guess your modus operandi is simple: when you have no ammunition, you start flinging bullshit.”
This is absurd. Paul certainly did have ammunition and his post was quite calm and dispassionate. This is an empty accusation.
“You claimed that with regard to Domestic Violence “women are half the problem.” I showed you, clearly and simply and logically, why this is not so.”
What you have proven is women are visiting police and doctors more often. In my book this does not equate with women not being a part of the problem. Nobody ever really refuted the widely-known fact that women are initiating DV at the same rates as men. Even the sources Futrelle quoted to show that DV against women is “more serious” supported gender symmetry.
“I offered evidence, from government surveys and peer-reviewed academic journals, backing this up.”
Well, waddayaknow, Elam did just the same in his first post. He quoted government surveys and peer-reviewed studies. And you, David, never really refuted them since your argument about the methodological flaws of the CTS was rather weak. For example you’ve neglected to mention that some of your sources (eg. the NIJ CDC “findings” based on NVAWS) also used the CTS questionnaire.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict_Tactics_Scale#Notable_usage
“Not only this, but I offered evidence of this from THE VERY PEOPLE YOU CITE to support your argument. They, too, say that male violence towards women is a bigger problem than women’s violence.”
I’ll let Feckless answer that: “Dave is mispresenting the positions of Straus and Gelles and misrepresentating what the MRM wants.” He quotes lengthily from the researchers in question, refuting Futrelle’s points, well worth reading.
http://avoiceformen.com/2010/10/22/a-debate-on-domestic-violence/comment-page-3/#comment-4972
“Fact is, there is NO credible researcher in the field who thinks “women are half the problem.””
This is just rhetorics. You argue that saying “women initiate half of DV” is not the same as saying “women are half the problem”, but your niggling is not convincing.
“Let’s try a quick quiz: Who said the following?”
This is just a stuck-up game. All “problems” with these quotes are dealt with by Feckless’ comment linked above.
“You reject the work of Michael Kimmel, because (…) he said in an email that Men’s Studies as a discipline has existed for several decades? Guess what! It HAS existed as a discipline for several decades.”
The problem is not that Men’s Studies have existed for decades. The problem is that it’s based on feminist theory and thus have nothing of substance to offer for non-mangina men. On a side note, it’s interesting how feminist women go berserk when a man tries to say anything about the experiences or the life women, but they are perfectly fine with the idea that they (feminist women) are the utmost experts on masculinity and the life of men. Thanks, but no thanks. It is not a coincidence that MRAs came up with Male Studies.
Kimmel is part of the pro-feminist, anti-male men’s studies and he actively tries to sabotage any other attempts at organizing male-oriented studies.
“I’m not sure how any of this (…) might somehow invalidate the findings of the article of his I cite.”
As I have already stated, if there’s a difference between the results of feminist and independent studies, it’s only natural that outsiders recognize that the political and personal prejudices of feminists against men have a radical effect on their findings. Feminists have a vested interest in skewing the results while independent researchers don’t. The independents are saying we are all equal human beings but women’s advocates say women are better than men – I think it’s easy to see who’s the more honest.
“(…) they are indeed … feminists. So that’s all it takes for you to reject their work without even looking at it? Work that has been published in actual peer-reviewed journals?”
Studies proving gender symmetry also have been published in actual peer-reviewed journals, so, what is your point exactly?
“If you really think what they’re putting out is feminist propaganda”
I have no choice but to wonder what you’re thinking about researchers advocating gender symmetry. Are they aligning with some kind of propaganda? What propaganda? Why? What’s your proof that their urge to align with propaganda is stronger than that of feminists’? To put it bluntly: are you saying that all gender symmetry proponents are mysogyinsts but proponents of antimale notions are not misandrists?
“I don’t know if you know this, but not all feminists are like Andrea Dworkin. They don’t all think the same things. They don’t all hate men.”
I’ve been thinking about this for quite some time now and I’ve noticed something interesting – bizarre, even. NAFALT is a common defense of feminists, but let’s examine one thing: who did feminists cast out of their movement. Was it Andrea Dvorkin because she was apparently a radical manhating retard? No. It was Christina Hoff Sommers because she was a moderate feminist advocating working together with men. An other example is Erin Pizzey, who was persecuted by feminists, again because her stance was pro-women, just not anti-men enough. NAFALT seems a rather weak argument since radicals were never expelled, but moderates often were. The feminists who really are “not like that” are expelled from the movement – how’s that for irony?
“Murray Straus, the guy who invented the CTS, and who is responsible more than any person for the notion of “gender symmetry” in DV … is also a feminist.”
Oh well, what can you say against his research then? He provided black-and-white proof that women initiate DV as often as men do, and he (allegedly) is a feminist. How can you argue against gender symmetry when even feminists advoc