With all the talk about Chris Brown and Rihanna, I’ve been talking and writing a lot about domestic violence. Chris and Ri were not married, are not related or cohabitating, so their incident comes more accurately under the heading of assault or another term I am hearing a lot of lately –Intimate Partner Violence.
I’ve been trying to broaden the conversation because I have been assaulted by women, and I know how helpless you feel as a man caught up in it. Every man I know has a “crazy bitch” story, as in “that crazy bitch tried to punch/cut/stab/club me. “ I don’t know what happened between Chris Brown and Rihanna, but I know that studies suggest that women instigate these crack-ups more times than we think. I really feel Byron Hurt’s attempt to get at men who abuse women, because we can all agree those “men” are sub-human. But while he wrote out the 10 excuses men use for hitting women, I kept waiting for the women’s list. I’m still waiting. I dig B’s idea, but I think we have addressed the equation from one end for long enough and found that it doesn’t work. The numbers haven’t gone down, and there has been no change. So it may be time for a new approach. Shaming, blaming propping up the double standard and polarizing the conversation doesn’t move it forward. We have to not just acknowledge that women hit men and that it is wrong, but figure out how to stop it. Trying to emphasize he frequency or disparity in the numbers misses the point, since some much of IPV involving women hitting men goes unreported. I think we have to agree that it’s wrong or agree that there is a double-standard.
First, let’s figure out what exactly we’re talking about.
March 24th, 2009 | Uncategorized | 4 comments