Good point.

I agree witb your others, too.

Making blanket statements like female=good /men=bad doesn’t help any-one. It can be hard to avoid when you’re talking generalities.

My first statement was to call Ed out on his suggestion that asking who children experienced more violence from would ‘prove’ women were as mean as men.
I think he’d get the results he’s looking for. But not for the reasons he’s expecting. The burden of child-care falls almost wholly on women, and in almost every culture physical discipline against children is approved and encouraged.

I’ve never heard a man accused of being mean for the sake of it. It might be helpful to everyone to drop the ‘for the sake of being mean’ entirely and be open to the reasons behind individual incidences of violence.

which is sort of damning with faint praise, i think. my rats are not axe murderers. that does not make rats = good.

also, “many men i know are not interested in their children” does not = “men bad.”

i suspect, though i’m not sure, of course, that sophie would agree with the statement “men don’t tend to be mean just to be mean.” i doubt, however, that this means she thinks men = good and men = bad simultaneously, as would have to be the case were the statements she’d made so easily reducible to superlatives.

I don’t think saying that men, in general, are uninterested in their children is biased. I could name one man who I know who does spend a lot of time with his daughter and is protective of her. I’d have to think really hard to find any more.
That’s the world I live in.

The power argument is a whole different issue. Perhaps a few men do feel powerless - but I don’t believe it’s comparable. Legally things have got a lot better in the last decade or so (divorce laws etc) but it appears to be swinging the other way now.
A decade ago, a woman who walked out on her husband could lose everything except, in most cases, the children.

My real problem with all of Maia’s assumptions are that she recognizes male power but refuses to recognize female power. I think that it was said best so far by Jane. When we choose to trust someone we give them power over us. When we love someone, that gives them power. When we share property or children with them..THAT gives them power. Physical strength is one type of power amid a multitude of others.

If you truly believe men don’t feel powerless in relationships I pity you for your lack of understanding of people, not just men.

That was bitter? I’m not only confused, I think we’re talking at cross-purposes. how are ‘women are not mean for the sake of being mean’ and ‘many fathers show no interest in their children’ mutually exclusive?

You clearly live in a very different world to the one I’ve seen. Frankly, if women were as you say I’d be terrified of encountering one.
My comment on fathers not showing interest was based on 2-parent homes that I’m familiar with.

But back on-topic - I’m with Maia on this one. Mutually abusive should not be the default presumption in cases of DV even where the woman has reacted physically towards her partner. The situation is much more complex in many cases.
For one thing, I recognise Denise’s scenario. I also punched and scratched a male several times when he didn’t hit me. All he did was hold me down and rape me. What sort of ‘equal power, mutual brawling’ scenario can you call that? And who is more at fault - me for defending myself or the guy who was able to use his weight to control the situation?
There’s a huge difference in lashing out in self-defence or to protect someone, and hitting for punishment.
(note that the guy concerned did later say he wished he had hit me, because he thought I deserved it)

You’re assuming that all women are so much weaker than all men that any physical violence from a woman to a man has to be “I’m weak and powerless and can’t really hurt you!” And then the man isn’t hurt and should shrug this off.

You’re projecting things onto the post that aren’t there. No where does Maia say, or imply, anything like “all women are so much weaker than all men.” No where does she advocate “blanketly exonerat[ing] any woman… because she happens to be a woman.”

You seem to be determined to assume anti-male prejudice whether or not it’s actually there.

I have actually seen the mutual abuse up close and personal. My husband is legally blind, skinny, and was physically abused by his father as a teen. His ex-wife had a pathological anxiety disorder that led her to lie to avoid conflict. Based on what I’ve *seen* them do, what he’s done to me, and what they’ve both told me, here was the dynamic:

She would lie to cover up that she hadn’t done something she needed to do that she was too anxious, too distracted by ADD or simply didn’t want to do. Such as pay the electric bill.

He would find out when the electric was turned off, with two small children and no money in the house to get it back on because he thought it was paid and hadn’t accounted for the money. He would ger verbally abusive and confrontational and would block her in, berating her.

She would overload with anxiety and respond with full-bore physical violence — punching, bodyslamming, head-butting.

He would go all PTSD from having been beaten near death as a teen and would respond with equal force.

At one point they got into a confrontation because she had run off to have an affair and claimed she’d been carjacked. They fought. She tried to strangle him. He locked her in their office to escape and called the cops… who arrested him for locking her up.

I know, from spending seven years with this man, that he can be verbally extremely nasty when he’s upset, and that he has an unpleasant tendency to try to prevent people from leaving the scene of an argument. But I also know that he never hits first. Having been beaten many times in his life, being a skinny guy, and being legally blind, he will respond as if his life is in danger if he’s physically attacked, unless the attacker is *plainly* not able to really hurt him — like our children. But he doesn’t ever throw the first punch.

By the logic presented here, he was the abuser because he was verbally nasty (though it wasn’t abuse that she kept endangering their family by lying to avoid confrontation), and when she hit him, she was just expressing her powerlessness. And then when he hit back, he was simply an abuser attempting to control His Woman. The idea that he could have considered her an equal and been genuinely in fear for his life and safety from a person with better vision who weighed more than he did, because his upper body strength was superior to hers, is impossible because he has a penis. He has to take anger management classes and has to be taught that it is misogynistic and wrong to hit a woman or get angry at her; however, she is justified in slamming him to the floor and trying to strangle him because she was afraid of his abusive language.

Let me be clear here — I don’t exonerate either of them. They were poisonous for each other, but I recognize that my husband certainly *could* have stopped this cycle at certain points within it, and I hold him responsible for his tendency to be verbally abusive when mad and his desire to keep people he’s arguing with from leaving and cooling off. That’s bad. So is hitting a man who hasn’t hit you first. Full stop. You don’t get the right to hit first just because you have ovaries and you “feel” powerless. And if you do hit first because you “feel” powerless, what happens when you hit a man who also “feels” powerless? And why does a woman get a free pass for hitting because she “feels” powerless but a man who hits because he “feels” powerless is an evil abuser?

Abuse follows power. Well, what happens when both parties have power? If one party can drive and the other can’t, who has power? If one party has a job and the other doesn’t, who has power? We envision power dynamics as always going male -> female, unless they very explicitly go the other way around. But in an actually egalitarian relationship *both* parties have power. If money is a joint property and one person is responsible for paying the bills, that person has power, even though the other person *could* step in and start paying them. Whenever we trust, we give power to another.

I have considered myself a feminist since I was 3. But to me, being a feminist means that men and women are equally human. If in the middle of a verbal fight, a short guy hauls off and belts a big guy, and the big guy hits back, legal culpability usually states that the short guy is at fault for starting it, and the big guy fought in self-defense, unless his return attack was so brutal that it was excessive force. We can’t have a separate rule for women because women “feel” powerless. We’re not children. If we hit first and in the resulting fight we end up getting injured worse, IT IS STILL OUR FAULT unless the force used against us was in great excess of the force we delivered. And in the absence of other abuse markers (jealousy, controlling behavior, isolating from friends and family), we cannot say that the man in a “mutually abusive” situation is invariably and solely to blame.

So no. I will agree that men are responsible for *worse* abuse than women, I will agree that men are responsible for more abuse than women, but I will not blanketly exonerate any woman in a “mutually abusive” relationship because she happened to be a woman. If you slap someone and they punch you, I’m sorry, you had fault in that. Maybe reasonable force would be that they slapped you back rather than punching you but you can’t claim you did nothing to provoke the punch either. Just as if you insult and berate someone and they hit you, you had fault in that. (Though I personally think that the bright line for the *most* fault is always who hit first.)

in our society power dynamics within heterosexual relationships are going to be gendered

Is there a society somewhere in which power dynamics within heterosexual relationships are not gendered? Has such a thing ever existed?

Ok, so in areas of violence you want “he did it” as the default assumption? This is better how? Everywhere you turn you hear about how the stories of female violence are justified or straight out lies. They are not either in many cases. I am not sure if it is mothers feeling entitled to whoop on the children because they “came outta me, dammit!” or what. With most of the people I talk to about growing up they recall being afraid of their father getting mad and punishing them. And they recall their mother GETTING mad and punishing them. Almost everyone remembers a version of “the stick” or “the flyswatter” or “the strap”. And more often then not it was wielded by an angry mother.
As for the power issue, what is a more uneven power base than ” I am going to take your kids” to a father who really does care? So quit playing the men have all the power card, it is old and lame. Women are just as sarcastic, biting and condencending of their partners as well. Unless you feel it is ok for wives to criticize husbands just not the other way around? Stealing someones dignity and respect from his/her peers or children is as bad regardless of the gender of the target. If you think women don’t powertrip, if you think there are not female control freaks in relationships, if you think you have to be male to feel entitled, you probably havent looked very deeply into the world.
As to the comment about the number of men who “show no intrest in their children”. You will sit there and say women are not mean for the sake of being mean and in the same breath say deadbeat dad’s are the default situation? Gee, we don’t have a skewed perception of the world, do we? I barely even sound bitter compared to coments like that. And what is no intrest? How many fathers have you ever personally met who was allowed or encouraged in his child’s life and wanted nothing to do with them? Are there men who don’t care? Sure, I am sane and can admit a fact. Is it more than the number of women who use their children as legal leverage, paydays, welfare tickets, or excuses for pity? That I doubt. So I guess one question to ask is it worse to be passively negligent or actively abusive? Neither is a good thing to the child.
So, ask only children who grew up in 2 parent homes, if it makes you feel better. Two parent homes with biological parents. See who gets pegged as more violent.

Are you aware of how badly skewed the answers to your question will be because of the sheer number of fathers who show no interest in their children?

I, personally, do not believe that there are many women who are mean for the sake of being mean. If you observe it that way, you’re missing a lot.

You condemn the mutually violent comment because you think it only works one way.

Actually, what was condemned was making “mutually violent” the default assumption so that limited data isn’t used to prove something that isn’t true. As c.’s experience shows, the victim can easily be mistaken as the source of the problem.

This dynamic fits my experience as a child abuse survivor. When I didn’t fight back, I was seen as mewling fair game, incl. by authority figures outside the home; when I became withdrawn and troubled, the abuse, disguised as tough, no-nonsense parenting, was seen as justified, incl, by authority figures outside the home, at a point when I was trying to tell; when I finally said, no, and became actively angry, it was the apparent apex of defeat, and I “became” an unconscionable, inexcusable, bad-and-sick-in-the-head, and calling me shit, stupid, freak was seen as prescient, as victory. By that time, no one stood up for me, including a minister who admitted the whole church thought my parents were a little peculiar. I’d been seen the whole time as inviting it. Doctors, teachers, social workers, saw me as the only problem. I was being told to toady to stop the abuse, whereas people who psychologically need a scapegoat and whom no one is acting to stop will ALWAYS find something to abuse about. One is seen as toady-complicit, or rebelling and therefore the problem. Reactions to abuse highly OFFEND people who “rationally” know better. They get in on the chicken peck. Everyone washed their hands of me.

I’ve heard “if I did X to you, no one would ever believe you” outta people due to this, around bullying, which worked, the main perpetrator being favored by the teachers and very socially intelligent, and with my first boyfriend (did not start a pattern).

I didn’t know why the world though it was “ok” that things happened to me that I knew the world did not think were “ok.” I didn’t know why, what my “mark” was, or what affect and script to follow to not have it happen.

I think in part people want to placate abusers, because they don’t think they’ll change, and because they think the abusers are the more dangerous. I think this is what a lot of people think of men and women deep down, which is why so much control and blame women, and I think very, very deep down they are dimly aware that it’s a projection.

That being said, I can absolutely imagine a relationship in which two horrid people pick and crap at each other foully for decades. It could be equal picking and crapping. If they break up, or if one of them does get hurt, it might be parsed through stereotypes. I had a wicked mother and a soft enabling father, but have never, ever gone to the “women are as bad as men or worse and there is no social gender power dynamic” position. I’m between that view and “abuse is always unilateral and the woman is always the weaker.”

I don’t think I’m the weaker of the parties in that abuse, although nothing that I ever yelled back at my parents or did to them was even truly “delinquent.” I haven’t continued the cycle of abuse. I win. I live with all the anger and all the violence and ingrained deprecating messages and memories that come back to me daily like recurring trauma, and I live with them. I stare down revenge ideation and suicidal ideation every day and tell it no, I do not want to play, I don’t write it down because I will not play, there are things I don’t say because I will not play, and I go out with approximate dignity and treat others with general respect. I win. And now, I will not play.