A Letter to Washington Post Columnist Mark Jenkins about Article on Female DV Victims Art Show
Dear Mr. Jenkins,
I respectfully ask that you take the time to read this letter about your article from last April, Phillips Collection show commemorates victims of domestic violence, and to thoughtfully consider what I say here.
Please note that although I normally only write to authors of recent articles, your article is such a horrible, egregious example of The Washington Post’s anti-male gender bias that I felt it absolutely necessary to communicate my strongest objection to it.
To begin, know that I’m a proud lifelong reader of the Post, who nevertheless has 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 after the paper published two undeniably gender-biased articles in 2018: Why can’t we hate men? and Amber Heard’s infamous op-ed that ultimately embarrassed the Post¹, cost Heard millions, and proved beyond doubt that men can be victims of violent women.
In response, I’ve been sending letters to Post columnists who have written articles that perpetuate this same gender bias.
Your article is, unfortunately, a most extreme example of this bias.
Please don’t misunderstand. I have the utmost sympathy for actual female victims of domestic violence.
But I also have even more sympathy for male victims of DV, as they are twice victimized: first, as true victims of female violence against men; second as the “missing persons” of domestic violence, as described by the preeminent family violence researcher Richard J. Gelles:
“Men have been shot, stabbed, beaten with objects, and been subjected to verbal assaults and humiliations. Nonetheless, I do not believe these are the ‘horrors’ of violence toward men. The real horror is the continued status of battered men as the ‘missing persons’ of the domestic violence problem.” — from The Missing Persons in Domestic Violence: Battered Men.
Men like Johnny Depp.
Or golfer Tiger Woods, comedian Christopher Titus, model Lewis Burton, baseball player Chuck Findley, and John Bobbitt, all who survived assaults by their female partners.
Or Texas dentist David Lynn Harris, comedian Phil Hartman, and American salesman Travis Alexander, all who did not survive assaults by their female partners.
You, The Washington Post, and the Phillips Collection should be ashamed for writing, publishing, and promoting, respectively, what you all disingenuously call an “art exhibit”, but which in reality is feminist propaganda.
American columnist Kathleen Parker and author of the book Save the Males, made mention of this “DV propaganda” in an article Men Aren’t the Only Abusers:
“… the [feminist] myth-making industry has continued to produce what amounts to propaganda — churning out statistics, erecting billboards of bruised women, going for the aorta with images of tear-streaked children asking “Why won’t Daddy stop hitting Mommy? … But some have been so driven by their political agenda to advance women’s causes, even at the cost of truth, that they can’t permit a variant view.”
To explain why the Phillips Collection “art exhibit” truly is propaganda, a website, How to tell the difference between real art and propaganda describes three characteristics that differentiate art and propaganda. After each characteristic quoted below, I show passages from your article that provide proof why the show and your article are both propaganda:
“There are important distinctions between art and propaganda. Although both are forms of visual communication, their aims are completely different. Great art explores the mysteries of human experience. Propaganda seeks to influence an intellectual decision by stirring up obscuring clouds of emotionalism.”
From your article:
· “They represent victims of domestic violence, “women who are not here anymore… Abuse, brutalization and murder of women by male partners increased significantly after March 2020, according to many reports.”
· She identifies them as victims but also describes them as “survivors.” The contrast between softly fashioned paper and hard-edge metal signifies the twinned qualities of vulnerability and indomitability, destruction and endurance.
“Strong art reaches universal, shared experience by honestly presenting the results of self-exploration. Propaganda seeks to substitute that universal appeal with the presentation of ideology it assumes to be commonly held by all right-thinking people.”
The ideology that is being promoted by the exhibit is of course that only women are victims of domestic violence. But the reality is far different. As the Johnny Depp / Amber Heard defamation trial proved, despite the feminist mantra to “believe women”, men can be victims of intimate partner violence.
“Propaganda is distortion, intended to drive the audience into a pre-determined conclusion.
Isn’t it obvious that the photograph below is deliberately meant to “drive the audience into a pre-determined conclusion”, i.e. that women are at extreme risk of injury or death — or even torture - at the hands of violent men?
This image is most definitely the very worst kind of propaganda, one that deliberately ignores and contradicts the uncomfortable truth about domestic violence: women are at least as violent as men. For proof, one need only visit The Partner Abuse State of Knowledge (PASK) website. PASK has performed an extensive review of 12,000 DV studies and concludes that domestic violence is NOT simply “men beating up women”.
In closing, let me include a quote from a book by journalist Sue Ellen Browder, Subverted: How I Helped the Sexual Revolution Hijack the Women’s Movement. Browder is a former writer for Cosmopolitan magazine who made the following observation:
“Unfortunately, the free press is only as free as the minds of those journalists, editors, and writers who work in the field. I had already become that strange paradox of mankind that’s especially commonplace among journalists: I had become both the deceiver and the deceived.”
Mr. Jenkins, with all due respect, when it comes to writing about domestic violence, you and your fellow journalists have abused the free press and have become both deceivers and deceived.
Please stop propagating the feminist lies about DV.
Sincerely,
Stephen Bond
Note: Because the author’s email wasn’t included on his Post profile page, this letter was sent directly to Post management, with the request that it be forwarded to him.
For other letters to Post columnists see my Letters to The Washington Post list:
FOOTNOTES:
1. Especially with articles like this online:
“A publication with any semblance of ethics might have asked Depp for comment about the sexual violence claims before running with the allegations — then subsequently spiked the op-ed or sicced its reporters on the case for more fact-finding. But not The Washington Post.
That paper, which loves to blather in its self-important tone about how “democracy dies in darkness,” didn’t bother to turn the lights in the direction of Heard’s claims. Instead, it gave her a free pass to air her dirty laundry against her ex-husband and consequently enabled her to paint herself both as a victim and a crusader of the Me Too era.”
By Stephen Bond on February 21, 2023.
Exported from Medium on February 28, 2023.