Pauline Hopkins is an editor who works for the Melbourne based publishing house, Spinifex Press; ironic employment given her apparent difficulties with reading comprehension.
That irony is softened, however, when you consider that Spinifex is a feminist publisher and Hopkins is just another indoctrinaire who blurs the already meager line between being ideological and being intellectually impaired.
Case in point, her recent article in Daily Life titled, “The group that believe [sic] violence against women is a conspiracy.”
I am sure you can guess which group that would be.
Hopkins was inspired by a sticker recently found on the entryway door to Spinifex that read, “False rape allegation: will your son be next?” It also displayed the URL of a certain website dedicated to the issues of men and boys, false rape claims being among them.
Daunted by her inability to contend with that message, she set about digging through the pages of AVFM until she felt like she had something to attack.
Her deflecting topic of choice was our take on the ideologically governed domestic violence industry, and the idea that those who professionally and financially profit from a distorted, gendered model of violence might just benefit from an abundance of female victims and male perpetrators.
I know, it’s crazy, but that’s how we roll.
To support her point, Hopkins takes a few glancing shots at AVFM Australian News Director Dr. Greg Canning. She attempts to buttress her attacks by mocking the idea that feminists have sought to unreasonably expand the definition of domestic violence to include highly misguided definitions.
Her problem, however, is that this is exactly what has happened.
To begin with, let’s take a look at how violence is defined, hopefully without the help of the Feminist Fictionary™.
According to the World Health Organization in 2002, violence is defined as:
“[T]he intentional use of physical force or power, threatened or actual, against oneself, another person, or against a group or community, that either results in or has a high likelihood of resulting in injury, death, psychological harm, maldevelopment or deprivation.”
The bold text is mine.
With that in mind I just spent a few seconds doing a Google search on “What is domestic violence Australia.” The first non-sponsored return was some nifty definitions of domestic violence from Reachout.com. To be fair, they did actually start by defining violence based on whether or not it involved someone being, uh, you know, violent. From there, however, it takes the feminist footpath and wanders into Spinitopia.
They inform us that violence is defined by things like, “pretending not to notice someone’s presence, conversation or value.”
There you have it. Husbands, if you don’t listen to your wife, it is domestic violence. So is not “noticing her value.”
Lack of compliments = domestic violence.
Of course, I am using the terms husband and wife in this context as we all know that women never fail to pay attention to their husbands. They also always listen to whatever he has to say, even during football games. And of course they are loathe to not notice his, uh, value.
From there Reachout moves on to even more egregious forms of domestic violence.
Ladies, a man “keeping you financially dependent,” or, as we used to say in saner days, his going out and working every day to support you, is domestic violence. Of course we all know that women never choose to be financially dependent. So many of them would gladly turn in watching daytime television in their pajamas for a shovel and life on a road crew, but some bastard is always holding them back.
That is violence.
He is also being violent if he is “making you ask for money unreasonably.” Now, Reachout did not say exactly who got to determine what was reasonable when asking someone to give you money, but I am guessing here it is the person asking for it, as the person having to cough it up might have funny ideas to the contrary.
He might also be a he.
What is most fascinating here is how the rules switch. First, if you have to depend on him, it is domestic violence. But if he does not allow you to depend on him when you think it is reasonable, it is also domestic violence.
Dependence = domestic violence.
Arrest all parents immediately.
It is enough to make your head spin. Well, unless you’re a grammatically challenged editor for a feminist publishing house.
Reachout goes on to cover a broad (I do not mean that in a sexist way) range of things that are violent without actually being violent, including spiritual, social and other forms of non-violent violence. They are very thorough.
They are also very full of shit, just like Pauline Hopkins.
Just how full of shit she is, Hopkins seems deliriously intent on proving. She continues her carnival of canards with the standard suspect sources:
“The most recent statistics from the Department of Justice in Victoria showing that 80% of domestic violence victims are female and more than 90% of perpetrators are men. But this data, as well as the VicHealth data showing male intimate partner violence is found to be the leading contributor to death, disability and illness for women aged 15 to 44 years, is dismissed by Canning as lies.”
It is probably because they are lies. But again, we roll kinda funny around here.
Feel free to read through the “report” for yourself. You might notice rather quickly that it is not focused on domestic violence, but rather on violence against women – two entirely different subjects.
That is the whole point of the report, all the way down to the impressive list of feminist ideologues who provided “research,” e.g. Michael Flood.
Flood has been caught with his hand in the gender cookie jar on more than one occasion. For instance, he claimed the following:
“Women are far more likely than men to experience a range of controlling tactics and experience violence after separation. Women’s perpetration of violence is much more often than men’s in self-defence. Men are more likely to perpetrate… for instrumental reasons.”
The truth about this whopper is provided by Australia’s 1 in 3 Campaign:
The Australian Institute of Family Studies (1999)15 observed that, post-separation, fairly similar proportions of men (55 per cent) and women (62 per cent) reported experiencing physical violence including threats by their former spouse. Self-defence is cited by women as the reason for their use of IPV (including severe violence such as homicide) in a small minority of cases (from 5 to 20 per cent). After analysing for verbal aggression, fear, violence and control by each gender, husbands are found to be no more controlling than wives.
Also, as reported by 1 in 3, “Men’s Health Australia contacted Dr. Flood to ask for references to back his claims but he was unable to provide any. These ‘statistics’ remain uncorrected.”
For the sake of dear Pauline and a few grins, let’s consider some actual, sweeping research on the incidence of domestic violence by gender . Martin Fiebert’s bibliography examines 286 scholarly investigations: 221 empirical studies and 65 reviews and/or analyses, which demonstrate that women are as physically aggressive, or more aggressive, than men in their relationships with their spouses or male partners. The aggregate sample size in the reviewed studies exceeds 371,600.
I will do what Hopkins and Flood, et al, can’t and won’t; include valid citation.
http://www.csulb.edu/~mfiebert/assault.htm
What is that you say? Fiebert is too American for you? OK, fair enough. Let’s look at Australian research. The following is from the Australian Bureau of Statistics Personal Safety Survey (2006), the largest and most recent survey of violence in Australia. It found that:
29.8% (almost one in three) victims of current partner violence since the age of 15 were male;
24.4% (almost one in four) victims of previous partner violence since the age of 15 were male;
29.4% (almost one in three) victims of sexual assault during the last 12 months were male;
26.1% (more than one in four) victims of sexual abuse before the age of 15 were male.
Also, the SA Interpersonal Violence and Abuse Survey (1999) found that:
32.3% (almost one in three) victims of reported domestic violence by a current or ex-partner (including both physical and emotional violence and abuse) were male;
19.3% (almost one in ?ve) victims of attempted or actual forced sexual activity since they turned 18 years of age were male (excluding activity from partners or ex-partners.
Keep in mind that this is survey data, and males are proven to significantly under report.
A British Crime Survey (BCS) found that only 19% of male victims would tell someone in a professional organization that they had been a victim of domestic violence– less than half the number of female victims (44%). It also found that 28% of male victims do not tell anyone–more than twice the proportion for women.
http://www.theyworkforyou.com/wrans/?id=2010-12-08b.29433.htm
A Canadian study reported that women are four times more likely to report partner violence to police than men.[1]
Of course, all this is elementary to those interested in evidence based solutions to social problems. It has been an established fact for decades that domestic violence is not a gendered problem. It has also been proven that men and boys suffer from a lack of services and sex-based discrimination from a domestic violence industry with an agenda to maximize profits from disinformation about the very victims they purport to serve.
Hopkins scoffs at these ideas, even as she offers herself as personal proof that the problem exists. Nowhere is her agenda and her bigotry more obvious than in the following:
“[M]ale intimate partner violence is found to be the leading contributor to death, disability and illness for women aged 15 to 44 years.”
Even a cursory glance at the data (real data) on causes of injury and death from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, dismisses this for the bullshit that it is.
More importantly, Hopkins making this statement can only lead to three possible conclusions. One, she is a liar and can’t be trusted. Two, she is too ignorant to have a valid opinion on domestic violence, or, three, she is both. I am betting three is the lucky number.
The data, which is well qualified in the study quoted by Hopkins, infers a positive correlation between illness, injury and death with domestic violence, not a causal relationship. It implies, among other things, that women who are victims of domestic violence are also likely to be smokers, and to have alcohol problems, and colds.
In that light, it is no more accurate to say that “[M]ale intimate partner violence is found to be the leading contributor to watching television, eating rice cakes and having toenails in women aged 15 to 44 years.”
It is complete and utter bullshit. It is also bullshit that Vic Health has been called on publicly. Here is their response to being called out on their distortion, reported by the 1 in 3 Campaign:
“As the media release relates to a past event, no correction will be made to the document on the website. However we will ensure more consistent wording is used in the future”–in other words they are happy for their website to continue to mislead the public.
And so is Pauline Hopkins.
The remainder of her article was a mishmash of feminist whines du jour which pretty much boil down to the idea that there are not enough rich, powerful women to make them happy, with nary a notion of the idea that being rich and powerful often requires the presence of a brain and the willingness to use it.
Should we add dumbing women down to the list, alongside creating victims of domestic violence in order to profit from them?
We absolutely should.
The domestic violence industry and the avaricious prigs who run it require stupid, victimized women with no personal agency. That’s what they need in order to line their pockets and maintain control. And that is precisely what they work to manufacture.
As I took a read through Pauline Hopkins’ article it was more than clear that she is a good faith player on team bullshit, taking any woman she can for a long, slow, stupid ride as long as it ends up with a little cha-ching for Spinifex Press — and consequently, herself.
Oh, and that sticker? The one she reacted to without writing about? It is not representative of A Voice for Men wearing tin foil hats and obsessing on conspiracies.
It is just KARMA.
[1] Brown, G. (2004). Gender as a factor in the response of the law-enforcement system to violence against partners. Sexuality and Culture, 8, 1–87.
