Domestic-Violence Attorneys, Culture, and Men

Win­ning the Fox News award for spin­ning the truth and con­flat­ing issues is Sam’s recent post “Redun­dant Oppressed Men.” Per­haps he should speak to one of the many domestic-violence attor­neys out there.

Please note that the divorce laws he decries are, as the judge on the first case put it, “old laws.”  They were passed in the “good old days,” when women didn’t have the right to vote, when they didn’t have the same prop­erty rights as men, when the only jobs avail­able to unmar­ried women were in nurs­ing and sec­re­tar­ial work.

In short, they are not mod­ern laws aimed at den­i­grat­ing men and pater­nity, but rather old laws that assumed what Sam con­sis­tently, if not explic­itly, argues for: women chained to the stove.

Indeed, all of the links Sam gives (save for the videos) are not exam­ples of how men are being den­i­grated or oppressed, but rather of how they are held to social and crim­i­no­log­i­cal stan­dards held over from Vic­to­rian times.

As for the videos, com­pare the search results between a Google (with Mod­er­ate Safe­Search on) of “girls suck” and one of “boys suck.”  “Boys suck” pages by far engage in behav­ior that your mother told you was the sign of low self-esteem: den­i­grat­ing boys.  Like Sam’s cho­sen videos, these pages betray not a grow­ing hatred of men but a fear that men might be more capa­ble and have more oppor­tu­ni­ties thanks to an acci­dents of biol­ogy rein­forced through cul­ture and society.

“Girls suck” pages, on the other hand, tend toward the sex­ual degra­da­tion of women.  (If you don’t believe me, take a look at the video results.)  Need I say more?

And, Sam argues against a law that would pre­vent men from coerc­ing their wives into iso­la­tion?  From keep­ing them from help­ing to sup­port them­selves and their fam­i­lies?  How can that pos­si­ble help soci­ety?  How is that a good thing?

Again, Sam, you show your­self to be uncar­ing and unfeel­ing towards the plight of women abused by men.

Here are some facts for you (quoted from the Amer­i­can Bar Asso­ci­a­tion):

• [N]early 25% of women and 7.6% of men were raped and/or phys­i­cally assaulted by a cur­rent or for­mer spouse, cohab­it­ing part­ner, or dat­ing partner/acquaintance at some time in their lifetime
• Approx­i­mately 1.3 mil­lion women and 835,000 men are phys­i­cally assaulted by an inti­mate part­ner annu­ally in the United States.
• Inti­mate part­ner vio­lence made up 20% of all non­fa­tal vio­lent crime expe­ri­enced by women in 2001.
• 84% of spouse abuse vic­tims were females, and 86% of vic­tims of dat­ing part­ner abuse at were female.
• Wives were more likely than hus­bands to be killed by their spouses: wives were about half of all spouses in the pop­u­la­tion in 2002, but 81% of all per­sons killed by their spouse.

The stats go on, but you get the pic­ture: Women are over­whelm­ingly the tar­get of domes­tic abuse.  Small won­der vio­lence against men doesn’t get much attention.

Let’s put this “issue” to bed once and for all: Women deserve equal­ity with men, noth­ing more, noth­ing less.