When a woman is a victim of violence she is an individual. Sure, "they" collect and publish statistics on her, but first and foremost she is a person who was abused, and most of us feel that. When a child is attacked we feel the same thing at a visceral level: this is a small person who was abused; someone must pay. However, when men are attacked, there is no sense that an individual person has been hurt. This isn't "Violence Against Women," it's just general violence that happens to theoretical people. Even when it happens right under your nose.
I was a passenger in a friend's car about a year ago. There were four of us in the car, driving downtown, skirting the roughest district. Down a side street, I saw something that I'm glad I rarely see: two men kicking another man as he lay crumpled on the ground, curled in a fœtal position. I looked around for a pay phone; my first thought was to call the cops. My friends looked over and saw the same thing. For a split second we all stared. Then the scene passed out of view as my friend drove on. Nobody remarked on what they had seen. I thought of calling the cops later, but what street was it? I was too busy staring at the unsettling violence; I didn't catch the exact location.
Would we have stopped if it had been a woman on the ground? I think that the response would have been different. At least the women in the car would have urged us to stop, or at least circle back and call the cops. As it was, it was just some guy getting beat up by some other guys. Ho hum.
This is the most extreme example I've seen, and you could argue that my friends weren't very sympathetic people, or at least weren't very civic-minded, and I wouldn't disagree with you. You could also argue that I caved in to feelings of peer pressure and should have urged the driver to circle back, and I wouldn't disagree with that either.
You could argue that this is an extreme example and atypical. I have, however, seen other, less extreme examples, and been subject to them myself.
This year at the P.N.E., a local fair, I saw three people walking together, two girls and a boy. They were perhaps sixteen or eighteen years old. The boy and one of the girls were evidently a couple: he had his arm around her; they were chatting and laughing. Then the boy said something that annoyed the girl, and she hauled off and punched him in the shoulder. Now, he was a tall guy, maybe six feet; she was maybe five-six. Nonetheless, the boy grabbed his shoulder and made a face that said, clearly, "That hurt!" He may have yelped... I was too far away to hear. The two girls strutted on ahead, paying him no attention. He walked behind for some time, holding his shoulder, with an expression of intense pain on his face. Nobody—not the girls, not the crowd, nobody—paid him any heed. Did it really hurt that much, or was he playing it up to get sympathy? I don't know, but I do know one thing: if he had punched her in the shoulder and caused her to yelp with pain, it would be called "Violence Against Women." As it was, this event had no name.
One ex-girlfriend slapped me in the face whenever I upset her. She considered this perfectly reasonable behaviour. She was horrified when I slapped her back. The thought that I could hit a woman unsettled her in the extreme; she said that she would never get used to it. I said that so long as she felt free to slap me, I would feel free to return the favour. I wasn't angry at her: when I slapped her I simply laid my hand on her cheek with no force at all. Just the same, it spooked her, and I suppose that was the point. Her hitting me bothered me. What bothered me more was that when I mentioned this in my men's group meetings, I received fleeting, uncomfortable looks from the other members. I suppose that for them this fit the definition of Violence Against Women.
Another ex-girlfriend hit me occasionally, too. She would punch me in the shoulder, or in the stomach, when I said something that she didn't like. It didn't hurt very much, but I would tap her back anyway, with what I judged to be equal force. She always retorted, "It didn't hurt that much!" In looking back on this, I think I understand. She was absolutely right: it didn't hurt that much. It never hurts so much when you're the one doing the punching; it always hurts more when you're on the receiving end. She always argued the contrary, of course. She said that I hit harder, that I didn't know my own strength. I think, in looking at these examples, that it is women who don't know their own strength.
The ironic part about the latter story is that at one point, this ex-girlfriend broke down in tears and told me the most closely-guarded, sordid tale from her past. She had gone out with some guy during university for a couple of years. At the end of it all, when she was breaking up with him, he hauled off and punched her. She shivered even to talk about it. It idea horrified her and gave her nightmares, yet here she was punching me in the arm in a moment of petulant pique. I doubt that she saw the connection.
I think that there is a connection. Although there are brutal men out there who pound their cowering wives, I think that the feminist propaganda machine has ably painted all domestic violence as fitting this simple-minded and satisfying vision of evil. I think that the more mundane situation is more balanced: she yells at him, he yells at her, then someone starts hitting. Some domestic violence studies that take the trouble to ask claim that women start the hitting a bit more readily than men. The problem is that men usually finish it. This pattern fits my theory: that women start hitting because they consider hitting a man an inconsequential, even cool expression of righteous anger, and that men hit back because it's much easier to bring yourself to hit a woman who's hitting you.
Even if you don't buy my theory, I think that you have to admit one thing: hitting isn't necessary. Whether it's a slap in the face or a punch in the shoulder, no adult needs to start hitting another adult. What would the world be like if hitting someone else simply because of something they said was considered as childish and stupid as throwing a temper tantrum in public? What would the world be like if, as an adult, allowing yourself to get so riled up over something that someone said that you hit them was a source of deep shame? What would the world be like if a woman slapping her husband across the face was considered as serious as if he had slapped her across the face?¹
I'm willing to bet that couples would scream at each other for longer. I'm also willing to bet that there would be less violence of all kinds, not just Violence Against Women, and I wonder if in that alternate reality my friends and I might have taken the time to call the police.
