The Washington Post has a long, troubling, and provable history of feminist-inspired gender bias. This bias is self-evident: for decades the Post has published thousands of sad articles about women beaten by their husbands or boyfriends, all but completely ignoring similar stories of millions of men who are equally battered by wives or of children that are beaten or even killed by mothers.
By its irresponsible publication of Amber Heard’s 2018 Op-Ed that defamed Johnny Depp, the Post inadvertently illuminated the fact that for fifty years it has been helping to propagate a massive feminist lie: that women aren’t as violent as men.
It is feminism’s Big Lie.
Proof of this massive lie is, ironically, reflected in the experiences of two female victims of domestic violence. These two “special victims”, Erin Pizzey and Suzanne Steinmetz, were stalked by and received death and bomb threats from the same abusers.
Pizzey was forced to flee England after her dog was shot and killed. Steinmetz’s abusers tried to prevent her from receiving tenure at the University of Delaware and had bomb threats made at her daughter’s wedding.
What had these two women done to provoke their common abusers’ wrath?
They told the truth:
Women are at least as violent as men in intimate relationships.
And who were their common abusers?
Feminists who wanted to keep this ugly truth hidden from the world.
Erin Pizzey founded the world’s first women’s shelter in England in 1971. She observed that that 62 of the first 100 women who came into the refuge were as violent as the men they had left. She wrote a book, Prone to Violence that told the truth about female violence. Feminist extremists hounded her out of the country:
“Over the 12 years that I was running the refuge, if I went to speak there were screaming feminists outside. I tried to publish a book called Prone to Violence, we finally did get it published, but I had to have a police escort all round England and there were death threats and bomb threats. And the final moment came for me, after struggling for all those years, when the bomb-disposal unit came to my house because there was a suspect package and so everything that came to me had to go to them first because they were concerned about my safety and the safety of my family. And that’s when I left England and went into exile for something like 15 years.” [source]
Dr. Susan Steinmetz, author of The Battered Husband Syndrome (PDF) received death threats from radical women’s groups after her book was published. Two partners in related DV research, Richard Gelles and Murry Straus, described how the extreme feminist reaction over the issue of battered men squelched further study of the subject and caused many other researchers to avoid the field completely:
“Perhaps the most unfortunate outcome of the wrangle over battered men is that since the debate in the late 1970s, there has been virtually no additional research carried out on the topic. The furor among social scientists and in the public media has contaminated the entire topic. … Other social scientists who witnessed the abuse heaped on our research group — especially on Suzanne Steinmetz — have given the topic of battered men a wide berth.” [source]
But in the years since these two courageous women were threatened by feminists for telling the world about the female role in domestic violence, other women have come forward to speak the truth:
· In her book When She Was Bad — Violent Women and the Myth of Innocence, Patricia Pearson challenged 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.”
· Cathy Young, cofounder and vice-president of the Women’s Freedom Network, wrote in her book Ceasefire! Why Women and Men Must Join Forces to Achieve True Equality,
“…bad acts by men are magnified into a “war against women”, while women’s bad acts are denied. A new emphasis on special protections for women rather than equal rights has dangerously eroded the rights of men accused of rape, domestic violence, or sexual harassment [emphasis added].”
· Syndicated columnist Kathleen Parker, author of Save the Males, wrote 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. [emphasis added]”
· American writer Nancy Updike in 1999 wrote an article Hitting the Wall in “Mother Jones” magazine. The article described a study performed by female psychology professor Terrie Moffitt of the University of Wisconsin:
“A surprising fact has turned up in the grimly familiar world of domestic violence: Women report using violence in their relationships more often than men [emphasis added] … “[The] research disputes a long-held belief about the nature of domestic violence: If a woman hits, it’s only in response to her partner’s attacks.”
· English journalist Melanie Phillips, in her book The Sex Change Society: Feminised Britain and the Neutered Male, wrote how feminism had become an “unchallengeable orthodoxy” in England. Her book describes an ominous campaign launched by the Cabinet Office Women’s Unit:
“Children were urged to report violence against mothers and sisters. There was no mention of abuse against fathers. Instead, a television advertisement showed a husband berating his wife when she told him dinner would be late. That was the violence. It was followed by a helpline number for children to call if a woman in their house had been abused.” [Note that the husband was berating his wife, not beating her.]
· Mary Cleary formed the organization AMEN (Abused MEN, renamed Men’s Aid Ireland). She observed that male victims of domestic violence were systematically denied their basic human rights:
“No social issue in modern times has been the subject of such deliberate deception and misrepresentation as that of domestic violence.”
Pizzey, Steinmetz, and these other brave and honest women, unbeholden to feminists or the National Organization for Women, aren’t some right-wing, woman-hating nutjobs. What they say is backed up by solid research:
· Two pioneering, federally sponsored studies, the National Family Violence Surveys of 1975 and 1985, were the first to conclusively reveal the equal female role in domestic violence. Also see a list of the many reports generated because of these surveys.
· In an annotated bibliography References Examining Assaults by Women on Their Spouses or Male Partners (click “[PDF]” for full list) by California State University professor Martin S. Fiebert includes 286 scholarly investigations, 221 empirical studies, and 65 reviews and/or analyses that all show women are as physically aggressive, or more aggressive, than men in their relationships with their spouses or male partners. (Yes, you read that right: “or more aggressive”.)
· An analysis that completely demolishes the feminist lies about female abuse of men, Disabusing the Definition of Domestic Violence: How Women Batter Men and the Role of the Feminist State (PDF) (notice the title ending: “the Role of the Feminist State”), was written in 2003 by Linda Kelly (now Kelly Hill) and published in the Florida State University Law Review. Anyone who wants a brief, but extremely well-annotated summary about feminists’ assault on the truth about domestic violence is strongly urged to read this analysis.
· In an ironic — even hilarious — contradiction to the feminist position that DV is predominantly “men beating up women”, multiple studies show that lesbian couples have much higher rates of domestic violence that do heterosexual couples. This article discusses the findings of two federal studies that revealed these higher rates of abuse. If you do the calculation, one study shows that lesbian women are nearly 75% more likely to be victims of domestic violence that are heterosexual women.
· Finally, those who will steadfastly deny that feminists have lied about female violence should 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”. Be sure to view the video by Dr. Tonia Nicholls, The uncomfortable facts on IPV.
Feminists have denied the facts about women’s role in domestic violence since Erin Pizzey and Suzanne Steinmetz brought it to the world’s attention nearly 50 years ago. And feminists continue to deny these facts to this day.
But even if feminists deny the facts of these studies and the words of these women — and no doubt they will — feminists can’t deny the web-documented reality of women abusing men.
Just ask Johnny Depp.
Or ask golfer Tiger Woods, or comedian Christopher Titus, or model Lewis Burton, or baseball player Chuck Findley, or John Bobbitt, or … well, yet again, you get the point.
Or, finally, you could ask Texas dentist David Lynn Harris, or comedian Phil Hartman, or American salesman Travis Alexander, or Susan Smith’s two children, or Caylee Anthony. Oh sorry, you can’t ask any of them. They’re all dead, killed by girlfriends, wives, or monstrously selfish mothers.
Or you could do a Google search on “male victims of domestic violence”. I was again surprised by the number of results: 57,000,000 (or 471,000 when I searched for the exact string)!
Why do feminists and the National Organization for Women stubbornly cling to their “blame it on the patriarchy”, gender-biased view about domestic violence?
For chivalric sympathy:
Marie Anne Du Deffand, a French hostess and patron of the arts perfectly summarized, some 250 years ago, a core reason why today’s jaundiced feminist view of domestic violence (and the entire world) has been so successful:
“Women are never stronger than when they arm themselves with their weaknesses.”
Feminism is the abuse of male chivalry.
As long as feminists can gain male sympathy by appealing to men’s chivalric nature, the more lies they can get away with. It really is that simple. Feminists have always preyed on the better angels of men’s nature.
But mostly it’s all about the money (and hating men):
In one interview our inestimable Erin Pizzey summarized the money-and-hating-men angle:
“[There’s] a lot of money in hating men, particularly in the United States-millions of dollars. It isn’t a politically good idea to threaten the huge budgets for women’s refuges by saying that some of the women who go into them aren’t total victims. Anyway, the activists aren’t there to help women come to terms with what’s happening in their lives. They’re there to fund their budgets, their conferences, their traveling abroad, and their statements against men [emphasis added].”[Daphne Patai. Heterophobia: Sexual Harassment and the Future of Feminism (cited David Thomas, Not Guilty: The Case in Defense of Men)]
In her “Disabusing the Definition of Domestic Violence” analysis, Linda Kelly Hill supplies a more thorough summarization of the money motive behind DV:
“For real-world domestic violence advocates, defining domestic violence as a woman’s problem is a practical, not an academic, decision. In a world of infinite problems but finite resources, competition for adequate attention and funding is terrific. Recognition demands prioritization. By limiting the definition of domestic violence to male violence, domestic violence advocates have been able to frame the issue in a manner narrow and sympathetic enough for it to remain high on the public agenda. Broadening the definition to include female violence risks diluting the effectiveness of domestic violence funding campaigns, as female violence as well as male violence would then have to be targeted with, presumably, the same fixed amount of money. As the commentators honestly explain, given the “fierce competition” for funding,
[i]f we acknowledge the existence of battered husbands, then the funding designated for programs to assist battered women will be cut further because monies will be directed at programs for battered men. Thus, many radical feminists have fought for years to keep battered husbands closeted so that the small amount of money that was available for wife abuse would not be jeopardized.” [The secondary quote is from “Intimate Violence: The causes and consequences of abuse in the American Family”, by DV researchers Richard J. Gelles and Murray A. Straus, 1988.]
The quintessential example of this focus on money is the billions of dollars in feminist pork available to feminists to distort the facts about domestic violence via the Violence Against Women Act, an act whose very name reaffirms the “men beating women” portrayal of intimate partner violence while it completely ignores the existence of violent women.
As summarized in my prior online article A Letter to Joe Biden,
“History will ultimately show that, with [Joe Biden’s] active support and assistance, the United States Congress, in passing the Violence Against Women Act, enshrined into American law an Act that shares the same ideological parents as the Nuremberg Laws of Nazi Germany: hate and prejudice. This law is not worthy of a nation that needs to present itself to the rest of the world as a “fair and just democracy”.
For other articles about the many lies told by feminists, see my Feminist Lies section.
By Stephen Bond on September 30, 2022.
Exported from Medium on February 28, 2023.