"The Red Pill" and Feminist Violence

The BBQ Pit
61

We have the same low numbers for male forensic exams for sexual assault (which we also provide.) I suspect the rates of sexual assault for men are much higher than reported but how in hell do we get them to start talking about it? In order to demonstrate a need, we have to have a demand for the service, but men are less likely to pick up the phone if they know they aren’t likely to get help.

And in the midst of all this we have received a warning that James O’Keefe is trying to make propaganda videos smearing domestic violence shelters in order to discredit the Violence Against Women Act, which funds many DV shelters, including ours. It’s fucking sick.

62

Spice Weasel, I once read that men are turned away from shelters for fear that they’re posing as victims because they know the woman they battered is there. Have you ever come across that situation, or have you heard discussions about it?

63

It’s pretty disturbing the lengths to which batterers will go to get to their victims. Where I work we have very high security (just to get to my cubicle I have to go through three security-locked doors, and that’s not even the shelter side of the building, which has a gated parking lot.) We have had issues with batterers posing as volunteers at local shelters, and we’ve had issues with batterers trying to gain entry to our building by claiming they are dropping some stuff off. They frequently ask if so-and-so is here and our policy is we can neither confirm nor deny that anyone is receiving services with us. Occasionally we have batterers threaten to come back and blow up the building or something. (I have never felt unsafe at this job because security is so tight. The new building has been open a little over a year and so far we’ve had no incidents where batterers actually made it into the building.)

So it is totally within the realm of possibility that a batterer would try to pose as a victim to gain entry to a shelter.

Fortunately, we have a really good relationship with the Sherriff’s office.

One of the first thing we do with new residents when safety planning is gain a full description of their batterer and one of the first things we do during intake screening is determine if they fit any of the batterer descriptions. The intake room is also secured from the rest of the shelter, and I’m going to guess that the shelter staff would get a sense of something being off pretty early on in the intake process.

The reality, though, is that most domestic violence shelters can’t afford the kind of security that we have. Where I work is pretty special, because it houses not only the shelter, but counseling offices, legal advocacy, prevention education, forensic examination, career counseling, and administrative staff all in one building. It is a 36,000 square foot facility. I’m not going to lie, it is pretty exceptional in size and quality and I am very proud to work there. I could see smaller places being a lot more vulnerable to those types of incidents, which is why many choose not to disclose their location. Once we constructed the new building we made a decision to publicize the location kind of as an intentional symbolic statement that survivors need no longer hide in the shadows.

64

In my own work experience, many, if not most unsafe work conditions result from a cavalier attitude toward safety that can be traced to a macho, “I can handle it”, “cut the crap and let me work” approach to work, where people with safety concerns are often seen as “pussies”. Like it or not, these are very often gendered attitudes.

65

This is an insane stretch. If you’re going to represent feminism, the least you can do is, well, not this. It’s a common criticism of feminists that we shoehorn the patriarchy in everywhere, in ways that are often inappropriate. This is so clearly one of these cases that it’s kind of mind-blowing to see someone actually bring it up.

66

This is nothing new for him in GQ. Same dance, different tune.

Now that Obama is no longer the President I guess his focus has become all these female thugs running amok in the streets and why nobody is talking about that.

67

Yeah, I was gonna say something, because as a feminist, it seems fairly obvious to me that the reason men get depressed when they get divorced is that divorce sucks. We have some evidence that men take it harder than women and that men remarry faster than women. Studies have shown that men tend to be happier in a state of marriage than women (which is interesting, because the stereotype is usually the opposite.)

I have a lot of theories about that, many of them involving problematic gender expectations, but none of those theories involve the desire to dominate women.

68

Same as here: lots of baited hooks being slowly dragged behind boats.

69

I’m sure you’re right but you could lose the sneering scare quotes. There do exist men that are battered by their female partners. The proportion is minuscule compared to the horrific problem of battered women but it is nevertheless real. They are victims too and deserve better than to be scoffed at or their existence denied

70

Breast cancer in men is also real, but extremely rare, enough not to be a major medical concern. With very rare exceptions, men do not normally endure the kind of long-term physical abuse at the hand of female partners, unless it comes as a result of some other type of abuse. For instant elder abuse or by caregivers for seriously ill and or immobile persons. This type of abuse is better considered and handled under those heads since the abuse normally flows from that situation.

Adult males face a different type of adverse circumstance and violence then women do. Enough that totally different assistance strategy would be effective compared to women, so sending such a man to a women’s shelter is not helpful for him at all.

Certainly, countries could do well to improve social service for men and though I am going hoarse saying it, start to pay greater attention to the risks that teenage boys face.

71

Bullshit. Breast cancer in a man is every bit as serious as in a woman and is indeed a “major medical concern” when it occurs.

It’s not a common medical problem, which I assume is what you meant to say. I point this out because your sloppy wording can come across as minimizing the problem for an individual man. Sloppy wording and sloppy thinking means that those uncommon individuals who DO have that particular problem are not taken seriously and do not get the help they need and deserve.

I am pleased that the place I get my annual mammograms has an entirely separate dressing/prep/counseling area for the men, away from the women’s area, which is respectful to the fact they’re men and they don’t have to use the same pink-washed facilities as the women with their posters and brochures talking about breast cancer in women. I haven’t been to the men’s area, but presumably the information offered therein is geared towards men, with male imagery, and support specific to men with what is often considered a “woman’s cancer” is offered.

Uncommon is not the same as unimportant, and uncommon is no less deserving of proper services.

And this is very true - men who suffer “adverse circumstances” often do require different services than women.

72

That’s not what he “tried” to say: that’s literally what he just said.

73

He said it was uncommon and therefore not a major concern.

That can be read two ways - it’s uncommon and therefore not of medical concern, or it’s uncommon and it’s not a major societal concern. Which latter is true but I think shitty because it’s essentially saying that rare problems don’t deserve treatment.

Precise wording avoids confusion.

74

This is 100% bullshit. I’ve personally known enough men that it has happened to for me to believe the issue is wildly unreported. I’ve known men who called the police on an abusive partner to end up getting arrested themselves. There are strong cultural forces at play that result in men not reporting this.

Please note that I am not saying that more men than women suffer abuse from an intimate partner. According to the NCADV, 1 in 4 women and 1 in 7 men are the victims of severe physical violence by an intimate partner in their lifetime. One in seven is not a “very rare exception.” Furthermore, those 1 in 7 men get abused by the system in a way that those 1 in 4 women don’t, and that’s a real problem.

It’s a problem made worse by assholes like you using “scare quotations” around male victims of abuse and trying to pretend they don’t exist, so fuck you for that as well.

75

Much has been made about the notion that physical violence against men is more common than is traditionally recognized, and men who are exposed to such violence are not often greeted with much sympathy because it’s ‘‘only’’ a woman doing the abusing.

This is not okay. It’s not okay no matter who is on the receiving end of the abuse. Growing up there was a lot of violence in my home, and in most cases, it wasn’t from the men.

That said, let me give you an idea of the kinds of issues women coming to shelter often face:

-batterer has refused to allow them to work, meaning they have had no work history for years

-batterer is 100% in control of the finances

-batterer has destroyed their birth certificate, driver’s license, and social security card so they cannot leave

-batterer has threatened to kill their children or pets if they leave

-batterer has strangled them (strangulation is one of the most significant indicators of a potentially lethal situation. It is tied to all other kinds of violence. In fact, a batterer strangling his partner is even correlated with an increased statistical risk that he will fire a weapon at a police officer.) It’s also one of the most downplayed, and strangulation victims don’t even always remember if they were strangled. Our forensic nurses are experts on strangulation and they have really fancy cameras that can identify petechiae and other indicators of strangulation that may not even be visible to the naked eye. We watched this insane video during orientation in which a man strangled his girlfriend in a parking lot. She went down, completely unconscious, in five seconds, and you could see her right leg twitching. Within another five seconds she was on her feet again, someone walked by and asked if she was okay, and she said yes. She had no idea she had been unconscious. It is really freaky stuff and disturbingly common.

I’m sure the above things do happen to men, but given the way that our society is currently structured, and the fact that men are often physically superior to women in terms of brute strength, it is much less common that they encounter the same patterns of control and dominance that women do.

76

Well there’s a load of horseshit that came rolling out of your head…

Hi. My name is Chimera. I am a survivor of Domestic Abuse. I was violently assaulted in my sleep on 3 occasions as well as being routinely tripped, slapped, shoved into things, having things ripped out of my hands and my property destroyed.

While my “loving” wife went around telling everyone else that I was beating her. :smack:

One day she decided to go down her phonebook and call everyone to claim that I had beaten her. Then she got to my sister. My sister came over and they talked for 2-3 hours. My sister came to get me and took me straight to Family Court to file for an Order for Protection. Because my wife was not able to give my sister so much as a single instance of me hitting her, but admitted to hitting me. My sister approached me, utterly convinced my wife was planning to kill me in my sleep and was just lining up her court defense.

Rare? No, you just don’t see it. Mostly because you don’t take the whole idea very seriously.

77

:mad: That is one way I think in which men are particularly vulnerable, given that it is assumed this kind of abuse is impossible coming from women, so abusive women can more plausibly set themselves up as the victims. I know you’ve talked about this in the past, but it really never fails to get me riled up on your behalf, because you are such a good person. And I admire that you haven’t gone the way of the Red Pill craziness to assume all women are this way. I’ve seen men on this board become bitter misogynists for far lesser offenses.

78

I’m wondering the same. most of them are just bent out of shape because someone told them something they said was “not cool.” So they go on rants about SJWs and snowflakes trying to tell them what to do.

79

I’m afraid you’re wrong. Men have a higher acceptance rate to college than women.

80

I am way familiar with the kind of abuse victim face. The list of problems that women have that you listed are pretty much in line with what I have seen.Our jobs as outside Counsel typically involves giving of legal advice and or filing of cases to rectify these problems. I currently am doing a case for a woman whose hubby one day up and kicked her out of their house, their joint business and took the kids. From a nice middle-class life to a women’s shelter. She has not adjusted well, unsurprisingly. She also has some fairly serious mental issues, which I am sure have not been helped by recent events. Would love to say there will be a happy ending, and the law is indeed on our side here. Whether practical realities of the Court process permit that, I don’t know.

Well, as I said earlier, men don’t have the same issues as women do. Here is a UK Government report on the matter from 2010 (PDF starts around page 70). Basically;

*most serious sexual assaults on women are done by partners, most serious sexual assaults on men by strangers.

  • The only type of intimate violence where men and women face relatively equal risk is is nonpartner family abuse. In everything else, including intimate partner abise, sexual violence, physical violence men face much lower incidences. Much more pertinent, a significant number of violence against men reports are from stalking or harassment; which are now defined as “physical violence” as well.

  • Something like 3 out of four perpetrators are men.

  • Younger men were more at risk than older married or widowed men, while the older women risk was lower then younger women, but not as substantially lower.

Basically, its an apples and oranges comparison.

[QUOTE=Broomstick]
He said it was uncommon and therefore not a major concern.

That can be read two ways - it’s uncommon and therefore not of medical concern, or it’s uncommon and it’s not a major societal concern. Which latter is true but I think shitty because it’s essentially saying that rare problems don’t deserve treatment.

Precise wording avoids confusion.
[/QUOTE]

Only if you absolutely ignore the context and not read the whole post, but rather cherry pick. Considering I said right under what you quoted (and what you conveniently left out of your quote)

And yes, while it would be desirable to give all necessary assistance to rare scenarios, real life does not work that way. Shelters, trusts, government programs have budgets, and limits on resources and they need to be expended on the most common and likely problems. Indeed half the time they struggle just to handle the more common scenarios.