What constitutes Misogyny?

[charlie meadows]

on the other hand she was blandly and routinely disrespected by an individual in the course of a small business transaction.

All she left out was everything in between.

Horrors!

And the colour for irony is...?

[barracuda]

That's funny to you, I guess. But you know what? I never get disrespected by people whose services I am paying for. Never. But it must happen to you all the time, right Charlie? Because you're a woman. That's why you're so fully filled with inappropriate irony (inappropriate, because the state of being ironic has almost nothing to do with your statement. Exactly how is your response, "Horrors!" ironic in some way? Try "sarcasm" next time. They're two very different things. As I'm certain you know. It was likely just an oversight on your part.)

[Project Willow]

I have to say, I am confused by Charlie's sarcastic quip as well, it's completely over my head.

I'm still quite appalled that a woman cannot share two experiences which she views as examples of misogynistic behavior without being mercilessly attacked. Both of C_W's personal postings were in direct answer to the OP. I saw the connecting thread between them as the act of letting a strange man into one's house and how it is a WHOLLY AND COMPLETELY different experience for women than it is for men.

Here's the irony, apparently some of you guys consider yourselves the ultimate arbiters of what may or may not constitute incidences of misogyny for women whom you chance encounter on a discussion board.

[charlie meadows]

That's funny to you, I guess. But you know what? I never get disrespected by people whose services I am paying for. Never. But it must happen to you all the time, right Charlie? Because you're a woman. That's why you're so fully filled with inappropriate irony (inappropriate, because the emotional state of irony has almost nothing to do with your statement. Exactly how is your response, "Horrors!" ironic in some way? Try "sarcasm" next time. They're two very different things. As I'm certain you know. It was likely just an oversight on your part.)

Barracuda,

Irony is often lost on the speaker.

As rust never sleeps, I suggest something ferrous (ferric?)...

on the other hand she was blandly and routinely disrespected by an individual in the course of a small business transaction.

All she left out was everything in between.

The irony deepens every time I read it.

Well, that's it for me in this thread. FWIW, from now on--when I am so moved--I'll be contributing to just a few topics: Pryse and The Apocalypse Unsealed, Kubrick, brothers Coen... and my interpretation of them; and self-sufficiency in its appropriate subforum.

Enjoy!!!!!!!

[barracuda]

Oh charlie, I'm so glad to see your back. Keep walkin'.

[compared2what?]

C_w, fwiw:

As far as I'm concerned, the connection between those two events is so obvious, I was already taking it for granted that there was one (at least in a general sense) before I'd even finished reading the sentence "Furnace Guy is supposed to be at my house at 8:30."

[Stephen Morgan]

Okay all you lovers of me,
Here's another real life experience:

I understand. I too have been assaulted, and I also hate to let anyone into my home.

I don't do business with dummies.

Bullies should be avoided too.

A person standing up for themselves is not a bully, no matter if they are male or female.

I want to stand up for bullies. Standing up for themselves is exactly what bullies are doing. Bullies are made, not born.

When C_w was attacked it was by some men, by the Other. It was damaging, the resulting fear and rage is projected into a distrust of a surly tradesman. When I was assaulted, it was the punching and kicked kind rather than the groping kind, it was by people like me. I was turning the other cheek as my religion demands and I'm physically resilient enough that it wasn't even sore the next day, but it made me cry, words very difficult to type. Not from the physical pain, of course, as a man I'm just expected to put up with that. Anyway, there was no Other upon which to project my feelings. I didn't become a bully, I'm a very mild mannered sort of man in person, but if I perceive any sort of physical threat to myself or anyone around me I attempt to avert it.

The next time I was threatened, after that, there were these two lads, each bigger than me, who were chiding me as I walked alone along the street, for my flowing hippy-style locks. So I charged at them like a fucking maniac. If they had been karate masters revelling in their physical strength and superiority I would have been in trouble, but they were just a couple of idiots demonstrating their psychological weaknesses by picking on someone smaller on his own, so they took off like a couple of scalded cats and easily outpaced me. Which is good because I'm a pacifist and if I'd caught up with them that would've been quite inconvenient. It's just a display, as is bullying generally, which is what they were doing, what I was doing, what C_w was doing. Could even be what the tradesman was doing, if it wasn't just nervous laughter.

So, you see, this isn't the world women live in. This is the world we all live in. Women may see it as the world they live in because to them a man in intimidating, is the Other, and on top of that is generally physically stronger and larger. All the more so if the crime is a sexual crime, where the Otherness is an active component. In reality both men and women, when committing acts of criminal violence, choose most often to target men.

Also, in regard to Jack's query as to what made me this way, perhaps there is something about C_w's feminism originating in this event. My socialism, although I was raised with it, certainly owes much of its force to this. When I was young it was like being under siege, continuously terrified of a knock on the door, of bailiffs, of social services. These, identified explicitly with the state and the capitalist order were the Other. They are why I don't let people into my home, why my first reaction to a doorbell is a terror-fueled rage, why I don't want other people to suffer the same thing.

[Stephen Morgan]

(you picked THE KLAN??? REALLY???)

That's exactly the reaction the Klan got. No matter how non-racist they were, it's always with the "but you're the Klan!".

But really, your evidence that women are a "privileged group" resides where exactly?

I'm not falling for that! I don't mind being the argumentative pest, but I'm not shitting in the punch bowl. There are plenty of places you can find that information yourself.

...
btw, for future reference:

OP ED, as it happens, is not a feminist. [OP ED hates women]

OP ED, as it happens, is not a socialist either. [OP ED hates pinko layabouts]

Stephen Morgan loves both women and pinko layabouts. Stephen Morgan, in fact, is a pinko layabout. Stephen Morgan does not wear ties. Stephen Morgan prefers not to wear clothes. Including skivvies, or kecks as we call them around these parts. A skivvy is something else entirely.

However, OP ED, as it happens, does often support positions created and maintained by self-identifying sub-sections of both "groups" although OP ED could and would argue that both groups exist more in the imagination than in any active reality, especially as anything other than potential propaganda value to their omnipresent detractors.

Groups, with the possible exception of well-organised bodies with official membership lists and regular contributions by direct debit and physical headquarters and corporate charters and so on, all exist only in the imagination. They are a perception of a thing, rather than a thing. An abstract concept. An artefact of language. But the play's the thing.

The Bechdel Test is a way of examining movies for gender bias. The test poses three questions: Does a movie contain two or more female characters who have names? Do those characters talk to each other? And, if so, do they discuss something other than a man? An astonishing number of light entertainments fail the test. This points to a crucial imbalance in studio comedies: distinctive secondary roles for women barely exist. For men, these roles can be a stepping stone to stardom.

It strikes me that most chick flicks don't meet those criteria. The female characters only talk about the romantic aspect, and apart from some cliched banter about sports or something similar, so do the male characters.

apparently you didn't see it that way. Can you tell me how you would have dealt with it if you had three people coming to apply for a job with you and one of them:
a. was late
b. laughed at you for asking them why they were late
c. asked to talk to your 'boss?'

You mean that's not the way to do it? Wait, I'll jot that down. One day I will be a paid employee.

[Canadian_watcher]

Stephen,

I want to thank you for sharing that story.
I also want to thank you for not joining in the dog pile but waiting to comment until things had calmed down.
Thank you.

Only one thing I'll take a little bit of issue with in what you wrote in your first post, which is that that incident might be the root of my feminism. If memory serves I was still, at that age, arguing with my mother about the 'fact' that equality had already been reached and there was no need for anyone to identify as a feminist any longer.

It wasn't until I was left holding a baby and started back to university that the whole of my existence seemed to make more sense in light of the history of oppressed people (including but not limited to females) - when I learned about laws, regulations, religious beliefs, social practices, mythology, biology and economics and how they impacted class/race/gender differences - that is when I realized I the women's movement was not close to finished. That is when I learned to deeply respect and admire and want to emulate those women warriors who had come before me.

There were nights at home, after the baby was sleeping, when I'd be sitting doing my readings, that I would put down the texts and cry - out of thanks, sometimes, and other times from frustration - but always with a new sense of understanding.

edit: oh, and ... I don't think I was a bully to Furnace Guy, nor do I think you were one when you ran at those two eejots in the street.

[OP ED]

What is striking, in that it is not striking, is the routine nature of the sort of encounters described, both the overt assault and the disrespectful furnace man.

by which i mean, the extent to which even people here consider the latter so normal as to disregard it as even being relevant.

fwiw, OP ED wouldn't have even done the prick the courtesy of telling him he was fired. he would've needed to figure this out after OP ED had shut the door on him. but things like this rarely happen to OP ED. [Although this may be partially because OP ED usually answers the door while festooned with daggers]

ahem. that is. contrary to Stephen's continued proclamations that ALL women are a privileged class, OP ED knows from personal experiences that the routine removal of evidence and blame when assaults and harrassments [such as C W described] happen is thoroughly institutionalized to the point of standard-operating-procedure in most or all institutions and businesses. OP ED has personally been "encouraged" by company lawyers to not tell the plaintiff's lawyers and investigators things OP ED had just told them about because OP ED was supposed to be "a team player" and to be concerned about OP ED's "future prospects" for upward mobility in said company. After said company was forced by the existence of recordings of harassing behavior to settle this matter, these lawyers informed us that the big bosses would be okay, would not be punished or pay for their settlement personally, as said company makes certain to set aside funds to cover for such "indiscretions" on the part of managers. they even write them off on their taxes. What OP ED is saying is that one of the top twenty employers in America plans in advance for its managers to commit acts of sexual harrassment and moderate assault on its female employees. They have people whose full-time job is to "encourage" people who might otherwise tell the truth to be "team players" instead and not to let "those sorts of bitches" hurt the company. [or its bottom line]

OP ED has a hard time understanding how someone, like you Stephen, otherwise intelligent and clearly probably living in the very same actual world as OP ED, can make his living without encountering this sort of imbalance in justice and see it as such.

How can someone speak English their entire life without realizing that the genderbiases are built into the language itself?

[one does not need to be a linguistics major to grasp the basics of this concept]

sigh. jesus.

OP ED is not a feminist, but some people make OP ED consider switching its identification preference.

[thee glass slipper is on thee other foot]

[wallflower]

Canadian_Watcher thanks for this thread and all the tending you've done to make it happen.

I haven't quite gotten the hang of keeping up with threads here and am late to the pile up. My understanding of your behavior in the entirety of the tread is that you've been responsible. Some topic attract collisions and explosions, and misogyny, in fact topics connected to feminism often flame out.

I've gone back a couple or few times to the beginning and scrolled through this thread. Every time I've done it I've discovered something new. There's a wide range covered.

I find news of sexual assault very disheartening and I'm ashamed to say that I turn my head away from the news. This is particularly true about news of sexual assault of children. I can't remember whether or not I linked to an article in The Nation earlier, "Cleveland, Texas and Gender Jim Crow" http://www.thenation.com/article/159550/cleveland-texas-and-gender-jim-crow The essay stuck with me because the author of it, William Jelani Cobb uses the history of lynching to show how people tend to mitigate and add qualifiers to what is plainly horrible. My habit of turning the other way with news about sexual assault come from a similar impulse: It can't be that bad, can it?

A production crew is interested in using my place as a location for a video that's intended for young people addressing "No means No!" in various scenarios. I'm eager about the project. Partly because of this thread I've been paying a bit more notice of news. Earlier in the month CNN ran a piece by Toby Simon "Why is sexual assault tolerated on campus?" Simon is a former Dean of Student Life at Brown. While at Brown she did a survey and found that sexual assault was one of the main reason student transfered to Brown. Simon notes:

A National Institute of Justice study in 1997 put the number of college women reporting a rape or attempted rape while at college at between 20% and 25%, but campuses remain reluctant to deal with the issue head on. (The figure for such assault on women in the general population is about one in six.) Some 25% percent of American college males admitted to sexual coercion of some form, but there's little outrage.

Outrage is important, but it's essential to find ways to reduce such violence. Better understanding misogyny is useful to begin to find appropriate responses to this pathology of violence.

Newsweek had a report http://www.newsweek.com/2011/04/03/the-military-s-secret-shame.html on male soldiers being raped and sexually assaulted in the military--some 50,000 male veterans screened positive for "military sexual trauma" last year. The gist of the article is the military is only beginning to confront the issue. The question was raised about getting rid of Don't Ask Don't Tell and the point made that rape is about power more than it's about sex. That is an important distinction, but the lines are also probably a bit fuzzy. At least I suspect that part of the problem of college campuses dealing with sexual assault has to do with sexual assault has to do with perceived fuzziness along the line of sex and violence.

Probably because I'm not paying attention, I'm still not sure what constitutes misogyny. This thread has helped me to better see the outlines of it. And certainly the drive for power over others is an important root of misogyny. With that perspective male rape in the military doesn't seem disconnected from societal misogyny. In the Newsweek report the comment was made that gays in the military actually might make it easier for the military to address the problem of male sexual assault--I should hope also to address sexual assault on female soldiers and contractors too. Alas, I'm afraid that at least some of the response will be from a fundamentalist Christian perspective and won't get very far along the way to actually addressing the core issues.

[Stephen Morgan]

ahem. that is. contrary to Stephen's continued proclamations that ALL women are a privileged class,

"ALL women are a privileged class" is a meaningless statement. Women as a class have privileges, like the much greater social and legal rights to a relationship with their children, that doesn't equate to all women being privileged as individuals, on aggregate. I know some normal, poor women, who are in pretty much the same position as myself in everyday life.

You can't address "ALL women" and "women [as a] class" in the same sentence.

OP ED knows from personal experiences that the routine removal of evidence and blame when assaults and harrassments [such as C W described] happen is thoroughly institutionalized to the point of standard-operating-procedure in most or all institutions and businesses.

I've heard exactly the same thing from men's rights activists, who see evidence suppressed by the police and lawyers and the CPS and so on, in cases of false accusations, especially in the top-secret family courts, and so on.

OP ED has personally been "encouraged" by company lawyers to not tell the plaintiff's lawyers and investigators things OP ED had just told them about because OP ED was supposed to be "a team player" and to be concerned about OP ED's "future prospects" for upward mobility in said company. After said company was forced by the existence of recordings of harassing behavior to settle this matter, these lawyers informed us that the big bosses would be okay, would not be punished or pay for their settlement personally, as said company makes certain to set aside funds to cover for such "indiscretions" on the part of managers. they even write them off on their taxes.

Restaurants take out insurance in case they poison people, that doesn't mean they intend to or condone it. Vodafone put aside money to pay their taxes, that doesn't mean they wanted to get caught evading them.

What OP ED is saying is that one of the top twenty employers in America plans in advance for its managers to commit acts of sexual harrassment and moderate assault on its female employees. They have people whose full-time job is to "encourage" people who might otherwise tell the truth to be "team players" instead and not to let "those sorts of bitches" hurt the company. [or its bottom line]

OP ED has a hard time understanding how someone, like you Stephen, otherwise intelligent and clearly probably living in the very same actual world as OP ED, can make his living without encountering this sort of imbalance in justice and see it as such.

I don't make a living, I'm a pinko layabout. Pay attention!

I'm unemployed and when I do voluntary administrative and retail work for a charity raising money for medical research, every paid employee I've come across other than the Head of Retail is female. All the HR bods at HQ, all the managers and area managers and assistant managers and so on. I did once hear that someone I met had been sexually harrassed, when I was subject to involuntary attendance at a welfare-to-work scheme called "Action 4 Employment". The girl who worked there, I heard from one of the other people who worked there, had been "harassed", allegedly. Not on of her superiors at the company causing her bother, rather one of my fellow unemployed allegedly making a sexual comment to her and being summarily chucked off the course.

I suppose I don't see your story as an example of sexism. Obviously a big company is going to try to stop trouble-making, is going to have money set aside to compensate the people who sue them, and so forth. The existent of suits on the basis of sexual harassment just shows that there are in place measures to protect women from harassment in the workplace which doesn't rise to the level of being a criminal offence. No such considerations are given to those disadvantages under which men labour.

How can someone speak English their entire life without realizing that the genderbiases are built into the language itself?

[one does not need to be a linguistics major to grasp the basics of this concept]

There are plenty of gender biases built into the language, certainly. The reference to ships and other large mechanical beasts as "she", in such circumstances, glorifying women as the epitomy of great and powerful machines, how can a young boy ever aspire to run a steam engine? The reference to "mother earth" and the "mother country", leaves no doubt at all who owns the country, as both the SPR's Eric Dingwall and Camille Paglia have spotted. Even "English" from the name of the Norse earth goddess, after whom the Ynglinga saga. The word "women", which makes it seem that men are less that women to the extent of a "wo". That's why I prefer the term "myn".

Sexist.

sigh. jesus.

OP ED is not a feminist, but some people make OP ED consider switching its identification preference.

[thee glass slipper is on thee other foot]

[Canadian_watcher]

Wallflower - You must, by now, be beginning to see what constitutes misogyny.

Sometimes it is simply the unwillingness to validate a woman's experience because "she must be hysterical... she must be too close to the subject to think rationally about it" We saw an example of this when brekin warned me 'not to go there' with the story of my sexual assault. Why should I not go there? It is my experience. He might say he was eager to help me, protect me. I don't think so. He wasn't so eager to stand up for me against the disrespect of the Furnace Guy. What he was really saying in relation to the sexual assault story was: "This isn't fair. You can't hand us an example that we can't blame you for in some way! You can't' make yourself vulnerable in front of us because then we'll look like bad guys if we attack you!" He failed to see that this whole thread makes us vulnerable, and attacking at any point in the discussion is the same type of insult.

Stephen interjects to remind us that male on male violence is a problem in this world. You have just done so, too. Yes, thank you both, it is. I can see that both of you are concerned about violent males among us. I am, too. The demonization of feminine qualities is as old as the hills - both men and women pay for displaying those qualities. In spades. So far though, it has only been the female and queer communities who have made ending violence a pivotal part of their resistance to tyranny.

On that note, I'm going to insert a wonderful piece by Eve Ensler, author, playwright, and one founders of The City of Joy in the Congo.

REFUSER
From the Lebanese mountains
To the Kenyan village of El Doret
We are practicing self-defense
Versed in Karate, Tai Chi, Judo, and Kung Foo
We are no longer surrendering to our fate.
Now, we are the ones who walk our girl friends home from school.
And we don't do it with macho. We do it with cool.
Our mothers are the Pink Sari Gang
Fighting off the drunken men
With rose pointed fingers and sticks in
Uttar Pradesh.
The Peshmerga women
in the Kurdish mountains
with barrettes in their hair
and AK47's instead of pocket books.
We are not waiting anymore to be taken and retaken.
We are the Liberian women sitting
in the Africa sun blockading the exits
til the men figure it out.
We are the Nigerian women
babies strapped to out backs
occupying the oil terminals of Chevron.
We are the women of Kerala
who refused to let Coca Cola
privatize our water.
We are Cindy Sheehan showing up in Crawford without a plan.
We are all those who forfeited husbands boyfriends and dates
Cause we were married to our mission.
We know love comes from all directions and in many forms.
We are Malalai who spoke back to the Afghan Loya Jurga
And told them they were "raping warlords" and
She kept speaking even when they kept
trying to blow up her house.
And we are Zoya whose radical mother was shot dead when Zoya was only a child so she was fed on revolution which was stronger than milk
And we are the ones who kept and loved our babies
even though they have the faces of our rapists.
We are the girls who stopped cutting ourselves to release the pain
And we are the girls who refused to have our clitoris cut
And give up our pleasure.
We are:
Rachel Corrie who wouldn't couldn't move away from the Israeli tank.
Aung San Suu Kyi who still smiles after years of not being able to leave her room.
Anne Frank who survives now cause she wrote down her story.
We are Neda Soltani gunned down by a sniper in the streets of
Tehran as she voiced a new freedom and way
And we are Asmaa Mahfouz from the April 6th movement in Egypt
Who twittered an uprising.
We are the women riding the high seas to offer
Needy women abortions on ships.
We are women documenting the atrocities
in stadiums with video cameras underneath our Burqas.
We are seventeen and living for a year in a tree
And laying down in the forests to protect wild oaks.
We are out at sea interrupting the whale murders.
We are freegans, vegans, trannies
But mainly we are refusers.
We don't accept your world
Your rules your wars
We don't accept your cruelty and unkindness.
We don't believe some need to suffer for others to survive
Or that there isn't enough to go around
Or that corporations are the only and best economic arrangement
And we don't hate boys, okay?
That's another bullshit story.
We are refusers
But we crave kissing.
We don't want to do anything before we're ready
but it could be sooner than you think
and we get to decide
and we are not afraid of what is pulsing through us.
It makes us alive.
Don't deny us, criticize us or infantilize us.
We don't accept checkpoints, blockades or air raids
We are obsessed with learning.
On the barren Tsunamied beaches of Sri Lanka
In the desolate and smelly remains
Of the lower ninth
We want school.
We want school.
We want school.
We know if you plan too long
Nothing happens and things get worse and that
Most everything is found in the action
and instinctively we get that the scariest thing
isn't dying, but not trying at all.
And when we finally have our voice
and come together
when we let ourselves gather the knowledge
when we stop turning on each other
but direct our energy towards what matters
when we stop worrying about
our skinny ass stomachs or too frizzy hair
or fat thighs
when we stop caring about pleasing
and making everyone so incredibly happy-
We got the Power.
If
Janis Joplin was nominated the ugliest man on her campus
And they sent Angela Davis to jail
If Simone Weil had manly virtues
And Joan of Arc was hysterical
If Bella Abzug was eminently obnoxious
And Ellen Sirleaf Johnson is considered scary
If Arundhati Roy is totally intimidating
and Rigoberta Menchu is pathologically intense
And Julia Butterfly Hill is an extremist freak
Call us hysterical then
Fanatical
Eccentric
Delusional
Intimidating
Eminently obnoxious
Militant
Bitch
Freak
Tattoo me
Witch
Give us our broomsticks
And potions on the stove
We are the girls
who are aren't afraid to cook.
"Refuser" is published in Eve's newest work - I AM AN EMOTIONAL CREATURE: The Secret Life of Girls Around the World, just released in paperback from Villard Trade Paperbacks.
Eve Ensler, a playwright and activist, is the founder of V-Day, a global movement to end violence against women and girls. In conjunction with I AM AN EMOTIONAL CREATURE, V-Day has developed a targeted pilot program, V-Girls, to engage young women in our "empowerment philanthropy" model, providing them with a platform to amplify their voices.

[Stephen Morgan]

Canadian_Watcher thanks for this thread and all the tending you've done to make it happen.

I haven't quite gotten the hang of keeping up with threads here and am late to the pile up. My understanding of your behavior in the entirety of the tread is that you've been responsible. Some topic attract collisions and explosions, and misogyny, in fact topics connected to feminism often flame out.

I respect that there C_w, even though I disagree with her on a metric shit-load of things.

I find news of sexual assault very disheartening and I'm ashamed to say that I turn my head away from the news.

I don't watch the news any more. Depressing, it is. No, in fact, agitating. The negative happenings about which I am powerless to act is extremely frustrating. Makes me want to kill people.

This is particularly true about news of sexual assault of children. I can't remember whether or not I linked to an article in The Nation earlier, "Cleveland, Texas and Gender Jim Crow" http://www.thenation.com/article/159550/cleveland-texas-and-gender-jim-crow

What an offensively sexist article.

"Beyond the horror of the organized murder of black citizens, students were most troubled by the recreational nature of it all: the images of smiling white citizens, fathers and sons, upstanding Christians gathered in fellowship around the smoldering ruin of a black body—all preserved on postcards."

Fathers and sons. Certainly no woman would ever have been involved in such a thing. Except, of course, that accusations of "rape" which could merely be looking at a white woman the wrong way were the leading cause of lynchings. As the article notes later on, but only as a reason the local blacks ought to be ashamed of themselves, not to correct the casual sexism earlier on.

Exactly the kind of unexamined sexism we ought to be against, the casual assumption that men are violent, all violence is the responsibility of men even when acting specifically on behalf of women, on the allegations of women.

Earlier in the month CNN ran a piece by Toby Simon "Why is sexual assault tolerated on campus?" Simon is a former Dean of Student Life at Brown. While at Brown she did a survey and found that sexual assault was one of the main reason student transfered to Brown. Simon notes:

A National Institute of Justice study in 1997 put the number of college women reporting a rape or attempted rape while at college at between 20% and 25%, but campuses remain reluctant to deal with the issue head on. (The figure for such assault on women in the general population is about one in six.) Some 25% percent of American college males admitted to sexual coercion of some form, but there's little outrage.

Outrage is important, but it's essential to find ways to reduce such violence. Better understanding misogyny is useful to begin to find appropriate responses to this pathology of violence.

There's as little outrage as truth. It's a pack of lies. The fact is that rape on campus is very rare, unless you count sex under the influence as automatically rape (of the woman, drunk men are never counted as being raped) in which case it's pretty common. Campuses have also done their best to stop it, mad take back the night marches, money spent on improving street lighting at night, that sort of thing.

Newsweek had a report http://www.newsweek.com/2011/04/03/the-military-s-secret-shame.html on male soldiers being raped and sexually assaulted in the military--some 50,000 male veterans screened positive for "military sexual trauma" last year. The gist of the article is the military is only beginning to confront the issue. The question was raised about getting rid of Don't Ask Don't Tell and the point made that rape is about power more than it's about sex. That is an important distinction, but the lines are also probably a bit fuzzy. At least I suspect that part of the problem of college campuses dealing with sexual assault has to do with sexual assault has to do with perceived fuzziness along the line of sex and violence.

It's sex and violence, so I don't see how that could be causing problems.

[Stephen Morgan]

Stephen interjects to remind us that male on male violence is a problem in this world. You have just done so, too. Yes, thank you both, it is. I can see that both of you are concerned about violent males among us. I am, too.

There's a difference between your position and mine: you see it as male violence, I just see it as violence. You only see violent men, I also see violent women. You see male violence, I see male victims. To you your group is the victim, the Other is dangerous, even if they're dangerous to each other as well.

After all, I'm also concerned about domestic violence where most of the violence is by women. Most male violence is against men, most female violence is against men. Could be evidence of a widespread violent hatred of men amongst women, definitely not evidence of misogyny.

The demonization of feminine qualities is as old as the hills - both men and women pay for displaying those qualities. In spades. So far though, it has only been the female and queer communities who have made ending violence a pivotal part of their resistance to tyranny.

Ending violence against them.

As you see the massive preponderance of male victims as somehow less important because it's "male-on-male" violence, so it is here. It's a fundamentally and fatally flawed approach to "ending violence" if you see the group which provides the majority of victims of violence as a dangerous group of genetic predators.