A Letter to Post Contributor Emily Nix About Recent Article on “Why women stay with their abusers”
Dear Ms. Nix,
I respectfully ask that you take the time to read this letter about your recent Opinion piece in The Washington Post, Why do women stay with their abusers? Here’s one overlooked reason, and to thoughtfully consider what I say here.
As a proud lifelong reader of the Post I have long noticed the paper’s gender bias, most notably its imbalanced coverage of domestic violence.
But my pride in the Post turned to quiet outrage in 2018 after the paper published two horrible, undeniably gender-biased articles: Why can't we hate men? and Amber Heard’s shameful op-ed that defamed Johnny Depp. In response, I’ve been sending letters to Post columnists who have written articles that perpetuate this gender bias.
Your article is, unfortunately, another example of this bias.
Please don’t get me wrong. I don’t deny the reality and have genuine empathy for women who are abused by their intimate partners. It truly is heartbreaking. But I have even more empathy for men, as they are twice victimized: first, they are equally abused by women, but their abuse is almost completely ignored by articles like yours – and by society at large.
Based on your USC Marshall profile page, it appears you are young enough to have lived your entire life under the feminist assertion that, as stated in your article, “the most common type of abusive relationship: a man victimizing a woman”, so I can understand how, with little thought and even less research, you have simply regurgitated this belief.
Your article – and thousands of others like it that mindlessly echo the myth of innocent, non-violent women abused by men – reminds me of the answer Ernest Hemingway gave when once asked what quality was most needed to be a great writer: “a built-in, shockproof, crap detector”.
Ms. Nix, you really need to turn your crap detector back on and then do some basic research.
To begin, you should read a book, When She Was Bad — Violent Women and the Myth of Innocence, that challenges the stereotype of men as the aggressors and women merely as innocent victims:
“The idea that domestic violence refers exclusively to wife abuse or to violence against women is so deeply ingrained in Western consciousness that it is impossible to grapple with [stories of male victims of DV] without first unraveling some potent conventional wisdom. … At the heart of the matter lies human will. Which partner — by dint of temperament, personality, life history — has the will to harm the other? By now it should be clear that such a will is not the exclusive province of men.”
Before you write another article about domestic violence or any gender issues, please review the following information that I also suggested to the Post’s gender columnist Monica Hesse in a recent letter I sent to her.
Visit The Partner Abuse State of Knowledge (PASK) website, a great source of evidence that proves that women are at least as violent as men.
Take the time to view a presentation found on the PASK website, The uncomfortable facts on IPV (interpersonal violence). Presented by Dr. Tonya Nichols, a professor and researcher at The University of British Columbia, I believe this video is the best single summary of the available data that disproves feminists’ depiction of DV. (If you don’t want to spend the time viewing the video, my Substack article, Domestic Violence: Feminists Can No Longer Hide the Truth, provides a good summary.)
Read my Substack article Domestic Violence: Feminism’s Big Lie. The article provides a brief history of how feminists used threats of violence against two women who spoke up about domestic violence perpetrated by women.
Finally, you really must read Australian men’s rights activist Bettina Arndt’s January 2023 article Feminism was never about equality. It includes reference to a video made by another men’s rights activist, Janice Fiamengo:
“Feminism was never sane. It was never without deep rancor and bitterness against men, never free from the claim that women were absolute victims of male predation, never uninterested in destroying the family, never accurate in its claims about women’s social situation, never unwilling to slander men in the most vicious and unpitying ways, and it never expressed any appreciation for men nor recognition that men had made any contribution to society or that men had ever acted out of love and concern and compassion for women in the laws that had been made or social instruments that had been developed over time. It was always a deeply misandrist, man-hating, man-blaming kind of movement.”
Ms. Nix, please turn your gender crap detector back on!
Sincerely,
Stephen Bond