Lots of blogging people have sustained elbow injuries from patting themselves on the back over how inclusive and tolerant they are with respect to gay marriage since the City and County of Frisco has been issuing marriage licenses to gay couples. This exercise generally involves quite a bit of sneering at the religious right and is generally most intense on feminist and/or libertarian blogs such as Reason Magazine, and on the sorts of blogs that were in favor of tolerating the marriage of Saddam Hussein with the people of Iraq a few months ago. And yes, I can see that this development is good for many gay people and not at all destructive to normal marriages, but the latter is because we’ve already paid the price for normalizing gay relationships and demonizing straight ones.
This process started in the US and the UK in the mid-seventies when the movement to provide shelter and support to violence-prone women was hijacked by a group of people who made a conscious decision to tear down the image of the traditional family in order to achieve a set of goals that included gay marriage, a permanent women’s rights movement, and an anti-male emphasis in most aspects of social engineering.
This is not to say that there’s anything wrong with sheltering and supporting battered women, or that there’s anything right with abusing or neglecting children. But it is to say that there’s something wrong with hijacking these issues and using them to beat up on straight men and women instead of genuinely and honestly trying to alleviate the suffering of the nominal victims.
One of the harshest critics of the hijacking of the family violence issue is Erin Pizzey, the founder of the oldest shelter for battered women in the world, Chiswick Women’s Aid. Pizzey notes that the anti-male emphasis in family violence advocacy prevents violence-prone women from getting the kind of help that will prevent them from cycling though violent relationships with a series of different partners.
The tactic that was used by the hijackers was to spin the dynamics of family violence through a series of myths, distortions and outright lies, many of which were documented by Christina Hoff Summers in Who Stole Feminism such as the Rule of Thumb myth. According to this delusion, English Common Law permitted men to beat their wives with a stick as long as it was no fatter than a thumb. Here’s what the National Organization for Women claimed in 1976:
Our law, based upon the old English common-law doctrines, explicitly permitted wife-beating for correctional purposes. However, certain restrictions did exist… For instance, the common-law doctrine had been modified to allow the husband “the right to whip his wife, provided that he used a switch no bigger than his thumb” — a rule of thumb, so to speak. — Del Martin, Battered Wives, Volcano Press, 1976, p. 31.)
But these are the facts:
The ‘rule of thumb’ story is an example of revisionist history that feminists happily fell into believing. It reinforces their perspective on society, and they tell it as a way of winning converts to their angry creed…
The ‘rule of thumb’, however, turns out to be an excellent example of what may be called a feminist fiction. It is not to be found in William Blackstone’s treatise on English common law. On the contrary, British law since the 1700s and our American laws predating the Revolution prohibit wife beating, though there have been periods and places in which the prohibition was only indifferently enforced.
That the phrase did not even originate in legal practice could have been ascertained by any fact-checker who took the trouble to look it up in the Oxford English Dictionary, which notes that the term has been used metaphorically for at least three hundred years to refer to any method of measurement or technique of estimation derived from experience rather than science.
See also: DEBUNKING YET ANOTHER FEMINIST MYTH, and No clear rule of thumb.
So why make up such a crazy tale? Well, let’s connect some dots. Lesbian relationships are fraught with violence. Claire Renzetti, herself a lesbian and a feminist, estimated in Violent Betrayal that half of lesbian relationships are violent. In straight relationships, violence is extremely rare, occurring in less than 1 percent of marriages (one survey by the Justice Department had it a 2 tenths of a percent). So lesbian rights advocates felt it was supremely important to create the perception that all women lived under a cloud of violence, not just gay women, so they undertook a campaign that de-emphasized the violence that women do to their partners and their children, while grossly inflating the extent of rape, child abuse, and partner abuse done by men. This campaign was been relentless since the mid-seventies, and has produced such gross misperceptions as:
- A woman is beaten every 9 seconds.
- Virtually all family violence is done by men against women.
- Most American women will be raped and abused by their fathers and husbands.
- A vast conspiracy forces women and children to be silent amidst this epidemic of rape and abuse.
- Etc, etc, etc.
The facts are quite different:
- Partner abuse is a fifty-fifty proposition, with women actually initiating violence a bit more often than men.
- Mothers commit four times as much child abuse as fathers.
- Only a small fraction of women are ever victims of rape or abuse.
- Rape charges are more likely to be false than are any other crime reports.
- Significant numbers of battered lesbians can’t go to their communities’ battered women’s shelters because their abusers work there.
The author of the NOW paper in which the Rule of Thumb was fabricated, by the way, was Del Martin, a lesbian separatist and one of the first two lesbians married in Frisco, so you’ll pardon me if I don’t jump for joy over this great advance in civil rights, at least as it pertains to her.
In addition to the thumb work, Martin banned Erin Pizzey from contact with California NOW and wrote an enormous crock on family violence (Battered Wives) citing Friedrich Engels as an authority on the anthropology of (actually fictitious) matriarchal socities, all the better to blame the nastiness on the men.
UPDATE: See Radley Balko squirm. He accuses me of bigotry and of making up Del Martin’s Rule of Thumb myth; the facts I’ve presented here speak for themselves.
“Only a small fraction of women are ever victims of rape or abuse.”
Please explain where this is declared true, how that is measured, and do not include in your math male prisoners, because that statistic doesn’t apply here.
And while you’re at it, please explain where you are getting this, too:
“Partner abuse is a fifty-fifty proposition, with women actually initiating violence a bit more often than men”
This issue in SF is more relevant to the legal definitions of marriage that it does domestic violence, or any other stats.
Not jumping for joy because Martin got married in light of these events is a little like not being happy about Hussein’s capture because of what it might mean for the future sales of Saddam t-shirts.
I’m not sure I follow the “marriage of Saddam with the people of Iraq” thing. Can you please elucidate?
sty, here are some good primers on domestic violence and child abuse epidemiology: “Behind Closed Doors” or “Intimate Violence” by Straus and Gelles. These guys have done three nationwide surveys over a twenty-five year period showing that women initiate domestic violence slightly more often than men. They found an incidence of around 3 or 4 percent, using a very broad definition of abuse that including pushing and shoving. The Justice Department’s National Crime Vistims Survey narrowed the scope to acts that would be considered criminal and found 188,000 acts a year in the US, most by men; that’s about 1 act per 2 tenths of a percent of couples.
Martin has been on a jihad to end family life as we know it, so it’s especially ironic that she would be the first to marry under a policy that we’re told has no effect on tradtiional families.
fanatic, I’m suggesting that those who practice tolerance in one sphere tend to practice it in other spheres, and sometimes there’s too much tolerance. Saddam Hussein, for example, was not someone we should have tolerated for as long as we did.
Right. It depends on how loosely or tightly one defines violence or spousal abuse. Women are as likely as men to engage in low level violence. While men are somewhat less likely to (partially thanks to societal strictures about hitting a lady, partially because the potential for ridicule and abuse make it less likely that a man would report being abused by his wife), when they do resort to violence, they tend to be much more likely to cause serious damage. (Partially because men are larger and stronger than women, on average, even though feminists barely like to acknowledge that, if at all.)
As you correctly point out, Mr. Bennett, the feminists try to have it both ways, changing the definition arbitrarily to whatever supports their argument. Either a very loose definition including pushing and shoving is correct, in which case women are just as guilty. OTOH, a stricter definition could be correct, in which case men are indeed much more likely to be abusers, but in which case the incidence is much, much lower than claimed.
“Martin has been on a jihad to end family life as we know it”
I have no idea what you mean here. What about my family life would she want to end ? So if she had her way, how would my family and my relationship with them change ? I still don’t understand this, and I’m not sure you’re properly expressing what you mean.
As to domestic violence…again, what does this have to do with the price of tea in Texas ? So far it’s looked like about 1700 marriages have been performed by Newsom, and suprisingly, heterosexual families across the country have not spontaneously combusted because of them.
I’m going to go out on a limb and say that I don’t think that they will in the future, either.
What would you have to say about this if the first couple that Newsom got hitched weren’t politically active gays or lesbians ?
I’m commenting on Del Martin, sty, not on gay marriage. I’m perfectly happy for gays to marry, all the better for judges to rule on custody disputes without following the Rule of Dress (“the one in the dress wins”).
Martin, given her drothers, would ban straight marriages because they’re obviously put up by the Evil Male Patriarchy to oppress women, and would probably round up all the men and put us in forced labor camps. That’s what Lesbian Separatism is all about, dude.