(The comment at the bottom left is by me. It says: "Misandry
(man-hatred) typical of the contemporary Lesbocracy')
I realise that many people will
not see the female violence depicted in this cartoon as bad. They
will concentrate on the reason for it. They will think that the
man should not have done what he did. This is typical of sexist
double standards on domestic violence. If a man is violent, people
concentrate on how wrong the violence
was. If a woman is violent, they concentrate on her reasons
for being violent.
Anti-male double standards are common. As I reported in the article
Males Suffer Horrific Rate of Psychological
Abuse, in 19th Century Britain, Queen Victoria blocked the
passing of a law which would have criminalised lesbianism along
with male homosexuality -- because she could not believe it existed!
According to the article Skimmington Revisited*
there were times in history when men were punished for being victims
of their wives' violence! And in an experimental study of people's
reactions to identical hypothetical scenarios of male, as compared
to female domestic violence, N. T. Feather**
found that:
"Participants were more negative to the husband than
to the wife in regard to responsibility for the offense, deservingness
of the penalty, seriousness of the offense, perceived harshness
of the penalty, reported positive affect, and reported sympathy."
Another example of Feminist sexism cropped up when I was doing
something connected with my family's history. One of my distant
Feminist relatives was obviously a Feminist, in the sense that
she kept on using her maiden name after her marriage. (I am not
criticising that practice, by the way.) This same woman told me
the name of a young child in her part of the family, together
with its mother's name -- but would not tell me the father's name,
because she thought the mother would not want the father's name
to be mentioned! Feminists often criticise Fathers' Rights groups
for allegedly treating children as property -- since women usually
get custody, they can pretend that this was in the best interests
of the child, and nothing to do with women treating children as
property. However, here we have a case of
a mother trying to eradicate any trace of the father from a child's
life, as if that child really was her personal property!
*M.J. George, Skimmington Revisited,
The Journal of Men's Studies, Vol. 10, No. 2, Winter 2002,
111-127.
** N. T. Feather, Domestic
Violence, Gender, and Perceptions of Justice, Sex Roles,
Vol. 35, Nos. 7/8, 1996.
***To be precise, the sticker was actually
on a grey metal cupboard, and the cartoon mentioned was actually
on a pillar in an open-plan office.
