Subject: Re: December 6

From: [email-masked] (Chris Auld)
Date: 6 Dec 1994 03:36:05 GMT

[email-masked] (John Baglow) writes:

>Suppose someone wanted to memorialize victims of lynchings in the southern
>US. According to Chris Auld, would this be racist?

Lynchings _are_ a racial issue.  Violence is _not_ a gender issue.

To be clear, I have absolutely no problem with people remembering Lepine's
victims.  Nor do I have any problem with people discussing forms of
violence that are gender issues, specifically rape, as such.  But I have a
major problem with people turning one man's insanity into a representative
case of violence.  Judging Marc Lepine differently because he happened to
have a penis is sexist.  Discussing violence against women as if it were
the only major form of violence in our society is sexist (it perpetuates
stereotypes of both men and women; the former as uncontrollable animals
and the latter is helpless victims), simply wrong, and dangerous -- the
plight of other victims, most notably children, is _de facto_ trivialized. 
And I obviously have a major problem with fools who gibber that Marc Lepine
didn't slaughter those women, ``society's misogyny'' did. 

The reasons that have been brought forward for concentrating on women as
victims of male violence are extremely weak.  It is true that the average
man is stronger than the average woman, but the average woman more than
compensate for that by being three times more likely to use weapons.  One
third of spousal murder victims in Canada are men.  Domestic violence is
approximately evenly split between men and women (see, for instance,
Steinmetz, S. and J. Lucca, ``Husband Battering,'' in _Handbook of Family
Violence_, Hasselt et al (eds.) Plenum 1988).  The fact that the
impression one gets from the media is always men as perpetrators and women
as victims reflects sexist stereotypes more than reality. 

But all this misses the point dramatically.  Even if it were true that men
are far more violent than women, it is still indefensible to reduce all
violence to that of men against women.  `Men' simply refers to the male
half of the human race, the only characteristic these human beings share
is their gender.  Just like it is reprehensible to judge someone based on
the colour of their skin, it is reprehensible to judge somone on their
gender; making the inference from `the average man is more likely to
commit violence than the average woman' that _each_ man is more likely to
commit violence than each women is both a logical fallacy and terribly
sexist.  

I wish to emphasize that I absolutely do not mean to downplay the horror
that some women have experienced at the hands of some men.  But I ask that
others do not downplay all the other forms of violence that _people_
suffer.  There is no reason to make violence a gender issue; as I've
argued, doing so is itself a result of sexist characterizations.

-- 
Chris Auld                               Department of Economics
Internet: [email-masked]       Queen's University
Office:   (613)545-2269                  Kingston, ON   K7L 3N6

---

From: [email-masked] (Chris Auld)
Date: 8 Dec 1994 23:48:23 GMT

[email-masked] (John Baglow) writes:

>In a previous posting, Chris Auld ([email-masked]) writes:

>> The
>> question is why we should single out any of these as more worthy of our
>> attention than others. 

>Who on earth is doing that? No one I know.

Then you should really get out more often, perhaps you could pick up a
newspaper or listen to almost any commentator on domestic violence.  The
_fact_ is that the attention drawn to male violence against women is far
disproportionate to its relative frequency.  According to popular
conception, male violence against women _is_ more worthy of our attention
than vice versa, by the simple fact that it actually receives orders of
magnitude more attention.  When was the last time we had a memorial, or
even a passing mention, of the male victims of female violence?

>Violence against women is one of those problems. What
>is wrong with trying to solve it specifically?

Nothing, as long as the attempt to ``solve'' the problem neither exacerbates
it nor trivializes other forms of violence.  The inordinate attention drawn
to this one type of violence does both.  If the problem is domestic violence,
why not treat the family as the unit to be helped?  Relentlessly analysing
only one type of violence can do nothing but perpetuate stereotypes.

>Look, Chris, you're busy and I'm busy, so I have some sympathy for you
>here, but it does seem to me that the onus is on the person who makes the
>claim to prove it, not on me to disprove it.

Here's a few facts for your digestion (thesis by damned):

o  The severe assault rate is 46/1000 for assaults by wives and 50/1000
   for assaults by husbands (Straus, ``Physical Assaults by Wives: A
   Major Social Problem'' in _Current Controversies in Family Violence_
   Sage 1993).

o  In the States, the number of husbands killed by their wives is
   approximately equal to wives killed by husbands.  In 1984, 43% of
   spousal victims were husbands (_Uniform Crime Reports_ 1984, quoted
   in Steinmetz S. and J. Lucca, ``Husband Battering,'' cited previously).

o  With the exception of rape, men are much more likely to be the
   victims of violence than women.

		   Victims of violent crimes (per 100,000)
 
                               males   females
				
       Murder                    9.3     2.5
       Forcible rape             3.9    84.6
       Robbery                 438.0   252.0
       Aggravated assault     1614.8   897.1       (_ibid_)

   ``Men constitute about 80% of the homicide victims; nearly 70% of the
     robbery victims and about 70% of the victims of aggravated assault.''
    (_ibid_)

   If we are going to concentrate on only one gender as victims, we should
   clearly be concentrating on men.  But that runs counter to accepted
   stereotypes, so we don't.

o  ``The data from a nationally representative study of family violence
     reported that although the total violence scores for spouse abuse
     were very similar, wives tended to be slightly higher in almost all
     categories except pushing and shoving.''  (_ibid_)   
  
o  3.8% of husbands are victimized by their wives, 4.6% of wives are
   victimized by their husbands, where victimization is defined by repeated
   acts of violence placing on the Conflict Tactics Scale N-R.  (Straus
   1993).

The literature clearly paints a far different picture than the media and
popular conception.  Men are always depicted as perpetrators and women as
victims in popular discourse; this is the direct result of sexist stereo-
types.  In reality, men are not always. or even usually, the one to init-
iate violence, nor are they significantly more likely to escalate the
violence to murder.  But one would never dream this is true from the
impression one gets from the media, indeed, the shock John Baglow and
others have expressed over the facts clearly demonstrates my point.  If
John is correct that drawing attention to violence against women is not
trivializing other forms of violence, he should not have been surprised at
all by the _fact_ that women in domestic relations are approximately as
violent as their partners.  I would be interested in hearing his
explanation for this, along with an exposition of his implicit premise
that popular conceptions of violence are not misinformed by sexist
stereotypes.  It seems that amongst the PC crowd sexism is just fine as
long as the negative stereotype is being applied to men instead of women. 

``To most people women's violence against men ... smacks of a grotesque
  joke.  The idea of a physically smaller woman, rolling pin in hand,
  intimidating or battering her mate is fit for burlesque skits.  It
  conjures up images of amazons bullying passive, wimpish men.  In fact,
  because of our Western patriarchical tradition, there is something 
  that seems so absurd about women abusing men that until recently
  the entire subject has been ignored.''

 			-- Shupe, A.,  _Violent Men, Violent Couples_

[ quoting out of order: ]

>                                                        There is no
>hierarchy of violence, making one form more or less acceptable than
>another.

[...]

>With respect, I think my example stands up better than yours. The only way
>they could be considered equivalent is if you believe that Blacks in the
>South and whites are somehow on equal footing in terms of power, control
>and status. Otherwise it makes no sense. 

So, in other words, there _is_ a hierarchy of violence.  If human being A
commits a violent act against human being B, we must know whether A
belongs to a gender or racial group that statistically has greater
``power, control and status'' than person B's group before we can judge how
heinous the act is.  What a remarkable and frightening comment.  In any
case, you ``neatly evaded my point'' -- is that quote acceptable or not? 
Or is it only unacceptable because blacks have less ``power, status, and
control'' than whites, and if so, how exactly does that follow?  If
Farrakan (sp?) made the same remark with black and white reversed, would
it then be perfectly acceptable?

>Moreover, you have neatly evaded
>my point, so let's have an answer out of you: would you oppose a memorial
>observance in the deep South dedicated to the victims of lynchings?

I'm not opposed to remembering Marc Lepine's victims, as I've already
said.  I am opposed to the interpretation of his action as representative
of all violent acts committed by men against women and the almost
exclusive attention drawn to one amongst many types of violence.  If the
lynching ``memorial'' was a thinly disguised front to perpetuate a notion
of racial warfare in the U.S. and of whites as innately more violent than
blacks, I would indeed be opposed to it.