Only women get help for spousal violence, while men are ignored

Submitted by Mastodon on Tue, 2015-03-10 17:02

Article here. Excerpt:

'A condition called hemispacial neglect, also known as hemiagnosia, is a rare phenomenon in the neurological world, characterized by the inability of those afflicted to process and perceive stimuli on one side of their environment. The most striking feature of the condition is that the victim not only fails to see what is in (usually) her left field of vision, but is also unaware of the fact that the other side of his environment even exists.

There is a cultural correlative to this condition that is remarkably common, affecting almost all academics in our university humanities and social science departments, most politicians and most media commentators. Cultural hemiagnosia presents as a failure to see, or even be aware of, the fact that half the population – the male half – are ever victims of violence by women.
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The result is that a great deal of social, educational and legislative concern focuses on female victims of domestic violence, with lavish sums of money devoted to counseling, shelters and public service campaigns aimed at sensitizing the public to this shameful social scourge, but virtually zero funds are spent on the same services for male sufferers of the same scourge – without guilt, since male suffering is both visually and cognitively invisible to the hemiagnosiacs creating the policies.
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Krowitz is correct that the most extreme form of spousal violence is male-on-female, but hard-core batterers and outright killers are rare (about 45 women are killed by male intimate partners in Canada annually, and about 25 men are killed by female partners, although the latter figure does not include proxy killings by boyfriends or others). In violence of the mild to moderately severe variety that constitutes most domestic violence – shoving, slapping, hitting, punching, throwing objects, even stabbing and burning – both sexes initiate and cause harm in equal measure. That includes gays and lesbians, where rates are higher than the general population.'

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Comments

"We" simply care more about female suffering than male suffering. That's the message men are given in numerous ways, including the current Canadian campaign against DV. We care about women. We don't care about men.

Men are the disposable sex. Men are expected sacrifice their lives for women. Men fight the wars. Men do the dirty work.

Women are the protected sex. Women are not expected to sacrifice their lives for men--or even their own children. Women rarely fight the wars. And women rarely do the dirty work.

These messages do not always sit well with men. Why are women so much more valuable than men? Why should a man be a punching bag for woman--and the man not even allowed to defend himself, lest he be convicted of DV? Remember there's never a reason to his a woman--but women are justified in hitting men.

Some people claim men are socialized to be violent. One of the messages used to socialize men in this way is the message that men are disposable, that their lives don't matter. Small wonder that some men become violent when they hear this message. In truth, most men instinctively want to live but this instinct must be denied. Small wonder that men kill themselves more often than women--because men's lives have no value. Or they have value only inasmuch as they serve women. Put simply, it's bad to hurt women, okay to hurt men. Being a man means putting up with being hurt--it's called "manning up."

So we pay attention to female suffering and not male suffering. But both are human beings that do not wish to suffer. To suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or to take arms against a sea of troubles and, by opposing, end them. That is the question all men must answer.

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Submitted by el cid on Wed, 2015-03-11 15:03