MISANDRY – Trying to get services for a male victim of domestic violence

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 won’t be speaking out publicly any more. It will likely get me killed.

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.

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.

I have systematicley kicked most of the feminists off my facebook page, as I got tired of dealing with their intellectual dishonesty.

Copyleft, yeah, because victim-blaming is an absolute non-no, depending on the victim.

Clarence, sigh….

The standard platitude is to say you’re better off and all that. It’s still a shame, though.

@Clarence:

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.

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:

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.

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).

We don’t have separate lives in separate camps. Every time some man is getting mistreated, it affects one or more women.

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.

@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.