AT MALE MATTERS OCTOBER 7: IDEOLOGICAL FEMINISTS FUEL ANGER AT MEN

What do politicians of both the Republican Party and the Democratic Party do when a member of either party commits a transgression, as did Bill Clinton, who lied about his affair with Monica Lewinsky, or as did former U.S. House representative Mark Foley, who apparently expressed an extraordinary -- and illegal -- interest in young male pages, employees of the House? They do what white bigots often do when, for example, a black American commits an act of violence, especially against a white: try to turn the violent act committed by one member of the black race into a self-serving opportunity to make sweeping generalizations about all members of the black race. White bigots seize the opportunity to publicly validate their racist, alienating ideology that says a particular black American is violent not because of his/her particular circumstances, but because “all blacks are violent and are driven by their hatred of whites.”

When politicians similarly take opportunities to generalize about their opposing political party, they expose their despicable darker side.

Many ideological feminists behave like politicians and often seek the same kind of opportunity. They seek it now in the recent tragic murder, by one obviously disturbed man, of five girls in their Amish schoolhouse last Monday.

"When I saw this case I said, 'Oh my God," states Leslie Wolfe, president of the Center for Women's Policy Studies. "This is one of your classic cases of women-hating violence and blaming-the-woman victim. It shows there is something patriarchal in our society to this day."

In ABC's “What to Tell Girls About School Shootings,” Kim Gandy, president of the National Organization for Women, echoed Wolfe's sentiments. She said violence has become a "cultural norm" for men and boys. "Violence against women is far too common an occurrence not to look at it as a societal issue that needs a serious and broad-based response."

In her rush to seize an ideology-serving opportunity, Gandy forgets that the Violence Against Women Act, passed by the "patriarchal" Congress over a decade ago, looks at violence aimed at women in exactly that way and is the serious and broad-based response she says is needed.

She and other ideological feminists forget other significant facts:

Men kill far more men than they kill women.
More men kill themselves than men kill women.

Why haven't these facts been interpreted by ideological feminists, who seem to view every individual man's violence against women as evidence that all men hate women, as evidence that men hate men more — even hate themselves more — than they hate women?

But what ideological feminists forget, perhaps most importantly, is that women, too, commit violence, and not just a modicum. Consider their violence against children. "Women,” says moderate feminist Naomi Wolf in her book Fire With Fire, “are more likely to commit major physical abuse of their children than are men: 56.8 percent to 43.2 percent." Rita J. Simon, professor of justice, law, and society at American University, Washington, D.C., writes in a paper titled "Women and Violent Crime," "Women are more likely to kill their children than are men: 55 percent to 45 percent."

Should ideological men seize the self-serving opportunity to claim that any woman's violence against children is evidence that all women hate children? You can understand how gender divisive that would be.

Women's rather extensive violence against children carries significant meaning:

If women can commit unprovoked brutality against children, whom they are socialized to love, they can indeed commit it against men, whom they've been encouraged regularly by ideological feminists to distrust, fear, and regard as violent and irredeemably misogynistic.

Indeed women do commit unprovoked violence. "Feminists are understandably reluctant,” writes Christopher Orlet in American Spectator, “to acknowledge that study after study have [sic] shown that women are not only as potentially violent as men, but they are potentially more violent, partly because they expect not to be punished for their actions."

Why do women expect not to be punished? Because ideological feminists, as well as the mainstream media, attempt to downplay and excuse women's violence. In other word's, even as these feminists complain that violence against women isn't taken seriously, they themselves refuse to take violence by women seriously. (Courts, too, tend not to take women's violence seriously. If both the courts and ideological feminists don't take women's violence seriously, how can they demand that we take women's opinions seriously? After all, an act of violence is merely an opinion acted out.)

True, women rarely kill in the “male” manner of the Amish schoolhouse murderer. One reason, I believe, is that most of the women who seethe with sufficient feminist-fueled anger and man-hating think they lack the physical prowess to pull off such a feat. But they do not lack the desire to pull it off. (Thus, because it's the thought that counts, women do not hold the moral high ground). That desire, I sadly suspect, surfaces often, especially after ideological feminists grab the gender political opportunity to foment female anger at all men over one man's act of violence against women.

We are a long, long, long way away from true gender equality.

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Further reading:

"Letter to Judiciary Committees on the Violence Against Women Act"
When She Was Bad

tags: gender violence  kim gandy  

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