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.

To the extent that there are gender differences in aptitudes for various forms of coercion, the genders’ experience of those kind of violence would of course differ strongly. And this is true whether one is a victim, perpetrator, or merely a by-stander empathising with others of your own gender.

It’s quite likely that many levels of bias are at play. If men are truly more likely to be the perpetrators than the victims of physical violence, men just won’t have the same experience of fear of becoming a victim than women have.

Also, if men’s physical strength gives them an edge over women, whether or not they use it, just because women fear they might use it – then a man who would never dream of laying a finger on a woman might still be blissfully unaware of the advantage that he has over women and the extent to which he subconsciously caches in on that advantage.

And then, the bitter pill: if violence is truly a more male phenomenon, maybe there’s a corner in every man’s proverbial reptilian brain that biases him to downplay the extent to which men are violent towards women  – to protect an ace that he secretly knows he might want to keep up his sleeve and play in future.

But I believe the same holds true in reverse.

To the extent that women have their own tendencies towards their own kinds of strategies for aggression, they would similarly be blinded to what it feels like to fear being on the receiving end. They would also be blissfully unaware of the self-protective contortions men go through “just in case” this woman plays her female ace, and the extent that they benefit from the power that fear gives them. They might also harbour their own dark dreams in their own reptilian brains of maybe, one day, actually doing it.

For one example amongst many: men often express the fear that a woman might falsely accuse them of rape or sexual abuse – and then they would be royally screwed. Frankly, this is a fear I can relate to; but it seems to me that women are almost always dismissive of that fear. Often they even go as far as saying that the man who says he fears that  is a chauvinist asshole who obviously is a rape denier, and he must be a sexual predator of some sort because otherwise why would he be concerned about being accused, if he’s innocent? And anyway, they add, it happens so rarely that to even mention it draws away attention from the real problem, which is that men are violent and stronger than women, and assault women.

I submit that all the aforementioned biases are at play here. The women downplay the fear of being a victim of false rape accusation because, frankly, that’s one of their modes of aggression, not one of their modes of victimhood. They just can’t conceive of it happening, or can’t understand how such a remote possibility could in any way weigh on men’s minds. They just don’t “get” the fear of a false rape accusation, just like men just don’t “get” women’s fear of walking alone at night. It’s not part of either’s reality.

I guess there’ll be lots of women reading this who’ll be annoyed reading this because, “Duh! Men are stronger and more violent than women, so obviously all this talk of psychological violence is just hair-splitting, because psychological violence is just not the same as physical violence!”. Well, no. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t – as I said at the outset: it’s very difficult for to weigh up the various aggressive behaviors men and women engage in and say which are “worse” on average. And maybe the rhetorical gambit of “sweeping everything but physical violence off the table” is just the bias I mentioned before talking, making you blind to women’s unique styles of aggression towards men, making a sole issue of men’s styles of aggression.

My challenge to women is this: Equality of the Sexes goes further than just equality of rights and opportunities.  Uncomfortable as it is, it extends to Equal Responsibility to Own up to the Dark Corners of our Psyche.

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.

Also, the fact that I mentioned scholarly studies about men and women in roles of aggressor and victim could have created the impression that my post was itself trying to be a factual, scholarly discussion on what the actual percentages of various categories of abuse are. Instead, I was talking about common attitudes about male and female culpability – culpability in general, not just for domestic violence. Only to the extent that I am just another human animal swimming my part of that sea of attitudes do I lay claim to any special knowledge – and then of my experience of swimming that sea only.

The big point of my juggling the various real, proposed and thumb-sucked statistics of various kinds of male-to-female ratios of domestic violence was not to try and argue that any specific one of those statistics were true.

Much of what “everybody knows” is often false. Often scholarly research that the popular media presents as “settled” and proven is often not settled at all. Therefore, I felt willing to entertain the notion that maybe much of what “everybody knows” about male and female violence is skewed too.

I juggled hypothetical numbers in my head because my question was: is it the factual reality of various statistics that make people commit to them, or are there underlying attitudes and biases that also play a role in people’s commitments to various stances? The fact that it felt politically incorrect to even entertain that temporary suspension of disbelief – what if there are in fact more violent women, even physically violent women, that is commonly thought? – confirmed to me that maybe there is a larger component of bias to “what everyone knows” than we realise.

All in all, I could have brought across my actual point much clearer if I didn’t drag the random blog post that triggered it into the discussion at all.

So, instead of trying to rehabilitate my original post, I’ll try and re-state the original underlying point I was trying to make, with no distractions – in a future post to come.

(Update: the “”future post” is here.)

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.

It feels to me as if there is a strong pressure to either admit that men can be victims too – in which case one is immediately branded as denying that women are victims at all. Or one can be concerned about the number of female victims of abuse – in which case there is strong political pressure to not just say that there are more female victims, but that there are only female victims.

Just consider the tone of this comment:

This guy Hamel sounds like a male supremacist. His idea of being equal is to cast blame onto women who are the victims 90% of the time. He does bogus studies to attempt to undermine protection for women and children.

Again with the black-and-white thinking. Why on earth would a reasoned discussion that men sometimes are victims too be and attempt to “undermine protection for women and children”? And if women really are the victims 90% of the time, why do the 10% victims not deserve the rare blog post or research paper here and there?

One thing seems clear to me: is such a strident person, who most likely is vastly exaggerating their case, can only dare reach for a number as relatively small as 90% to make the case that “only women are victims, male victims do not exist” – then likely the true ratio is likely closer to 60/40 or 40/60.

And that would be a very different reality than the one we mutually pretend to live in.

Just to be clear: I do not deny that women are victimized. And if they are, I wish them to break free from their abuse. I wish them to have the support they need to do so, and heal from the abuse.

All I want is to go a bit further than that: when those therapists or counsellors have helped the women, I wish the therapists would go grab a beer and shoptalk and compare notes with their buddies – the therapists and counsellors that assist the men.

In the battle of the sexes, why can’t we all just make love, not war?