As most readers know, advocacy of human rights for men creates a climate of continuous accusation. This demands rhetorical discipline in activists, now accustomed to exploitation by bad actors who deliberately twist their statements out of original context.
As targets of this persistent and often absurd torrent of accusation, and realizing the falsehood of the narrative, the ongoing imputation of malice begs explanation.
A recent HuffPo article by Eve Ensler suggests a possible explanation for innate male predatism. The Vagina Monologues author, in her rush to declare how over she was of her rape-culture fantasy, dropped the hint that she spent every day since the age of five obsessing on the topic.
I am over years and years of being over rape. And thinking about rape every day of my life since I was 5-years-old. [1]
When this is considered against Ensler’s play, in which a 13 year old character declares her own rape “good,” it becomes clear that the author’s concluding statement in her HuffPo piece reflects something other than the desired end to sexual violence.
The time is now. Prepare for the escalation.
Ensler appears earnest, but her rhetoric suggests a desire to indulge in large scale sexual victimization of the demographic she devotes so much time to heaping with accusation. In fact, Ensler and other advocates of her persistent-victim identification use the maintained narrative to enact violence by proxy against the sexual demographic supposedly responsible for all human harm.
Although the FBI recently redefined the legal definition of rape, criminal victimization statistics have consistently demonstrated that rape is the lowest-incidenced category of violent crime tracked by law enforcement. Thus the claim of “rape culture” decried by so many prominent feminists is not based is on real world data. Rather, it a projection of desire. Indeed, the feminist approved view, now normalized – that all harmful behavior is masculine – is also projection.
Further illustration is provided by the ongoing emergence of female supremacist online organizations cheerfully advocating systematic male-targeting infanticide and male-targeting eugenics. Pam O’Shaughnessy, the Simon and Schuster published author, advocates male targeting eugenics.[2] She is only one example of many.
While academically obvious – mainstream recognition of women’s capability for malevolence is obscured by the recitation of cultural myth. Specifically, the childish fantasy that women are uniquely good, nurturing or innately innocent. That this fantasy fails on cursory examination does not diminish the idea’s persistence.
Main stream media continues to promote and re-enforce the fantasy of male equivalence with evil using the sloppiest and most obtuse argument.
If women ran the world, there would be no war.
Even aside famously hawkish or corrupt politicians like Margaret Thatcher, Hillary Clinton, Condi Rice, Indira Ghandi, Imelda Macos, Winnie Mandela, this statement is complete nonsense. It is not merely false, it is one of the most hateful statements in continued use.
This idea trades on a wilful avoidance of the fact that now and throughout history, men’s and women’s motivations and means of acting in the world are different. The simplistic claim that most criminal offenders are male deliberately ignores this, and ignores how much male behavior is on behalf of, or manipulated by, women. This is not an attempt to re-attribute all male misbehaviour to women, but to point out the widely ignored but obvious fact that women’s misbehavior and violence is largely indirect, pursued through others.
Within domestic disputes, women’s use of chivalry-practicing men, as well as the use of state-funded enforcers, is not a secret. Setting aside the ethics of false claims of abuse or simply of fear, courts and police provide a mechanism of violence by proxy for women.
Outside of legal consideration, violence on behalf of women (or children) is the basis for the cultural construct of heroism. Within MRM writing, unaware men willing to absorb or provide violence based on chivalry are called white knights, and this term is not a compliment. These are men who have failed to recognize their own value as humans, but cling to the externally sourced valuation of themselves as “good men.” The literal translation of which is “disposable human.”
On a larger scale, western societies apply violence almost exclusively through the use of males, and on the behalf of females. This is demonstrated in the United States in the continued tradition of male-only requirement to registrater for military service. It’s also demonstrated by the practice of deploying female military personnel into low risk assignments.
Simple minded denouncers of masculine violence point to our culture’s choice in expending young men’s lives, while protecting women’s – and claim that soldiers using deadly force reflect those individual’s choices rather than their utilization by our culture’s collective will. So,the hateful, false claim of “If women ran the world there would be no war” is not only a direct lie, it also contains a number of other false assumptions.
[box type=”alert” icon=”none”]Judged by the measure of electoral power, women do run the world. “Women comprise more than half of the U.S. electorate and have influenced electoral outcomes for more than 40 years.” [3][/box]
[box type=”download” icon=”none”]Women also control the world when that control is measured in money. According to a number of sources, women control up to 65% of spending world wide, and 80% of spending in the united states[4][5][6][/box]
Some ideological bigots skilled in the art of public relations are lionized for celebrating this increasingly obvious fact. Rather than seeking equality of rights and opportunity – such individuals approach masculine apartheid with triumphalism.[7]
But what about war? If the human beings who have to die on foreign battle-fields controlled the world, then, maybe there would be some substantial reduction of war. Likely substantially less war which serves no purpose but to secure the profits of corporations.
Pauline Nyiramasuhuko was the first woman convicted of genocide for her Role in the Rwandan Genocide. Although she was a high-level organizer as well as direct participant in the mass-murder and rape of over 800,000 people within 100 days, the international press focused on her appearance – that of “school teacher” or someone’s “dear great aunt.”
Underneath these remarks was an assumption that women are purer, weaker, more subservient than men and therefore less capable of committing the kind of atrocities for which she stands accused.
Those who view Nyiramasuhuko’s actions during the genocide as somehow inexplicable because of her gender ignore history and engage in the stereotypical thinking that perpetuates the special victimization of women.[8] “The case [is] that women’s innate peacefulness is as mythical as men’s violence”[9]
The traditional view of women in conflict has always been as passive victims. This myth trades on a conception of feminine identity as lacking volition or agency. As if to be a woman is to be a child. It is an item of cultural mythology routinely exploited by ideologues and other bad actors, and it’s persistence prevents rational approaches to ameliorate violence both at a personal level in civil societies as well as large scale violence within the frameworks of warfare.
Pauline Nyiramasuhuko’s role as a planner and and driver in the Rwandan genocide is often incorrectly characterized as an item adherent outlying data, at odds with normal feminine behavior, but this is rationalization, attempting to conform to the mythology of women’s innate benevolence.
Nicole Hogg, a former legal adviser for the International Committee of the Red Cross wrote in March 2010 :
“Many ‘ordinary’ women were involved in the genocide but, overall, committed significantly fewer acts of overt violence than men. Owing to the indirect nature of women’s crimes, combined with male ‘chivalry’, women may be under-represented among those pursued for genocide-related crimes, despite the broad conception of complicity…”[10]
The American historian Wendy Lower drew international attention by documenting how large numbers of ordinary German women willingly went out to the Nazi-occupied eastern territories as part of the war effort, participating in support of genocide.
“Thousands would be a conservative estimate,” Lower said, in an interview in Jerusalem in July of 2010 .
While most did not bloody their own hands, the acts of those who did seemed all the more perverse because they operated outside the concentration camp system, on their own initiative.”[11]
The common understanding of violence is that which is direct, but this a simplistic conception of it, ignoring the indirect use of violence and force. This is not limited to flashy and spectacular evil such as organizing of mass-murder or genocide in the context of warfare.
While it may be true that women are not as direct in their use of violence as men, a number of social customs provide mechanism for indirect use of violence by women. The accepted outsourcing of violence through chivalric men is not only common, it’s also formalized in the use of state-funded enforcers by women. A persistent ideology of violence and aggression as uniquely masculine qualities helps obscure this. In situations of domestic violence – a phenomenon known by researchers in this field to be reciprocal, and not sexually specific – almost all public messaging portrays a false, sexually directional picture. This is the persistent myth of evil men, abusing innocent women.
In fact, women enjoy the ability to instigate violence on their behalf by using conformist men who buy into the idea of their own human worth as a product of their utility in dispensing and absorbing violence on women’s behalf. Using the police as muscle, making false claims of abuse, or merely claiming to be “afraid” are mechanisms available to women for indirectly instigating violence against men. As many as 75% of protective orders against males are obtained without justification. [12] This is a court-enforced mechanism for women’s indirect use of violence in the form of court officers or police.
That a uniformed man enacts this on behalf of an initiator of violence by proxy does nothing to change the fact that although outsourced and indirect, this is still violence.
The reality of the use of false accusations of rape, sexual assault, or violent assault are point of contention among ideologues whose attachment to the mythology of innate feminine innocence disrupts useful address of this issue. Despite a climate of denial, law enforcement professionals report that false accusations comprise as much as 50% of such allegations.[13][14].
False claims of victimhood are also an effective mechanism for directing violence by the proxy of police and court officers against individuals without direct participation by an instigator.
The examination of differing models for enactment of violence, comparing the direct and the enactment of violence by proxy illustrates two points. One being a disposal of the myth of feminine nature as uniquely peaceful. The converse case, that women are innately violent is not implied here, rather – that human beings, without respect to sex are capable of malice and violence. If a false narrative of innocence is attached to one biological group, members of that group are exempt from the adult accountability. The personal responsibility necessary in adults for a functional society.
Every person is capable of aggression, physical and otherwise, but adult accountability without an idealized self-image is what allows non destructive participation in a community. The second item is recognizing the demonstrated tendency to use indirect, rather than direct use of force nicely accounts for our current climate of accusation by members of one demographic against the other. No phantom epidemic of unreported criminal victimization is necessary to make sense of widespread frivolous accusation.
In addition, cultural recognition of indirect violence – or the use of force by proxy – is necessary if we’re serious about reducing the ensuing human damage.
[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eve-ensler/over-it_b_1089013.html
[2] http://radicalhub.wordpress.com/2011/10/04/radical-feminism-in-the-21st-century/
[3] http://www.america.gov/st/elections08-english/2008/April/20080523105153WRybakcuH0.5036737.html
[4] http://she-conomy.com/report/facts-on-women/
[5] http://www.trendsight.com/content/view/40/204/
[6] http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/global/below-the-topline-womens-growing-economic-power/
[7] http://www.avoiceformen.com/feminism/hanna-rosin-abusing-her-children-on-video/
[8] http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1662710
[9] Jill Steans – Gender and International Relation http://www.polity.co.uk/book.asp?ref=9780745635811
[10] http://www.icrc.org/eng/assets/files/other/irrc-877-hogg.pdf
[11] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/18/world/europe/18holocaust.html
[12] http://www.dvmen.org/dv-16.htm
[13] http://mensnewsdaily.com/2007/04/22/during-my-time-as-a-prosecutor-i-was-amazed-to-see-all-the-false-rape-allegations-that-were-made/
[14] http://www.ipt-forensics.com/journal/volume6/j6_2_4.htm
