IS FEMALE VIOLENCE AGAINST MALES ALMOST ALWAYS PROVOKED?

Most feminists, when discussing gender violence, want to talk only about men’s violence against women. If a feminist does get dragged into a debate on women’s savagery toward men, she is likely to argue that the female who harms a man does so almost always because the man provoked her. 

To see how accurate this feminist argument is, you don’t need to sift through tedious criminal-court records looking for the abundant cases showing women inflicting unprovoked violence on men. All you need to do is consider these two factors:

Women’s violence against children

Men’s image in the media

As for the first factor, consider a few alarming statistics:

Women are more likely to commit major physical abuse of their children than are men: 56.8 percent to 43.2 percent. (See also this report.)

Alarming as these grim statistics are, they don't tell the whole story about women’s apparently extensive violence against children. Mothers and female babysitters are increasingly caught on video tape while attacking the tiny individuals who cannot report victimizations. “Prime Time Live,” for example, on November 19, 1997, delivered the nightmarish scene of mothers clamping their hand over the nose and mouth of desperately struggling infants. In Great Britain, researchers using covert video cameras in just two hospitals filmed 33 parents suspected of child abuse, almost all of them mothers, in the act of deliberately smothering their newborns. Other videos, such as the one that aired February 21, 2001, on the Maury (Povich) Show, reveal female babysitters abusing toddlers and even babies — slapping them, banging them on the head with objects, and tossing them around like rag dolls. (For a more recent report, see "Dark Heart, Iron Hand," MSNBC, April 24, 2005.) If a hidden video camera operated day and night in every home in America, who knows how extensive women’s violence against children might prove to be.

You already know where I’m going with this: if women can wage against defenseless, innocent children a violence that is both extensive and unprovoked, they can, despite feminists’ fierce agitations to the contrary, wage the same kind of violence against men.

The plausibility of women's unprovoked fury against men skyrockets once we reflect on the second factor, the images of men that the media people have perhaps exhausted themselves to construct.

There are those images of men that Tucker Carlson, host of PBS's "Unfiltered," courageously detailed in the January Reader’s Digest. “Unless you’re particularly unlucky,” he writes, “the men portrayed in television advertising bear no resemblance to the actual men you know. The ones on television are dim, lazy, pompous and incompetent, sometimes lovable, but fundamentally ridiculous. They are clueless and insensitive. Useless lumps of flesh. Meaty doorstops.”

Such TV ads don’t necessarily affect everyone’s buying decisions, but “[o]n the other hand,” says Carlson, “it’s likely that a steady diet of anti-male advertising does affect everyone’s views of men.”

As despicable toward men as these TV ads are, they pale when compared to the truly virulent portrayals of men in television movies. Take Lifetime’s films as just one example. Almost every night, villainous men belittle, stalk, assault, rape, torture, or murder innocent females. “Man victimizes woman” is, with rare exception, Lifetime's sordid, consistent theme. Night after night after night.... 

“The sheer number,” say the authors of Spreading Misandry: The Teaching of Contempt For men In Popular Culture, “of movies and television shows featuring hideously predatory men, many of whom act for reasons that either are not or cannot be explained entirely or adequately to viewers in rational terms, has its effect.” 

Indeed it does. Heavy viewers of TV violence, according to George Gerbner, dean emeritus of the Annenberg School for Communication, “inhabit an exaggerated mistrust of strangers, the urge to buy a new lock or a gun. I call it a ‘mean-world syndrome.’” Such fears, Gerbner’s studies found, are particularly felt by today’s female viewers.

It’s not just strangers whom television’s evil male characters have taught women to fear. It’s also husbands and boyfriends. Many women, especially those among the millions schooled in a feminism hostile to men, may fear that the "nice" man sitting on the couch next to them will at any moment explode in a violent, misogynistic rage.

Fear in the right conditions is a prime igniter of violence that was never bound to happen. Thus it’s easy to imagine that the following can happen: A member of the group responsible for most of the mayhem against children, whom women are supposedly socialized to love, tells herself in an escalating quarrel with her husband, whom women are socialized to fear and hate: “To hell with trying to calm the waters in the traditional feminine style. I'd better kill him first because he’s sure going to kill me!”

So when you hear that women are spousal killers 41 percent of the time, as is the fact, or when you hear sociologist Murray Straus report, "Of the... respondents who experienced one or more assaults, both parties engaged in violence in 49 percent of the cases, violence by men occurred in 23 percent of the cases, and violence by women occurred in 28 percent of the cases” — when you hear any news of female violence against men, don’t let feminists get away with claiming the women did it because they were provoked. Tell them this claim is just so much ideological hot air for two simple reasons: women’s unprovoked aggression against children, and television’s demonization of men, which encourages women in trying times not to make peace with men, but to feel justified — indeed, almost morally obligated — in lashing out at them.

tags: female violence  

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