An interesting point

The Advice Goddess raises a good point:

It doesn’t take much for domestic violence against men to be taken seriously…usually, just a chalk outline where a man’s body used to be. The rest of the time, people tend to shrug it off or even find it cute: “Well, well, well, she’s quite the firecracker!” Granted, male abusers can do much more damage with their fists, but put a heavy object in a woman’s hands, and good morning brain damage! (Just wondering…has your husband gotten the ashtray out of his skull, or does he have to hang around smoking areas with his head bent down so people have someplace to flick their ash?)

I've been mulling over whether or not to get into the debate about feminism since I started writing this blog (yes, all three months of it....lol). I couldn't ignore this one.

My ex-wife is, or at least was, a staunch feminist of the "women are oppressed and always have been" stripe. I want to be clear about this: she is entitled to her opinion, and I am not going to say it doesn't have any merit. I do, however, happen to disagree with that viewpoint; this is largely because there are abundant examples of women who have chosen, for whatever reason, to stand out from the crowd and take some kind of action on their own behalf.

Therein lies the problem. Men, as a rule, have a strong tendency to see productive action as validating. Be successful, do something important, take action.....don't just sit and talk about it, for God's sakes....you'll never get anywhere that way. The problem with this point of view, and again, it has merit, but I'm not necessarily agreeing with it, is that it discounts all of the things that women seem to be naturally wired to do, which is networking and social interaction.

The feminist movement is, largely, exactly such a network. If men have a valid point that the cards are stacked against them in a domestic dispute with a woman, then one has to think a bit about why the deck is on the table that way and who's doing the dealing. This didn't happen by accident; the feminist movement going back to Sappho has focused its attention on changing the world to reflect its own agenda.

This, in concept, is not a bad idea. The problem is, things have gone too far.

How have we gotten in this country to a point where police responding to a domestic dispute immediately assume that the typical picture of woman = victim exists? Not all cops think that way, to be fair, but a great deal of them do based on experience. Presupposing the situation's details aside, in my opinion that's much like assuming that dice have a memory or that the stock market is always predictable - there are simply too many variables at work in peoples' interactions to assume that because a) has happened before, and often, that a) is also automatically true unless proven otherwise.

Dr. Helen had an article at Pajamas Media not too long ago that I found thought provoking, asking whether marriage is a winning propositon for men. The answer from her commenters was overwhelmingly no, that a man getting married is giving up far more than his freedom, he's opening the door willingly for a woman to take advantage of him in every way imaginable. Is this true? Have we really reached a point where the prospect of marriage's drawbacks outweigh its benefits?

Feminists have a point that there's a glass ceiling in a male-dominated workplace. I happen to work in an environment that is nearly the exact opposite, however - there are virtually no men at all in lower to middle management of the agency I work for, except if you go looking into IT. Other than that, one has to go further up into the upper echelons to find men. At my level, it's even more lopsided - my workplace numbers something like 40 women and 7 men. It's not quite 10:1, but it's close. Is this evidence of a glass ceiling, then, or it something much more pedestrian? The industry I work in doesn't attact a lot of men, and since the ranks of management are largely drawn from the pool of talent already in the agency, it would tend to make more sense.

Going back to the question of domestic violence, though, brings me to my last point (at least, as far as this post goes...). Men are encouraged, generally, to be emotionally repressed; thinking a problem through, reacting logically, taking whatever action is appropriate, these are all what men are "supposed" to do. For men to actually put the drive to "do" aside, and spend time networking, talking, and thinking the problem out, is hard, in part I think because it isn't generally encouraged (ie. not "masculine"), and in part because generally we have so little experience at it. Men - and I'm speaking largely for myself here - generally fear ridicule or mockery of their failures more than just about anything else, and not taking the somewhat more usual path of problem --> solution --> action --> resolution leaves one open to precisely that kind of shame.

In other words, expecting the person that's supposed to be "strong" to open up and discuss gooshy feelings is on a very basic level very counterintuitive. Personally, I think it takes a lot more strength to talk about one's problems than pretend they don't exist, but not everybody sees it that way.