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Agreed and understood. The only violent person in my family was my mother. My father is the least aggressive person I've ever met. I know some people have it the other way around, but they're not the ones being ignored.
The question is, what are we going to do with these facts? The problem with raising the issue of domestic violence by women is that it is perceived as being the opposite of or antagonistic to domestic violence by men. We've all heard that feminist line about not wanting to address domestic violence against men because it distracts attention from the 'real' victims. No adversarial system will work. Imagine one government department railing against violence by men and another railing against violence by women, each trying to outdo the other with tales of how nasty the 'enemy' is. I think this applies to a lot of men's issues. The only solution is to create a system which supersedes the existing one, addressing violence by men as one part of a larger issue, rather than the whole issue. The issue of violence against children may provide the necessary bridge. Indeed, feminists commonly use two-stage processes to go from one biased position to its opposite. Thus the idea that men were smarter than women first became the idea that men and women were equally smart before being moved on to the idea that women are smarter than men. The neutral position was an intermediate stage, not the destination. I'm not saying we should reverse the current biased perspective on domestic violence, but rather that before we can address violence against men in the home we need to pull people's attention away from violence against women, and the issue of violence against children would enable us to do that. I know all this sounds terribly cynical but it isn't meant cynically. Feminists have no qualms about lying through their teeth, and unless we toughen up they will get their own way right down the line.
Some possibilities, then...
You know how people wear those little loops of coloured ribbon to commemorate this or that issue? Well, that's what we need to do for this issue, especially if it's domestic violence awareness month. The colour? No colour. Make it transparent to remind everyone of the invisible victims. Try and pursuade someone famous to wear it - perhaps someone with a son. They care about their child, don't they? They want to help abused children, don't they? Hasn't Madonna got a son? Get her to wear a transparent ribbon during next year's domestic violence awareness month. Pursuade people on TV to wear one. Gear your explanations to the center position, not the opposite of the current position; people will only accept so much of a change in one go, and it's hard to deny that the center is better than the extreme. Use any opportunity to wrongfoot those who cling to the extreme. Make them look like crackpots. Be tough. You aren't trying to change their minds, just everyone else's.
Posters. A landscape-format poster divided into four portrait-format sections. In the first three sections we see a woman straight out of every advert aimed at women these days - she's sucessful, smart, attrative. There are captions, each with an appropriate picture. "She runs her own business", "She makes her own decisions", "She lives her own life". The fourth picture shows a frightened boy hunched into the corner of a room with a shadow looming over him. The caption reads: "She batters her son." Making the victim male is important because it breaks with the gendered picture of DV in the least psychologically difficult way. Underneath the pictures you could have a black strip containing stats and the name and number of whatever organisation is running the campaign - or have five slices to the poster, not four, and put the info in the last slice. It'd also make a great TV ad, if the money could be raised.
Shoot me down in flames by all means, but it is not enough to be right about something. What must be done to really change things?
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Okay. So, where do I contribute?
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They care about their child, don't they? They want to help abused children, don't they? Hasn't Madonna got a son? Get her to wear a transparent ribbon during next year's domestic violence awareness month.
I doubt you'd get Madonna. If you look at one of her recent music videos ("What It Feels Like For A Girl") and watch her on-stage antics on her tour, she likes to portray acts of violence against men. She spends the video running men down in a car. On stage, she shoots a male dancer with a shotgun while she's dressed as a Geisha.
Also, Madonna and her husband, Guy Ritchie (who directed that blasted video) have also reportedly been having spats about the lack of attention Madonna pays to the male child. He says she's only bonding with the female.
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p.s. I actually like the idea of a transparent ribbon representing "invisible victims," though.
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First of all, guys, thanks for the responses.
Secondly, the issue of domestic violence is a kind of template or model for the problems faced by the men's movement. We could destroy manhating as an effective social force if we could work out what it'll take to turn the DV industry around - and make no mistake, manhating IS an industrialised process; it's not just a set of attitudes, it's a business.
I made the point above that feminism commonly uses two-stage processes to turn situations around. DV is no exception. The idea that men should protect women from harm is not one the feminists invented. What they did was corrupt it. First of all it became the idea that men should protect women from harm by other men - this was the intermediate stage. Then it became the idea that women should be protected from harm by men. In two steps men went from being protectors, with all that it implied in terms of social organisation, to being that which must be protected against, again with all that it implies in terms of social organisation. You only have to look at Canada's shameful Bill 117 to see the final consequences of this corruption of an idea.
As things stand now, nobody seems too bothered about DV against men. If anyone does raise the issue, feminists easily sidestep it by saying that women are only hitting back, not starting anything. The idea of the male abuser has become such common currency that it is usually not challenged, and there never was any idea that men are people who should be protected from harm. To change the DV industry as a whole, not simply get a few worthy articles printed in newspapers, you would have to not only break the 'man=abuser, woman=victim' stereotype, you'd have to create the totally new social construct of men as people we should protect from harm. The feminists didn't have to create anything new. It was Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels who realised the significance of this back in the 1930s. Nazi propaganda films depicting Jews as vermin were not going down too well in cinemas. The images of hoardes of rats - symbolically Jews and other 'inferior' races - running towards the screen while the commentary calmly spoke of the need to control pests was turning people stomachs and switching them off the message. Goebbels realised that it was hard to get ordinary people to accept new ideas - such as Nazi racial ideology - but that it was a lot easier to simply manipulate things they already believed. So, out went the rats and the explanations of racial inferiority, in came entertaining movies in which the bad guys just happened to be Jews exhibiting those characteristics people already associated with them - treachery, dishonesty, manipulation, cowardice and greed. It didn't matter that people weren't being taught Nazi racial theory, it only mattered that they should accept its consequences. Similarly, in the DV industry there are few who really care whether anyone believes that men batter women as part of some kind of patriarchal system of control, what matters is that they should have such a perception of men that they will accept the consequences of the patriarchal idea. As with Nazi entertainment-propaganda, it's the physical consequences that matter, not the way they're brought about. It was easy for feminists to adapt the existing ideas of men as aggressive and women as passive, and of women being people we should protect. People already believed those things; nothing new was created.
Since there is no suitably ingrained idea we can manipulate to make people immediately sympathetic to male victims of DV we must look at some kind of intermediate stage. This brings us to the third group of domestic violence victims: children. This issue is highly problematic for feminism, and with good reason. Women batter more children than men and kill more children than men, and it can hardly be claimed that they do it in self-defense. We already have plenty of ideas about children being people we should protect, but they have yet to be meaningfully allied to the idea of women as abusers. One of the few common-currency ideas of the woman as child abuser is that of the wicked stepmother, but the idea is not general enough for our purposes. Nevertheless, there is something here that might be used to centralise the DV issue by bringing in the child victims of mainly female abuse. That would be the first step of a two-stage process which would then go on to address men as victims. The connection is obvious: children aren't genderless. By bringing in child victims of DV we can point out that females are protected throughout their lives, from being girls, to being women. Males, on the other hand, are only protected if they're children. Mysteriously this protection melts away when they grow up. What is the threshold age, and why? Questions like this will be important to the second stage of the process.
As far as the apparent attitudes of celebrities or anyone else in this process is concerned, I couldn't give a stuff and nor should you. As I said in my first posting, no adversarial system will work. At most a few people will make concerned noises, but come next year or the year after or any year, the posters will show bruised women and have slogans such as 'No man has the right.' If we are to succeed we must not simply 'address the issue of DV against men', we must create a system which supersedes the existing one, containing its claimed objectives and adding ours. We must seek to marginalise those who cling to the special case - DV by men against women - rather than accepting the general case. Some of you guys on this site talk of logic and reason, but these things don't trouble those who are so corrupt in their beliefs that they'll create something like Bill 117. There are no prizes just for being right or honest, only for hammering home a particular message time and time and time again, in as many ways as possible. Capitalise on everything. If Madonna agreed to wear an 'invisible victims' ribbon, capitalise on it. If she refused, capitalise on that - the most famous woman in the world won't wear a ribbon on behalf of children battered by women; what a bitch; what's she got to hide? She doesn't want to bond with her son? Ah-ha! Now it makes sense. Protest at events she attends, get your message on TV and in the papers. If she did wear the ribbon, go to those events and cheer, hold up banners saying 'Thank you, Madonna!' There is nothing that cannot be manipulated into the message - feminists have been doing it for years. It isn't about consistency of ideas, it's about consistency of objective, of what actually physically happens. On some days feminists have to claim that the sky is blue and grass is green, on other days that the sky is green and grass is blue; whatever it takes to keep sending out the same message. We'll have to do the same.
OK, so I've yakked on for a while. I've said things that sound terribly cynical, especially in relation to children and DV. I cannot stress how much I don't mean to sound cynical; I'm just trying to face the facts and see what has to be done. Being right isn't enough. If the men's movement is still skulking around in the shadows it's because it's not doing things right. That isn't meant as an attack on anyone, so please don't take it personally. The best way to destroy manhating is to make it redundant by providing something better - more comprehensive, more understanding, more relevant to ordinary people. We have the advantage over feminism here in that feminism can't exist without its divisions. Without the male/female split, the DV issue ceases to be a feminist issue. We don't need the split because we're not touting pseudointellectual rubbish about the patriarchy. We mustn't conceive of ourselves in terms of opposition or complementarity because there isn't room in people's heads for one big stack of ideas about DV being nasty men hitting nice women and another big stack of ideas about nasty women hitting nice men. There can only be one set of ideas, and it must be of our making. Manhaters will still exist, of course, but like white racists they will be seen as an embarrassing minority touting a world-view that everyone else has left behind for something better.
Any comments or ideas would be welcome.
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I didn't find your posting to be cynical at all.
As a matter of fact, I found it one of the most positive, helpful, and constructive things I've read on the issue of DV.
At last; some real ideas for how we shine light on the invisible victims and, just as importantly, the invisible perpetrators.
Thank you for writing this.
/Ragtime
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Hey, it's nice to be appreciated.
I've been in a situation with someone in which I had to go around like I was walking on eggshells just so I wouldn't set them off shouting at me or hitting me. It wasn't very nice, to say the least. I couldn't leave the situation because I was only a kid, and you can't get a job and a place of your own when you're only seven years old. It's said that children are very resiliant, but they don't really have any choice. I wouldn't wish that on anyone, but the feminists who engineered the DV issue so that it could be used to disempower men in the home don't think twice about the many children they condemn to lives of constant threat and fear at the hands of abusive mothers. I've heard all the crap about statistics, and I'm bored by it now. It simply isn't necessary to create a system which is axiomatically incapable of acknowledging and handling certain permutations of violence within the home. The fact that feminists have done exactly this tells us far more about them than it does about domestic violence.
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