During the many years that
I worked at The Correspondence School, in Wellington, I was subjected
to various form of abuse from Feminists. I came to understand that the
Feminism of most of the staff went hand-in-hand with sexist, anti-male
attitudes. On the one hand, a political sticker on a wall***
saying "Fight the Cuts" (a reference to some
spending cuts) had been amended to read "Fight the Louts"
-- a reference to campaigns against so-called "male violence".
On the other hand, one French teacher had posted a copy of a student's
work (a cartoon -- see below) onto a wall, and various teachers had
written comments applauding the (female) domestic violence depicted
in the cartoon.
For these Feminists, violence was only bad if it was done to women.
This is the same attitude as that held by Women's Refuges and their
male subordinates, such as the National Network of Stopping Violence
Services. |
(The comment at the bottom left is by me. It says: "Misandry
(man-hatred) typical of the contemporary Lesbocracy')
I realise that many people will not see
the female violence depicted in this cartoon as bad. They will concentrate
on the reason for it. They will think that the man should not have done
what he did. This is typical of sexist double standards on domestic
violence. If a man is violent, people concentrate on how wrong
the violence was. If a woman is violent, they concentrate on her reasons
for being violent.
Anti-male double standards are common. As I reported in the article
Males Suffer Horrific Rate of Psychological
Abuse, in 19th Century Britain, Queen Victoria blocked the passing
of a law which would have criminalised lesbianism along with male homosexuality
-- because she could not believe it existed! According to the article
Skimmington Revisited* there were times in
history when men were punished for being victims of
their wives' violence! And in an experimental study of people's reactions
to identical hypothetical scenarios of male, as compared to female domestic
violence, N. T. Feather** found that:
"Participants were more negative to the husband than to the
wife in regard to responsibility for the offense, deservingness
of the penalty, seriousness of the offense, perceived harshness
of the penalty, reported positive affect, and reported sympathy."
Another example of Feminist sexism cropped up when I was doing something
connected with my family's history. One of my distant Feminist relatives
was obviously a Feminist, in the sense that she kept on using her maiden
name after her marriage. (I am not criticising that practice, by the
way.) This same woman told me the name of a young child in her part
of the family, together with its mother's name -- but would not tell
me the father's name, because she thought the mother would not want
the father's name to be mentioned! Feminists often criticise Fathers'
Rights groups for allegedly treating children as property -- since women
usually get custody, they can pretend that this was in the best interests
of the child, and nothing to do with women treating children as property.
However, here we have a case of a mother trying
to eradicate any trace of the father from a child's life, as if that
child really was her personal property!
*M.J. George, Skimmington Revisited, The
Journal of Men's Studies, Vol. 10, No. 2, Winter 2002, 111-127.
** N. T. Feather, Domestic Violence,
Gender, and Perceptions of Justice, Sex Roles, Vol. 35, Nos.
7/8, 1996.
***To be precise, the sticker was actually
on a grey metal cupboard, and the cartoon mentioned was actually on
a pillar in an open-plan office.
See also:
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