John Duncan On VAWA: Most Men Can Handle Violence Better Than Most Women

Submitted by Mastodon on Tue, 2013-02-19 22:17

Article here. Excerpt:

'Rep. John "Jimmy" Duncan Jr. (R-Tenn.) said he doesn't know if he will vote for a renewal of the Violence Against Women Act, a bill the congressman said has a nice name, and argued that men can handle violence better than women.

"Every bill is given a motherhood-and-apple-pie title," Duncan said, according to the Chattanooga Times Free Press. "But if you voted [based] on the title, you'd vote for every bill up here. If we'd all done that, the country would have crashed a long time ago."

"So this is another bill with a motherhood-and-apple-pie title," added Duncan, who voted for the reauthorization of VAWA in 2005.

But constituents would be mistaken to think that Duncan's uncertainty over whether he will support the reauthorization this year means he isn't concerned with the issue of violence against women. He said it's an especially big problem because women are not as well equipped as men to handle violence.

"Like most men, I'm more opposed to violence against women than even violence against men," Duncan said. "Because most men can handle it a little better than a lot of women can."'

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Well I don't agree w/ the man from Tennessee on this idea: that men are largely better-able to "handlle it [violence]" than women.

But let's assume for the sake of argument that he's right. With this kind of thinking, one might believe that:

A robber holds up two different women for their gold necklaces, each necklace made of 2 oz. of 22k gold, no difference in craftsmanship: the first woman is independently wealthy to the tune of $50 million while the second works at Walmart for $8/hr. and has a grand total of $3,000 in savings. They're both 30 years old and are otherwise not much different except for the amt. of money they possess.

With the rep's line of thinking, you could say that the wealthy woman has been less put out by what happened to her as compared to the Walmart employee because relatively-speaking, the loss of the necklace to her isn't nearly as costly economically as the loss of the same necklace to the Walmart employee. "But," you might say, "that could be true." In a sense, maybe. But they both got held up and had their necklaces stolen. Same thing with getting beat up on. It's very unpleasant no matter how much of it you can take; just ask fellows like Mohammed Ali. And whether the wealthy woman feels less offended or put at a loss by having her necklace stolen than the Walmart employee is a rather subjective judgment anyway.

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Submitted by Matt on Wed, 2013-02-20 03:56