We all remember the images. Russia had just begun its invasion of Ukraine and the Ukrainian government was scrambling to respond. So were everyday Ukrainians. Millions headed for the border with Poland as the government issued a military conscription order. Women, children and old people fled to safety. Males of military age headed in the opposite direction – toward their friendly neighborhood conscription office to be fitted for a uniform, handed a rifle and told to lay down their life for their country and the regime-change aspirations of far-away powers.
So far, tens of thousands have done just that and tens of thousands more will as the war drags toward its first anniversary with no end in sight.
What happened to feminism? What happened to gender equality? Where are the feminists indignantly demanding to fight, be maimed and die alongside the men?
Those questions are perfectly obvious, but have gone entirely unasked, much less answered. Not only is there not an issue, it seems to have occurred to precisely no one that there might be one. The “gender equality” we’ve been hearing about for decades turns out to be entirely conditional – “equality” when it doesn’t threaten women, traditionally gendered roles when it does.
But we knew that. It doesn’t take a war for us to discriminate on the basis of sex; the domestic violence industry does the job quite well and has for some 50 years. From its very first days, that movement has made it clear that, despite the realities of male-female violence, DV can only be seen as a gendered phenomenon and men and women treated differently.
In 1971, Erin Pizzey opened the first domestic violence shelter for women in England. On interviewing her clients, Pizzey learned that 60% of them “were as violent or more violent than the men they’d left.” Therefore, Pizzey understood that, to combat DV, we had to understand that both sexes could be perpetrators and both victims. Moreover, protection for women meant convincing them to not initiate violence against their partners, a fact that’s been borne out by subsequent research.
But Pizzey’s revelation was an anathema to the burgeoning movement, for which every mention of female perpetration or male victimization was to be silenced. She was driven out of the movement she’d started amid a flurry of death threats and the murder of her dog.
Over the ensuing 50 years, the evidence backing up Pizzey’s revelation has grown far beyond critical mass. Literally hundreds of studies demonstrate beyond question that, if anything, women are more likely than men to start a fight with their partner and that their greater propensity for violence likely comes from our refusal to socialize girls and women against violence against men. Boys are told from their earliest years that it’s never alright to hit a girl, but girls receive no such instruction.
In short, we accept with barely a thought the violent victimization of men and boys; it’s a matter of unquestioned public policy worldwide. Cannon fodder in war is all but invariably masculine and no one bats an eye; half of domestic violence victims are male and again no one bats an eye, let alone offers them any sort of support or services. C’est la guerre.
In fact, authorities worldwide seem to be doubling down on policies they know to a certainty to be based on the fiction of male corruption and female innocence and that, because their premises are flawed, are incompetent to address the problem of DV.
Consider, for example, the United Nations that, in 2000, established November 25th as International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women that of course has been celebrated every year since, together with weeks of global activism on the subject. This year, the world body is ratcheting up its activism on behalf of women. UN Resolution A/77/302, vows the “Intensification of Efforts to Eliminate All Forms of Violence Against Women and Girls.”
What about an International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Men? No, there’s nothing of the kind. The violence against men and boys – in war, crime and DV – that far outstrips that against women and girls, goes entirely unmentioned, unconsidered, unaddressed. Elites in government, the press and academia appear perfectly happy with that status quo.
But not everyone is. Amazingly, 46 organizations from 16 different countries are petitioning the United Nations to conform its behavior to its stated mission of combatting discrimination on the basis of sex around the globe. The umbrella organization for those groups, Domestic Abuse and Violence International Alliance (DAVIA), points out that “A compilation of 343 scholarly investigations conducted in 40 countries concluded that “women are as physically aggressive as men (or more) in their relationships with their spouses or opposite-sex partners.” DAVIA’s demanding that the UN establish November 18th as the International Day for the elimination of Violence against Men to begin to combat anti-male domestic violence.
At last, there’s a burgeoning movement to force authorities to acknowledge and act on what is in fact old news. Without their doing so, serious progress against domestic violence cannot be made. I urge all readers to contact DAVIA and give them your support.
