Racism, Sexism, Antisemitism and other things one can unwittingly be

Thought-provoking. But perhaps it's because while women might yell, scream, and throw things, and might even slap or land or blow, a man's violence against women is more likely to lead to a visit to the hospital or permanent scars.

Just a theory.

@Gabrael: Perhaps his grandmother was simply stuck in the old ways of thinking?

A man without a woman is as unable to reproduce as a woman without a man.

Nope, most studies show that women are more likely to inflict serious injury.

edited 7th Sep '12 10:59:44 AM by Besserwisser

Besserwisser, you are a guy yourself, right? Therefore, isn't it possible that you notice the ways guys suffer from a sexist world more than you notice the ways women suffer from it? The problems that affect us directly do seem to be larger.

...Well actually, there are new, experimental, ways to allow two women to create children, so a man without a woman is less able to reproduce than a woman without a man.

Has it been done for real, or just theorized about?

I have had a range of ages as well as both genders accuse me of "homosexualizing" my son and encouraging him to be set apart by other boys and bullied for encouraging him to play house. So I think it's a fair cultural problem in general, especially in associating nurturing men as gay.

Now concerning domestic violence, women do get beat more just because of sheer numbers. But men can get injured worse because of the tendancy for women to use weapons, specifically blunt force objects like frying pans (that's a stereotype for a reason).

I believe it has been done in some laboratory...

Female impregnation without male sperm is at best experimental. And experimental is also the artificial womb, which makes women obsolete as child bearers. But this gets really off-topic I feel and it isn't going anywhere. So if anyone wants to discuss about artificial procreation, feel free to open a thread.

The point of me being more aware of discrimination of my own sex can be thrown right back to women. That's not getting us anywhere. What does is an honest discussion about what inequalities both genders suffer from. The problem I often see is that seemingly progressive group still engage in typical traditional views of Men Act, Women Are, setting men as active oppressors and women as passive victims, without examining it the other way around. The idea of men "creating their own problems" is surprisingly popular, especially when you consider how imprisonment rates are justified. "Men are more violent" is a perfectly fine thing to say, yet when you say the same thing about blacks, you get rightly accused of racism.

edited 7th Sep '12 12:50:48 PM by Besserwisser

I can somewhat identify with what Gabe is talking about. I had an uncle of mine chew me out for volunteering to change one of my little cousin's diapers, as that's not a job for a guy.

Head, this is the desk. Desk, this is the head.

Thank God. It's not like we need another thing to bruise our egos!

edited 7th Sep '12 1:02:08 PM by TheStarshipMaxima

Here are a few of the studies listed in the link I posted earlier;

These are just a few of the hundreds of studies in the link I posted. Many of the studies found higher rates of violence initiated by men against women. Many found higher rates of violence initiated by women against men. The overwhelming majority show no signifigant difference.

edited 7th Sep '12 2:09:49 PM by Talby

According to the US Department of Justice, about three times more women are killed by their intimate partner than men in any given year. (cite). What this suggests to me is that there is a disparity on the severity of violent conduct.

ALL MY RAGE.

That seriously surprises me. I have heard of plenty examples of women killing their spouse, blaming them for abuse and then getting away with barely any prison time at all even without the abuse ever being proven. What's worrying about the statistic it that the disparity seems to have grown, although it's a relief it also overall sunk. Also, white women seem to be the vast majority of victims, which only confuses me further.

Anyone any explainations for that? I'm out of ideas right now.

Women outnumber men in general to the world population. So women are proportionally more victims because there are just more of them as well as there being a longer history of abusing women being tolerated.

I'm not surprised white women get hit more. In my personal experience that has proven true. Now if you ask my father about cases where he has had to arrest both partners for mutual violence, it's blacks in our area who do that. In cases of Hispanics, well, by the time the cops get there the man is already in a bloody mess on the lawn and the woman's brothers have just driven off.

The 'demoralization of fatherhood' really cuts my cheese.

back in the day, there was nothing wrong with a man knowing to how to do basic child care what with women dying in child birth like flies. 

Then the 50s came and bam! Suddenly changing a nappy was 'women's work' and men were incapable of performing basic house keeping and would end up comically killing the children if they tried.

*sigh* I going off to play Bio Shock 2

edited 7th Sep '12 4:32:12 PM by joeyjojo

@Besserwisser: You hear about uncommon things because they're more newsworthy than common ones. Partner murder as a whole isn't that common, after all (how many instances have you known from your own life? I can't think of any offhand).

Most people aren't capable of the premeditated murder of a partner — regardless of their propensity for less lethal partner violence.

One factor is that men are simply physically stronger, especially in the upper body strength that is more likely to kill. It's simply easier for a man to kill in the course of unarmed physical violence. Men are also more likely to own guns, and are more likely to have served in the military (which teaches the skills of killing).

We also have a culture that does not encourage physical strength among women (witness the worry about looking bulkier that turns women off strength training in the gym), and discourages overt demonstrations of physical aggression among women. This paradoxically also means that a female physical abuser may find it easier to get away with it, because "women don't do that kind of thing".

In many respects, and no matter what the reason, women tend to be more statistically clustered; the female bell curve for a lot of things is narrower than the male, that I recall. The kind of person who kills their partner is a statistical outlier, and men are more likely to be statistical outliers.

There's also the fact that the incidence of certain mental illnesses is greater among men and some, such as schizophrenia, tend to show up at a younger and more aggressive age than among women.

Women outnumber men in general to the world population.

That a fact Gabs? I had always assumed that they were more men then women what with china and all.

Certainly in Europe and America there are (slightly) more women than men. Not that I think that that is at all an important factor in this.

You do have to add that violence against a husband by his wife was punished. By making the man ride onto a donkey backwards through the town. There were instances when men were legally able to beat their wifes, there was basically no punishment for the wife if she was the aggressor in most cases. Today taking the husband to prison in domestic violence practices is the default action by police, even when there is no evidence that there was either violence in the first place or evidence that the woman was initiating the violence.

How do you explain the changes in the statistics then? Most cases go down, white females stay high up.

I'm not sure why the rate of murder by intimate partner has gone down so much more for men than for women. Anyone know any research?

There are obviously flaws in the data; for one thing, we don't have the stats on the gender of the murderers rather than victims, and for another, they admit that there's a good proportion of murders where whether the murder was intimate partner violence isn't recorded or is unknown.

One way, I'll admit, that the old sexism in the system is meshing with newer opinions to produce a bad result is the ancient, sexist assumption that a woman is effectively harmless and any physical violence she may employ must be therefore harmless and minor; if a man can't take it in his stride and is bothered by it, it must be that he's not a Real Man. Meanwhile, the idea that a man can seriously hurt a woman, and easily, is deeply entrenched. At the same time, men are trained with the idea that they should not ever employ physical violence on a woman, even in self-defense. This training doesn't take in all cases, but it does mean that non-violent men are left believing they're not allowed to defend themselves from a violent woman.

Thus, I'd say that there's a certain subgroup of men who are very vulnerable to becoming a victim of domestic violence, and that abusers are likely to be able to tell who falls in that subgroup and select them. This doesn't mean that there's not also a proportion of men who are very likely to be violent toward their partners.

Wasn't supposed to be a threat; was supposed to be a warning. I'd assumed that if it wasn't me it'd be other people.

It hasn't been; I'm not sure if everyone else has managed to be so polite BECAUSE of my warning (in which case, yay self-defeating prophecy!) or in spite of it.

the NISVS

Also also, I heard Bess repeat a standard MRA claim, so let me point him to this related document, in particular questions number three and five in the "interpreting NISVS results" section.

this might be helpful

edited 7th Sep '12 6:29:42 PM by BlackHumor

@ Besserwisser, please next time just use my name. Too many arrows is confusing when you're troping with a smartphone.

It all depends on the culture. I'm Irish. My family does have some history of domestic abuse. But we also have a different way of handling fighting in general as a people. I have to always brief my cousins when they visit they can't say certain things over here because America has laws over inciting fights. If anyone hit someone on the island, well, the cops would take their time coming over so the family could handle matters.

My dad could arrest a man for beating his wife and not an hour later, the very dumbass would be at the station crying how he didn't mean it and trying to bail him out. They are most likely white.

It is really interesting the cultural divides of domestic abuse.

If the reason for less male deaths is the increased access to domestic violence shelters it's even more tragic that men rarely have access to similar institutions.