So who is it that's advocating that we just drop the whole issue? Where'd you get that? Is that the best straw man you can set up?

But in case you want to know some reasons why men don't get on those victim's lists, here are a few:

DV is routinely used in divorce cases, mostly by the woman, to get the man evicted from the house and to decrease his chance at custody or meaningful visitation. Therefore, if you are relying on any studies or case histories that include DV claims in divorce proceedings, beware.

In many cities, if a man call the police to report his wife/girlfriend abusing him, HE is the one arrested, not her.

In some cities, if a man calls the police to report his wife/girlfriend abusing him, if they arrest her, they place his children in foster care. In other words he loses his children at least temporarily. If the woman calls, the kids stay with her while dad goes to jail.

For well-documented reasons, men do not report being victims of DV. Stoicism about injury is one, protecting the woman from the justice system is another, fear of arrest is another, fear of being branded a wimp is another.

All of the above militate in favor of greater reporting by women and less by men. You claim that only 15-20% of DV cases are initiated by women. That's not supported in any literature I've seen. Site your sources.

Hmm. I can't buy what you're saying. You seem to think that people who get married, say, in their twenties, know everything about themselves for all time and that they will never change. That's just not true. When I was 24, I decided I wanted to be an attorney, so I returned to school, completed my degree, went to law school and practiced law for many years. At some point it became clear to me that I had moved beyond wanting to make law my exclusive career. That's not because I didn't know myself when I was 24, it's because I changed. Other people do too. We'd be fools not to admit that and we'd ruin perfectly good relationships if we tried to irrevocably tie our partners to decisions made years ago. Again, people change and loving, generous partners accomodate that.

is a lie in the same way that all art is a lie - it is a depiction of the real, not the real thing itself. As such it has a point of view and depicts its subjects in ways that the artist hopes are compelling to the viewer. Karnasiewicz rightly points out that photography is not an objective portrayal of its subject, but later criticizes Curtis for "failing" to do exactly that. In other words, to call Curtis's work a lie is gratuitously pejorative and inflammatory. It is profoundly disrespectful of the work of a man who underwent amazing hardships to give us the some of the very few images we have of a part of American history we will never have again.

Apart from his photographs, he also made audio recordings of the songs and ritual chants of many native American tribes which are the only surviving exemplars of those languages. Some of those languages would have been lost forever had it not been for Curtis, but, thanks to him, descendants of those tribes have been able to recreate and preserve those idioms. Perhaps for Wiggins and Karnasiewicz that is just more perfidy on Curtis's part, but some of us are more generous.

yes, we can all agree that Stony Brook is a reputable institution, and Prof Kimmel may be a fine scholar, but what I can't help but notice is that you don't deal with the large number of studies showing that men and women in intimate relationships attack each other equally. Go to Fiebert's site and explain why all those studies are wrong. It's a simple and well-established fact which you and countless feminists can't seem to grasp. I understand it doesn't fit many peoples' preconceived notions about the innocence of women and the perifdy of men, but it's still a fact.

Yes, the photos are posed. Guess what kind of equipment Curtis was working with. That's right, huge cumbersome cameras with glass plates and chemical emulsions requiring lengthy exposure times. All this he carried by mule back over extremely rugged terrain, sometimes resulting in accidents that destroyed months of work. He couldn't do it any other way. It's so easy to criticize.