I’ve made a few corrections to this article by Mychal Denzel Smith that originally appeared at Feministing. Mychal isn’t a bad writer, but he needs an editor. I’m providing that service free of charge.
I’ve made these corrections based on the very simple idea that losing a fight you started doesn’t make you a victim. The truth is that men rarely hit women, unless you hit them first.
Here’s a sure-fire way to know that you hate men: when an incident of intimate partner violence in which a woman beats a man with a nine-iron gains national attention and every question or comment you think to make has to do with his behavior, you really hate men. Like, despise.
There is no other explanation. There is no “I need all the facts.” There is no excuse. You hate men. Own it.
Now, you probably don’t believe you hate men. You probably honestly think you’re being an objective observer whose only interest is the truth. You are delusional.
We have this problem in our discourse around the most important challenges we face where we feel we have to be “fair to both sides.” But sometimes, one of those sides is subjugation and oppression. If you’re OK with legitimizing that side in the interest of “fairness,” you’re essentially saying you’re OK with oppression as a part of the human condition. That’s some hateful shit.
Violence against men doesn’t deserve a “fair” hearing. There should be no justifications offered, no rationalizing, no equivocating. Violence against men should be intolerable. But every time we are called upon to collectively denounce that violence, there’s a section of the choir that starts singing from a different set of sheet music.
“Well, I don’t believe she should have hit him, but he also shouldn’t have …”
“Hitting men is wrong, but …”
“He has a responsibility to his family …”
“He stayed with her, so obviously he’s condoning that behavior …”
“It’s none of our business what happens between …”
“What did he expect?”
Hate. It’s all hate. Because if you can look at the history of men being beaten and battered into silence and second-class citizenship, their lives thrown away in wars women are protected from, and still ask if they are at all to blame for the violence visited upon them, there’s nothing else to call that.
There is a tendency to judge the actions of those with the least amount of power the same as those with more power and then ask, “Isn’t that what equality means?” It’s a clever rhetorical evasion of the issue. Equality is the goal, but to pretend that we actually exist as equals right now is to ignore reality. Like it or not, we all carry history with us in our personal interactions. The history of violence against men is one where men’s bodies are a battleground in a struggle for power. Punches, kicks, weapons, and the threat of death have been used to assert dominance and deny men autonomy, at home and out in the rest of the world.
How are men denied autonomy? How are their bodies used? The most common way is to deny them the right to choose parenthood. Their money, their lives, their bodies are nothing but instruments to be used at the sole discretion of women. And just to remind men of how disposable their bodies are, every single one of them, upon turning 18, is required to sign a document acknowledging that they can be discarded like trash at the whim of the government. Women have never been required to acknowledge their bodies or their lives as something that can be disposed of in service to a greater good.
If you think violence against men is funny, or not worthy of consideration, or somehow less important than violence against women, you hate men.
It’s that simple.
There, Feministing. I fixed your stupid piece-of-shit writing about hate for you.
You’re welcome.
Lots of love,
JB
