Hacker News Reader

I think if you looked at the early years of feminism, you would a similar hatred of men. Only people who have been pushed to the absolute brink are prepared to break the social taboos. The sooner the world accepts that there needs to be a conversation about equality going both ways, the sooner that anger will be defused. Arguing about who has it "worse" is probably counterproductive now.

(All of this applies mainly to the western cultural context. Some places in the world are still at the stage of needing suffragettes)

> I think if you looked at the early years of feminism, you would a similar hatred of men.

I'd be fascinated to see a historical account of that. Many suffragettes (including the founder Emmeline Pankhurst) were married. Perhaps they all hated their husbands, but I'd be interested to know more.

> Arguing about who has it "worse" is probably counterproductive now.

It's kind of unavoidable, though. Encouraging women to report domestic violence, and taking action when they do, has a knock-on effect of there being more false accusations and innocent men punished. So it's a direct tradeoff. The key is to try to minimise those tradeoffs as much as possible.

I think being unmarried as a woman was a recipe for a live in poverty back then.

> I'd be fascinated to see a historical account of that.

Well, not a hard-source, but having been alive in the 90's most women didn't consider themselves feminists in the 90s. And if pressed they'd say things like "I believe in equality but I wouldn't call myself a feminist."

Anecdotally, there was a perception that those who most loudly and immediately identified themselves as "feminist" (not unlike those who most loudly and immediately identify as men's-right-activists) had a HUGE emotional investment in the topic and saw unfairness/oppression everywhere.

Additionally, with 90's feminism at least, some women associated loud self-proclamations of feminism as a move more common to "butch" women.

Hopefully the conversation on treatment of men will make as much progress in 20 short years.

Maybe because there was oppression/unfairness everywhere? Where not being sexually assaulted at work was a rare privilege?

Yeah, except there wasn't.

I'm surprised you know most women in the 90s. I was alive during the 90s but only managed to meet a few.

> I think if you looked at the early years of feminism, you would a similar hatred of men.

But that is only relevant if the situations are similar. But for example, it is the most "feminist" countries that grants the most paternity leave. And the reason why the US have unwavering laws on divorce, custody and alimony is to protect the traditional family model where divorce is discourage and women didn't have career to fall back on.

I'm not an expert in the early years of feminism, but from what I have read, this seems very wrong. The early years were about exploration and starting a conversation about what equality would look like. It was closely tied to the philosophical and social movements of the time. I doubt there was any other period in time where men and women worked so closely and cooperatively on the issue. It started as a small group against society, not men vs women.

You are right - while suffragettes could be quite violent, the violence was political and (as far as I can tell) misandry didn't hit hard until Second Wave Feminism, in the 60s-80s. But hit hard it did, and the effects reverberate today.

The point is, toxic hatred for the "other side" is a distasteful but not uncommon feature of movements in a particular stage of their existence. It doesn't invalidate their complaints.

Such communities are easy pickings for exploitation, which is how they get infiltrated and made toxic to hell. See also "incel", something that started out from a woman's blog and turned from self-deprecating to a bit of mutual help, to finally a toxic hell hole.

Yeah, it makes me really sad that (particularly in the incel case) young men looking for a support community basically end up being radicalised. Lessons for society as a whole, I suppose.

Generally agree with you. However, I don't think "overcorrected" is the right term for issues around childcare and family dynamics.

The idea that women are always better caretakers is something most feminist theorists would call "benevolent sexism". It has some advantages for women, but it also hurts them in the workplace, and promotes unreasonable divisions of labor in private life.

> That said, historically women have been on the receiving end of physical violence from men far, far more often than vice versa

It is funny how statistics works. If we look at questioners, women and men report the same amount of physical violence from partners. If we look at households the rate of police reports for domestic violence is identical regardless of what gender the inhabitants has.

There is no gender difference in who is on the receiving end of physical violence. There is however a gender difference in the method of physical violence. Women mostly use knives and makeshift weapons. Men mostly use their hands. As is, knives and makeshift weapons don't actually do a lot of damage on average when wielded by someone not trained. Fists however almost always causes damages, especially when repeated.

> That said, historically women have been on the receiving end of physical violence from men far, far more often than vice versa and were told to suffer in silence

Statistically, this is not true. In relationships where there is one-sided violence, the violence is (something like) 70/30 with the woman initiating the violence. In relationships where there is two-sided violence, the woman initiates the violence more than half of the time. These studies are hard to find and often have no funding because they get shouted out of the mainstream consciousness.

Here is a study that covers part of this: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1854883/

Ask yourself why you've never heard of it.

If you are speaking historically, surely you are not suggesting incarceration of men as reparations for things we didn't do?

> The authors say they have no intention of minimizing the very real problem of serious domestic violence — the classic male batterer. The survey did not cover the use of knives, guns, choking, or burning, and it was not concerned with the kind of situation that can drive a woman to seek shelter outside the home. The view of the authors is that most intimate partner violence should not be equated with severe battering. Domestic disputes that turn physical because of retaliation and escalation do not have the same causes or the same consequences as male battering. Couples counseling is generally regarded as ineffective for batterers, but if the violence is moderate and the injuries are minor, both partners are involved, and they want to stay together, it makes sense for a therapist to work with both of them.

https://www.health.harvard.edu/newsletter_article/In_Brief_D...

The article's own summary suggests against making the kind of conclusions the article you linked to makes.

> If you are speaking historically, surely you are not suggesting incarceration of men as reparations for things we didn't do?

Not even slightly and it's an absurd reading of my post to suggest that I am.

> The article's own summary suggests against making the kind of conclusions the article you linked to makes.

Of course, they have to. Do you think 30% of men murder their wives? No, clearly it's some small percentage that severely batter. Therefore, those are the statistics that I would ignore and rather focus on the remainder who are the men that suffer as a result of this type of conflation. It's politically easy to conflate the two, of course. But it isn't intellectually honest.

> Not even slightly and it's an absurd reading of my post to suggest that I am.

So why should historical events I have no responsibility for serve to restrict my freedom? In an argument with my wife, I am the batterer, in divorce court, I am simply a pocket to be picked.

Let's make sure we understand the power dynamics at play. This is about reducing my autonomy to benefit a certain segment of society.

> So why should historical events I have no responsibility for serve to restrict my freedom?

Again: I am not suggesting that. No-one is suggesting that. I am saying that society is attempting to move beyond horrifying historical trends, and that in the course of that has over-corrected in some areas. No-one is suggesting this is a good thing or that it shouldn't be fixed.

And I am saying these horrifying trends with men battering women to the point of death never existed.

That article says that women strike more often, while men do more damage with their strikes. I know which I'd prefer, given the choice between being hit more often or more severely.

Men murder intimate partner women at 4x the rate of women murdering men intimate partners, per https://www.ozy.com/acumen/us-domestic-violence-murder-rate-...

Not only that, it says that men don't strike back 70% of the time.

Men are big and strong. No amount of mental gymnastics will fix that. So you absolutely should not engage someone stronger than you in a physical manner because retaliation would be bad.

It doesn't seem impossible that women are just as likely to shove or slap a man they're in a partnership with, though I'd like to see more followup than this article to be convinced.

However, the statistics on murder are pretty fucking clear: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/07/homicides.... Given the frequency with which murder is preceded by a string of violence requiring medical attention, I'd wager that's similarly unbalanced.

Don't conflate the murdering men with men who have done nothing. This is the entire problem. All men don't rape, all men don't murder.

> All men don’t rape, all men don’t murder

As a man, I’m well aware of this! However, your comment is a non-sequitur.

Then why are you so loose in your response? Why do you conflate murder with a loose definition of domestic violence? With the looser definition, women are MORE violent than men.

You're offering up a tabloid source which is ultimately referencing a survey of 11,000 people.

>> These studies are hard to find because they get shouted out of the mainstream consciousness.

Abstracts for studies are pretty easy to find on the internet (even the one you mention that is "hard to find").

Are you saying that there are legitimate academic studies which have been deleted? Serious assertions require serious evidence. Do have any beyond a screen shot of a study taken out of context inside a PDF written by a defunct tabloid?

I read the original study, but my google-fu is not good enough to find it.

So are they hard to find because they get shouted out of mainstream consciousness, because of insufficient expertise at searching, or because they don't exist?

Let me ask you: had you heard of this very old statistic until now? Why not?

Edit: I dusted off my Google-fu and found this: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1854883/

Yes. There's nothing intuitively shocking about those results.

What exactly is your concern here?

Weird. In one reply you ask me why these studies don't exist, in the next you agree they exist and are not controversial.

That is, women are more violent than men.

Weird.

The only weird thing going on here is you are drawing conclusions not supported by data that your are citing, and intimating systemic suppression where there is none.

>historically women have been on the receiving end of physical violence from men far, far more often than vice versa and were told to suffer in silence.

Historically, men have been on the receiving end of violence far, far more than women. Far more likely to be assaulted/murdered on the street, convicted for a crime they did not commit, or drafted into and killed in war.

What's your actual point here? That domestic violence shouldn't be discussed because men go to war?

I think he was rebutting the point he quoted. Don't forget jail too. There's more men on men violence (and rape) than men on women because of the horrendous prison system and how society couldn't care less.

Doesn't make either more acceptable, but it would be nice if prison violence got a little more air time.

Right, but it all just ends being whataboutism. Effectively we're saying "sure, domestic violence exists, but what about prison violence? What about war?".

They're not invalid points but the effect is to grind conversation to a halt. We can talk about, and tackle prison violence. We can talk about, and tack domestic violence. But refusing to consider one until the other is also factored in just means nothing ever happens. They don't depend upon each other. We can work on both, independently.

>They still suffer far more

You're creating a false dichotomy by claiming women suffer more from physical violence from men. History and context are important for understanding reality as a whole (as best as we can).

In all honesty we should be framing these issues as human problems. Creating false dichotomies, dividing men against women, and then trying to play victim olympics under false pretenses is disingenuous not helpful to humanity.

And you're selectively quoting me. I did not say "women suffer far more", I said "women suffer more from violence by men than vice versa". If you're going to debate a quote at least be honest about it.

Framing things as human problems is a lovely concept, but disparities exist. Ignoring them by labeling them a "false dichotomy" and talking about "victim olympics" does not help solve any issues. You can't solve an issue without identifying its causes. Otherwise we end up asking "how do we solve violence as a human problem" and guess what, nothing ever gets solved.

>You can't solve an issue without identifying its causes.

Agreed.

How are the fundamental causes of domestic violence different from the fundamental causes of all other types of physical violence, in your opinion?

They're often rooted in the lack of emotional tools us men are given to process anger. We are raised to be "strong" and talking about your feelings is seen as weak. So things bottle up until they explode, often in the direction of domestic partners because they are closest. Particularly in situations out of our control... it's even been shown in studies that reports of domestic violence increase when a local sports team loses a game.

By comparison the violence that happens when a person gets mugged is wrapped up in the act of the mugging. Rarely is anyone doing it for fun, they're doing it because they need money. Being convicted for a crime you didn't commit has nothing to do with violence at all. And men being sent off to war... well, I'll spare the pages long post about nation states, but the point is that the cause of that isn't meaningfully similar to that of domestic violence.

>often rooted in the lack of emotional tools us men are given to process anger. We are raised to be "strong" and talking about your feelings is seen as weak

Mental/emotional repression and the evolutionary need to appear strong and act on anger with physical violence is influential in many/most types of violence: domestic violence, school yard bullying, common assault, gang violence, police violence, and military violence.

Could it be that the root cause(s) of most types of violence -- whether on a micro scale (domestic assault) or a macro scale (war) -- are interrelated?

"historically women have been on the receiving end of physical violence from men far"

Without the "from men" it would presumably not even be true. And the "from men" doesn't really justify retaliating against modern men in general.

Some men are rapists, most men fight rapists and many risk their lives in the line of defense (policemen, fire fighters, soldiers...). Yet they also get blamed for the deeds of the rapists. It's just weird.