Letters to the Editor
alarajrogers
Published Letters: 441 Editor's Choice: 86
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Reasons for DV
[Read the article: New hope in the fight against domestic violence]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Brightstar says:
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Since women hit men half the time first
Are those women feeling superior over the men?
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Sometimes, yes. Sometimes they feel morally superior, and therefore justified. Sometimes they assume they cannot possibly hurt men because our culture teaches us that men are big and strong and women are small and weak, when in fact the actual strength differential is that women are about two-thirds as strong as men on average, not exactly negligible. Sometimes they react because they're frightened. But then, sometimes *men* hit because they're frightened. People who were abused as children are likely to overreact to violence, and perceive a threat as larger than it actually is.
There are certainly men who need to be taught that they do not have the right to hit women over a disagreement. There are also women who need to be taught that they don't have the right to hit men, but because only 14% of the people who show up in hospitals as serious victims of DV are men, this isn't the social priority that teaching men not to hit women is. (Whoever starts the fight, generally speaking, the man does more damage most of the time.)
That being said, 14% is the percentage of African-Americans in the American population, and considerably larger than the gay population, so the fact that this issue is pretty much ignored entirely by liberals is appalling. Men should be getting 14% of the resources for victims, and it's not even close to that. Stopping male DV against women is vitally important, but I am discouraged that the strategy doesn't appear to be "hitting people you love is bad" but "men hitting women is bad", as this marginalizes both straight male victims and *all* gay victims of either sex. The insistence that domestic violence is an issue of men hitting women, rather than an issue of people being violent to their lovers and life partners, does hamper efforts to curb it. (I have actually heard "seven times as many women as men end up in the hospital with injuries caused by a violent spouse or lover" given as an excuse for why we should not pay attention to the issue of DV against men, without any recognition that one seventh of a group is 14%, and that all civil rights battles *except* feminism have been conducted on the behalf of people who are that percentage of the population or lower.)
So I am pleased to see new programs developed to help male offenders stop offending, because they cause the majority of the damage, but I am still waiting to see programs developed to help females stop beating people they love. Or 14% of the DV-shelter money going to shelters for men (or mixed-sex shelters that segregate the sexes under a single roof.) We don't need to invest as many resources in stopping female battering of men, or gay battering of same-sex lovers, as we do in men battering women, any more than we need to invest as many resources in the police out in sleepy small towns as we do in major urban centers. But I'm pretty sure the sleepy small towns would be outraged at having *no* police.
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To M K Korpela:
[Read the article: Over the pill]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I'm pretty sure that all the men who frequently post here ranting about how women trick men into becoming fathers would really, really like to have a male pill.
Pregnancy has severe consequences for men if the woman chooses neither to abort nor to give up for adoption. It's called "eighteen years of child support, state-enforced, pulled out of your paycheck without your say-so." Yes, men can get out of it -- by moving constantly, working under the table, holding jobs for short periods of time, being unemployed and supported by girlfriends -- but any man who wants a nice, stable middle-class life for himself could find that dream crushed by a single night of meaningless fun. Many men are coming to this realization and are hungry for a means of controlling their own fertility that's less permanent than vasectomy and less unpleasant than condoms.
Unplanned pregnancy certainly has *greater* consequences for the mother than the father, but the father does not get off consequence-free in this day and age. Men who fail to recognize this reality will be crippled financially. Sorry, that's just the way it is.