This story will come as no surprise to anyone familiar with what male victims of domestic abuse face when it comes to getting taken seriously and getting any kind of services in their time of need. But there are lots of denialists out there, some out of self-interest because they think victimhood is a female prerogative or perhaps out of macho posturing because they like to think men are invulnerable – whatever the reason, there are lots of people in denial about the vulnerability of men to Intimate Partner Violence.
This is a simple story. A woman stabs her boyfriend three times with a knife and punctures both of his lungs. She also stabs her son during the same session, incidentally. She of course bonds out. No danger to anyone in the community, after all. Being oppressed will do that for you.
The man finds he has nowhere to go and that basically no one in the DV advocacy community cares enough to do anything about it. At that point his cousin, Sharain Spears, steps in. Thank God for female relatives, the kind that see through the bullshit and do something about it.
Here was a man who was doubly disposable – he is black and he is male – and the system treated him exactly that way – a system he was paying for in taxes. This is basically the same issue as Brown v. Board of Education. I could go through all the places he tried to get help and all the other roadblocks he hit, but go read the article itself. They deserve the clicks for publicizing this.
Like I said – simple story. And pretty common too.
Something else that’s common is the denial that men are victims of domestic violence, the denial that women initiate most domestic violence, that men have gendered trouble coming forward about it, or that men have gendered trouble getting help and any kind of real support when they are victims of these crimes. I am getting pretty disgusted about this kind of denial, whatever the reason for it.
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This just exemplifies just how much of an uphill battle male survivors and their advocates face.
There’s still shit all support for them and a driplet of empathy compared to the amount of support female survivors get.
Maybe if society, like I said, would do away with the myth that it’s machismo and pride preventing them from coming forward then we can get started with some actual support they have been screaming for since god knows when.
Then there’s the misandric notion of men as primary agressors and women as primary victims that fuel the biased domestic violence industry.
Sometimes I wonder if doing a play about the subject really made an impact of was it all futile. I go online and still see next to nothing about their plight, even my own as a survivor of child and teenagehood bullying from both genders.
I just left this comment over at the Beacon-News. Interestingly, it appears the knife-wielding attacker (Romano71?) may have left a comment there as well.
My comment:
Thank you for this story, Ms Crosby, and thank you, Ms Spears, for your determined efforts on the part of Mr Ingram.
No one, woman or man, deserves to be the victim of domestic violence. No one, woman or man, deserves to kicked out of their home because their abuser still lives there. Knife wielding harridans who have stabbed people repeatedly, however, do not deserve to bond out of jail.
Men are NOT disposable. Men are NOT the appropriate vessels for violent attack. What a shock it is to some that men matter, just as women matter.
What a shock.
I won’t be speaking out publicly any more. It will likely get me killed.
gwallan, could you write something up on the incident or circumstances?
Ther eis this meme running aorund about the MRM tending towards violence, when in fact it’s the anti-MRM people, the ones making that accusation, who are overtly violent. It’s time to shine a light on this. Anonymity guaranteed.
I just posted the link to this on my Facebook, with the comment “Men who are domestic violence victims need help too,” and one of my female friends responded:
MC: jesus, finally someone realizes that. i brought that up in my human rights class and my professor basically told me i was a moron and “part of the problem facing women.” dont we fight for rights so that people who may seem on the fringe or in the minority arent forgotten?
Male domestic violence victims are on the fringe (in terms of who knows and cares about them), and they are forgotten. That she understands this is wonderful; she is absolutely right. However, it also makes me really fucking sad because she’s going to the same university I graduated from, and it’s clear that anti-male bigotry is strong there.
God this is deppressing. The fact that Gwallen fears for his life because he, gasp, dares to advocate on behalf of his pain and the pain of other male survivors makes me want to slit my throat because I know what it’s like to feel alone and ostracized, having to face a world that bows to the whims of female victims and tosses ignorance at male ones.
Gwallen, Eagle 33, et all:
If this makes you feel any better I might be about to lose a “friend” over this.
She has an annoying habit of sharing her political causes to all and sundry.
Most of it I actually agree with or is rather harmless: she’s big into animal rights.
But she’s pretty big into the ‘gynocentric’ form of feminism as well, so she posts the occasional feminist stuff.
Usually I can agree, or it’s not so bad.
But today she put a post up about “zero tolerance” for violence against women.
I actually responded and said I wasn’t going to share it because it basically amounted to propaganda (women as the only victims of domestic violence, that sort of thing).
I might have typed a total of 3 sentences. Then in another comment just below I linked to this post.
She deleted BOTH( and posted a comment saying it’s ok to disagree but don’t rant on her page) as if she hadn’t SHARED the stupid thing, and asked others to do the same -share it, that is.
I’ve posted back asking her why she deleted my link to this post.
Her answer *if any* will determine our future friendship.
JDCryan, that dynamic, of women being realy loud about how men they know get screwed in the system, wa sone of the big surprises back when I statrted looking at this stuff. It turns out Typhonblue is far from anaomalous. And it stands to reason. Althuogh it is seductively easy to categorize people as men and women and discuss them that way, that’s not how they/we live. We don’t have separate lives in separate camps. Every time some man is getting mistreated, it affects one or more women.
I have systematicley kicked most of the feminists off my facebook page, as I got tired of dealing with their intellectual dishonesty.
#1 question facing male victims of female violence: “I wonder what he did to deserve it?”
Copyleft, yeah, because victim-blaming is an absolute non-no, depending on the victim.
No answer as of yet. But her mom got involved about 45 mins ago and launched the standard gynocentric shaming attacks, while totally ignoring any addressing of my question.
Beautiful, huh?
Clarence, sigh….
The standard platitude is to say you’re better off and all that. It’s still a shame, though.
Update:
Defriended her. She did respond , but changed the subject and made threats about blocking and this and that.
Not worth it.
@Clarence:
Gynocentric feminism – the kind that often involves the shaming of men/others who disagree – is awfully Machiavellian. It doesn’t matter who they hurt, via shame, through lack of help and/or through using others to get what they want. It’s an attempt to arrive at social justice via the least socially just avenue.
@Ginkgo:
Same here, and I’m glad you see it, too. It can be pretty abysmal looking out at the sea of online capital-F-Feminist bigotry toward men, but it’s really satisfying to have female friends offline who really get that being male isn’t all milk and cookies (or power and wealth), recognize that men are treated as disposable, and that men are human and, as humans, need help and understanding as well, in addition to the ability to be who they are, whether they’re socially awkward science and music nerds like yours truly, men who want a quiet life with art and family, guys who are stereotypically guys, or any combination of the above or the many, many other types of men out there without being crapped on for it (or at least not unduly crapped on for it, anyway. I’ve always been a little leery about the “celebrate womanhood” schtick from feminists, and eye “celebrating” men the same way).
Yes, yes, yes!
And that reminds me of a conversation I was having the other day with my brother’s wife. I asked if she thought men and women were treated differently when they were in a failing relationship, and she said, without missing a beat (paraphrasing here), “Yes. When a woman is having problems with a man, she can complain to others about how he doesn’t pay attention to her, doesn’t do things she wants to do when she wants to do them, watches too much sports, etc., and people say ‘dump the bastard. You can do so much better!’ But when a man complains about a woman, even if she’s done something vastly worse than to him than ‘watching too much sports’ would be to the woman, the response is much different. People tell him to bring her flowers, give him tips on how to listen (as if anyone else really knows how), or, worse, tells him to man up and learn to take it and live with it.”
You’re right; we don’t have to live in separate camps, but sometimes it’s hard not to. As in the case above, it’s almost like women live in a camp where many people think they should expect perfection in their social interactions (at least with men, but often with anyone), whereas men are taught to not only expect something less than perfection, but often to live with something that everyone else knows is a horrible and just deal with it. If a man wants perfection, he’s told he’s acting like a child.
It would be very nice if the expectation field was leveled (somewhere below women’s and above men’s), and the camp opened up to everyone.
God, I hate the human race now and am ashamed to be a part of it.
They like to go on and on about tolerance, empathy and goodness but the minute they find something that challenges their orthodoxy, they show their true colors.
Case in point: Male Survivors.
I feel like I’m the only one on this planet who gives a damn about them, regardless of how many are identfied compared to female survivors.
Then again there’s you guys, Jacobtk, Danny, Daran, Ballgame and others from feminist critics.
@JDCyran
One of the universal constants re: male/female relationships, that I’ve noticed in my travels around the world is that (outside of rural Islamic areas) women are expected to reject men for any reason. Conversely, the only widespread reason that is allowable for men to reject women is infidelity (and there are plenty of women in feminised countries who will advocate on the cheater’s behalf as long as the cheater is female.)
Pakistan works as a great example. In most of the country, marriages are arranged by parents. Aside from lack of virginity, the only thing that a man can use as a viable rejection criteria is “She’s too dark.” Her size, her height, her oral hygiene (or lack, thereof), her “educated, Western ways”, her lack of frugality, etc., doesn’t matter if the man isn’t rich. A woman, OTOH, who isn’t scraping up loose grain from the local millstone for food has dozens of options. I have an American-born friend of Pakistani descent. He described his parents courtship process to me: she was his second choice (after his first choice was found en flagrante delicto), he was her *61st* choice (she rejected men for being too old, too skinny, too fat, too dark, too *light*, too pretty, too stupid, too traditional, too *modern*…)
When she stabbed him, hit him with metal pans, slashed their children with broken drinking glasses, ran up tens of thousands of debt, etc., their families agitated for reconciliation. When she discovered/intuited that his secretary was interested in him, their oldest relatives began giving him hints about taking a second wife. It literally took the disappearance of my friend’s mother for a year to end the White Knighting on the families’ end. And when she returned to claim “her” kids, the White Knighting resumed.
@MaMu1977
Hmm. This makes me want to write a long comment about the acceptance/rejection dichotomy, but I don’t have the time due to research deadlines and a music project. This is will be very short and incomplete, and likely to be taken the wrong way thanks to that, but do you think that most societies create a culture of rejection around males and acceptance around females?