Pieter Nagel: Swapping Thoughts

Whether men, or women, we all have our shadow sides. Having shadows you’d rather deny are part of being human, too.

We lie, we steal, we plot against each other, we betray one another, we stab friends in the back. We even beat up and assault enemies, or rape, or murder. The list goes on.

Now, it is almost undeniable that there are some things on the list that men are more guilty of than women. By that token, it’s equally undeniable that there are some things on the list that women are more guilty of than men. Sometimes it makes a difference whether it’s men doing it to men, or women doing it to women, or men and women doing it to each other.

Sometimes it’s easy to make a judgement call which of these are worse than the other: for example, as far as I’m concerned, one single murder outweighs a lifetime of gossip.

But sometimes it’s not that easy. If, for example, some drunk at a bar were to knife me twice and break my arm, would that be worse than if someone were to feign friendship for ten years and during that time systematically destroy my self-worth and independence?

Given all that, I find it extremely unlikely that one could ever stand back and make a final judgement call: yup, men are worse than women, because even though women are more guilty of A, B, and C, men are more guilty of X, Y and Z – and X, Y and Z are undeniably worse than A, B, and C.

I believe very strongly in gender equality.

Therefore, it seems logical to me, that if  men are, for example, physically stronger than women and have the upper hand when it comes to physical violence and intimidation – whether in sexual relationships, friendships, amongst their peers or towards their adversaries – women would tend to tactically resort to other strategies to even the field.

To imply that women are intrinsically incapable of finding other strategies would seem, to me, to be terribly paternalistic – a virtual admission that women are in fact inferior.

To imply that women are intrinsically virtuous and untempted to find other strategies, would seem – well, frankly as far as I’m concerned making women out to be Angels is just as paternalistic and demeaning.

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Society Gender relations

Well, I (rightly) got some flak for my previous post Domestic violence: are women guilty more often than we think? That forces me to try and disentangle what I really wanted to say – always a good thing.

Although the particular article that prompted me to write was about domestic abuse, domestic abuse was not the issue I wanted to write about – the article merely tickled other broader concerns that have been gnawing at me for years. This caused me to be much more casual about conflating physical, psychological and other abusive behaviours than I should have been.

Someone with an intense concern about physical abuse would see physical abuse being mentioned, assume my post was all about physical abuse – and naturally so, since we all read our own fears and hopes and issues into the world around us. From that perspective I would seem distressingly dishonest for suggesting that women are physically as violent as men are – and do so by making reference to psychological aggression.

And since my post was jumbled enough to permit that kind of misunderstanding, I apologise.

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Society Gender relations

(Update: I horribly bungled the point I was trying to make. See here for a revisit)

It is a common stereotype that men are the batterers, and women the victims.

Now, I’ve always found absolutistic either-or thinking fascinating – and dangerous. Even if, for the sake of argument, men were predominantly more violent than women, so that (thumbsuck) 90% of all domestic abuse were perpetrated by men, that would still mean that 1 in 10 victims of domestic abuse would be men,

Now, to my mind, the hypothetical 90% would be an extremely skewed distribution of violence, and as such would be a very generous admission of the premise that men are more violent than women. But even then: 1 in 10 male victims is far from nothing, and surely warrants a few shelters for battered men here, or magazine articles there?

The 90% was made up, of course.

This is where the black or white thinking comes in: it seems to me that even people who would quite freely grant that the notion of “men as batters” is a simplification, and that male victims do exist – even they seem to speak and act as if for all practical purposes male victims of domestic violence are sufficiently few to ignore for practical purposes.

In Woman Comparable to Men in Domestic Violence: Stereotypes and their Consequences on Brainblogger, Robbert Yourrel presents a telling anecdote:

A volunteer who presents about male victims was presenting to a police department. She had 200 law enforcement personnel present. At the end, she got a police officer to volunteer a call to a shelter, posing as a male victim. He called a hotline for a battered womens program and asked about services for men, explaining that he was experiencing violence at the hands of a female. The hotline worker said, “You should be in jail.”

He then cites a  litany  of 22 research papers from 1980 – 2007 that either show a more or less equal victim vs. aggressor distribution between men and women for physical and/or emotional abuse – or show a ration that is significantly less skewed than my hypothetical 90/10 ratio above.

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Society Gender relations