Reelya, you have completely ignored my point and in doing so revealed why you don't accept a lot of what Anita and I have said.
Here is the core of it;
This whole thing requires you to believe that domestic violence is about being weaker than the abuser and that it is that is the root of the problem. As opposed to, say, economic dependence or social pressure for the abused to stand by their abuser combined with toxic ideas of masculinity.
Reducing domestic violence to a question of who would win in a fight is ignoring the things that make it actually harmful. If it were a matter of a strong man beating up a weak woman it would be bad, but not anything like the problem it actually is.
Domestic violence is about a power imbalance and abuse within a relationship. Physical abuse is horrific but secondary to this. It is a problem because people can't escape. They can't escape for family reasons, for economic reasons and for social reasons. The first two should be fairly obvious. The last one is where Anita's argument is focused. Because those social reasons are what these sorts of narratives re-enforce. It's these narratives that lead people to believe
they deserve what is happening to them. That they would be in the wrong if they left. That they would be shunned by others if they reported the crimes.
Where are the stories prevalent? I certainly never read them.
In common books and films (hell, try
Twilight for starters). In the games that Anita used as examples. In
courtrooms.
In real life. In workplaces. In homes.
When I talk about narratives I don't just mean media sources. I mean the stories that people tell themselves and others to understand what is happening in the world. We like to relate events to stories we know and understand to help get a handle on them, especially if we don't have the details to comprehend the situation on its own. Putting aside these stories is hard, even if you recognise you are using them.
There is a good example in the
Hunter link. They are breaking down the narratives used in courtrooms to describe domestic violence incidents;
(1) ‘Violence’ means ‘physical assault’. By contrast to the feminist understanding of violence as the exercise of power and control producing fear, social stories about violence tend to define ‘violence’ exclusively to mean (serious) assaults producing physical injuries. This is evident, for example, in most domestic violence prevalence studies, which measure only the incidence of physical and sexual assaults.
The focus on physical assaults diminishes the scale of domestic violence, allowing it to be seen as a relatively exceptional or rare event rather than as the pervasive phenomenon suggested by the statistics cited at the beginning of this article.
(2) Violence is a product of relationship conflict. A national survey of attitudes towards violence against women in 1995 found that only 6 per cent of respondents attributed the causes of violence to ‘male socialisation, dominance or power’. Respondents were more likely to attribute domestic violence to factors such as financial pressures, relationship problems and alcohol abuse.
More recently, men’s violence has been excused in the media as a product of frustrations engendered by the family law system.
(3) The view that violence is a matter of relationship conflict suggests that both parties are responsible for domestic violence, a view that underpins the proposition that women are as violent as men.
(4) If violence is about relationship conflict, then the obvious way to end violence is to end the relationship. If violence
is caused by the stresses of marriage, it follows that once the parties are separated, the violence will stop.
(5) Women who are subjected to violence are thus expected to leave their relationships in order to stop the violence. Consequently, social stories about violence also seek to explain women’s failure to leave abusive relationships. These include the notions that women who endure abuse are willing victims – masochists – or somehow attract abusive men.
Alternative explanations centre on the woman’s lack of credibility – that is, she must be lying about or exaggerating the severity of the violence,
because if it was true she would not have stayed.
It goes on and is a worthwhile read. In particular point 7 which I want to focus on for now;
(7) Social and legal stories about domestic violence tend rather to deny, minimise and trivialise violence than to regard it as a serious issue. There is a degree of ambivalence in social attitudes towards violence, in that while it is abhorred in the abstract, individual claims to victimhood tend to be treated with suspicion.
Even when people understand that domestic violence exists and is abhorrent they are unlikely to translate that to a situation in front of them. A lot of the time this is because it doesn't fit their own mental model of what such abuse should look like, often because that model is itself unrealistic along the lines of the points in the extended spoiler. Even once you have accepted that the violence has occurred there are whole range of excuses and reasons for it that the mind instantly brings up, fitting the abuser into a more or less acceptable narrative that is familiar and understood (even if it's utter bullshit).
And once again this comes back to choosing not to re-enforce the narratives that are behind such attitudes. Promoting media that reflect progressive or simply accurate models of domestic abuse and violence is important, as is calling out media and arguments that push outdated, regressive, apologetic and inaccurate models.
It is true that attitudes are shifting, but they are far from as far progressed as you have suggested.
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Topic: Re: Only two posts on 'Tropes vs Women in Video Games' (Read 303709 times)