It was hard to decide what to write about tonight. Iraq, the confusion over the definitions of “marriage” in this thread, my ongoing battles with my very evil and very stupid tabby cat, you name it. But in the end, there’s some low-hanging fruit available and in honor of Twisty posting an FAQ on the scourge that are MRAs, I thought I’d shine a little light on some more pro-domestic violence (of women) writing.
From Twisty’s blog:
The goals of the men’s rights ‘movement’ include, but are not limited to:
• supporting legislation that would give men an edge in child custody battles.
• the right to hijack another human being’s personal uterus if the MRA suspects his sacred genetic material is involved in an embryo contained therein.
• promulgating baseless claims that men are in constant danger of physical assault by legions of villainous females, and that there exists some kind of vast matriarchal conspiracy to cover this up.
• the practice of beating up women, kidnaping her kids, going on the lam, convincing family court judges that the woman is crazy, and summarily escaping jail time.
The organized support for wife-beating is our topic today, as David Usher has written yet another article about the tragedy that is the increasing difficulty of beating your wife and getting away with it. You see, in the old days, keeping a woman trapped in an abusive marriage was so easy. Socially mandated financial dependence helped, but your average abuser has a whole array of tactics, the most important being the practice of sequestering your bride from the rest of the world so that she doesn’t get assistance in leaving you or even the message that she’s not crazy if she thinks that regular beatings are bad. Nowadays, while your average abuser can still successfully get his mark to quit talking to her mother, drop her friends from her life, and wear sweaters and make-up to avoid questions about her injuries from concerned parties, the abuser must still contend with all the technological access that a woman has to the outside world.
Today’s villian: Cable TV programming that teaches the dangerous lesson to women that your husband is in the wrong when he beats you.
Lifetime TV (also known as Lifetime Movie Network) has become a major socio-political mouthpiece for promulgation of the sexist agenda of radical feminism. LMN’s show schedule is loaded with sexist and myopic “documentaries” about abused women.
Some of LMN’s recent hate programming includes “Every Nine Seconds”, “If Someone Had Known”, “Broken Silence”, “The Promise”, “Dangerous Intentions”, “Dangerous Child”, “Fighting the Odds”, “Final Justice”, “A Life Interrupted”, “Lies Of The Heart”, “The Stranger Beside Me”, “Bastard Out Of Carolina”, and “Her Desperate Choice”. Not one of LMN’s shows honestly presents the true facts of domestic violence or holds women responsible for the half of domestic violence they DO initiate.
I’m surprised he only blames women for “initating” half of domestic violence, because by my last measure, wife beaters tend to blame women for 99.9% of beatings administered, at least until said abusers feel guilty and try to make up for it later. (We can blame the reach of the feminazis for the guilt one feels after beating your wife when she started it by mouthing off to you, crying too hard or otherwise forcing you to enact some fist-driven discipline.)
LMN goes beyond broadcasting unsupportable broad beliefs about men and husbands; it is also a major lobbying mouthpiece of the radical feminist machine…..
LMN’s lobbying event will feature an Oedipal rendition about domestic violence by Eve Ensler. Ensler is best known for the “Vagina Monologues”, which among other things glorifies sexual abuse of boys by predatory women.
David Usher has found the Wayback Machine to the Looking Glass World, because in my world there’s no passages in the “Vagina Monologues” that advocate women raping little boys, but there is indeed evidence that the Lifetime movies the routine nature of violence against women are drawing from reality.
LMN recently scared Congress into reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act. As part of this, the International Marriage Broker Regulation Act (IMBRA) was passed, which forms a “Berlin Wall” around the United States to prevent American men from marrying foreign women, on the notion that these women are being imported as sex slaves and are therefore victims of sex trafficking.
The major way that the supporters of wife-beating lie to themselves is by implying that they stand for all men, when they really only stand for abusers. When you’re living in a modern world where women have been conditioned not to accept abuse as readily as in the past, and where they have escape hatches, shelters, the internet and yes, TV shows that make it clear that being beaten is not acceptable, you’re in a pickle in terms of catching and keeping a woman to abuse. The MRA solution is to seek immigrants, who can be more easily separated from people who will help them by geography, language barriers and immigration obstacles. By no means is every man who marries a foreigner seeking to have an easily controlled wife, though, so the IMBRA tries to separate the two groups (evil assholes and normal men) through some important provisions. Marriage brokers have to do background checks and inform potential brides if said men are domestic abusers. Mail order brides have to be informed that they have rights if their husbands start abusing them. Mail order brides and victims of sex trafficking can also apply for a special visa so that their abuser or pimp cannot threaten them with deportation. It also limits you to starting one fiancee visa at a time, as a stopgap measure to slow down men who are shopping around for a personal houseservant-wife.
Lies about men and domestic violence may have millions of victims. The Duke Rape case is the most visible: Three young men nearly went to prison for thirty years based on no evidence whatsoever.
I love how a woman’s testimony is considered “no” evidence. Insufficient evidence, sure. But none? But what makes this quote interesting is the way that Usher himself takes for granted the truth to the radical feminist theory that domestic violence against intimates is part of the same cloth that creates rape between near strangers. Anti-feminists want it both ways—to say there is no patriarchy while defending same patriarchy fairly explicitly as it is. See: Phyllis Schafly defending a man’s right to rape his wife.
Anyone upset about Don Imus should be much more concerned about the Lifetime Movie Network. Imus’s comments did not actually harm anyone.
Because to be “anyone”, you have to have a penis, and we have it on good authority that the disparaged members of the Rutgers women’s basketball team do not.
LMN’s agenda wreaks havoc in marriages and emotivates passage of laws based on the deeply sexist, anti-marriage political agenda of radical feminism. This creeping agenda has led to a national divorce rate of over 50%, drives today’s record rates of non-marriage and illegitimacy, and is the primary predictor of poverty for women and children.
Wife-beaters, however, are hurt terribly by losing their abuse objects. And since most wife-beaters are be-penised, they deserve the sort of consideration that female athletes are not. What I like here is the notion that the 50% divorce rate is the result of women escaping abusive relationships. While that is probably a high percentage of divorces, it’s by no means all or even the majority. Men initiate some divorce. There’s boredom, infidelity, people going their separate ways. But in the narrow world of the MRA, it’s all because feminists convinced women they don’t have to stay married to abusive fucks.
As an issue of corporate responsibility, cable companies such as Charter and Comcast should drop the Lifetime Movie Network from their line-up immediately. LMN’s agenda is exceptionally damaging to women, children, and men.
LMN must start planting seeds for personal growth and happiness in women, and stop planting dynamite in their heads.
Suggested titles: “Don’t You Have Something To Clean?”, “How To Be A Better Helpmeet”, “Your Husband Is Entitled To A Monthly Threesome With The Babysitter”, and everyone’s favorite “You Should Quit Talking To Your Mother Since She’s Just A Vindictative Bitch Out To Get Your Husband”.
LMN’s programming should positively impact mental health of its viewers, not practice unsound psychological principles inculcating unhealthy beliefs that drive women to harm themselves and their marriages.
Until women really, truly learn and believe that it’s your fault and you wouldn’t get beaten if you didn’t drive him to it, the nation’s bitches can safely be written off as crazy. LMN, can’t you do your part?
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Articles like this make me happy.
No, really. I mean, they’re desperate now, aren’t they? The MRAs are driven to attack mainstream culture as antithetical to their views. Everything around them is a potential threat to their desired way of life.
That makes me incredibly happy.
I’m pretty sure that already aired on Cinemax.
Oh my dear sweet God/dess.
How the hell is it that in 2007 we still have jackasses like these anywhere near the national microphone. How do they feel alright making arguments like this - shouldn’t just the basic fact of shame compel them to try not looking like assholes? I will bet any amount of money that the writer of this misogynistic trash secretly feels that his argument was watered down, and a major compromise with the media. I am reminded of a scene in Futurama, where Nixon runs for a third term, shouting into a microphone the lyrics from “White Rabbit”, followed by “I’m meeting you halfway, you filthy hippies!”
I can just see the new Men’s Right movie; “Honey, I Need To Take Out The Trash”. A woman (the villain) asks her husband “Honey, can you take out the trash?” during a commercial while he’s watching TV. To teach her to respect his leisure time, he breaks her arm, splits her lip, and blacks one of her eyes, but we see he’s really a good guy when he brings her flowers in the hospital room, and explains to her how the house is her responsibilty. The last scene is a happy ending; he’s watching TV, and she’s doing all the domestic chores herself, having learned her lesson about a woman’s place.
I love the old John Wayne/Maureen O’Hara movie The Quiet Man. Yet I cringe most every time I see it when they reach the scene where Wayne is “walkin’ her back, the whole long way” as the dialouge goes. The part I especially wince at is when the “helpful” woman from the town hands a switch to Wayne and says, “And here’s a stick to beat the nice Lady with.”
I know the movie is a product of both the time it was made and the period in which it is set and that I can’t judge it by today’s mores but it does bother me.
As for LIfetime Movie Network, I think their movies are much more reflective of reality than those on Spike. Especially since many of them are pulled directly from the daily headlines while Spike just does all the blow ‘em up cr*p.
I love the old John Wayne/Maureen O’Hara movie “The Quiet Man.” Yet I cringe most every time I see it when they reach the scene where Wayne is “walkin’ her back, the whole long wayâ€? as the dialouge goes. The part I especially wince at is when the “helpfulâ€? woman from the town hands a switch to Wayne and says, “And here’s a stick to beat the nice Lady with.â€?
Though if it’s any consolation, notice that Wayne throws the stick away within a few minutes — he rejects the community norm that he should beat his disobedient wife.
Molly Haskell has a really good essay about this film in her book From Reverence to Rape, if you’re interested.
Ya know, them Duke boys would have been loads more credible as “victims” had they not proposed “cumming in their duke spandex” while skinning a black woman alive as their idea of a party activity.
Mnemosyne,
Thanks, that looks like it might be a good read. And I do recall Wayne throwing the stick away without using it. Maybe that was Ford’s point in how Wayne was caught between two different cultures and trying to find his way.
Lifetime TV (also known as Lifetime Movie Network) has become a major socio-political mouthpiece for promulgation of the sexist agenda of radical feminism.
Bwaaaaaaaaaaaa haaaaaaaaaaaaa haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
I thought LMN was just the lame network where the careers of Kellie Martin, Torie Spelling, and Jenny Garth went to die. Little did I know that the death of Western manhood could be laid at its door. Is the Bravo network (Queer Eye, Project Runway, Top Chef, Shear Genius) another fellow traveler in this fiendish, nay, dastardly, conspiracy? Please, brothers and sisters, open my eyes to the other low conspirators in this evil scheme!
rainne, that was what struck me too - the sheer desperation here. (well that, and the hideous layout of that post chronicle site.) I mean, REALLY - Lifetime? With its movie lineup that has remained soothingly unchanged since I was in college? Where has this guy been? Or did I miss something?
And not to pick nits, but isn’t “Bastard Out of Carolina” about childhood sexual abuse? I guess that’s a *myth* that hurts teh menz, too!
All that being said, I think the sentence that peeves me the most is “LMN must start planting seeds for personal growth and happiness in women, and stop planting dynamite in their heads.” It’s possibly the most condescending and paternalistic thing I’ve read about women since…oh yeah that Kennedy bullshit LAST FREAKING WEEK.
I hate this so called men’s movement. As a man, I am offended that anyone claims to speak for me and suggests anything other than a need for an end to sex and gender biases in law and culture.
I don’t like Lifetime, but I don’t like most cable networks. I’d never consider Lifetime to be a radical force any more than a host of other channels could be. But I ignore those channels, too: FoxNews, Spike, TBN and the other Christian channels, shopping networks, that thing that once called itself “Music Television”, and the many others that leave me cold.
It’s sad that the (somewhat valid) complaint about the monologue about a grown woman having sex with a thirteen (later changed to 16) year old girl has been turned into some misconception that it glorifies the sexual abuse of boys by women. It’s as if the abuse of a girl doesn’t raise the ire that the abuse of a boy would.
And also, all the other channels must stop showing all the violence and sex and “reality” shows that only happen to a fraction of 1%. Car chases should be shown only in about .01% of shows, reflecting their true incidence in real life. And we must forbid stupid comedies - real life does not have a laugh track, so it must be forbidden in TV. Instead, broadcasters must take up normal, everyday, healthy topics, such as minor league baseball, local legislative meetings, and watching paint dry.
The way I see it, if there are men who listen to this stuff and get addicted to this propaganda, then let them go out into the world on the basis of their false premises, and mess up their own lives. They are, of course, a danger to women and others, but ultimately they can’t help but injure themselves as well. Eventually social evolution will catch them up.
How can you possibly talk about LMN and NOT mention Valerie Bertinelli?
Or am I just OLD?
(My brother used to say, ‘…next — on Lifetime’s ‘Women in Peril’ week.”
Amdanda, I’m glad you brought up IMBRA. I found out about it a few weeks back on one of the MRA sites. It was another David Usher waaah piece :
http://mensnewsdaily.com/2007/02/15/imbra-time-to-end-feminist-destruction-of-marriage-and-free-speech
Predictably, in the comments they were foaming at the mouth, and trying to figure out a way around it. The consensus seemed to be they’d actually have to go slave-shopping in person in some foreign hell-hole to do the deed. No more mail-order! Waah!
Eve Ensler. Duke. Imus. Wow! If only Usher had mentioned Lifetime’s relentless promotion of Heather Has Two Mommies, I would have had Lifetime Movie Network Bingo!
Damn you David R. Usher!!!
On the other hand, his article does contain the following paragraph, which made me love Usher a little:
Heaven help us! Not CEDAW and its array of Marcusian socialist agenda! Run away, men! Run away!
Hem. Actually, CEDAW is the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women. Scary stuff. Also very Marcusian, ‘cause as the saying goes, men are from Nietzsche and women are from Marcuse.
Writes Usher:
The agenda is the primary predictor of poverty? I suppose that “predictor” could mean “cause” here, or that “creeping agenda” could mean single motherhood. But I suspect that, in his patriarchal frenzy, Usher forgot how “and” works. Better misogynuts please.
I don’t have cable (yes, I’m one of THOSE people), but suddenly I want to get a few pints of soy ice cream and watch nothing but Lifetime for a weekend. If I’d known Lifetime was the raging mouthpiece of virulent feminazis, I would have actually watched it back when I got more than five channels.
On a related note, I’ve never been a victim of or witnessed domestic or sexual violence, so it’s been easy for me to ignore the issue. Am I in the majority or the minorty by being so sheilded from what’s obviously a massive and legitimate problem? More to the point, can Lifetime’s programming pull double-duty by (a) letting victimized women know that they are indeed victims and (b) informing us lucky women who’ve escaped violence about the prevalence and seriousness of these offenses? It doesn’t have to be high-budget or well-acted to be useful.
While you were looking for material, how could you overlook Camile Paglia on how sex-withholding wimmin caused the VT massacre? Or do you find that projectile vomiting slows down your writing?
Re: • promulgating baseless claims that men are in constant danger of physical assault by legions of villainous females, and that there exists some kind of vast matriarchal conspiracy to cover this up.
Heh. Remember when — bwahaahaa — the beseiged pre-victimized dears tried to (haw haw haw) popularize the term BOBBITIZE — (HAHAHAHAHA) — to pretend there was an existing, widespread, habitual — (OMFG I CAN’T BELIEVE THEY TRIED THIS SHIT) — equally endangering practice of spousal castration that one time Lorena Bobbit cut off her husband’s schlong?
::: bladder burst :::
::: eye wipe :::
Cripes, those assholes were priceless.
.
The best is the berlin wall sentence. I’m sorry, that is surely the top of the top ten funny things about this article. It has everything - the bonkers anti-communism/John Bircher reference, the idea that freedom’s just another name for a guy getting a mailorder wife, and the play - the faint play - on Emma Lazarus’ Give me your tired, your poor, your fourteen year old impoverished Russian gal kidnapped by a broker yearning to be free. That a man can’t decently smuggle in a poor woman, rape her to his heart’s content and have her clean the house and cook the meals - that they would (sob) take that away, it chokes one up. This, this is what Derbyshire was getting at about the pussification of this nation. And to think of lifetime tv putting the dynamite in the heads of the lucky over the wall mail order brides, if the satanic neighborhood feminist gets them to watch it - surely it is the kind of thing they should mull, darkly, at The Corner.
Eeeewwwww. I haven’t even read the rest of your post yet; I just clicked that link and now I feel really dirty for having read even a quarter of it. Blech. I think I need to go scrub my eyeballs with bleach now. I mean,
(Usher thought bubble: “If I put it in ALL CAPS, they can’t call me on my outrageous bullshit!)Rebecca, I honestly don’t think that Lifetime movies are a good thing, because while they do raise awareness, they also propagate the myth that women are sort of born victims. Still, domestic violence pretty hinges on social cooperation with the abuser’s agenda and Lifetime movies do not cooperate with the myth that it’s not a big deal or that it’s private or that men who beat their wives are really good guys who just have bad days. I have no idea if they have helped anyone sucked into an abusive marriage wake up to the fact. But they might. Twisty once wrote a very moving post about how, even though she finds Oprah Winfrey’s condescending show utterly nauseating, there was that one day when her abusive boyfriend was torturing her and she flipped on Oprah’s show and the simple message to dump the bastard got through to her. So, maybe.
Certainly the point of the article was that shows that directly oppose domestic violence present a threat to the abuser’s ability to control his victim by convincing her that the abuse is acceptable. If abusers think it’s a threat, then by god I hope that it is
Doctor Science: !
Well, Betsy, you have to remember, in that particular fantasy world, if a wife slaps her husband, and he retaliates by beating her, raping her, and throwing her against the wall so she fractures her skull, then the husband and wife are considered “equal” in terms of domestic violence. Of course, both kinds of violence are wrong, but there’s a bit of a diff between rubbing your cheek for a few minutes and spending a week in the hospital.
Amanda,
I think Lifetime got very good ratings with the film The Tracy Thurman Story where Nancy McKeon played a wife in Connecticut who was almost killed by her ex. It was one of the first movies based on reality that was brought to them. That and the Farrah Fawcett one I think called The Burning Bed. I believe both of these were based on fact and both garnered good ratings.
Or I may be wrong and an idiot.
Amanda, I’m featuring Sexual Assault Awareness Month on my blog, Knitting for Change (http://www.sheeptoshawl.com/charity) this month.
I’d love to be able to reprint this essay there, with your permission of course. Please let me know if that would be OK.
Thanks.
Donna
I thought men were from Marx and women from Vanini.
LMN, to my mind, is most notable for its series “Snapped,” an odd mix of wish-fulfillment and cautionary tale about women — always women — who go off the deep end.
It used to be that Becky and I slotted LMN shows we’d see into one of two categories: “Men Suck” and “That Bitch!” The second category was way in the lead by the time we quit watching.
Wait — did he just claim radical feminism causes poverty?
“Wait — did he just claim radical feminism causes poverty?”
Well, it caused that guy to go crazy at Virginia Tech, the ongoing difficulties in Iraq, Iran, and North Korea, male pattern baldness, rising deficit spending and the trade deficit, the inability of the US to win the World Cup…
I’m sure I’m missing some good ones…
Dr. Science,
While you were looking for material, how could you overlook Camile Paglia on how sex-withholding wimmin caused the VT massacre?
Don’t laugh: that can be proven mathematically!
This is one more piece of evidence for my theory that right-wing America is really out to destroy the English language. “Creeping agenda?!!?” That sounds like something with pink flowers my grandmother planted to cover a fence.
I’d love to make a more intelligent comment, but every time I see someone say “David Usher, I just think of this guy and want to cry that some asshole shares his name.
Does Lifetime still show Golden Girls reruns? It was the only thing I ever actually watched on that channel back in the day when I GOT that channel. I fuckin’ loved that show. And I don’t care who knows it!
Wait, does this mean I’m not entitled to a threesome with the babysitter?
I mean, if we had a baby. And, therefore, a babysitter. As such.
Makes me long for the good old days of Iron John and “Dances with Drums.”
*sniff*
Paglia, huh? It’s been awhile since that sock puppet has been stampin’ her brand of misogyny on the old discourse community. I wonder if she’ll ever stop pretending she’s some sort of randy buck.
You know, I think Usher might have a point. LMN might just be dangerous to marriages. I went away one weekend to visit friends and family in my hometown while my wife stayed home (she liked neither my family nor my friends). When I returned on Sunday, there she was, on the couch, pretty much where she was when I left.
“You’re having an affair!” she cried when I came in.
“What? I am not!”
“You are, too. I’ve been watching Lifetime all weekend. You’re having an affair, but I know how to kill you and get away with it!”
I think, to use Mr Clark’s phrase from above, she’d had a surfeit of both the Men Suck and That Bitch! movies, merging them in her mind into a kind of perfect storm. Lucky for me, she never put her new theories to the test.
[…] Via Amanda, who got it from Vanessa. […]
A “vindictative” bitch, hunh? That’s some bitchery there.
When i wrote about Violence against Women on Valentine’s Day, I lost friends.
Because, apparently, writing about women victims of domestic violence hurts men, and I ruined “the one day of the year that’s supposed to be the end of the war between the sexes”.
Good riddance.
gawd, just when I thought “Lifetime Network” served no useful purpose. Guess I’ll have to rethink.
I’ll have to think about what else to say - topic hits (pun not intended) too close to home. Ex-husband was a physical abuser - pancake makeup hides black eyes real good.
What gets me, what really gets me, is his inclusion of “Bastard Out of Carolina” among his examples of why Lifetime is showing a bunch of made-up bullshit. Because I have read Bastard Out of Carolina, and discussed it in a women’s studies class, and it’s basically autobiographical.
But I guess I forgot–women don’t know the truth about their own experiences! What was I thinking?
I think, to use Mr Clark’s phrase from above, she’d had a surfeit of both the Men Suck and That Bitch! movies, merging them in her mind into a kind of perfect storm. Lucky for me, she never put her new theories to the test.
Early in our relationship, Mr. Mnemo made me promise to stop reading Cosmo because I kept becoming convinced that he was having an affair with my sister (he would have to remind me that I don’t even have a sister) or that he was secretly a woman who would con me out of all of my money. This after we had already had sex several times.
So, yeah, there’s something to the notion that places like Lifetime can create a little extra paranoia. But until rape, molestation and domestic violence are things of the past, it does serve a purpose for people who don’t have a name for what they’re going through.
Because, apparently, writing about women victims of domestic violence hurts men, and I ruined “the one day of the year that’s supposed to be the end of the war between the sexes�.
Careful– some people have so little direct experience of life that they even romanticise ‘the war between the sexes’. Actually, I must have inadvertently stumped one Nietzschean with my Marcusian insights, for when he told me that the sexes were at war, and that I couldn’t (by extension) expect any rational behaviour out of him, I took that as his personal declaration of war.
Twisty picking on men’s rights nutjobs is rich.
Wow, I’m still puzzled by that Camille Paglia article.
It’s sort of like how people blamed Doom for Columbine: the fact that Harris and Klebold named their sawed-off after the character from the book and loved the games, doesn’t make the millions of law-abiding fans of id Software’s masterpiece anywhere in the wrong. H&K had psychological problems that extended far beyond playing Doom.
Likewise, Cho had problems that had nothing to do with getting laid.
Honestly I know exactly what it feels like to have the “everyone’s getting laid but me” feeling (you have no idea how embarrassed I was a few years ago to come back from a vacation in Cancun…during the winter…with my parents…where there were literally no other people in sight in their early 20s like me…and then have to avoid telling people because I knew that all but my closest friends would be too knee-jerk to understand those excuses for not getting laid there. And likewise circumstances in college that caused me to not have a car, compounded with how my college was 80% male, made me not even try to pursue dating.)
But hey, did any of that stuff make me want to go postal on my classmates?
If anything, feminism has made it more acceptable for any woman to date men who aren’t “studs,” provided those men’s “wounds” aren’t self-inflicted through their own chauvinism and boorishness, and for all the right complains about the “sexualization” of culture, they have brought much of it on themselves by their male chauvinists promoting the idea that any guy who doesn’t get laid is a “loser,” and conservative women who go along with it in setting twisted “standards.”
“Imus’s comments did not actually harm anyone. ”
But Usher, surely you have forgotten about the fathers of these young brides-to-be. Their market value has fallen in direct proportion to what Imus said. How on earth will they get fiar price for these breeding cows? [/sarcasm]
Really I’d like to send him a copy of the Doll’s House… Let’s tell him it was last week’s movie of the week…..
My own suspicions are that the sympathy battered women do get from society is the empathy and nagging conscience felt by people who don’t beat women. That is also what keeps more of them, in a society that has not yet a firm grasp on the value that wife beating is not the name for a style of undershirt but a psychosocial problem that spans generations, from giving “their woman” a whack.
The crazed righteousness in which the abuser cocoons himself [and in a small minority herself] is almost impenetrable and those people are not reading this blog anyway. Like I said:
. When the violence finally reaches a fatal end, the crime statistics paint the grim lopsided picture…and its actually worse than reported via the FBI crime stats at that link.I support the men’s rights movement but the current crop of MRAs are pathetic. I think that the best thing the men’s rights movement can do is not to try and talk to women but talk to men. MRAs need to stop worrying about Lifetime and Oprah and start worrying about building manhood back up. I do agree with them about fighting the legal system but I don’t see many of them filing lawsuits.
Three men nearly went to jail for thirty years? Wow. It was my understanding that three men faced charges, which were then dropped, but, if they hadn’t been, would have led them to stand trial, before they were even close to being sentenced.
Just my $0.02 on Lifetime. While I avoid the network and hate their “female victim of the week” movies, I’ve been watching their adaptation of Tanya Huff’s “Blood Ties” and am hooked. Vickie Nelson is an amazing character, strong, a feminist, and never a victim. She’s even bisexual, and while they’re downplaying it so far this season, you can still pick up hints.
That said…David Usher is a fool if he thinks that *I* was the one who initiated the domestic violence against me. It is so easy for people like him to write about something he has never experienced and to make such gross, and false, claims.
Did it give anyone a literal black eye? No. Did it cause employment discrimination, among other ills? Yes.
The relevant portion of the link:
This is just one example of the myriad ways in which racist and sexist comments like Mr. Imus’s help to poison the atmosphere all around us. Another example occurred two days prior to this incident when a narcotics sergeant in Queens is alleged to have “jokingly� said to a black female officer, “Don’t give me no lip or I’ll have to call you a nappy-headed ho.�
“It’s sad that the (somewhat valid) complaint about the monologue about a grown woman having sex with a thirteen (later changed to 16) year old girl has been turned into some misconception that it glorifies the sexual abuse of boys by women. It’s as if the abuse of a girl doesn’t raise the ire that the abuse of a boy would.”
Well, if they started talking about how the play glorified the sexual abuse of girls by women, they wouldn’t be able to point to that as an outrageous example perfectly illustrating their weird little feminists-are-out-to-get-men point, would they? It wouldn’t be germane.
Wow, what a load of paranoid BS. My spouse used to work in family law, and he rolls his eyes right out of his head when the phrase “men’s rights” comes up.
Lifetime’s biggest problem is that it proclaims itself “television for women,” and then constructs that in a way that completely ignores the women who’d rather watch CSI reruns on Spike. That said, I have hope that its decision to adapt Tanya Huff’s Blood novels might clue the rest of television and movies into the fact that hey, women like horror and scifi! Who knew? Besides the entire book industry, I mean.
(Although I have a theory that Spike intentionally programs stuff they know women like so that men can watch tv with their wives and feel like they’re winning somehow. I mean, one of the fist shows they aired was Highlander. Highlander, tv for men. Ha!)
They would have a more legitmate complaint if they talked about how female teachers get a slap on the wrist for molesting their students.
“They would have a more legitmate complaint if they talked about how female teachers get a slap on the wrist for molesting their students.”
Didn’t Slate do an article where they compared the convictions rates and sentences for male and female sex offenders, normalized for circumstances, and found that women tended to get slightly harsher sentences than men for comparable crimes?
Ow, I couldn’t bring myself to read it properly but it’s so horrible that he’s using the difficulty of investigating/prosecuting cases of human trafficking as proof that it doesn’t happen. Don’t they do the same thing with (other kinds of) rape? I can’t really express the extent of my disgust for someone who would talk that way, at least not without using eliminationist rhetoric.
I also don’t understand them. Do they know they’re lying, and not care because they just want to make it easier for men to abuse vulnerable women? Because that is still incomprehensible to me; it makes them seem like cartoon villains, Lord Voldemort style. Or have they somehow managed to convince themselves that their own propaganda is true? If so… how?
Lucy Gillam
Apr 24th, 2007 at 9:13 am
. . .
Lifetime’s biggest problem is that it proclaims itself “television for women,� and then constructs that in a way that completely ignores the women who’d rather watch CSI reruns on Spike. . .
. . . (Although I have a theory that Spike intentionally programs stuff they know women like so that men can watch tv with their wives and feel like they’re winning somehow. I mean, one of the fist shows they aired was Highlander. Highlander, tv for men. Ha!)
OMG ROTFLOL - that’s me too. I love CSI:LV and Adrian Paul.
You know, I consider Lifetime to be one of the more useless cable television networks out there. The rant above made me boggle and laugh.
But this? to adapt Tanya Huff’s Blood novels makes me rethink my opinion on Lifetime. Must tell the DVR to record.
Kali, I think it’s both. I think they think that violence against women is okay if they’re asking for it—by being slutty, mouthy, burning dinner, whatever. Basically, violence against women is discipline so that the “good” girls know what’s gonna happen to them if they slip up.
But the enormity of violence against women is basically an argument against the theory that it happens only to bad girls who did something wrong. While I don’t doubt your average MRA thinks that over 33% of women deserve to be beat and raped for insubordinance, they know that most people are not going to agree. So they downplay how much it happens and try to highlight how women “ask for it”—for instance, “initiating” a beating by being an uppity bitch or a hysteric who cries to “manipulate” her partner out of relentlessly berating her.
I misread this line.
“Not one of LMN’s shows honestly presents the true facts of domestic violence or holds women responsible for the half of domestic violence they DO initiate.”
I thought he was trying to refer to the women domestic abusers, rather than saying that women start the domestic violence. Although, his statistic is off.
…I do not watch television as a matter of course. My boyfriend has gotten me into a few shows, consisting mainly of Dr. Who, Torchwood and Firefly. We watch none of these in realtime, although we do have a projector and screen on which I occasionally watch Jeopardy. I would much rather read a book or do a crossword to relax than watch TV or movies.
The fact that someone is adapting Tanya Huff’s books to the screen might be enough to make me sit down and watch television. I wonder if we get Lifetime…
Re: the Tanya Huff adaptation:
It’s called Blood Ties, and it’s on Sunday nights. It’s not a perfect show - I love it like I love saltine candy, in all its salty sugary goodness - but it’s fun, and it is interesting to see horror so unabashedly written and filmed with a female audience in mind.
Gosh. And to think that around here we used to call it “Lifetime: Television for Victims” because all the movies seemed to involve some woman missing every clue in the book about what a dangerous loser she was involving herself with. And then extricating herself with the help of some tough yet sympathetic other guy.
This post is great, because it shows just how crazy the MRA types are. I can see sane people using it to stop guys who are merely troubled from getting sucked into the MRA cult. “Hey, look, you don’t want to take advice from people who think Lifetime is a feminazi conspiracy.
Female teachers DON’T get “a slap on the wrist” for molesting male students any more than male teachers get a “slap on the wrist” for molesting female students. People have run the numbers.
Also, the main advocates of the idea that “it’s not a big deal” if female teachers molest male students are ALWAYS men. ALWAYS. I’ve never seen a woman advance this argument unless she were the molester herself or a friend/family member of the molester.
Amanda, these people who want to deny women access to the outside world through the internet are NOT men’s rights activists in any way, form or fashion. People like Dave Usher, James Bopp, Bill Donohue, the Bush Administration and the five uncouth justices in the Supreme Court (and you know who they are) are male supremacists. That means that people like them want men to dominate women.
Paula Zahn talked about women who batter men at this time in June 2006. The incidences, according to her report, are going up. So there is some credibility. But again, some male supremacist using violence against men by their wives/girlfriends as an excuse to justify a woman being abused by her boyfriend/husband. This type of excuse is what defeats any purpose of battered men’s shelter getting funding from the government.
Instead of trying to help men leave their abusive wives/girlfriends, Dave Usher rips into women saying such vile things like what Amanda brought up in the first post. Remarks like his is a disservice to all men in this country.
Wait, women supposedly initiate half of domestic abuse? I grew up in a very conservative household, lots of Rush Limbaugh on the radio on family vacations etc, but I’ve never heard or read any credible source that said anywhere even close to an equal number of domestic-abuse initiators are women.
Are they counting the number of spankings they got from their frustrated, overworked, undercompensated mothers?
“The incidences, according to her report, are going up. So there is some credibility.”
Do you happen to have a link for that, or was it a television-only thing?
I didn’t say that there was a big increase. Women are still the primary victims of domestic violence. And CourtTV reported on what you all are trying to touch on — 3.1% of domestic violence related murder victims are men, 32.7% are women. Therefore, while violence against men is on the rise, most of the male victims of abuse by women survive the attack.
3.1% of domestic violence related murder victims are men, 32.7% are women.
And the remaining 64.2% are mutant frogs from the planet Neptune.
No, seriously. 3.1% of all male murder victims are killed by an intimate partner; 32.7% of all female murder victims are. But 80% of *all* murder victims are men. So if you run the numbers it actually looks like about a third as many men are killed by intimate partners as women are… so, actually a third of all domestic violence murder victims are male.
It *really* changes the figures when you look at the percentages of domestic violence murder victims by gender rather than the percentages of murders by sex by whether or not it was DV.
Now, keep in mind, at least some portion of that is going to be abused women fighting back. And there’s no way to know how much of it is abused women fighting back, because the reason for the killing is not gathered in the statistics (and also because apparently every woman who ever killed her husband or lover claims she was an abused woman fighting back, including serial killer Aileen Wuornos.) But at least *some* of them are traditional abuse, or murder/suicide. The comedian Phil Hartmann was murdered in a murder/suicide by his mentally ill wife Brynn Hartmann, and I noticed when it happened that all the coverage was about the tragedy of mental illness. Absolutely no one mentioned the domestic violence aspect of it — apparently Brynn had been hitting Phil, who had stayed with her because he was trying to get her help for her mental condition.
I’m not going to tell you that women abuse men as much as men abuse women, because that’s ridiculous and we all know it’s not true. But I *do* think it does the feminist movement no good to trivialize the actual frequency of female violence against men. To look at it another way, a widespread statistic says that seven times as many women as men end up in the hospital with serious DV related injuries… but seven times as many women means one out of every eight victims is male, and that’s 12.5%, similar to the total proportion of African Americans in America and higher than the highest estimate of gays. Yet I have seen liberals, feminists, who would be horrified at “disappearing” blacks or gays into nonissues just because they are a minority, actually say that we should ignore the issue of female violence against men because it’s so rare that it shouldn’t count as an issue. (I am not inventing strawfeminists here… I’ve actually seen it said. By self-identified feminists, on liberal/progressive blogs.)
I will say that I suspect men are often more directly culpable in being treated with violence than women are — by which I mean that women are more likely to hit out of fear, because the men did things that did not initiate physical violence but were threatening, such as blocking the door, berating their partner verbally, or so on, whereas men are more likely to hit out of a sense of entitlement and anger. But even if someone is standing in front of you screaming at you, while it might be understandable to hit him, it would still be wrong. And I have noticed that teen girls of my acquaintance seem to think that it’s totally acceptable to hit a boy for a non-violent sexual offense, such as crude remarks, flashing, or peeping. Personally, I think there’s a firewall between physical violence and everything else, and absolutely nothing that does not involve another person laying their hands on you (or other physical contact) can ever justify you violently striking them, but teens I know seem to disagree. (Maybe that’s an improvement over meekly taking it; it might overall lead to less harassment. But I still don’t think it’s right to hit someone for a verbal offense.)
The trouble with MRAs is not that they don’t have any good points to make whatsoever; feminism really does ignore female violence against men as much as the larger culture does, the larger culture because it doesn’t fit the gender role script, and feminism because fighting men’s problems isn’t really our jobs and they should step up to the plate and do it themselves. But fighting *feminism* isn’t the answer; feminism isn’t the reason there are no battered men’s shelters, it is the reason there *are* battered women’s shelters. MRAs consistently live in a fantasy world where feminists, and/or women in general, run the world, and oppressed men must struggle against gynocentric oppression, which means that even when they do have a good point it’s buried in so much bullshit no one can dig it out and do anything useful with it ‘cause it’s too stinky.
“And CourtTV reported on what you all are trying to touch on — 3.1% of domestic violence related murder victims are men, 32.7% are women.”
Can you cite that? I’m not trying to be an ass, but the way it’s presented there, the numbers are more or less meaningless. There’s too much information missing.
It’s the same thing with “female-on-male domestic violence rates have increased.” Okay, sure. I’ll buy that. But why? Is it an actual increase or a perceived increase? If it’s an actual increase, are more women battering their partners, or are women who batter their partners battering them more frequently? If it’s a perceived increase, what’s the root cause? Are social barriers that traditionally kept men from reporting being lowered? Are auto-charge laws responsible? Are police more willing to arrest both partners when both have been violent, rather than just carting the male off to jail for the night? Are neighbors/bystanders more willing to call the cops now than they used to be when the abuser is female? Does there need to be a battery conviction for it to qualify as an ‘incident’? If not, what are the criteria?
Generally reports on these issues cite the studies from which they’re drawing their evidence. The studies list their methodology. Getting a closer look at that gives us a better understanding of whether we’re looking at a problem that’s getting worse or a problem that’s actually getting a little bit better, and where we should start looking for answers about what should come next.
Hate to break it to you, but it is an actual increase. Many people preceive it as this spike (sudden increase), when in actuality, there has been a slow and gradual increase in female-on-male domestic violence.
There are many factors that can be contributed behind the increase. Maybe the woman saw abuse going on in her house as a child. This was basis for the 1993 movie “Men Don’t Tell” (and possibly the 1998 documentary “When He Didn’t Come Home”). But in any case, women are battering more frequently than they did in 1995 — though still not at the rate (or frequency) of men who batter women. Women are physically weaker, which can explain my last sentence in my previous post.
Both sides of the domestic violence debate don’t tell the whole story. Feminists don’t talk about violence against men and I still don’t know why they will do nothing to at least address this problem. Masculinists are very critical of the “abuse-excuse” women on trial (like Mary Winkler and Susan Wright) make. Furthermore, masculinists carp about reverse sexism in such situations and they don’t have solutions.
As far as the Zahn report goes, this was in Florida where CNN talked to five men who were physically and sexually assaulted by women that is supposed to love them. My home state of South Carolina adopted an auto-charge law in 2003 and we have seen an increase in women being arrested for domestic violence here. Men here in SC can no longer drop domestic violence charges against a woman, even if he wants to. So if you’re talking about SC, then you can say that the auto-charge laws are part of the reason behind the increase of arrest of female abusers. I too much don’t know about the other 49 states.
I’m not gonna minimize the problem, because it would declare me the loser. But 3.1% is the percentage of men murdered by a woman. That means that percentage of killings were not in self-defense. If we throw in the percentage of men killed by self-defense, it would be higher than just 3.1% of men killed by women overall. Ashleigh Banfield explained that pretty cut and dry when she asked the question during the dual coverage of the Winkler and Melanie McGuire trials. I will say that out of the 34% of women killed by men, there were a few (I’m talking around 1%) that were by self-defense — e.g. Robert Blake. As far as men’s shelters goes, there are very few around the country. Some women’s shelters — like SafeHomes, now accept male victims of abuse. Alara, I don’t believe that 80% of murder victims are men — unless you’re taking into account of robbery, drug-related, gang-related and other non-DV homicides.
I have previously posted on 19th century feminist and businesswoman, Victoria Woodhull. There is another one who talked about the woman at home, Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
“Gilman and Woodhull both flatly rejected the sentimental tributes to family relations that flooded American culture throughout their lifetimes. Indeed, Gilman’s famous short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper (1899),” depicted the sheltered circumstances and mundane pursuits of the privileged New England wife as cause for emotional collapse.22s Moreover, as Anita Allen and Erin Mack observe in “How Privacy Got Its Gender,” in Women and Economics, which was published in 1898, after “The Right to Privacy” had garnered wide attention, Gilman devoted a great deal of effort to “exploding the myths the Brandeis and Warren article enshrined.”
“In Gilman’s view, the domestic refuge venerated by Aikman and scores of other writers provided no respite for women. On the contrary, she argued, the nineteenth-century American home functioned more as a “workshop” for women who performed household labor and as a “museum” for those who hired others to perform domestic tasks. Like Godkin, Warren and Brandeis, Gilman observed that the notion that “a man’s home is his castle” held sway with the American public, but rather than celebrating the idea of paternalistic protection, Gilman urged her readers to lift the veil of sentimentality that obscured the “sacred precincts of the home” in order to see that the “windows are shut to keep out the air. The curtains are down to keep out the light. The doors are barred to keep out the stranger.” ”
http://historyofprivacy.net/Home5.htm