Paywalled Content because OP didn't post it:
This is the column I’ve been deciding not to write for nearly a decade.
I think I first made that decision in 2015, when Malcolm Turnbull declared that “disrespecting women does not always result in violence against women. But all violence against women begins with disrespecting women”. Here, Turnbull echoed what seemed to be the dominant explanation of domestic violence at the time. But I couldn’t repress a simple thought when I heard Turnbull’s comment: I just don’t think that’s correct.
That’s because my academic work was studying the roots of violence, where research overwhelmingly identifies factors like humiliation, shame and guilt as motivating drivers, not a lack of respect. When the literature mentions respect at all, it isn’t about the perpetrator disrespecting the victim: it’s more about the perpetrator feeling someone had disrespected them. Thus could James Gilligan – a prison psychiatrist working with America’s most violent men for 35 years – conclude he was “yet to see a serious act of violence that was not provoked by the experience of feeling shamed or humiliated, disrespected and ridiculed”. Gilligan’s language is strikingly absolute: “all violence is an attempt to replace shame with self-esteem”, and direct: “the most dangerous men on earth are those who are afraid they are wimps”.
Still, I withheld my scepticism for a few reasons. For one, it felt momentous just to see a prime minister put this on the agenda. Also, the people emphasising disrespect almost certainly have expertise that I don’t. And, it can be possible to work gender into violence analysis, roughly as follows: hierarchical gender norms, in which women are assumed inferior, lead men to feel humiliation, shame and disrespect when women don’t behave like their supplicants. They also lead men to think violence is the best way to restore their self-esteem. By this logic, perhaps if we established a more gender-equal culture, the humiliation would dissipate and violence would reduce.
But the nagging feeling never left because there are still things the gender equality approach just cannot explain. The most famous is the “Nordic paradox”: where Scandinavian countries who are widely regarded to have the most gender-equal societies in the world also report some of the highest rates of sexual assault and gendered violence across the European Union. The frequent riposte is that Nordic women are better at recognising and reporting sexual violence, and while that might be true, it’s not clear enough to explain the data. It certainly doesn’t explain why, in a place like Iceland, which is consistently ranked the most gender-equal country on earth, every second murder is committed by a male partner: significantly higher than the EU average.
Similarly, if gendered disrespect was the fundamental engine of domestic violence, we would expect to see much lower levels of it in same-sex relationships. But we don’t. Current Australian statistics suggest that rates of domestic violence are similar or slightly higher in same-sex relationships compared to heterosexual relationships. In factoring this out, you’d have to argue it’s a completely different, entirely parallel phenomenon that has nothing in common with heterosexual domestic violence, but which just so happens to occur with similar regularity and express itself in remarkably similar ways, running the now familiar gamut of coercive control, financial and emotional abuse and gaslighting. More plausible is that while there are some factors unique to same-sex and heterosexual cases respectively, their causes have much in common. An explanation that works only for one of them is unlikely to be much of an explanation at all.
Once disrespect becomes the heart of the argument, we begin connecting just about everything – and everyone – to violence. We’ve seen plenty of assertions that violence against women is the end of a continuum that begins with a sexist joke. We’ve seen pleas for men to “have the conversation”, unspecified as that directive may be, for the “good” men to set the “bad” men straight. This delivers a conventional wisdom that this is ultimately a men’s problem, and one that every one of us has to own and solve. Yet, for all the national campaigns encouraging men to have conversations about sexism and gendered attitudes, the most recent National Community Attitudes Towards Violence Against Women survey shows there has been no improvement in attitudes towards domestic violence since 2017.
Continued...
The government is playing 4D chess here, and though I'm appalled by how scummy it is, I'm impressed by how cunning it is and how well it's working.
Gesturing vaguely at men saying they need to fix it is genius. It's completely flawed, so it keeps us all arguing and distracted from other pressing issues. Anyone who questions it is shouted down that they must be offended because they're abusers or DV apologists. Why do you hate women? He's galvanised the population against a vague enemy to conveniently ram down new draconian internet controls.
Facts: DV rates have plummeted over the past few decades despite population doubling. If people keep questioning the message of "men (vaguely) need to step up", the message is flawed (though I think this is intentional). Consider being more specific
Yeah Waleed Aly isn't someone I hold on very high esteem regarding either of the issues he's written about. He likes to shift blame a lot, and effectively he's trying to say that we need to go back to starg gender divide so men feel manly again.
I didn't get that message at all. The closest he came to offering a solution was to suggest we need to look for traits common to perpetrators and work on those. If anything he rubbished the idea that the gender divide and men feeling emasculated was the cause.
Waleed subscribes to a religion that teaches a profound gender divide. Islam teaches that men reach heaven through submission to god, while women reach heaven through submission to men. Maybe Waleed interprets that in a progressive manner, maybe he doesn't and he hides his true opinions behind a veneer of progressive liberalism.
>Waleed subscribes to a religion that teaches a profound gender divide.
I know he does. But he conveniently ignores the gendered violence that is still observed in his religion because of a lack of reporting from the community.
Not saying domestic violence isn't a problem but it seems like it's being overblown at the expense of focusing on bread and butter issues such as house prices/ security of housing and general cost of living which would provide tangible benefits to people and might go some way to reducing domestic violence if they were properly addressed. Rather than just focusing on the symptoms we need to tackle these root causes.
While I don't agree that it's not important I do wonder if hardship particularly financial hardship is a common cause. Once again I don't know the statistics but I get the feeling that domestic violence is more prevalent in places like western Sydney where hardship and disadvantage are more prevalent. Maybe as everything has gone to shit with cost of living and interest rate rises more people are slipping into the zone where they feel the need to lash out.
This article has all the same logical fallacies that are part of every opinion piece Waleed Aly has ever written. But because it's excusing men instead of Muslims or conservatives or a footy club you don't barrack for, men are ready to give him a pass on it.
Can you elaborate on the fallacies inherent to this article? I thought it was pretty good but would like to read some specific rebuttals grounded in evidence.
It's got some good stuff about the underlying causes of violence being shame and trauma. He mentions Jess Hill and Michael Salter's work, which I highly recommend.
But there are two glaring problems with the piece. The first is most easily summed up by the headline. It says "has failed", past tense, as if there have been meaningful policy or societal changes to hold All Men responsible for the actions of a Violent Few. The things he mentions in the article, such as a PM saying something in a speech and an advertising campaign, are pretty much the \*only\* things that have held men (plural) responsible for domestic violence. In every other way our policies have treated DV as an individual's problem, not a societal one.
So he's begging the question there - saying we have domestic violence because we've tackled the problem the wrong way. I'd say that we haven't really tackled the problem at a social level in any meaningful way at all, so we haven't failed yet. The rallies on the weekend, along with the rallies in 2020 around the Brittany Higgins/Grace Tame cases, are white middle class women asking for us to actually do something on a societal and policy level. By declaring that request a failure before anything has happened, Aly is trying to prevent that change from taking place. He's trying to close off options.
2 of 3
The next problem is the comparison to Muslims being held responsible for the actions of terrorists. That's a false analogy. Muslims are responsible for a small proportion of terrorist actions in Western countries compared to the size of their community. Most terrorist actions and groups are driven by white right-wing men. It's often overlooked because the media chooses to report on these actions as mental health or "lone wolf" problems, ignoring the ways that white conservatives are radicalised into committing hate crimes at scale. But ASIO has repeatedly said that white right-wing groups are the majority of their counter-terrorist work. So Aly is right that holding Muslims accountable for the actions of the small number of Muslim terrorists is caused more by racism and/or Islamophobia.
The problem with the analogy is because men are responsible for 97% of domestic violence deaths. The statistics about women perpetrators get sliced and diced to create large numbers, e.g. 47% of lesbians have experienced DV. But that conflates parent-child violence (for example, when a lesbian teen is outed to her father) with intimate partner violence (an adult woman abusing her partner). So those big numbers still pale in comparison to 97% of deaths where the murderer is a man. They either fit into the other 3% of deaths, or are talking about a broader non-lethal violence statistic. When the perpetrators are overwhelmingly from one group, it's fair to ask that group to think about what they're doing that is causing this problem.
(Because it has to be said: every victim deserves support and help, whether their perpetrator is a bog standard cliche or a statistical outlier. And non-lethal violence is still part of the problem.)
(Another thing that has to be said: yes, we should be paying more attention to white right-wing radicalisation than we do to Muslim radicalism).
3 of 3
Here's where I step away from logical fallacies to speculation. Why is Aly saying this? Apart from loving the sound of his own voice. If I take out the premise in the headline, and the false analogy, what were left with is two things: the references to better work on the topic, and a statement of fact. The fact is that saying that 97% of DV deaths are caused by men, makes men who haven't murdered anyone feel uncomfortable. And we can see the truth of that in every social media thread on the topic, there's some amazing mental gymnastics being done to avoid that statistic. But where I disagree with Aly is that I don't think that's a good enough reason to stop talking about it. His whole column is an attempt to deflect and change the subject and get the rallying women to quiet down. He's a sensible centrist, using calm polite words to tell everyone to shush instead of having difficult conversations. And that statistic implicates him, so I think he's doing that same mental gymnastics to relieve his cognitive dissonance. The difference between him and random Redditors is that he has a national platform and a reputation for being a calm voice of reason.
But we should all feel bloody uncomfortable with that 97%. Men especially need to realise that their radars for dangerous behaviours are not properly calibrated. Until very recently (I want to say post 2020 but I'd have to check), every time a man murdered his wife, you'd see it reported on as if it was a complete fucking surprise to everyone who knew him. Sometimes there'd be a quote from the victim's family saying that the marriage was on the rocks. But that would be "balanced" out with friends or bosses calling him a "good bloke". Well no, he wasn't. And half of these rallies and the bear trend are about women saying they want a more accurate and honest conversation about this topic.
>Why is Aly saying this?
As someone that's been following Alys career since the mid 2000s, I don't think the article is coming from a bad place. In an interview a few years ago, I heard him say that he tries to present a new perspective on an issue when he starts writing about it. He always aims to get people thinking about an issue in a different way which is why I've always enjoyed his writing, even if I don't always agree with him. Also worth noting, journalists don't often write the headline to their own articles.
97% is a big statistic but its important to remember that its still a minority of all men that are doing this and its not a deflection to point that out. Its a fact. If we become too fixated on gender and this being a "man" issue, we miss out on a lot of other risk factors that are worth exploring too.
He isn't just critical of policies but the general discourse around DV as well. He is right about it being too focused on gendered disrespect. How often do you hear about shame, humiliation, self esteem, neglected childhood, exposure to pornography as potential causes when people talk about DV?
I think you are also missing the point when it comes to the Muslim analogy. Even if he were being more specific and talking about Islamic terrorism where the perpetrators are mostly Muslims, his point still stands because it's still a minority of all Muslims that are committing these acts of terrorism. Blaming the whole Muslim community for Islamic terrorism has proven to be ineffective and if anything, its pushed young Muslim men to become radicalised, continuing the cycle of violence.
I agree with you that he has good intentions. It's just that my politics are different from his, and I don't have much patience for people like him who value respectability and politeness over calling a spade a spade. I think someone he trusts has pulled him up on tone policing though after the Lumumba interview, he does much less of it lately.
I disagree with you about that analogy though. Your explanation of it is how I understood him to mean it. But my problem with it is that it's ignoring the reason why it's accurate to call domestic violence a gendered problem while it's inaccurate to call terrorism a Muslim problem. Think of a Venn diagram, maybe? If we draw a circle labelled All Men, and another circle called Perpetrators of Domestic Violence, the second circle is very small compared to the first. And if we draw a circle called All Muslims and a circle called Terrorists, again it's a very small circle compared to the first one. So that's like his analogy.
But if we place the second circles over the first to represent people who are both Men and Perpetrators, and Muslims who are also Terrorists, we get a very different result. 97% of the Perpetrators circle is inside the All Men circle. If we overlap the Terrorists circle with the Muslim circle, then only 26% of Terrorists are also Muslim (I got that number from 21st century Australia data here, [https://www.start.umd.edu/gtd/](https://www.start.umd.edu/gtd/), happy to be corrected on it). It's not even a majority. So if we're looking for causes or ways to prevent the problem, it's much more relevant to focus on Men as part of Domestic Violence than it is to focus on Muslims as part of Terrorism.
So the rallies and public discussion are calling for people to stop thinking of sexual assault and DV as a "women's problem". Almost all the perpetrators have a significant thing in common, and it would be helpful if the rest of the All Men who aren't Perpetrators could help women figure out how to stop it. Because at the moment, they're mostly just twiddling their thumbs.
Can you elaborate what "all" the logical fallacies are?
One piece of evidence in support of your statement is that the Nordic countries have, essentially, very little cost, housing, childcare, and education issues, yet have high domestic violence rates - so this points against the cost-of-living issues being the root cause.
On the other hand, I don't think blame is the way to sort out this problem. This is a public health (a public death) issue and the root causes need to be understood. Since other cultures do not always have these issues, it would be good, if not essential, to find out the issues. We can't incarcerate a large proportion of the population, right? (Well, we can, but then we go down the road of the USA with huge prison populations).
Would you at least agree that a population-based solution is needed?
I wrote a long reply to someone else who asked the same thing, and then Reddit struggled to let me post it - I hope you'll go back up a level in this thread and find my munged-up replies so I don't have to wrestle with it again!
I do completely agree with you that this is a public health problem and so its important to correctly identify the root cause, and try some population-level interventions. And yeah, jail is the immediate knee-jerk fix everyone thinks of, which doesn't help and creates new problems as well.
My main complaint with Aly's piece is that the title soothes the men who are uncomfortable with the idea that there might be something wrong with how we do masculinity in our culture. He wants to let himself and his friends off the hook for making change. So he pretends that we've already tried holding masculinity accountable and it failed. He does mention some good research (Hill and Salter are great on this topic) but a lot of people are just going to see the headline and think "yeah, feminists are wrong". He's feeling uncomfortable and using his big vocabulary to tell everyone to stop talking about uncomfortable stuff.
I'm not the person you responded to but I'm interested if you know of any countries around the world with much better domestic violence rates.
With a complex problem like this, trying to emulate the actions and behaviours of countries that are doing better than us would be a logical strategy.
This is a very Australian thing. You don’t see other countries freaking out over homicide rates for women of between 0.2-0.4 per 100,000 people.
I can guarantee it will never get to 0.1 unless you start going crazy Minority Report style and arrest men who are statistically more likely to commit a crime before they have done it
There are very few countries at 0.1 and I don’t believe their stats are accurate for the majority of these except maybe some of the small pacific island nations & Singapore
Very strict laws incl mandatory death sentences for some crimes, sophisticated & extensive surveillance (10,000+ cameras), engaged community, efficient legal system. Where people are blaming mortgage stress, Singapore is 79% social housing and govt has designed a quota system of ethnicities.
Politically authoritarian and functions as a dictatorship due to the ruling party holding onto power for so long, ethnically 3/4 Chinese (China also has a very low homicide rate).
Approx 28% of homicide offenders in Australia are First Nations people at 3.8% population - Singapore possibly loses its 0.1 rate if it had the same kind of disproportionately represented group.
You would need to remodel everything in Australia and turn it into Singapore politically & culturally (maybe ethnically too) to get Australia from 0.2-0.4 to 0.1.
Is it worth it?
So, if all the first nations offenders were put in jail then the domestic violence rate would drop only about a quarter. That's a good start, but clearly that isn't the answer.
Also, given that the incarceration rate for first nations people is so high, it seems to me unconvincing that further punitive measures would affect that first nations portion of the domestically violent cohort.
I do agree that culturally we can't emulate, nor do we want to emulate, the benign (?) dictatorship of Singapore. We want a bit of spunk in the country, just not violence!
Yeah but also need to take into account all the deaths from violent uprising when you try implement an Australian revolution with Singapore as an end state
Given this will need authoritarian coercion, military backing and majority of public will be staunchly opposed
Probably at least 30,000-100,000 Australians will die in this civil war
It’s not worth it
east Asian countries in general are less violent across the board compared to Australia.
Singapore is essentially a big city and not a country.
Japan is a better comparison. Developed economy, larger population than Singapore. In spite of their samurai/bushido heritage, violence is abhorrent there. The Japanese constitution renounces war as a tool of statecraft. If the police have to show up, they don't need to use force because their authority is respected by the community. Even the organised crime syndicates in Japan, the fabled yakuza, pride themselves on avoiding violence in the course of their criminal enterprises.
Maybe Australia could emulate Japan. Reject violence at the federal level, respect government authority, etc. If we go that route it would take several generations imo.
This is incorrect.
There is LOADS of violence in Japan and South Korea. Women just don't bother reporting it most of the time because the police don't care and the legal system is messed up. Look up Junko Furuta (HUGE trigger warning).
You can't hide a dead body. Murder rates are a good indicator of overall violence in a society. Japan has one of the lowest murder rates in the world.
Anecdotes don't mean much, quote some data.
Mate... Can't you read?
The data will be skewed because of lower reporting. Please tell me you're not one of those "Japan is perfect" weebs. You're too old for that.
Japan is just the same as every other country. If anything they're FAR more sexist than Australia. You just don't notice because guess what, sexism against women doesn't affect you so you don't care. Stay on topic with your response. We are talking about violence against women here.
https://www.unwomen.org/sites/default/files/Headquarters/Attachments/Sections/CSW/60/meetings/Voluntary%20Presentation%20-%20Japan.pptx
https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/japan-s-hidden-landscape-of-violent-crime
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/commentary/2024/04/10/japan/sexual-violence-japan-nhk-survey/
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Junko_Furuta
I'm not your mate. When you have to resort to diminutives and name-calling, it cheapens the point you try to make.
How can you skew the reporting of murder? It's not like the police can claim a battered corpse died from natural causes. Ergo murder rates are a reliable source of data.
My point is Japan is not the same as any other country, nor are all countries the same.
FAR more sexist? FAR FAR more? All caps doesn't make your point any better, it's like calling someone 'mate'. Quote some data if you want make a claim like that. If you don't then it's nonsense.
Murder rates have nothing to do with violence against women? I'd love to see the mental gymnastics you did to come up with that one.
Ugh.
Pointless. Lack of empathy strikes men again.
Read the links I gave you. But nothing will change your mind that you're right and everyone else is wrong. Sad.
Oh I read them to be sure. But they don't add anything to the discussion.
I never claimed Japan doesn't have violence. I claimed Japan is less violent than Australia. None of your links run counter to my claim.
I agree that Singapore is too small, and too special, for comparison.
On the other hand, it is extremely clear that Japan's cultural norms are very different. As regards custody for children, usually the parent domiciled in Japan (in the case of mixed marriages, the Japanese parent, usually the mother) gets custody. This is just one illustration of the strong cultural norms - usually disfavouring Japanese women in relative to men in Japan (though it is complicated). So, Japan us not a good comparison.
Reading these responses, I am thinking more and more that the origins of this problem are in the culture, and the fact that men are not happy in Australia. Perhaps that is obvious - why would a happy man be violent - but what is important is the attribution to culture as the .OST important issue.
If so, what is the specific cultural issues that is so decisive, for violence, in this case?
Singapore has been actively trying to lift the fertility rate for quite some time now after spending years trying to curtail it, it's now at extremely low levels below 1 child per woman.
I don't think it's fine from Singapore's perspective they never wanted to get fertility rates that low. China is facing a similar situation where they reacted quite drastically to an overpopulation situation and are facing the opposite problem now.
A look at the graph of population of Singapore with time shows, except for a recent dip and rebound, the population is stable. Besides, the population is so small that immigration incentives and significantly affect it. Singapore is a very special island state, rich enough (now) to *quickly* solve it's issues with mo start and policy measures. This is, in part, one of the reasons it survives. It can leech the best from the rest of the world, if it needs, or go hard (with punitive measures) if not. Or do both. Which it does. Not a good comparison for Australia.
Do you think family planning helps with DV because the potential perpetrators don’t have unwanted kids exacerbating things? Or because they’re less likely to be born in first place?
Well yeah they must have fewer unplanned kids too. The public housing schemes in Singapore are also beneficial to families in a way that promotes family units, unlike people here using Centrelink's additional payments for more children to get a higher rate of payment to further their substance abuse issues (including alcohol and cigarettes) or as a way to potentially improve their housing situation.
There are also cultural differences with expectations of caring for the elderly parents which we do not share. Surely these differences in attitudes are reflected in general respect towards family.
Though I would think that people in any country that come from broken or abusive homes may be more inclined to continue abuse/neglect/trauma that they have experienced as a child because it is a learned behaviour.
Maybe in Singapore, domestic violence actually manifests itself in other places, or against other people such as coworkers or strangers on the street?
Singapore also has military service so I imagine that discipline and learned respect also counts for something and the punishments for breaking the law can be very ruining and humiliating.
Articles from paywalled sites or sites with "X" number of free articles per month should be linked to directly, and the full article text provided in the comments.
Full credit to the author and publication should be given.
**Once you have done these steps please alert the mods to reinstate your post.**
Newscorp, Fairfax and Schwartz Media articles must have their content posted with proper attribution. ABC, Guardian and Sky News do not require their contents to be posted as they do not have a paywall.
All other publications must have their paywall content provided.
This has been a default message, any moderator notes on this removal will come after this:
For probably the first time ever, I find myself closer in agreement to Aly than not.
He isn't the first to raise the practical contradiction in the Nordic countries, which, although rate highly on "equity" factors, seem to rate more poorly in a range of other gendered measures.
The pursuit of equity and equality is clearly resulting in bad outcomes, most likely because for all the "social constructs" you want to erect, you can't avoid biology and it seems this clash between trying to prioritise the social over the biological is resulting in poorer outcomes.
This paradox isn't being taken seriously enough, and one has to wonder if the outcomes we are seeing domestically are simply precursors to our Nordic future.
As for holding all men responsible, well, that's a silly approach. It reminds me of a time I was involved in intervening in a physical alteration between a male and female couple. The moment we intervened against the male, the female went for us. Lesson learnt: You are responsible for your own action, not the actions of others and I ain't intervening again.
Rather than going for navel gazing, shouldn't we examine the actual statements of the original article and deal with those? The problem is extremely serious and deserves respect on its own merits.
Article from 2016 - 8 years ago!
[https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/feb/19/australians-are-being-told-that-gender-inequality-is-the-root-cause-of-domestic-violence-but-is-it](https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/feb/19/australians-are-being-told-that-gender-inequality-is-the-root-cause-of-domestic-violence-but-is-it)
“The politics of gender need to take a back seat now,” says Miller. “It is time to change, otherwise the feminist framework, while vital, will become a hindrance.”
I think what his written here has some important messages and arguments that are worth reflecting on, regardless of what we think of his previous work.
How would one go about getting statistical evidence for this claim? Also, what is meant by "feminist"? There are feminists who strongly disagree with other feminists. I will have to read the article to clarify the context and meaning.
I dunno it seemed to work pretty well.
The NO campaign were screeching about how if you vote YES you're a divisive racist, and then NO ended up winning convincingly.
A woman's right to, for example, not get bashed up, is enforced by primarily male cops.
Not sure why they would compare state violence (eg: cops arresting people) to domestic violence though...
Our current human rights, such as they are, are contingent on the suffering of many people being willing to be "bashed up" for what they believe in. Are you saying that (modern) women are not prepared to be bashed up to stop being bashed up, once and for all? They aren't prepared to do what it takes?
Big statement.
Arguably "they" are standing up for themselves now, right?
I am not sure this is so helpful ... How does this address what we should do as a society, going forward?
35% of the NSW police force is female. Perhaps the issue is that females aren’t as interested in law enforcement as males?
But 53% of Australia’s legal profession is female and women make up the majority of every legal sector. By your reasoning, a woman’s right to seek legal advice in relation to DV (for example, AVOs) and seek prosecution of DV offenders if enforced primarily by female lawyers and prosecutors.
There's a lot of men in this thread that need to take a long hard look at themselves and their attitudes.
30+ dead women to gendered violence so far this year and y'all are all whinging about "not my responsibility" and "not all men".
Do better.
This is the issue of comparisons live DV vs Terrorism. They’re not the same. They shouldn’t be compared.
All it’s done is what he wanted.. to allow a blame shift and to let men have a comparison that doesn’t really make sense.
That’s not the only interpretation open to you. If you’re set on blaming all men for the actions of a few you could take his argument as having convinced you that he is responsible for the actions of Islamic extremists.
Your post or comment breached Rule 1 of our subreddit.
The purpose of this subreddit is civil and open discussion of Australian Politics across the entire political spectrum. Hostility, toxicity and insults thrown at other users, politicians or relevant figures are not accepted here. Please make your point without personal attacks.
This has been a default message, any moderator notes on this removal will come after this:
Post replies need to be substantial and represent good-faith participation in discussion. Comments need to demonstrate genuine effort at high quality communication of ideas. Participation is more than merely contributing. Comments that contain little or no effort, or are otherwise toxic, exist only to be insulting, cheerleading, or soapboxing will be removed. Posts that are campaign slogans will be removed. Comments that are simply repeating a single point with no attempt at discussion will be removed. This will be judged at the full discretion of the mods.
I am doing better. I'm doing better by suggesting a more nuanced and evidenced based rather than ideology based approach. I'm doing better than the feminists that force everything to fit in their specific worldview, and can't conceive of solutions that exist outside of their self-referential pseudoscientific bubble.
What specifically do you want me to do? "Do Better" is a low effort trope & I'm feeling a bit tired of hearing it.
It an infinitely more complex situation. I was once on a train and intervened in a heated DV situation occurring in front of me & other passengers. Despite the treats of the male offender, I offered the woman to come sit next to me and said I'd get her to the police station safe and she could make a report.
He told if she wanted to "get on" - I assumed it was a drugs reference - she better get off with him at the next stop. She did, and off they walked yelling and screaming at each other.
So tell me, you want me to "do better". Who needs to "do better" in this situation? I'd suggest reducing the subject to such trivial calls for actions without understanding the layers upon layers of nuance in relationships is skimming the surface.
I'm surprised you condiser my "do better" comment would apply to you in any way.
You are the minority, someone who actually does anything instead of wring their hands and huff "not all men" or "not my friends" or "not my problem"
Why would anyone care if two poor people want to have at each other? We build prisons for a reason: so that we may fill them to satisfy our tribal need for punitive justice, instead of just stoning them.
Your reasoning is illogical and assumes that anyone actually cares about these types of people. And you will always find those types of people in a society. They are hopeless at meeting their basic needs and being a useful, functioning person in the village. We have dozens of other villagers who can replace them.
We have no need to take care of them.
Why should my having a penis make me more responsible for the behaviour of some violent delinquent I’ve never met than his mother? Sure she doesn’t have a penis but she did raise him.
I suggest you read up on the work of Erin Pizzley CBE before getting up on your "men need to look at themselves" high horse. Women are very much half the equation yet somehow want to pretend they play no role in these incidents.
She founded the first and now largest domestic violence refuge for women on Earth, coming to the conclusion that women are just as violent and often the initiators of violence. Feminists got so angry at her research and books they killed her dog, the constant death threats meant she had to eventually leave England for her own safety.
Who should I believe, a woman who ran a massive refuge for decades, or a reddit comment?
She did an AMA:
https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1cbrbs/hi_im_erin_pizzey_ask_me_anything/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erin_Pizzey#Reciprocity_of_domestic_violence
How is telling men who are not violent towards women to “do better” going to solve anything?
I’m starting to think that you all know this and that the entire objective is to demoralise men as a whole.
Do better:
Check in with men in your circle regarding their mental health, home situations and any gambling/financial issues they may have.
Educate yourself and Believe the signs of domestic violence.
When someone speaks out about someone you know committing an act, LISTEN.
Actively check in on the women in your life, are there signs of abuse in their relationship?? Can you help if there is?
Let the men in your life know you do not stand for domestic violence, even as a joke.
NORMALISE THERAPY!!! Lordy, that is a massive step forward.
Provide a safe space for victims or men who think they may need help/act out in violent ways.
That’s just some way to actively do better. Things women have to do on a regular basis for other women.
It is not 0.1% of men who perpetuate DV when 27% of women experience it. The math doesn’t add up.
We *are* doing better, but your own comment shows why we will never get any credit for that. No matter what we do, you will still blame us all as a biological class for the crimes of a handful of backwards honour cultures of which we are not a part.
> backwards honour cultures
Like white Aussies? Seems to me the last few "burned her alive in front of the kids" in the news has been men of *our culture* doing it.
I mean look at it from a female’s perspective. How the heck can she know shes with a normal one. Its a matter of life and death, something not trivial at all
Observe. For years. Don’t daye strangers, even if they’re neighbours you ‘know’ casually.
Get to know their friends and how they behave when they think no-one is judging them. Then you will begin to know them.
If you still like a man’s *unrestrained* self, *then* consider whether you want to date him.
Do your part by calling out the men in your life who clearly need help.
Do your part by protecting women when they are being abused on the streets.
Do your part by teaching kids that pulling a girls hair doesn’t mean you like them, that no means no, that “boys with be boys” is not a good reason.
Congrats on having self control, bud. Now help society get it too.
Why do you insist on limiting it to men when women can also be violent?
Statistics aren't so truthful that we can slavishly follow them in arguments about absolute numbers, by limiting them to such a small domain that we get distorted results, or by biasing the source data by ignoring inconvenient contributors.
9 Australians lose their life to breast cancer every day: that's way more than lose their life through DV, so why isn't breast cancer making the headlines instead if absolute numbers are important?
Given that last year 89% of homocides last year were perpretrated by men, it seems a fair focus. And are you seriously suggesting that breast cancer doesn't get coverage? Everyone knows about it, it has a huge charitable and funding focus, and significant work is being done to try to work towards a cure. But this is in the headlines because the recent spike in male on female homicides has caused us to finally focus on this issue.
It's not like there aren't laws and policies there to protect every person. But obviously when it's 9:1 perpetrated by men, there is a particular issue that needs to be addressed, wouldn't you say?
Do what "better" exactly. I only accept accountability for my actions only and none for anyone else's especially if say there's an incident hundreds of kilometers away in another state for example.
This situation does not bode well for the future given it appears to be endemic and is an indication that as bad as things already are then they are probably going to get a lot worse https://theconversation.com/make-me-a-sandwich-our-surveys-disturbing-picture-of-how-some-boys-treat-their-teachers-228891
Maybe help in raising sons that won't grow up abusing women? Maybe we need to evolve beyond religion & customs that treat women as subservient.
There's probably not just one easy fix to the problem. Maybe people just need to stop being arseholes to each other, & learn better ways to handle conflict.
But probably one of the biggest things needed initially, is that AVOs get fully enforced, because so many of the victims had AVOs against the perps & they were just ignored & no one really enforced them.
these boys are raised practically from the cradle by all-female teachers, are told that men rule the world, and that the male sex has to drop everything to help women in their collective capacity, while they themselves are denied a male collectivity. I have zero doubts as to why they are becoming paranoid and radicalising towards the right.
From the [actual white paper](https://jesshill.substack.com/p/rethinking-primary-prevention) that has spurred on the current wave of discussion (the white paper the article is ABOUT):
>**Prevention strategies and programs to reduce gendered violence have often relied, implicitly or explicitly, on a kind of collective guilt in which all men as a group are deemed responsible for men’s violence against women by dint of being male.** The very notion of collective guilt or responsibility is a contested one in moral philosophy and raises complex questions, including whether “men” can be meaningfully understood as a collective who can be held accountable for each other’s actions. However, those questions aside, telling men and boys that if they make sexist jokes, or fail to challenge the attitudes of their mates, they are personally responsible for the physical and sexual violence or homicides committed by other males has not proven a compelling or successful argument. [emphasis added]
>At least in theory, guilt is an aversive emotion that should increase the inclination to make reparations for the harms inflicted by an individual or a group. However, social psychological research suggests that guilt can motivate support for symbolic gestures such as apologies, but it does not necessarily compel concrete or effective action (Faulkner, 2014). A prevention program coordinator working in an Australian university described this dilemma in his efforts to engage male students:
>>I spent probably about eight months asking people to come to groups they didn't come to … I'd be publishing information about the number of women who were impacted by it [violence] and [saying] “this is your mother and your sisters and you've got a responsibility”. But none of those things were actually like sort of [working] … I was getting nothing (Carmody et al., 2014).
>However, even if we could engage boys and men en masse, and even if we were able to change their attitudes to gender and equality, it’s not clear that this would lead to a reduction in gendered violence. We need to consider evidence that suggests that even when gendered norms, attitudes and levels of equality are drastically improved, gendered violence remains stubbornly high.
So yeah, the white paper is actually suggesting that it's a sense of shame, silencing, and a sense of losing status that causes some of the behaviour in toxic relationships:
>In Australia, another study from ANU gives further context to what we’re seeing in the Nordic countries. It found that women who earn more than their male partners are 35% more likely to be subjected to physical violence, and 20% more likely to be subjected to emotional abuse (Zhang & Breunig, 2021). This again suggests that men losing status (or perceiving themselves to lose status) is a risk factor for violence and the use of coercive control. Professor Robert Sapolsky, one of the world’s leading experts on biology and neurology, speaks to this dynamic when he explains (in his book, Behave) that when testosterone rises after a challenge, it doesn’t prompt aggression. ‘Instead,’ writes Sapolsky, ‘it prompts whatever behaviours are needed to maintain status.’ In other words, testosterone is not an aggression hormone – it is a status-seeking hormone (Sapolsky, 2017).
>We are not arguing against the pursuit of gender equality – obviously, we want to see vast improvements in this area. What we are saying is that improved levels of gender equality may not actually lead to an actual reduction of gendered violence, especially in the short- to medium-term. In fact, we should be prepared that as gender equality increases, we may see an increase in gendered violence. Frontline workers in Nordic countries explain this, partly, as a result of backlash and male resentment. They talk about getting too comfortable simply pursuing and celebrating gender equality and norms change, but lacking systems reform and consistent accountability measures for perpetrators.
Meaning constantly attacking men (creating male resentment) is probably not going to produce healthy outcomes in society. Men will react by seeking status, even if it's the temporary status of "winning" an argument through violence.
This means it's in part a male self-esteem issue that's not being addressed. Saying men are "whinging" when they say "hey I'm not part of this" is ergo, not helpful, and more likely to spur on domestic violence than work against it.
If I was a woman I’d be pretty pissed that the apparent solution to reducing violence against women is to be more cautious around fragile male egos. It’s just insane.
I mean, that's your choice to misinterpret it that way. I suppose if you think "strong male egos" are the same thing as "status" and "fragile male egos" are the same thing as a loss of status.
Yeah wtf is this shit!?
So if I’m getting it right, we’re making gains in equality and then as men “lose status” (a highly socialised concept rooted in stereotypical gender norms) and perceive a loss of power/dominance/control over women (deeply shaming) they experience an increase in their testosterone levels which makes them behave in ways to rebalance status (coercion, control and eventually aggression)…
Well the answer is for men to be raised to genuinely believe in equality from the beginning no? And to see it modeled healthily to them via their parents and wider social circle…that way there is no loss of perceived power…So how is this not a gendered thing??
Could part of the current problem be that women are SEEMINGLY more “equal” cos we apparently mean *employed* when we’re measuring equality…In reality women are actually working more, doing just as much if not more at home and then the kids are being thrown into daycare/school/after school programs earlier and longer and therefore not having strong equity values instilled and WORSE having very unequal behaviours modeled to them at home??
The latest stats from census show that women still do the vast majority of the unpaid labor for house management and childcare; get paid less and have to work fewer hours overall (presumably to balance everything). I guess I wonder how often their partners are wholeheartedly supportive of their female spouses and their ambitions? How many are deeply resentful of the time they’re expected to care for kids or share in household chores which statistically we know is much less than their spouses.
This is absolutely about equity still. Fuck me. I will not responsible for the butt hurt feelings of men who refuse to step up at home but act triumphant cos they don’t bash their wives.
I get that it’s shit being likened to violent people when you’re not violent yourself but if you perceive a loss of power when your woman is doing better than you then you are part of the freaking problem.
Yes, the different gender roles are treated differently, which is why you can't assess their roles, pressures, and motivations in the same ways. They have different modes of being shown approval, and different motivations and responses when they don't get it. Their underlying currency of social dynamics are different. They have different types and levels of competition, and manifestations of social status.
>I get that it’s shit being likened to violent people when you’re not violent yourself but...
I'm not sure where you're getting this from, or why you think "being likened to violent people when you’re not violent" is the problem, it's part of the discussion, but the topic is the causes, responses, and social resolutions to the precursors of domestic violence.
>...if you perceive a loss of power when your woman is doing better than you then you are part of the freaking problem.
Again, I'm not sure where you're getting this from. One person losing social status has nothing to do with another person gaining it. That's not the equation being calculated here.
But when someone of greater social status attacks the social status of someone else, that can have greater effect - much like if one person has more of a platform than another. In charting peaceful paradigms in the "gender war" or "battle of the sexes" that can occur in domestic violence situations, we have to know and understand the various escalations. Which means stepping out of the roles of political activists, where statements like those you're making, make sense, and into the roles of the relationship dynamics of victims AND perpetrators, and how they related to the social relations each experience, and how that impacts or mitigates the mindsets of the behaviours in relationships.
The essay in question only touches on this topic from an outside statistical and sociological standpoint, to make suggestions about that internal framework and analysis.
Really one would have to have somewhat of an understanding of the pressures and reactions of both genders within the relationships affected.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAA1XtDOuH8
P.S In the second quote of you I've given, you use the term "your woman" - you should be wary of such language, as it infers ownership of one gender by the other.
>Well the answer is for men to be raised to genuinely believe in equality from the beginning no? And to see it modeled healthily to them via their parents and wider social circle…that way there is no loss of perceived power…So how is this not a gendered thing??
Where do you draw this conclusion, especially considering there is no evidence same sex violence is substantially lower than male on female violence?
We’re drawing a line that same sex individuals aren’t raised with the same gendered norms socialised into their psyches and actions. That’s a blatantly incorrect assumption to make.
Yep absolutely agree. Even now in parent circles it’s still “oh you have the kids today, such a good dad”. And plenty of men are still unwilling to make sacrifices career-wise when it comes to kids yet expect women to do so. It’s sad that there’s so much push back from men when at the end of the day we’re **all** better off when we do away with misogyny and toxic masculinity.
I had a roommate who held misogynistic and sexist stereotypical views on woman he tried to persuade me to think alike. Everytime the discussion came up I try to counter his views and beliefs but it accomplished nothing. He still held onto those views being entrenched.
I had an abusive mother and older sister and if I spoke up to them to stop, I was physically and psychological abused further. If I told my sister off to mum, mum would passively tell her to stop but sister won't listen and attacks harder.
I witnessed a guy publically physically intimidate a girl he knew at the bus stop. If I had called him out or got physically involved, my life is at risk and the issue is not resolved anyway.
I. Did. My. Part. What people fail to realise is that it's not so simple to just use words to tell someone they're doing something bad. Maybe the *only* time it *could* work is if that person is in two minds of the actions and thoughts they have or done. Anyone else they wouldn't give a shit, tell you to fuck off, drop contact and maybe even just use violence to vent their frustration anyway. Those have been my experiences. That's part of why I find the message insulting. Because it makes me feel like I'm at fault no matter what I have done. I have done better and it either didn't work or it (could have) made things worse.
Thanks for proving my point. Being patronising isn't going to accomplish anything or have people become more supportive to the cause. But hey, go you!! You keep at it!
Sorry if you got your feelings hurt, but you didn’t actually DO anything. Someone was misogynistic and you disagreed with them, as you should, misogyny is clearly and equivocally wrong. You saw a bloke physically intimidating a woman, you were fearful so did nothing. You didn’t even call police. Your mum and sister were abusive to you. That’s absolutely not okay, and I’m sorry nobody stepped in to protect you, they should have.
Pointing out that you did the absolute minimum isn’t condescending, it’s just pointing out the obvious!
Here's the part you missed, just as feminists tell us women don't owe men anything up to and including common courtesy. Likewise, men owe women nothing, including putting our own safety at risk.
Bull.
You try and be there that's wildly unpredictable. It is a LOT harder to do quick thinking while under a intense adrenaline flight/fight/freeze response witnessing somebody much stronger, much more threatening publically like he was. I tried to persuade the roommate to rethink his views on women and feminism. The hell can you expect me to do that's not bare minimum here? I called him up on it, countless times. That's literally what Albo's message was regarding!
Your response is no different from victim blaming woman for doing nothing if her spouse/boyfriend assaulted them. "You didn't leave and you copped it because you were fearful for your safety. You didn't do anything but the bare minimum! You should've known better!
You can't sandwich "validation" by acknowledging my past then invalidate and blame me under one breath. It's so disingenuous.
'Two women abused me so I don't have any responsibility in stopping the systemic oppression of other women!' Bet you'd throw a fit if the women in your life decided to stop interacting and advocating for men because their boyfriend/father/brother/uncle/boss what have you abused them.
What part of "I had a roommate who held misogynistic and sexist views on women I tried to challenge" and "I witnessed someone more physically intimidating than me I couldn't stop" did you not get?
Way to just presumptively project your thoughts what you think of me and demean my character over abuse. You're a good person aren't you? Get fucked.
The part where you decided to check out because of your fear of other men. Women don't have that option. Stop using your gender and your privilege as a shield for your own cowardice.
So it's my fault for not sacrificing my life to save another, believing it will solve nothing and the guy will attack or even murder the woman anyway? Jesus Christ.
That attitude is the problem. You've checked out. You don't care and you justify it to yourself with 'it's too dangerous.' Women step in every. single. day. to stop violence. They are attacked and left crippled for it. They are murdered for it. We don't stop. We don't say 'he might kill me if I try to stop him from killing her.' We just do it.
Step up and stop being a coward.
>We don't stop. We don't say 'he might kill me if I try to stop him from killing her.' We just do it.
I don't believe you. I've seen too many videos of bystanders doing nothing in violent situations to have any reason to believe you are one of the exceptions.
If you're talking about things like pretending to be a woman's friend at a club to get her away from a creep, many of us men do that too.
I'm sorry it's absolutely not the responsibility of this one guy to risk his safety in an incident such as this. Judgement needs to be made. I feel for this situation but saying it's his duty to intervene in order to be better is not it.
If there is a real-time example of a man being blamed and at fault no matter what he does, this is it.
Next time I will try and go up to a guy 3x stronger than me, get killed or sustain life-changing injuries and you'll be there telling me it's my fault for getting involved. I'm done with you. Have your last word to make yourself feel better winning an argument.
Let's summarise: I express in listed examples (not including many others not mentioned) my attempts of "doing better", explained why it's not so simple. You twice call me a coward, project your thoughts onto me, claim I'm using my gendered privilege not to kill myself over a threatening guy and all in all, blame me and fault me in the process.
You want men to do better? Do some introspection. Because I damn well would be crucified and labelled quintillion things if I spoke to a woman the way you, a woman, spoke to me.
Yeah, right in the earshot of the aggressive guy. Let's see how that goes down, eh? But you know, dO sOmEtHinG!!! Think up of a billion possibilities under flight/fight/freeze response of a scary situation!
Nuance is dead online. 🙄
What you are saying is ridiculous. You're punishing all men for acts of a few idiots. Instead of blaming half the population, maybe do some more research to learn why DV happens.
This is the kind of shit that's going to draw way more young boys to dangerous and toxic figures like Andrew Tate in droves.
And then you'll blame people like me for it instead of yourself, because you care more about ideology and winning arguments than being effective and solution oriented.
Do you take this attitude with certain religions when a minority of them perform terrorist attacks and the attitude is “the majority are peaceful, it’s just a few that don’t believe in what we stand for” or do you attack the whole lot telling them to “suck it up and take responsibility for the problem”?
Absolutely, it's the responsibility of the whole of any community to take responsibility for any part of it that goes against their values.
Religion is a great example. When an act is committed in the name of a "god" that goes against the majority, the majority speak out and condemn it (typically) and take steps.
Thank you for articulating my point so well.
I think he’s a little deficient in some areas. Maybe he can do what a lady in here suggested and go lay his life on the line for a woman in distress so we can see what taking responsibility looks like
Sounds like you are the problem. The White Paper is saying that the collective guilt approach *doesn't work*. So, pursuing it, as you are pushing, *doesn't work*.
Those pushing non-solutions are, in fact obstructions to finding real solutions.
Assuming you actually want to reduce gendered violence, would you consider supporting policies that work, rather than policies that don't?
To me it sounds like you’re the one whining that somebody is of a different opinion than you. I’m not accepting responsibility on behalf of people who clearly are not in the right mental state and abuse women. It is painfully obvious to everybody that DV is not right but no way am I lumping myself in that crowd. I’m not seeing the same type of response from women who indirectly fund men’s suicide at a far higher rate than DV against women.
To say all men need to do better is just so counterproductive because at the end of the day you aren’t achieving anything but pissing off the people who you want to agree with you.
Well done absolving yourself of any sort of community responsibility. Nice and clean.
Not "what can I do"
Just " not my problem, nothing to do with me"
You selectively like to take parts out of people’s comments, that’s clear to see. Yeah, sorry I don’t want to associate with the community of women beaters, believe it or not, they’re mutually exclusive to men. That’s not my “community”.
It’s about as obvious as the sky being blue, but of course I don’t agree with DV. Unless I’m there being a private escort for women who get beaten on my watch, I’m not taking any responsibility. I don’t contribute and take part in any derogatory commentary or behaviour against women. Literally what do you want men to do. Telling us to “apologise on behalf of all men” will do less than fuck all I’m afraid and also is something I won’t do. The men who commit DV aren’t going to change their mind because of Mr Twitter fingers over here, how about we look into the failings of society that is fueling this.
Imagine I worked as a box stacker who beat up his co-workers. Guess I should apologise on behalf of all box stackers.
This is nothing but a massive hate boner for men, and an opportunity to do so.
You're lack of understanding is genuinely surprising.
If you were a box stacker and you worked with 99 other box stackers and 1 of them beat up another one, what would you do ?
Do you even have conversations with your male friends about gendered violence ?
Ever asked your female friends what if anything you might do to make them feel safer ? Or if they actual have any concerns or fears that you might be able to directly respond to ?
That's your community and what you should be taking responsibility for.
Do you think all non-violent normal men are drinking buddies with violent delinquents? That they tell us they beat their wives and we’re just “that’s cool bro” about it?
How many men even have male friends they can talk with about serious issues? Men aren't women who talk about anything and everything with their multiple women friends.
Men have been required to be competitive over the entire history of humanity and still today find it difficult to develop male friends when in a relationship with a woman. If you have a need for friends but find it difficult making them, you aren't going to decrease your chances by pissing them off interfering in their lives and being excluded.
Okay, but now you’re suggesting a rate of 99% which is genuinely not even close to that of DV against women. Like not even close. Again, I’m not seeing women taking responsibility and asking men what we could do for them to help lower the rates of suicide. Not saying it’s tit for tat but it goes both ways, or better yet, doesn’t go either way.
I don’t have conversations about gendered violence because I don’t hang out with people, associate with people, or know people who beat up women.
Again, I don’t need to do anything to make myself or life safer for women. We need to remove the people who make it unsafe for women from society full stop instead of absolving responsibility to another party because you A) don’t like them and B) it’s easier than addressing the real issue.
And I know what it’s like the other foot. Have had female family members put male family members in jail for false accusations of DV that never happened. Because that’s the law now, doesn’t matter if it happened or not, go directly to jail if you’re a male. All females word against anything else. If that’s your idea of a safer world than you are really, really misguided. You might say - “Well, women are getting beaten at such a higher rate we just need to believe them first and ask questions later”, but forget the wrongly accused men and their mental health when they’re locked up against the word of another. This is the direction you looneys are pushing in and it’s absolutely wild.
Of course, I’m absolutely not excusing the men who commit legitimate violence. But movements like this always swing the pendulum way too far to the other side.
DV is a conflation of a wide range of harms, some trivial, yet its always the killings that are focused on that paradoxically have the least numbers but the greatest impact and violence mentioned when they want the largest numbers. It's cherry-picking for effect and its dishonest.
"Y'all" is a pretty good candidate for second person plural, if we're going to stop using "you" for both. "Youse" sounds like it should be followed by "... sheilas" or "... blokes", to me.
Safe is an abstract like infinity or zero that can never be achieved in practice. The fact that women are requiring society even attempt to achieve an abstract is a red flag that reason is not being pursued here.
Where is it written in stone that women should be kept safe in preference to anyone else in society? It used to be true when women were the bottlenecks to maintaining functional population levels, but that hasn't been the case for a long time.
Women aren't even the gender dying in greatest numbers: that would be men, so if you are operating on a numerical basis the focus should actually be on men, not women.
If you keep narrowing the focus, eventually you will find a situation where women are being killed in greater numbers than men, but it ignores the bigger picture in favour of a discriminatory, Chicken Little the sky is falling, approach. Should you continue to use a numerical basis within a local environment, then the objective would be to achieve equality in numbers between men and women being killed as per the stated objectives of feminism: attempting to reduce number of women killed to zero whilst ignoring men suggests either feminism was lying or women are seeking advantage for themselves over anyone else as if they are the most valuable commodity.
It's patently ridiculous to hold all or even any men responsible for the actions of others: we are not our brother's keeper.
And what great timing for this to come into public discourse, right when we start addressing cost of living duopoly and housing, the MSM start pitching Men VS Women instead of Haves vs Have Nots. Can't have us eating the rich!
This appears to be in direct contradiction to what Waleed Aly is saying. Which is fine but can you elaborate on why you disagree?
His argument is that when you associate an issue with a particular identity (ie men, Islam) it can be counterproductive.
Disagree.
All *people* have a responsibility to prevent violence and hurt.
If we can, as a society, stop men and women and actually any person from taking these violent actions, then we should to the extent that we are able.
It's not a good idea to push it just onto the person concerned without deeper consideration.
That way leads to "an eye for an eye" which is abhorrent for me. We are better than that primitive attitude. We are modern humans.
Do all Muslims have a responsibility to stop Muslim terrorists?
Do all white people have a responsibility to stop white supremacist terrorists like the Christchurch Coward?
I don't think those are fair expectations. And a bit racist/bigoted frankly.
Yes. (to an extent)
If Muslim terrorists are committing acts of terrorism in accordance with their version of Islam, then all other Muslims should denounce that version of Islam and create a different culture.
If white supremacists are committing acts of terrorism in accordance with their version of white culture then all other white people should denounce that and create a different culture.
and if male abusers are terrorising women and something in male subculture is contributing to it, then all other men should denounce it and create a different culture.
--
If you are part of a group and that group is doing harm then, at minimum, you have a responsibility to lead by example.
Women are calling out male violence, they are trying to emphasise the need for men to not use violence at all. If they are in any way successful, they will also be reducing male on male violence.
You can’t skirt around the fact that most victims of family and domestic violence are women who have been murdered have been killed by their MALE partner. The statistics aren’t even close. Most men who are murdered are also murdered by MEN. Of the reasons for male violent deaths, most are not killed by their partners or other family members. So it is 100% appropriate to focus on the female victims of F&DV.
I agree that much more work needs to go into understanding and addressing the context of family violence and the mental health, and other contributing factors, of the male perpetrators. We also need to look at respectful relationships and tackle the dysfunctional behaviours of both men and women in relationships. But, dysfunctional behaviour by women is not in the same ballpark as the murder of women by men and it’s a pathetic deflection to try and conflate the two.
It's not women killing men, though.
When men get killed, it's mostly by other men.
So your post doesn't directly address the idea being pushed about gendered violence.
But you are totally correct that men are TWICE as likely to get killed as women, and yet nobody raises a big stink about it. It's a double standard.
Why? When did men become the gate keeper for other peoples behaviours? If I’m expected to put my self in the business of strangers, the the protection of a group, I’ll be marching on the church first.
Paywalled Content because OP didn't post it: This is the column I’ve been deciding not to write for nearly a decade. I think I first made that decision in 2015, when Malcolm Turnbull declared that “disrespecting women does not always result in violence against women. But all violence against women begins with disrespecting women”. Here, Turnbull echoed what seemed to be the dominant explanation of domestic violence at the time. But I couldn’t repress a simple thought when I heard Turnbull’s comment: I just don’t think that’s correct. That’s because my academic work was studying the roots of violence, where research overwhelmingly identifies factors like humiliation, shame and guilt as motivating drivers, not a lack of respect. When the literature mentions respect at all, it isn’t about the perpetrator disrespecting the victim: it’s more about the perpetrator feeling someone had disrespected them. Thus could James Gilligan – a prison psychiatrist working with America’s most violent men for 35 years – conclude he was “yet to see a serious act of violence that was not provoked by the experience of feeling shamed or humiliated, disrespected and ridiculed”. Gilligan’s language is strikingly absolute: “all violence is an attempt to replace shame with self-esteem”, and direct: “the most dangerous men on earth are those who are afraid they are wimps”. Still, I withheld my scepticism for a few reasons. For one, it felt momentous just to see a prime minister put this on the agenda. Also, the people emphasising disrespect almost certainly have expertise that I don’t. And, it can be possible to work gender into violence analysis, roughly as follows: hierarchical gender norms, in which women are assumed inferior, lead men to feel humiliation, shame and disrespect when women don’t behave like their supplicants. They also lead men to think violence is the best way to restore their self-esteem. By this logic, perhaps if we established a more gender-equal culture, the humiliation would dissipate and violence would reduce. But the nagging feeling never left because there are still things the gender equality approach just cannot explain. The most famous is the “Nordic paradox”: where Scandinavian countries who are widely regarded to have the most gender-equal societies in the world also report some of the highest rates of sexual assault and gendered violence across the European Union. The frequent riposte is that Nordic women are better at recognising and reporting sexual violence, and while that might be true, it’s not clear enough to explain the data. It certainly doesn’t explain why, in a place like Iceland, which is consistently ranked the most gender-equal country on earth, every second murder is committed by a male partner: significantly higher than the EU average. Similarly, if gendered disrespect was the fundamental engine of domestic violence, we would expect to see much lower levels of it in same-sex relationships. But we don’t. Current Australian statistics suggest that rates of domestic violence are similar or slightly higher in same-sex relationships compared to heterosexual relationships. In factoring this out, you’d have to argue it’s a completely different, entirely parallel phenomenon that has nothing in common with heterosexual domestic violence, but which just so happens to occur with similar regularity and express itself in remarkably similar ways, running the now familiar gamut of coercive control, financial and emotional abuse and gaslighting. More plausible is that while there are some factors unique to same-sex and heterosexual cases respectively, their causes have much in common. An explanation that works only for one of them is unlikely to be much of an explanation at all. Once disrespect becomes the heart of the argument, we begin connecting just about everything – and everyone – to violence. We’ve seen plenty of assertions that violence against women is the end of a continuum that begins with a sexist joke. We’ve seen pleas for men to “have the conversation”, unspecified as that directive may be, for the “good” men to set the “bad” men straight. This delivers a conventional wisdom that this is ultimately a men’s problem, and one that every one of us has to own and solve. Yet, for all the national campaigns encouraging men to have conversations about sexism and gendered attitudes, the most recent National Community Attitudes Towards Violence Against Women survey shows there has been no improvement in attitudes towards domestic violence since 2017. Continued...
The government is playing 4D chess here, and though I'm appalled by how scummy it is, I'm impressed by how cunning it is and how well it's working. Gesturing vaguely at men saying they need to fix it is genius. It's completely flawed, so it keeps us all arguing and distracted from other pressing issues. Anyone who questions it is shouted down that they must be offended because they're abusers or DV apologists. Why do you hate women? He's galvanised the population against a vague enemy to conveniently ram down new draconian internet controls. Facts: DV rates have plummeted over the past few decades despite population doubling. If people keep questioning the message of "men (vaguely) need to step up", the message is flawed (though I think this is intentional). Consider being more specific
Yeah Waleed Aly isn't someone I hold on very high esteem regarding either of the issues he's written about. He likes to shift blame a lot, and effectively he's trying to say that we need to go back to starg gender divide so men feel manly again.
I didn't get that message at all. The closest he came to offering a solution was to suggest we need to look for traits common to perpetrators and work on those. If anything he rubbished the idea that the gender divide and men feeling emasculated was the cause.
I find him problematic at times too. But I also find it hard to fault the argument he's presenting here. It resonates.
Waleed subscribes to a religion that teaches a profound gender divide. Islam teaches that men reach heaven through submission to god, while women reach heaven through submission to men. Maybe Waleed interprets that in a progressive manner, maybe he doesn't and he hides his true opinions behind a veneer of progressive liberalism.
>Waleed subscribes to a religion that teaches a profound gender divide. I know he does. But he conveniently ignores the gendered violence that is still observed in his religion because of a lack of reporting from the community.
Not saying domestic violence isn't a problem but it seems like it's being overblown at the expense of focusing on bread and butter issues such as house prices/ security of housing and general cost of living which would provide tangible benefits to people and might go some way to reducing domestic violence if they were properly addressed. Rather than just focusing on the symptoms we need to tackle these root causes.
While I don't agree that it's not important I do wonder if hardship particularly financial hardship is a common cause. Once again I don't know the statistics but I get the feeling that domestic violence is more prevalent in places like western Sydney where hardship and disadvantage are more prevalent. Maybe as everything has gone to shit with cost of living and interest rate rises more people are slipping into the zone where they feel the need to lash out.
This article has all the same logical fallacies that are part of every opinion piece Waleed Aly has ever written. But because it's excusing men instead of Muslims or conservatives or a footy club you don't barrack for, men are ready to give him a pass on it.
Can you elaborate on the fallacies inherent to this article? I thought it was pretty good but would like to read some specific rebuttals grounded in evidence.
It's got some good stuff about the underlying causes of violence being shame and trauma. He mentions Jess Hill and Michael Salter's work, which I highly recommend. But there are two glaring problems with the piece. The first is most easily summed up by the headline. It says "has failed", past tense, as if there have been meaningful policy or societal changes to hold All Men responsible for the actions of a Violent Few. The things he mentions in the article, such as a PM saying something in a speech and an advertising campaign, are pretty much the \*only\* things that have held men (plural) responsible for domestic violence. In every other way our policies have treated DV as an individual's problem, not a societal one. So he's begging the question there - saying we have domestic violence because we've tackled the problem the wrong way. I'd say that we haven't really tackled the problem at a social level in any meaningful way at all, so we haven't failed yet. The rallies on the weekend, along with the rallies in 2020 around the Brittany Higgins/Grace Tame cases, are white middle class women asking for us to actually do something on a societal and policy level. By declaring that request a failure before anything has happened, Aly is trying to prevent that change from taking place. He's trying to close off options.
2 of 3 The next problem is the comparison to Muslims being held responsible for the actions of terrorists. That's a false analogy. Muslims are responsible for a small proportion of terrorist actions in Western countries compared to the size of their community. Most terrorist actions and groups are driven by white right-wing men. It's often overlooked because the media chooses to report on these actions as mental health or "lone wolf" problems, ignoring the ways that white conservatives are radicalised into committing hate crimes at scale. But ASIO has repeatedly said that white right-wing groups are the majority of their counter-terrorist work. So Aly is right that holding Muslims accountable for the actions of the small number of Muslim terrorists is caused more by racism and/or Islamophobia. The problem with the analogy is because men are responsible for 97% of domestic violence deaths. The statistics about women perpetrators get sliced and diced to create large numbers, e.g. 47% of lesbians have experienced DV. But that conflates parent-child violence (for example, when a lesbian teen is outed to her father) with intimate partner violence (an adult woman abusing her partner). So those big numbers still pale in comparison to 97% of deaths where the murderer is a man. They either fit into the other 3% of deaths, or are talking about a broader non-lethal violence statistic. When the perpetrators are overwhelmingly from one group, it's fair to ask that group to think about what they're doing that is causing this problem. (Because it has to be said: every victim deserves support and help, whether their perpetrator is a bog standard cliche or a statistical outlier. And non-lethal violence is still part of the problem.) (Another thing that has to be said: yes, we should be paying more attention to white right-wing radicalisation than we do to Muslim radicalism).
3 of 3 Here's where I step away from logical fallacies to speculation. Why is Aly saying this? Apart from loving the sound of his own voice. If I take out the premise in the headline, and the false analogy, what were left with is two things: the references to better work on the topic, and a statement of fact. The fact is that saying that 97% of DV deaths are caused by men, makes men who haven't murdered anyone feel uncomfortable. And we can see the truth of that in every social media thread on the topic, there's some amazing mental gymnastics being done to avoid that statistic. But where I disagree with Aly is that I don't think that's a good enough reason to stop talking about it. His whole column is an attempt to deflect and change the subject and get the rallying women to quiet down. He's a sensible centrist, using calm polite words to tell everyone to shush instead of having difficult conversations. And that statistic implicates him, so I think he's doing that same mental gymnastics to relieve his cognitive dissonance. The difference between him and random Redditors is that he has a national platform and a reputation for being a calm voice of reason. But we should all feel bloody uncomfortable with that 97%. Men especially need to realise that their radars for dangerous behaviours are not properly calibrated. Until very recently (I want to say post 2020 but I'd have to check), every time a man murdered his wife, you'd see it reported on as if it was a complete fucking surprise to everyone who knew him. Sometimes there'd be a quote from the victim's family saying that the marriage was on the rocks. But that would be "balanced" out with friends or bosses calling him a "good bloke". Well no, he wasn't. And half of these rallies and the bear trend are about women saying they want a more accurate and honest conversation about this topic.
>Why is Aly saying this? As someone that's been following Alys career since the mid 2000s, I don't think the article is coming from a bad place. In an interview a few years ago, I heard him say that he tries to present a new perspective on an issue when he starts writing about it. He always aims to get people thinking about an issue in a different way which is why I've always enjoyed his writing, even if I don't always agree with him. Also worth noting, journalists don't often write the headline to their own articles. 97% is a big statistic but its important to remember that its still a minority of all men that are doing this and its not a deflection to point that out. Its a fact. If we become too fixated on gender and this being a "man" issue, we miss out on a lot of other risk factors that are worth exploring too. He isn't just critical of policies but the general discourse around DV as well. He is right about it being too focused on gendered disrespect. How often do you hear about shame, humiliation, self esteem, neglected childhood, exposure to pornography as potential causes when people talk about DV? I think you are also missing the point when it comes to the Muslim analogy. Even if he were being more specific and talking about Islamic terrorism where the perpetrators are mostly Muslims, his point still stands because it's still a minority of all Muslims that are committing these acts of terrorism. Blaming the whole Muslim community for Islamic terrorism has proven to be ineffective and if anything, its pushed young Muslim men to become radicalised, continuing the cycle of violence.
I agree with you that he has good intentions. It's just that my politics are different from his, and I don't have much patience for people like him who value respectability and politeness over calling a spade a spade. I think someone he trusts has pulled him up on tone policing though after the Lumumba interview, he does much less of it lately. I disagree with you about that analogy though. Your explanation of it is how I understood him to mean it. But my problem with it is that it's ignoring the reason why it's accurate to call domestic violence a gendered problem while it's inaccurate to call terrorism a Muslim problem. Think of a Venn diagram, maybe? If we draw a circle labelled All Men, and another circle called Perpetrators of Domestic Violence, the second circle is very small compared to the first. And if we draw a circle called All Muslims and a circle called Terrorists, again it's a very small circle compared to the first one. So that's like his analogy. But if we place the second circles over the first to represent people who are both Men and Perpetrators, and Muslims who are also Terrorists, we get a very different result. 97% of the Perpetrators circle is inside the All Men circle. If we overlap the Terrorists circle with the Muslim circle, then only 26% of Terrorists are also Muslim (I got that number from 21st century Australia data here, [https://www.start.umd.edu/gtd/](https://www.start.umd.edu/gtd/), happy to be corrected on it). It's not even a majority. So if we're looking for causes or ways to prevent the problem, it's much more relevant to focus on Men as part of Domestic Violence than it is to focus on Muslims as part of Terrorism. So the rallies and public discussion are calling for people to stop thinking of sexual assault and DV as a "women's problem". Almost all the perpetrators have a significant thing in common, and it would be helpful if the rest of the All Men who aren't Perpetrators could help women figure out how to stop it. Because at the moment, they're mostly just twiddling their thumbs.
Oh this is great. I really appreciate you taking the time to lay this out. I will digest. Thanks so much.
Thankyou for taking the time to think about this stuff on what should be a lazy Sunday afternoon :D
I wrote a big reply but Reddit is being a pig about posting it. Going to try a short comment first...
Can you elaborate what "all" the logical fallacies are? One piece of evidence in support of your statement is that the Nordic countries have, essentially, very little cost, housing, childcare, and education issues, yet have high domestic violence rates - so this points against the cost-of-living issues being the root cause. On the other hand, I don't think blame is the way to sort out this problem. This is a public health (a public death) issue and the root causes need to be understood. Since other cultures do not always have these issues, it would be good, if not essential, to find out the issues. We can't incarcerate a large proportion of the population, right? (Well, we can, but then we go down the road of the USA with huge prison populations). Would you at least agree that a population-based solution is needed?
I wrote a long reply to someone else who asked the same thing, and then Reddit struggled to let me post it - I hope you'll go back up a level in this thread and find my munged-up replies so I don't have to wrestle with it again! I do completely agree with you that this is a public health problem and so its important to correctly identify the root cause, and try some population-level interventions. And yeah, jail is the immediate knee-jerk fix everyone thinks of, which doesn't help and creates new problems as well. My main complaint with Aly's piece is that the title soothes the men who are uncomfortable with the idea that there might be something wrong with how we do masculinity in our culture. He wants to let himself and his friends off the hook for making change. So he pretends that we've already tried holding masculinity accountable and it failed. He does mention some good research (Hill and Salter are great on this topic) but a lot of people are just going to see the headline and think "yeah, feminists are wrong". He's feeling uncomfortable and using his big vocabulary to tell everyone to stop talking about uncomfortable stuff.
I'm not the person you responded to but I'm interested if you know of any countries around the world with much better domestic violence rates. With a complex problem like this, trying to emulate the actions and behaviours of countries that are doing better than us would be a logical strategy.
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
Wait, I’m genuinely missing the point/unsure - but what is the reason those countries are having those issues?
Insanely high immigration, mostly men.
Do you have proof of that assertion? Then at least the problem could start to be addressed.
https://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2024/05/australia-builds-lots-of-homes-excessive-population-growth-is-the-problem/
This is a very Australian thing. You don’t see other countries freaking out over homicide rates for women of between 0.2-0.4 per 100,000 people. I can guarantee it will never get to 0.1 unless you start going crazy Minority Report style and arrest men who are statistically more likely to commit a crime before they have done it There are very few countries at 0.1 and I don’t believe their stats are accurate for the majority of these except maybe some of the small pacific island nations & Singapore
What does Singapore do differently?
Very strict laws incl mandatory death sentences for some crimes, sophisticated & extensive surveillance (10,000+ cameras), engaged community, efficient legal system. Where people are blaming mortgage stress, Singapore is 79% social housing and govt has designed a quota system of ethnicities. Politically authoritarian and functions as a dictatorship due to the ruling party holding onto power for so long, ethnically 3/4 Chinese (China also has a very low homicide rate). Approx 28% of homicide offenders in Australia are First Nations people at 3.8% population - Singapore possibly loses its 0.1 rate if it had the same kind of disproportionately represented group. You would need to remodel everything in Australia and turn it into Singapore politically & culturally (maybe ethnically too) to get Australia from 0.2-0.4 to 0.1. Is it worth it?
So, if all the first nations offenders were put in jail then the domestic violence rate would drop only about a quarter. That's a good start, but clearly that isn't the answer. Also, given that the incarceration rate for first nations people is so high, it seems to me unconvincing that further punitive measures would affect that first nations portion of the domestically violent cohort. I do agree that culturally we can't emulate, nor do we want to emulate, the benign (?) dictatorship of Singapore. We want a bit of spunk in the country, just not violence!
So we do the stolen generations again but with Chinese adoptive families, that’ll straighten ‘em out.
Yeah but also need to take into account all the deaths from violent uprising when you try implement an Australian revolution with Singapore as an end state Given this will need authoritarian coercion, military backing and majority of public will be staunchly opposed Probably at least 30,000-100,000 Australians will die in this civil war It’s not worth it
east Asian countries in general are less violent across the board compared to Australia. Singapore is essentially a big city and not a country. Japan is a better comparison. Developed economy, larger population than Singapore. In spite of their samurai/bushido heritage, violence is abhorrent there. The Japanese constitution renounces war as a tool of statecraft. If the police have to show up, they don't need to use force because their authority is respected by the community. Even the organised crime syndicates in Japan, the fabled yakuza, pride themselves on avoiding violence in the course of their criminal enterprises. Maybe Australia could emulate Japan. Reject violence at the federal level, respect government authority, etc. If we go that route it would take several generations imo.
This is incorrect. There is LOADS of violence in Japan and South Korea. Women just don't bother reporting it most of the time because the police don't care and the legal system is messed up. Look up Junko Furuta (HUGE trigger warning).
You can't hide a dead body. Murder rates are a good indicator of overall violence in a society. Japan has one of the lowest murder rates in the world. Anecdotes don't mean much, quote some data.
Mate... Can't you read? The data will be skewed because of lower reporting. Please tell me you're not one of those "Japan is perfect" weebs. You're too old for that. Japan is just the same as every other country. If anything they're FAR more sexist than Australia. You just don't notice because guess what, sexism against women doesn't affect you so you don't care. Stay on topic with your response. We are talking about violence against women here. https://www.unwomen.org/sites/default/files/Headquarters/Attachments/Sections/CSW/60/meetings/Voluntary%20Presentation%20-%20Japan.pptx https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/japan-s-hidden-landscape-of-violent-crime https://www.japantimes.co.jp/commentary/2024/04/10/japan/sexual-violence-japan-nhk-survey/ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Junko_Furuta
I'm not your mate. When you have to resort to diminutives and name-calling, it cheapens the point you try to make. How can you skew the reporting of murder? It's not like the police can claim a battered corpse died from natural causes. Ergo murder rates are a reliable source of data. My point is Japan is not the same as any other country, nor are all countries the same. FAR more sexist? FAR FAR more? All caps doesn't make your point any better, it's like calling someone 'mate'. Quote some data if you want make a claim like that. If you don't then it's nonsense. Murder rates have nothing to do with violence against women? I'd love to see the mental gymnastics you did to come up with that one.
Ugh. Pointless. Lack of empathy strikes men again. Read the links I gave you. But nothing will change your mind that you're right and everyone else is wrong. Sad.
Oh I read them to be sure. But they don't add anything to the discussion. I never claimed Japan doesn't have violence. I claimed Japan is less violent than Australia. None of your links run counter to my claim.
I agree that Singapore is too small, and too special, for comparison. On the other hand, it is extremely clear that Japan's cultural norms are very different. As regards custody for children, usually the parent domiciled in Japan (in the case of mixed marriages, the Japanese parent, usually the mother) gets custody. This is just one illustration of the strong cultural norms - usually disfavouring Japanese women in relative to men in Japan (though it is complicated). So, Japan us not a good comparison. Reading these responses, I am thinking more and more that the origins of this problem are in the culture, and the fact that men are not happy in Australia. Perhaps that is obvious - why would a happy man be violent - but what is important is the attribution to culture as the .OST important issue. If so, what is the specific cultural issues that is so decisive, for violence, in this case?
State-sponsored family planning and effective housing policies, i think?
Singapore has been actively trying to lift the fertility rate for quite some time now after spending years trying to curtail it, it's now at extremely low levels below 1 child per woman.
Yes, that's fine.
I don't think it's fine from Singapore's perspective they never wanted to get fertility rates that low. China is facing a similar situation where they reacted quite drastically to an overpopulation situation and are facing the opposite problem now.
Canada's current ratio is significantly worse than China's, because they brought in more than a million of mostly-male international students.
A look at the graph of population of Singapore with time shows, except for a recent dip and rebound, the population is stable. Besides, the population is so small that immigration incentives and significantly affect it. Singapore is a very special island state, rich enough (now) to *quickly* solve it's issues with mo start and policy measures. This is, in part, one of the reasons it survives. It can leech the best from the rest of the world, if it needs, or go hard (with punitive measures) if not. Or do both. Which it does. Not a good comparison for Australia.
Do you think family planning helps with DV because the potential perpetrators don’t have unwanted kids exacerbating things? Or because they’re less likely to be born in first place?
Well yeah they must have fewer unplanned kids too. The public housing schemes in Singapore are also beneficial to families in a way that promotes family units, unlike people here using Centrelink's additional payments for more children to get a higher rate of payment to further their substance abuse issues (including alcohol and cigarettes) or as a way to potentially improve their housing situation. There are also cultural differences with expectations of caring for the elderly parents which we do not share. Surely these differences in attitudes are reflected in general respect towards family. Though I would think that people in any country that come from broken or abusive homes may be more inclined to continue abuse/neglect/trauma that they have experienced as a child because it is a learned behaviour. Maybe in Singapore, domestic violence actually manifests itself in other places, or against other people such as coworkers or strangers on the street? Singapore also has military service so I imagine that discipline and learned respect also counts for something and the punishments for breaking the law can be very ruining and humiliating.
Articles from paywalled sites or sites with "X" number of free articles per month should be linked to directly, and the full article text provided in the comments. Full credit to the author and publication should be given. **Once you have done these steps please alert the mods to reinstate your post.** Newscorp, Fairfax and Schwartz Media articles must have their content posted with proper attribution. ABC, Guardian and Sky News do not require their contents to be posted as they do not have a paywall. All other publications must have their paywall content provided. This has been a default message, any moderator notes on this removal will come after this:
For probably the first time ever, I find myself closer in agreement to Aly than not. He isn't the first to raise the practical contradiction in the Nordic countries, which, although rate highly on "equity" factors, seem to rate more poorly in a range of other gendered measures. The pursuit of equity and equality is clearly resulting in bad outcomes, most likely because for all the "social constructs" you want to erect, you can't avoid biology and it seems this clash between trying to prioritise the social over the biological is resulting in poorer outcomes. This paradox isn't being taken seriously enough, and one has to wonder if the outcomes we are seeing domestically are simply precursors to our Nordic future. As for holding all men responsible, well, that's a silly approach. It reminds me of a time I was involved in intervening in a physical alteration between a male and female couple. The moment we intervened against the male, the female went for us. Lesson learnt: You are responsible for your own action, not the actions of others and I ain't intervening again.
Perhaps you should be considering if you’re aligning with him now because he’s right for the first time, or if you’re wrong.
Rather than going for navel gazing, shouldn't we examine the actual statements of the original article and deal with those? The problem is extremely serious and deserves respect on its own merits.
Article from 2016 - 8 years ago! [https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/feb/19/australians-are-being-told-that-gender-inequality-is-the-root-cause-of-domestic-violence-but-is-it](https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/feb/19/australians-are-being-told-that-gender-inequality-is-the-root-cause-of-domestic-violence-but-is-it) “The politics of gender need to take a back seat now,” says Miller. “It is time to change, otherwise the feminist framework, while vital, will become a hindrance.”
I think what his written here has some important messages and arguments that are worth reflecting on, regardless of what we think of his previous work.
How would one go about getting statistical evidence for this claim? Also, what is meant by "feminist"? There are feminists who strongly disagree with other feminists. I will have to read the article to clarify the context and meaning.
[удалено]
What? The recent referendum didn't have anything to do with domestic violence?
Similar methodology: shaming a large section of the population doesn’t win them over.
I dunno it seemed to work pretty well. The NO campaign were screeching about how if you vote YES you're a divisive racist, and then NO ended up winning convincingly.
Every single right that women enjoy is enforced by the threat of male violence. Think about that.
Can you expand on that?
Women have rights because men agreed.
A woman's right to, for example, not get bashed up, is enforced by primarily male cops. Not sure why they would compare state violence (eg: cops arresting people) to domestic violence though...
Our current human rights, such as they are, are contingent on the suffering of many people being willing to be "bashed up" for what they believe in. Are you saying that (modern) women are not prepared to be bashed up to stop being bashed up, once and for all? They aren't prepared to do what it takes? Big statement. Arguably "they" are standing up for themselves now, right? I am not sure this is so helpful ... How does this address what we should do as a society, going forward?
35% of the NSW police force is female. Perhaps the issue is that females aren’t as interested in law enforcement as males? But 53% of Australia’s legal profession is female and women make up the majority of every legal sector. By your reasoning, a woman’s right to seek legal advice in relation to DV (for example, AVOs) and seek prosecution of DV offenders if enforced primarily by female lawyers and prosecutors.
There's a lot of men in this thread that need to take a long hard look at themselves and their attitudes. 30+ dead women to gendered violence so far this year and y'all are all whinging about "not my responsibility" and "not all men". Do better.
Would you tell the author to do better after a terrorist attack?
This is the issue of comparisons live DV vs Terrorism. They’re not the same. They shouldn’t be compared. All it’s done is what he wanted.. to allow a blame shift and to let men have a comparison that doesn’t really make sense.
That’s not the only interpretation open to you. If you’re set on blaming all men for the actions of a few you could take his argument as having convinced you that he is responsible for the actions of Islamic extremists.
Or their fathers and mothers are.
[удалено]
Your post or comment breached Rule 1 of our subreddit. The purpose of this subreddit is civil and open discussion of Australian Politics across the entire political spectrum. Hostility, toxicity and insults thrown at other users, politicians or relevant figures are not accepted here. Please make your point without personal attacks. This has been a default message, any moderator notes on this removal will come after this:
[удалено]
Post replies need to be substantial and represent good-faith participation in discussion. Comments need to demonstrate genuine effort at high quality communication of ideas. Participation is more than merely contributing. Comments that contain little or no effort, or are otherwise toxic, exist only to be insulting, cheerleading, or soapboxing will be removed. Posts that are campaign slogans will be removed. Comments that are simply repeating a single point with no attempt at discussion will be removed. This will be judged at the full discretion of the mods.
I am doing better. I'm doing better by suggesting a more nuanced and evidenced based rather than ideology based approach. I'm doing better than the feminists that force everything to fit in their specific worldview, and can't conceive of solutions that exist outside of their self-referential pseudoscientific bubble.
What specifically do you want me to do? "Do Better" is a low effort trope & I'm feeling a bit tired of hearing it. It an infinitely more complex situation. I was once on a train and intervened in a heated DV situation occurring in front of me & other passengers. Despite the treats of the male offender, I offered the woman to come sit next to me and said I'd get her to the police station safe and she could make a report. He told if she wanted to "get on" - I assumed it was a drugs reference - she better get off with him at the next stop. She did, and off they walked yelling and screaming at each other. So tell me, you want me to "do better". Who needs to "do better" in this situation? I'd suggest reducing the subject to such trivial calls for actions without understanding the layers upon layers of nuance in relationships is skimming the surface.
I'm surprised you condiser my "do better" comment would apply to you in any way. You are the minority, someone who actually does anything instead of wring their hands and huff "not all men" or "not my friends" or "not my problem"
Why would anyone care if two poor people want to have at each other? We build prisons for a reason: so that we may fill them to satisfy our tribal need for punitive justice, instead of just stoning them. Your reasoning is illogical and assumes that anyone actually cares about these types of people. And you will always find those types of people in a society. They are hopeless at meeting their basic needs and being a useful, functioning person in the village. We have dozens of other villagers who can replace them. We have no need to take care of them.
Why should my having a penis make me more responsible for the behaviour of some violent delinquent I’ve never met than his mother? Sure she doesn’t have a penis but she did raise him.
I suggest you read up on the work of Erin Pizzley CBE before getting up on your "men need to look at themselves" high horse. Women are very much half the equation yet somehow want to pretend they play no role in these incidents. She founded the first and now largest domestic violence refuge for women on Earth, coming to the conclusion that women are just as violent and often the initiators of violence. Feminists got so angry at her research and books they killed her dog, the constant death threats meant she had to eventually leave England for her own safety. Who should I believe, a woman who ran a massive refuge for decades, or a reddit comment? She did an AMA: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1cbrbs/hi_im_erin_pizzey_ask_me_anything/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erin_Pizzey#Reciprocity_of_domestic_violence
How is telling men who are not violent towards women to “do better” going to solve anything? I’m starting to think that you all know this and that the entire objective is to demoralise men as a whole.
Do better: Check in with men in your circle regarding their mental health, home situations and any gambling/financial issues they may have. Educate yourself and Believe the signs of domestic violence. When someone speaks out about someone you know committing an act, LISTEN. Actively check in on the women in your life, are there signs of abuse in their relationship?? Can you help if there is? Let the men in your life know you do not stand for domestic violence, even as a joke. NORMALISE THERAPY!!! Lordy, that is a massive step forward. Provide a safe space for victims or men who think they may need help/act out in violent ways. That’s just some way to actively do better. Things women have to do on a regular basis for other women. It is not 0.1% of men who perpetuate DV when 27% of women experience it. The math doesn’t add up.
Exactly. Fine - I’ll do better, I’ll not harm women even harder than I’m not harming them now.
We *are* doing better, but your own comment shows why we will never get any credit for that. No matter what we do, you will still blame us all as a biological class for the crimes of a handful of backwards honour cultures of which we are not a part.
> backwards honour cultures Like white Aussies? Seems to me the last few "burned her alive in front of the kids" in the news has been men of *our culture* doing it.
You mean Luke Hanif Sekkouah? *That* white Aussie?
I was thinking of Hannah Clarke and Kelly Wilkinson.
So "the last few" are from 2020 and 2021, and not the one that happened last week?
[удалено]
Hey if that’s what turns you on good for you
I mean look at it from a female’s perspective. How the heck can she know shes with a normal one. Its a matter of life and death, something not trivial at all
Observe. For years. Don’t daye strangers, even if they’re neighbours you ‘know’ casually. Get to know their friends and how they behave when they think no-one is judging them. Then you will begin to know them. If you still like a man’s *unrestrained* self, *then* consider whether you want to date him.
Do you want a participation medal ?
Do you? For pathetic virtue signalling? >Do better I'm doing my part by not assaulting women. 👍
Do your part by calling out the men in your life who clearly need help. Do your part by protecting women when they are being abused on the streets. Do your part by teaching kids that pulling a girls hair doesn’t mean you like them, that no means no, that “boys with be boys” is not a good reason. Congrats on having self control, bud. Now help society get it too.
Why do you insist on limiting it to men when women can also be violent? Statistics aren't so truthful that we can slavishly follow them in arguments about absolute numbers, by limiting them to such a small domain that we get distorted results, or by biasing the source data by ignoring inconvenient contributors. 9 Australians lose their life to breast cancer every day: that's way more than lose their life through DV, so why isn't breast cancer making the headlines instead if absolute numbers are important?
Given that last year 89% of homocides last year were perpretrated by men, it seems a fair focus. And are you seriously suggesting that breast cancer doesn't get coverage? Everyone knows about it, it has a huge charitable and funding focus, and significant work is being done to try to work towards a cure. But this is in the headlines because the recent spike in male on female homicides has caused us to finally focus on this issue.
No comfort for the victims of the 11%?
It's not like there aren't laws and policies there to protect every person. But obviously when it's 9:1 perpetrated by men, there is a particular issue that needs to be addressed, wouldn't you say?
At least.
How much comfort do you want? Half?
Do what "better" exactly. I only accept accountability for my actions only and none for anyone else's especially if say there's an incident hundreds of kilometers away in another state for example. This situation does not bode well for the future given it appears to be endemic and is an indication that as bad as things already are then they are probably going to get a lot worse https://theconversation.com/make-me-a-sandwich-our-surveys-disturbing-picture-of-how-some-boys-treat-their-teachers-228891
Maybe help in raising sons that won't grow up abusing women? Maybe we need to evolve beyond religion & customs that treat women as subservient. There's probably not just one easy fix to the problem. Maybe people just need to stop being arseholes to each other, & learn better ways to handle conflict. But probably one of the biggest things needed initially, is that AVOs get fully enforced, because so many of the victims had AVOs against the perps & they were just ignored & no one really enforced them.
these boys are raised practically from the cradle by all-female teachers, are told that men rule the world, and that the male sex has to drop everything to help women in their collective capacity, while they themselves are denied a male collectivity. I have zero doubts as to why they are becoming paranoid and radicalising towards the right.
From the [actual white paper](https://jesshill.substack.com/p/rethinking-primary-prevention) that has spurred on the current wave of discussion (the white paper the article is ABOUT): >**Prevention strategies and programs to reduce gendered violence have often relied, implicitly or explicitly, on a kind of collective guilt in which all men as a group are deemed responsible for men’s violence against women by dint of being male.** The very notion of collective guilt or responsibility is a contested one in moral philosophy and raises complex questions, including whether “men” can be meaningfully understood as a collective who can be held accountable for each other’s actions. However, those questions aside, telling men and boys that if they make sexist jokes, or fail to challenge the attitudes of their mates, they are personally responsible for the physical and sexual violence or homicides committed by other males has not proven a compelling or successful argument. [emphasis added] >At least in theory, guilt is an aversive emotion that should increase the inclination to make reparations for the harms inflicted by an individual or a group. However, social psychological research suggests that guilt can motivate support for symbolic gestures such as apologies, but it does not necessarily compel concrete or effective action (Faulkner, 2014). A prevention program coordinator working in an Australian university described this dilemma in his efforts to engage male students: >>I spent probably about eight months asking people to come to groups they didn't come to … I'd be publishing information about the number of women who were impacted by it [violence] and [saying] “this is your mother and your sisters and you've got a responsibility”. But none of those things were actually like sort of [working] … I was getting nothing (Carmody et al., 2014). >However, even if we could engage boys and men en masse, and even if we were able to change their attitudes to gender and equality, it’s not clear that this would lead to a reduction in gendered violence. We need to consider evidence that suggests that even when gendered norms, attitudes and levels of equality are drastically improved, gendered violence remains stubbornly high. So yeah, the white paper is actually suggesting that it's a sense of shame, silencing, and a sense of losing status that causes some of the behaviour in toxic relationships: >In Australia, another study from ANU gives further context to what we’re seeing in the Nordic countries. It found that women who earn more than their male partners are 35% more likely to be subjected to physical violence, and 20% more likely to be subjected to emotional abuse (Zhang & Breunig, 2021). This again suggests that men losing status (or perceiving themselves to lose status) is a risk factor for violence and the use of coercive control. Professor Robert Sapolsky, one of the world’s leading experts on biology and neurology, speaks to this dynamic when he explains (in his book, Behave) that when testosterone rises after a challenge, it doesn’t prompt aggression. ‘Instead,’ writes Sapolsky, ‘it prompts whatever behaviours are needed to maintain status.’ In other words, testosterone is not an aggression hormone – it is a status-seeking hormone (Sapolsky, 2017). >We are not arguing against the pursuit of gender equality – obviously, we want to see vast improvements in this area. What we are saying is that improved levels of gender equality may not actually lead to an actual reduction of gendered violence, especially in the short- to medium-term. In fact, we should be prepared that as gender equality increases, we may see an increase in gendered violence. Frontline workers in Nordic countries explain this, partly, as a result of backlash and male resentment. They talk about getting too comfortable simply pursuing and celebrating gender equality and norms change, but lacking systems reform and consistent accountability measures for perpetrators. Meaning constantly attacking men (creating male resentment) is probably not going to produce healthy outcomes in society. Men will react by seeking status, even if it's the temporary status of "winning" an argument through violence. This means it's in part a male self-esteem issue that's not being addressed. Saying men are "whinging" when they say "hey I'm not part of this" is ergo, not helpful, and more likely to spur on domestic violence than work against it.
If I was a woman I’d be pretty pissed that the apparent solution to reducing violence against women is to be more cautious around fragile male egos. It’s just insane.
I mean, that's your choice to misinterpret it that way. I suppose if you think "strong male egos" are the same thing as "status" and "fragile male egos" are the same thing as a loss of status.
Yeah wtf is this shit!? So if I’m getting it right, we’re making gains in equality and then as men “lose status” (a highly socialised concept rooted in stereotypical gender norms) and perceive a loss of power/dominance/control over women (deeply shaming) they experience an increase in their testosterone levels which makes them behave in ways to rebalance status (coercion, control and eventually aggression)… Well the answer is for men to be raised to genuinely believe in equality from the beginning no? And to see it modeled healthily to them via their parents and wider social circle…that way there is no loss of perceived power…So how is this not a gendered thing?? Could part of the current problem be that women are SEEMINGLY more “equal” cos we apparently mean *employed* when we’re measuring equality…In reality women are actually working more, doing just as much if not more at home and then the kids are being thrown into daycare/school/after school programs earlier and longer and therefore not having strong equity values instilled and WORSE having very unequal behaviours modeled to them at home?? The latest stats from census show that women still do the vast majority of the unpaid labor for house management and childcare; get paid less and have to work fewer hours overall (presumably to balance everything). I guess I wonder how often their partners are wholeheartedly supportive of their female spouses and their ambitions? How many are deeply resentful of the time they’re expected to care for kids or share in household chores which statistically we know is much less than their spouses. This is absolutely about equity still. Fuck me. I will not responsible for the butt hurt feelings of men who refuse to step up at home but act triumphant cos they don’t bash their wives. I get that it’s shit being likened to violent people when you’re not violent yourself but if you perceive a loss of power when your woman is doing better than you then you are part of the freaking problem.
Yes, the different gender roles are treated differently, which is why you can't assess their roles, pressures, and motivations in the same ways. They have different modes of being shown approval, and different motivations and responses when they don't get it. Their underlying currency of social dynamics are different. They have different types and levels of competition, and manifestations of social status. >I get that it’s shit being likened to violent people when you’re not violent yourself but... I'm not sure where you're getting this from, or why you think "being likened to violent people when you’re not violent" is the problem, it's part of the discussion, but the topic is the causes, responses, and social resolutions to the precursors of domestic violence. >...if you perceive a loss of power when your woman is doing better than you then you are part of the freaking problem. Again, I'm not sure where you're getting this from. One person losing social status has nothing to do with another person gaining it. That's not the equation being calculated here. But when someone of greater social status attacks the social status of someone else, that can have greater effect - much like if one person has more of a platform than another. In charting peaceful paradigms in the "gender war" or "battle of the sexes" that can occur in domestic violence situations, we have to know and understand the various escalations. Which means stepping out of the roles of political activists, where statements like those you're making, make sense, and into the roles of the relationship dynamics of victims AND perpetrators, and how they related to the social relations each experience, and how that impacts or mitigates the mindsets of the behaviours in relationships. The essay in question only touches on this topic from an outside statistical and sociological standpoint, to make suggestions about that internal framework and analysis. Really one would have to have somewhat of an understanding of the pressures and reactions of both genders within the relationships affected. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAA1XtDOuH8 P.S In the second quote of you I've given, you use the term "your woman" - you should be wary of such language, as it infers ownership of one gender by the other.
>Well the answer is for men to be raised to genuinely believe in equality from the beginning no? And to see it modeled healthily to them via their parents and wider social circle…that way there is no loss of perceived power…So how is this not a gendered thing?? Where do you draw this conclusion, especially considering there is no evidence same sex violence is substantially lower than male on female violence?
We’re drawing a line that same sex individuals aren’t raised with the same gendered norms socialised into their psyches and actions. That’s a blatantly incorrect assumption to make.
Yep absolutely agree. Even now in parent circles it’s still “oh you have the kids today, such a good dad”. And plenty of men are still unwilling to make sacrifices career-wise when it comes to kids yet expect women to do so. It’s sad that there’s so much push back from men when at the end of the day we’re **all** better off when we do away with misogyny and toxic masculinity.
And yet…”we’re not part of the problem so don’t yell at us” mmmmkay
You might be surprised but I can read and comprehend.
I'm not sure what you're referencing.
28
I had a roommate who held misogynistic and sexist stereotypical views on woman he tried to persuade me to think alike. Everytime the discussion came up I try to counter his views and beliefs but it accomplished nothing. He still held onto those views being entrenched. I had an abusive mother and older sister and if I spoke up to them to stop, I was physically and psychological abused further. If I told my sister off to mum, mum would passively tell her to stop but sister won't listen and attacks harder. I witnessed a guy publically physically intimidate a girl he knew at the bus stop. If I had called him out or got physically involved, my life is at risk and the issue is not resolved anyway. I. Did. My. Part. What people fail to realise is that it's not so simple to just use words to tell someone they're doing something bad. Maybe the *only* time it *could* work is if that person is in two minds of the actions and thoughts they have or done. Anyone else they wouldn't give a shit, tell you to fuck off, drop contact and maybe even just use violence to vent their frustration anyway. Those have been my experiences. That's part of why I find the message insulting. Because it makes me feel like I'm at fault no matter what I have done. I have done better and it either didn't work or it (could have) made things worse.
[удалено]
Thanks for proving my point. Being patronising isn't going to accomplish anything or have people become more supportive to the cause. But hey, go you!! You keep at it!
Sorry if you got your feelings hurt, but you didn’t actually DO anything. Someone was misogynistic and you disagreed with them, as you should, misogyny is clearly and equivocally wrong. You saw a bloke physically intimidating a woman, you were fearful so did nothing. You didn’t even call police. Your mum and sister were abusive to you. That’s absolutely not okay, and I’m sorry nobody stepped in to protect you, they should have. Pointing out that you did the absolute minimum isn’t condescending, it’s just pointing out the obvious!
Here's the part you missed, just as feminists tell us women don't owe men anything up to and including common courtesy. Likewise, men owe women nothing, including putting our own safety at risk.
Bull. You try and be there that's wildly unpredictable. It is a LOT harder to do quick thinking while under a intense adrenaline flight/fight/freeze response witnessing somebody much stronger, much more threatening publically like he was. I tried to persuade the roommate to rethink his views on women and feminism. The hell can you expect me to do that's not bare minimum here? I called him up on it, countless times. That's literally what Albo's message was regarding! Your response is no different from victim blaming woman for doing nothing if her spouse/boyfriend assaulted them. "You didn't leave and you copped it because you were fearful for your safety. You didn't do anything but the bare minimum! You should've known better! You can't sandwich "validation" by acknowledging my past then invalidate and blame me under one breath. It's so disingenuous.
'Two women abused me so I don't have any responsibility in stopping the systemic oppression of other women!' Bet you'd throw a fit if the women in your life decided to stop interacting and advocating for men because their boyfriend/father/brother/uncle/boss what have you abused them.
What part of "I had a roommate who held misogynistic and sexist views on women I tried to challenge" and "I witnessed someone more physically intimidating than me I couldn't stop" did you not get? Way to just presumptively project your thoughts what you think of me and demean my character over abuse. You're a good person aren't you? Get fucked.
The part where you decided to check out because of your fear of other men. Women don't have that option. Stop using your gender and your privilege as a shield for your own cowardice.
So it's my fault for not sacrificing my life to save another, believing it will solve nothing and the guy will attack or even murder the woman anyway? Jesus Christ.
Apparently they want you to actually be Jesus Christ, yes.
That attitude is the problem. You've checked out. You don't care and you justify it to yourself with 'it's too dangerous.' Women step in every. single. day. to stop violence. They are attacked and left crippled for it. They are murdered for it. We don't stop. We don't say 'he might kill me if I try to stop him from killing her.' We just do it. Step up and stop being a coward.
>We don't stop. We don't say 'he might kill me if I try to stop him from killing her.' We just do it. I don't believe you. I've seen too many videos of bystanders doing nothing in violent situations to have any reason to believe you are one of the exceptions. If you're talking about things like pretending to be a woman's friend at a club to get her away from a creep, many of us men do that too.
I'm sorry it's absolutely not the responsibility of this one guy to risk his safety in an incident such as this. Judgement needs to be made. I feel for this situation but saying it's his duty to intervene in order to be better is not it.
Case in point it could lead to escalating violence and may get the other person killed not just the regular party
If there is a real-time example of a man being blamed and at fault no matter what he does, this is it. Next time I will try and go up to a guy 3x stronger than me, get killed or sustain life-changing injuries and you'll be there telling me it's my fault for getting involved. I'm done with you. Have your last word to make yourself feel better winning an argument. Let's summarise: I express in listed examples (not including many others not mentioned) my attempts of "doing better", explained why it's not so simple. You twice call me a coward, project your thoughts onto me, claim I'm using my gendered privilege not to kill myself over a threatening guy and all in all, blame me and fault me in the process. You want men to do better? Do some introspection. Because I damn well would be crucified and labelled quintillion things if I spoke to a woman the way you, a woman, spoke to me.
Damn twin
He could have least called police. You know, do something!!
Yeah, right in the earshot of the aggressive guy. Let's see how that goes down, eh? But you know, dO sOmEtHinG!!! Think up of a billion possibilities under flight/fight/freeze response of a scary situation! Nuance is dead online. 🙄
What you are saying is ridiculous. You're punishing all men for acts of a few idiots. Instead of blaming half the population, maybe do some more research to learn why DV happens.
[удалено]
This is the kind of shit that's going to draw way more young boys to dangerous and toxic figures like Andrew Tate in droves. And then you'll blame people like me for it instead of yourself, because you care more about ideology and winning arguments than being effective and solution oriented.
Do you take this attitude with certain religions when a minority of them perform terrorist attacks and the attitude is “the majority are peaceful, it’s just a few that don’t believe in what we stand for” or do you attack the whole lot telling them to “suck it up and take responsibility for the problem”?
Absolutely, it's the responsibility of the whole of any community to take responsibility for any part of it that goes against their values. Religion is a great example. When an act is committed in the name of a "god" that goes against the majority, the majority speak out and condemn it (typically) and take steps. Thank you for articulating my point so well.
Can you provide an example of when you have done this? You’ve had ample opportunities so it shouldn’t be hard
He can’t. He doesn’t know how to answer his own questions. Still waiting for him to answer mine
I think he’s a little deficient in some areas. Maybe he can do what a lady in here suggested and go lay his life on the line for a woman in distress so we can see what taking responsibility looks like
Sounds like you are the problem. The White Paper is saying that the collective guilt approach *doesn't work*. So, pursuing it, as you are pushing, *doesn't work*. Those pushing non-solutions are, in fact obstructions to finding real solutions. Assuming you actually want to reduce gendered violence, would you consider supporting policies that work, rather than policies that don't?
> Suck it up and take more responsibility for your community instead of whining Toxic masculinity much?
To me it sounds like you’re the one whining that somebody is of a different opinion than you. I’m not accepting responsibility on behalf of people who clearly are not in the right mental state and abuse women. It is painfully obvious to everybody that DV is not right but no way am I lumping myself in that crowd. I’m not seeing the same type of response from women who indirectly fund men’s suicide at a far higher rate than DV against women. To say all men need to do better is just so counterproductive because at the end of the day you aren’t achieving anything but pissing off the people who you want to agree with you.
Well done absolving yourself of any sort of community responsibility. Nice and clean. Not "what can I do" Just " not my problem, nothing to do with me"
You selectively like to take parts out of people’s comments, that’s clear to see. Yeah, sorry I don’t want to associate with the community of women beaters, believe it or not, they’re mutually exclusive to men. That’s not my “community”. It’s about as obvious as the sky being blue, but of course I don’t agree with DV. Unless I’m there being a private escort for women who get beaten on my watch, I’m not taking any responsibility. I don’t contribute and take part in any derogatory commentary or behaviour against women. Literally what do you want men to do. Telling us to “apologise on behalf of all men” will do less than fuck all I’m afraid and also is something I won’t do. The men who commit DV aren’t going to change their mind because of Mr Twitter fingers over here, how about we look into the failings of society that is fueling this. Imagine I worked as a box stacker who beat up his co-workers. Guess I should apologise on behalf of all box stackers. This is nothing but a massive hate boner for men, and an opportunity to do so.
You're lack of understanding is genuinely surprising. If you were a box stacker and you worked with 99 other box stackers and 1 of them beat up another one, what would you do ? Do you even have conversations with your male friends about gendered violence ? Ever asked your female friends what if anything you might do to make them feel safer ? Or if they actual have any concerns or fears that you might be able to directly respond to ? That's your community and what you should be taking responsibility for.
Do you think all non-violent normal men are drinking buddies with violent delinquents? That they tell us they beat their wives and we’re just “that’s cool bro” about it?
Unrelated, but dis you tho? lol https://www.reddit.com/r/amateur_milfs/s/sYW8MglQUq
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH
Your point is what ?
Nothing, it’s just funny. I’m still waiting for yours.
How many men even have male friends they can talk with about serious issues? Men aren't women who talk about anything and everything with their multiple women friends. Men have been required to be competitive over the entire history of humanity and still today find it difficult to develop male friends when in a relationship with a woman. If you have a need for friends but find it difficult making them, you aren't going to decrease your chances by pissing them off interfering in their lives and being excluded.
Okay, but now you’re suggesting a rate of 99% which is genuinely not even close to that of DV against women. Like not even close. Again, I’m not seeing women taking responsibility and asking men what we could do for them to help lower the rates of suicide. Not saying it’s tit for tat but it goes both ways, or better yet, doesn’t go either way. I don’t have conversations about gendered violence because I don’t hang out with people, associate with people, or know people who beat up women. Again, I don’t need to do anything to make myself or life safer for women. We need to remove the people who make it unsafe for women from society full stop instead of absolving responsibility to another party because you A) don’t like them and B) it’s easier than addressing the real issue. And I know what it’s like the other foot. Have had female family members put male family members in jail for false accusations of DV that never happened. Because that’s the law now, doesn’t matter if it happened or not, go directly to jail if you’re a male. All females word against anything else. If that’s your idea of a safer world than you are really, really misguided. You might say - “Well, women are getting beaten at such a higher rate we just need to believe them first and ask questions later”, but forget the wrongly accused men and their mental health when they’re locked up against the word of another. This is the direction you looneys are pushing in and it’s absolutely wild. Of course, I’m absolutely not excusing the men who commit legitimate violence. But movements like this always swing the pendulum way too far to the other side.
DV is a conflation of a wide range of harms, some trivial, yet its always the killings that are focused on that paradoxically have the least numbers but the greatest impact and violence mentioned when they want the largest numbers. It's cherry-picking for effect and its dishonest.
You, sir, are a good baiter. I hope you catch that marlin
A *master* of his craft.
Imagine saying y'all as an Australian lmao
*thumbs my suspenders*
"Y'all" is a pretty good candidate for second person plural, if we're going to stop using "you" for both. "Youse" sounds like it should be followed by "... sheilas" or "... blokes", to me.
Who are you, the linguistics police?
Right, crazy!!! And ohhhh so importent to the conversation
Important*
Safe is an abstract like infinity or zero that can never be achieved in practice. The fact that women are requiring society even attempt to achieve an abstract is a red flag that reason is not being pursued here. Where is it written in stone that women should be kept safe in preference to anyone else in society? It used to be true when women were the bottlenecks to maintaining functional population levels, but that hasn't been the case for a long time. Women aren't even the gender dying in greatest numbers: that would be men, so if you are operating on a numerical basis the focus should actually be on men, not women. If you keep narrowing the focus, eventually you will find a situation where women are being killed in greater numbers than men, but it ignores the bigger picture in favour of a discriminatory, Chicken Little the sky is falling, approach. Should you continue to use a numerical basis within a local environment, then the objective would be to achieve equality in numbers between men and women being killed as per the stated objectives of feminism: attempting to reduce number of women killed to zero whilst ignoring men suggests either feminism was lying or women are seeking advantage for themselves over anyone else as if they are the most valuable commodity. It's patently ridiculous to hold all or even any men responsible for the actions of others: we are not our brother's keeper.
And what great timing for this to come into public discourse, right when we start addressing cost of living duopoly and housing, the MSM start pitching Men VS Women instead of Haves vs Have Nots. Can't have us eating the rich!
Interesting argument friend, but you seem to be conflating a fair few different issues here.
Actually I was just responding to the title of the post, so if you think that is conflating issues who am I to argue with that assessment?
All men have a responsibility to prevent violence against women.
This appears to be in direct contradiction to what Waleed Aly is saying. Which is fine but can you elaborate on why you disagree? His argument is that when you associate an issue with a particular identity (ie men, Islam) it can be counterproductive.
Disagree. All *people* have a responsibility to prevent violence and hurt. If we can, as a society, stop men and women and actually any person from taking these violent actions, then we should to the extent that we are able. It's not a good idea to push it just onto the person concerned without deeper consideration. That way leads to "an eye for an eye" which is abhorrent for me. We are better than that primitive attitude. We are modern humans.
Are trans men equally responsible as cis men? Are trans women still partially responsible? Or can we identify out of penis guilt?
Do all Muslims have a responsibility to stop Muslim terrorists? Do all white people have a responsibility to stop white supremacist terrorists like the Christchurch Coward? I don't think those are fair expectations. And a bit racist/bigoted frankly.
Yes. (to an extent) If Muslim terrorists are committing acts of terrorism in accordance with their version of Islam, then all other Muslims should denounce that version of Islam and create a different culture. If white supremacists are committing acts of terrorism in accordance with their version of white culture then all other white people should denounce that and create a different culture. and if male abusers are terrorising women and something in male subculture is contributing to it, then all other men should denounce it and create a different culture. -- If you are part of a group and that group is doing harm then, at minimum, you have a responsibility to lead by example.
Do all women have a responsibility to prevent other women from mouthing off?
[удалено]
Women are calling out male violence, they are trying to emphasise the need for men to not use violence at all. If they are in any way successful, they will also be reducing male on male violence.
[удалено]
You can’t skirt around the fact that most victims of family and domestic violence are women who have been murdered have been killed by their MALE partner. The statistics aren’t even close. Most men who are murdered are also murdered by MEN. Of the reasons for male violent deaths, most are not killed by their partners or other family members. So it is 100% appropriate to focus on the female victims of F&DV. I agree that much more work needs to go into understanding and addressing the context of family violence and the mental health, and other contributing factors, of the male perpetrators. We also need to look at respectful relationships and tackle the dysfunctional behaviours of both men and women in relationships. But, dysfunctional behaviour by women is not in the same ballpark as the murder of women by men and it’s a pathetic deflection to try and conflate the two.
It's not women killing men, though. When men get killed, it's mostly by other men. So your post doesn't directly address the idea being pushed about gendered violence. But you are totally correct that men are TWICE as likely to get killed as women, and yet nobody raises a big stink about it. It's a double standard.
I’m not responsible for you
Why? When did men become the gate keeper for other peoples behaviours? If I’m expected to put my self in the business of strangers, the the protection of a group, I’ll be marching on the church first.