Demonic Men, Angelic Women
August 5, 2004
The majority of fundamental feminists and domestic violence advocates clearly agree that the vast majority of the time it is men who are responsible for initiating the domestic violence incidents in relationships. This cartoon appears on the www.non-sequitur.com website.
I first saw it in the August 4, 2004 edition of the Boston Globe. As I read through that edition of the Globe I noticed a few other articles that gave me cause to wonder.
The Mayor of Newburyport, Massachusetts admits that she had an inappropriate relationship by electronic mail with a man who is a gym teacher in the Newburyport school system. The man is an assistant football and athletic strength and condition coach who has worked with her son at the high school. Her husband was arrested for assaulting and threatening the man when he found out about the relationship. Perhaps Bill Clinton might explain the vagaries of an “inappropriate electronic mail relationship”.
The same edition reports that Mary Jean Armstrong of Beverly, Massachusetts forced her 9 year old daughter into prostitution in order to obtain illegal drugs. Armstrong pleaded not guilty to multiple charges of inducting a minor to become a prostitute, rape of a child with force, indecent assault and battery on a child under 14, and distributing material of a child [her daughter] in the nude.
Same edition reports Private First Class Lynndie England was not just following orders when she was photographed mocking Iraqi prisoners. She told an army investigator that, “It was just for fun, kind of venting frustration.” A second army investigator reports that England said that, “she was never an unwilling participant in the photos and that she even took some of the pictures herself.
Almost a decade ago I wrote on page 3 of my book, Domestic Violence: Facts and Fallacies the following:
Domestic violence is most often presented on the one hand as an epidemic that views men as wild beasts, who are only loosely tethered by the constraints of civilization and who are aggressive, combative demonic primates who enjoy nothing better than battering, beating, and murdering women and children. . . . Women have not been proven more moral then men, they simply remain less uncorrupted by institutional control and political power.
Over the last decade or so since I wrote that, women have gained a lot more institutional control and political power. The above stories allow me to paraphrase a popular maximum. “You’ve come a long way Baby!” And, on a daily basis many women continue to make me look like a prophet, at least in the secular sense.
