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[Max White]

I think the problem here is the point of view that women deserve violence because they annoyed someone.

Annoying someone is not a justification for violence.  Period.

This is true, however it does make a very interesting point.
Men who beat their spouse aren't, for the most part, doing it doing it because they think violence against women is acceptable, they are doing it because they are emotionally impaired at that point. As such citing it as an example of the prevalence of men who think violence against women is ok is dishonest. I mean really

Having worked in prisons ranging from remand right through from maximum to minimum security levels I so often noticed what was an unofficial profile of the wife killer. He would sit in the remand yard kinda numb gazing into space for hours on end, hardly moving at all. Occasionally he might wring his hands, hit himself on the head and mutter something like, "I've killed my best friend". It could be easily seen what great pain he was in and the intense loneliness felt. Invariably he desperately wanted her back.

Does that sound like a guy that just enjoyed beating women, or that knowingly made a mistake. The problem doesn't seem to be the perception women deserve violence, but rather a mix of one parties inability to utilize a program to control their emtions and/or the others inability to work with that program.

Looking back at the post that link was from...

Personally, i'm not buying that there's a cultural meme of women needing to be beaten. Maybe in the US.

It's certainly not a popular belief here. To be honest, as a worldview it's up there with the "popularity" of pedophilia.

EDIT: I'm not sure I'd call one of the most reviled acts in modern society part of the "cultural consciousness"

I couldn't find any statistical data or study that wasn't behind a paywall unfortunately.

But these anecdotes give the general sense.

http://www.care2.com/causes/domestic-violence-teens-think-rihanna-deserved-it.html
http://voices.yahoo.com/some-reasons-men-give-being-violent-their-partners-3405980.html

EDIT: I'm going to dig around more since I know I've come across a study before and I hate not having hard data.
EDIT2: Nope.. just snippets through Google of the article discussing it, but not even something viewable in the abstract. Darn.

I'm going to go with Reelya here in saying that I'm not convinced that there's a cultural meme of women needing to be beaten.

Further more, if you look at the examples in Anitas video, they aren't women deserving violence, some what the opposite. They are cases where women have done nothing to deserve any sort of punishment, but instead they have to suffer due to circumstance. It isn't trueful to say that the fridge trope is promoting the idea that women deserve violence.

[Vector]

Female is BOTH a noun AND adjective.

Indeed!  As demonstrated right here.

if it's a female who threw the punch

I already linked it before in the thread, here:

http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=124353.msg4299191;topicseen#msg4299191

The chance of acquittal is 10 times higher for female husband killers as for male wife killers.

That was not the question I asked.  I asked for a citation for the specific piece of data: "women are acquitted for assault in response to verbal abuse."


Max White: You're both Australian.  We're talking about US-made video games that come out of, and speak to, the USA's own cultural cesspit.  Please see my own comments on what large swathes of this country turn out to really be like.

Does that sound like a guy that just enjoyed beating women, or that knowingly made a mistake. The problem doesn't seem to be the perception women deserve violence, but rather a mix of one parties inability to utilize a program to control their emtions and/or the others inability to work with that program.

Sounds to me like someone who was allowed violence and encouraged in it (the corrosive formation of modern masculinity and "boys will be boys" shitfest), and then got to the real world and fucked up.

This is why we don't ask for personal solutions to institutional problems, folks.

[Max White]

But you have no evidence to suggest that in this specific case that is what happened. Showing symptoms of clinical depression like that makes it pretty clear such a guy regrets what he did, and doesn't feel like it was deserved at all. There is evidence to suggest such an incident was the result of his inability to control his emotions.

You can't make this leap and then assume it is because violence was encouraged at a younger age. As a society we have long since movied on from such Freudian methods as blaming upbringing without specific evidence.

EDIT: Ok you know maybe this is another cultural gap, who knows, but emotional problems -> violence encouraged in childhood seems like a pretty big leap here.

[Neonivek]

I don't know the type of guy Vector seems to be talking about is less the prototypical guy who killed his wife.

And more the stereotypical guy who killed his wife.

The stereotype of the abusive women beater did actually come from actual women beaters.

At the same time, however, that can be said about just about any stereotype.

[Glowcat]

I already linked it before in the thread, but i'll reiterate the citation.

...

http://bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/SPOUSMUR.PDF (Summary: http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/SPOUSFAC.PDF )

I think that may be the study your link was referring to. He seems to be attacking a media headlines and some kind of argument that men always get off easy. It's definitely true that women tended to have lower sentences and acquitted more often but there was also either evidence of self-defense or in the cases of men aggravating factors such as alcohol or drug abuse. The person you linked even admitted as such, but it was irrelevant to his argument. It is however relevant to the argument you seem to be making, which is that women are always treated more leniently on the basis of verbal abuse.

[Reelya]

If you looked into it, you'd know the extreme difficulty of getting the police to acknowledge domestic violence with a male victim. Much more difficult than with even female domestic violence to get anyone to take it seriously.

For example, there are dozens of shelters in Canada for female victims, holding thousands of places, all publically funded, and there was ... exactly one shelter in Canada, for men in similar situations, which could hold 20 people and was privately funded and has now been forced to closed down, and the proprietor has committed suicide.

http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2013/04/29/earl-silverman-dead-suicide_n_3179850.html

Erin Pizzey, a prominent activist who founded one of the first women’s shelters in London, England, in the 1970s, said male victims of domestic violence remain largely ignored, if not ridiculed, by society today

“Billions are spent — billions I say — across the world for women's refuges and virtually nothing for men,” Pizzey told readers on Reddit. “And the one men's refuge in Canada was so denigrated and despised by the Canadian government ... Earl committed suicide after he was forced to sell his home and he lost everything.”

[Neonivek]

If you looked into it, you'd know the extreme difficulty of getting the police to acknowledge domestic violence with a male victim. Much more difficult than with even female domestic violence to get anyone to take it seriously.

It is why a few places actually force the police to take it seriously whether they want to or not.

Mind you we have jumped out of videogames at this point and should jump back since the videogame discussion didn't actually get to its natural end.

[Vector]

@Max White: Right.

And if there are a lot of guys like that who can't control their emotions, and not a lot of women like that, we have to ask what's going on.  Most people leap to biology, but this is my opinion: if you could have biology or society, switch society.  That should be your first plan of attack.  When people do that, there are big gains.  We found out that little girls who are given blocks to play with get the same spatial abilities as little boys.  We found out that female physics students who were given a simple assignment: "Spend 10 minutes in class writing down your dreams and aspirations, and I won't be collecting it" had their grades move up from C's and B's to A's and B's, not quite as good as the men but pretty close.  Just from that.  Our data is so muddied by cultural forces, and people keep jumping to biology--why, because it's easy?  Because they swallowed too much hard scientific kool-aid?  Because they think that genes are destiny?  Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that treating this shit like it's totally unfixable seems like a kind of horrible thing for everyone involved, beyond just being counter-indicated.

So I think that maybe if we worked on a simple message for boys and men: "It's okay not to dominate.  You're worthwhile being you," things could change a lot.  I've had multiple guys plaintively tell me that they had been fed so many messages their entire lives about deserving a supermodel that they just couldn't deal with women as they are.  Sexism is good for absolutely no one, even the people being pandered to.

If you looked into it, you'd know the extreme difficulty of getting the police to acknowledge domestic violence with a male victim. Much more difficult than with even female domestic violence to get anyone to take it seriously.

That is a different statement than the one you made.  This statement is true.

For the other: citation needed.  Still.  Please stop moving the goalposts.

[Reelya]

I don't have the data on hand. But the conviction rate is vanishingly small for female domestic abusers.

i raise an eyebrow at how you're suddenly not buying into the difficulty of convicting domestic abusers - but only skeptical based on the gender of the accused. If I was to state that male abusers aren't commonly convicted, I'm sure you wouldn't require citations.

Anyway, link #1:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_crime#Statistical_data

Aggressivity and gender
Further information: Aggression#Gender

Males are typically more openly and violently aggressive than females (Coie & Dodge 1997, Maccoby & Jacklin 1974, Buss 2005), which violent crime statistics support.

Some researchers have suggested that females are not necessarily less aggressive, but that they tend to show their aggression in more covert and less physical ways (e.g., Passive-aggressive behavior). For example, females may display more verbal and relational aggression, such as social rejection.[15][16] Additionally, some data shows that while men are more likely than women to use physical aggression overall, rates of physical aggression within the context of dating and marriage tend to be similar for men and women, or that women are even more likely to commit domestic violence against a partner.[17][18][19][20] However, such data generally shows that men tend to inflict the greater share of injuries in domestic violence.[21]

Whilst males inflict greater injuries, the overall rates of domestic violence are pretty much equal. what difference exists is clearly due to strength.

Males are much more likely to be both charged and convicted however.

[Bauglir]

I base this assertion on the much higher acquittal rate for female spousal murders vs male spousal murders.

I question your assertion on the basis that that's an overly simplistic measure, relying on the assumption that there's no significant difference between the events that lead to such trials. It's entirely possible that cultural assumptions about women's weakness will influence a jury against considering her capable of murder (or assault), but it's at least equally possible that those same assumptions will influence women to avoid committing violence against men except under threats that serve as adequate cause for self-defense in the eyes of the law. And at the same time, assumptions that men should be dominant will influence more men to commit violence with no such justification, leading to a higher conviction rate.

EDIT: Above is a plausible alternative explanation, not an assertion of sincere belief about the true situation. My actual belief is that you're concluding something in agreement with your initial opinion based on insufficient data, and there isn't enough information to conclude what the source of the difference is. ENDEDIT

More broadly, though, I'm frustrated by the strategy of taking an argument about women's treatment in media and spending so much time arguing about victimization of men. I don't intend to say men are never victimized, nor do I intend to say that their problems don't matter. It's just that it seems like a subtle derail to bring up examples of how men are treated in a discussion about how women aren't. Perhaps I've missed the point, but it seemed like Anita's argument was that women have X, Y, or Z as potential roles, and can also fill in when the medium doesn't make any meaningful distinction (for instance, silent protagonists). And that that's the extent of their participation. It wasn't about the industry being unfair in favor of men, for instance.

At least, that's what I took away from it. All armchair reasoning, or it would be if this damn office chair had arms... It's also possible that I've missed part of the conversation that made this whole double standards thing relevant, or the part of the video. Fallibility is definitely a thing that could be relevant here. So, sorry if I've mischaracterized any arguments here.

[Max White]

@Vector
I would like to propose a different hypothesis.
Perhaps the problem is that there is a social expectation that men do not have emotions. Men don't cry, they need to be strong and tough and manly! If they are sad they are weak and if they are angry they are villains. When you pressure people to not acknowledge their own feelings, you are going to start seeing emotional problems showing up such as domestic abuse, substance abuse and depression, all of which are more common in men. The problem isn't that men think violence is ok, but rather they think being anything other than a rock of solidarity is bad.

So I think that maybe if we worked on a simple message for boys and men: "It's okay feel natural emotions like anger and sorrow.  You're not a bad person for it" things could change a lot. I've had multiple people tell me I was less of a man for being unhappy that it got to a point that I couldn't deal with it (Although in my case I took this out on myself rather than another). Sexism is good for absolutely no one, even the people being pandered to.

Telling men they have been bought up to be violent and domineering does not help because it just pushes the point that men need to try and pretend not to feel anger until to gets to breaking point, and then women become victims not because they are women, but rather because they are the closest to this guy at the time. Just look at the rate of domestic abuse in gay relationships, the problem isn't that men feel like they need to dominate women, otherwise these numbers would be much higher than in male only relationships.

[Glowcat]

Men who beat their spouse aren't, for the most part, doing it doing it because they think violence against women is acceptable, they are doing it because they are emotionally impaired at that point. As such citing it as an example of the prevalence of men who think violence against women is ok is dishonest. I mean really

I really wish I could find that study since it specifically dealt with rationalizations even after the fact being "she deserved it". Even in the heat of the moment a man is going to be influenced by what he is taught. If he's taught that a woman who "deserves it" should be hit then he is most susceptible to that message during an impassioned moment where his brain's higher functions are impaired.

Personally, i'm not buying that there's a cultural meme of women needing to be beaten. Maybe in the US.

It's certainly not a popular belief here. To be honest, as a worldview it's up there with the "popularity" of pedophilia.

It doesn't have to be popular or even openly accepted. Racism isn't accepted and yet racist stereotypes still manage to populate under different guises by people who swear up and down that they aren't racist, and not out of intentional dishonesty either.

Further more, if you look at the examples in Anitas video, they aren't women deserving violence, some what the opposite. They are cases where women have done nothing to deserve any sort of punishment, but instead they have to suffer due to circumstance. It isn't trueful to say that the fridge trope is promoting the idea that women deserve violence.

Again, you can't just stop at the internal consistency (Woman is possessed by darkness, our noble hero must kill the one he loves) but rather other cultural memes which already exist and, as mentioned, it's the prevalence of either this or the fridge trope that are reinforcing a subconscious idea about roles in relationships. While it's not directly the woman's actions that must be punished, at least in most cases, the implication is still there that violence is for her own good. It's problematic in that relationship and repeats to us a common image of what is "true" that requires conscious abandonment to overcome.

[Reelya]

It was a general observation that the justice system deals with the two cases very differently. After all, in case of murder you have a dead body, so there is definitely a crime committed. Also the number of deaths on each side is broadly similar. So it shows they're buying the defense case much more readily for female killers than male killers.

for domestic violence, I can't find many sources of readily available data. But, bearing in mind many sources which say that the incidence of male->female relationship violence is roughly similar to the female->male incidence, let's look at conviction numbers. Unfortunately it's the Daily Mail, but hopefully they can't get raw numbers wrong:

Just one in 15 domestic violence cases results in a conviction

The number of women convicted of domestic violence is up 268 per cent in five years, from 806 in 2004-5 to 2,968 in 2008-9.

Convictions of men were up 144 per cent, from 18,659 to 45,484.

3000 vs 45000, for a crime category which studies including the British Crime Survey state is broadly similar between the genders. Note that the raw crime reporting rates do not show such a large gap, as reported in the guardian etc, so that shows the conviction rate for female victims / male abusers, is much larger than for male victims / female abusers.

[Neonivek]

because that's the "blame the victim" strategy

I accept blame the victim to a certain extent... mind you the idea that men report it less DOES factor into it.

So yeah, what is the percent of reports to convictions?

[Reelya]

In the british Crime Survey and Home Secretary Office's data, reported in the Guardian etc, the gap was much less than the 15-to-1. of the conviction rate. about 40% of domestic violence crimes reported had a male victim, and this rate was steady for several years in which data was collected.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/sep/05/men-victims-domestic-violence

so that shows that the crimes with a male victim were far less likely to secure a conviction than the ones with a female victim.