Dear Readers,
Please excuse the long absence, I've been having a bit of a rough time with a few personal trials, and with a M.A. course to catch up on, all while I've adopted a new dog, so life has been very busy.
However, I decided to come back to help arm most of you folks if you come across the all too frequent myths and lies and dismissals used on male abuse survivors and advocates of, usually by concern trolls, abuse apologists and extremists and just morons of various stripes.
Luckily, these are pretty easy to debunk so I urge you all to use these arguments if confronted by them.
"The vast majority is done by men to women but it does happen to men as well"
This is the most common minimising language, usually aimed at minimising the presence of male abuse victims. For a while, every single article on male abuse victims seemed to start this way. The authors seem to be under the impression that bringing up the subject takes something away from female abuse victims (such as resources or attention). There is no evidence whatsoever to prove this paranoid fear.
"We don't deny women can abuse sometimes"
We can all hear the "but" coming. "I'm not racist but." Usually the person writing this will argue that female abusers are as rare as a unicorn, and so irrelevant to the wider picture, and will almost certainly use one of the usual excuses you see down below.
"Patriarchy hurts men too"
This is basically concern trolling, pretending to be concerned about the same subject matter, but actually selfishly manipulating. "Give me power and I'll pretend that I'm going to help you." Rest assured, the person in question has no intention of helping male abuse victims, and is more interested in manipulating the target of their rhetoric. The conspiracy of patriarchy is based on assumptions rather than an objective way of looking at the world. It assumes that every man is powerful and every woman is disenfranchised, and again, it's nonsense, or male abuse victims wouldn't exist, simple as.
"Any man abused by his partner is weak."
This may be based on fear, but it's bullshit. Being abused doesn't make you a weak person, man or woman. Abusers target people out of their own insecurity, desire to control, in other words, out of their own weaknesses. Being abused can make you feel weak, believe me I know, but it's not a fault of yours that they target you. Nobody makes anyone abuse them, it's the abuser's fault 100% every time.
"Abuse of men is rare"
An old fashioned trope that's based on old fashioned ideas. Firstly, it's based on either forgetting or omitting the fact that an abusive action by a woman (such as forced sexual activity) aren't counted in the same way as an abusive action by a man, even if the action is identical.
https://jameslandrith.com/2012/01/25/why-yes-rape-can-be-gendered-against-men-and-by-women/
With this technical bias, it's not possible to use those unreliable and useless statistics to accurately work out the correct number of female abusers. According to figures from 2018, over 690,000 men in the UK have been victims of domestic abuse. Not exactly a small number in and of itself.
Secondly, it's the neo-Victorian premise that women are all entirely childlike and delicate creatures who can do no harm to a man, which is a strange anachronism in a time when the same people who say this are also saying that women are just as capable as men in combat and the police. Which leads me to:
"Men who are abused by their female partners aren't in fear of their lives"
This is what we call "shifting the goalpost". As soon as stats show even middling to high levels of abuse of males, there's always some dullard who comes up with this argument. Unfortunately for them, abuse isn't restricted to lethal actions. According to the UK government, domestic abuse includes:
- Emotional abuse
- Financial abuse
- Psychological abuse
- Physical abuse
- Sexual abuse
Nothing in that list suggests that abuse has to be lethal violence to count as abuse. If you're emotionally tormented or controlled by a partner and you're not in danger of death, you're still being abused.
"As patriarchal oppressors, men can't be properly abused the same way women are"
Conspiracy theories are unfortunately all too common, and this statement is based on an idea, not a fact. The truth is that the idea of patriarchy has about as much weight as the 'Protocol of the Elders of Zion'. It assumes that every man is powerful and every woman is not, forgetting the existence of female lawmakers, judges, millionaires, politicians, etc. This makes zero difference when someone is pouring a pot of boiling water on you while you sleep: https://www.itv.com/news/anglia/2019-03-07/were-still-so-far-behind-says-domestic-abuse-survivor-as-government-pledges-500k-to-help-male-victims
One of the funniest examples I once came across on one blog was "I can't hurt men, the patriarchy would destroy me if I harmed a hair on their heads" (which comes across as a good argument for the mythical "patriarchy"). This is self-evidently laughable nonsense, because if it were true, there wouldn't be a single male victim/survivor of domestic or sexual abuse.
"Any guy who gets raped by a woman should be grateful. What is he a pussy?"
Rest assured, the sort of morons who use this worthless argument haven't a clue. I almost didn't want to bother with this one, it's so stupid, but I'll use the analogy that there's a difference between drinking a beer, and drowning in a vat (or eating a bar of chocolate and having the whole thing forced by someone else into your gullet without being unwrapped).
"Men who are abused don't speak up about it because of toxic masculinity"
This shortsightedness is unfortunately typical of modern discourse. True, one of the reasons male abuse victims don't speak up IS because of fear of being seen as not masculine enough (for status among peers, among women, etc). However, this is part of the bigger picture.
Discourse does not include male abuse victims to the extent that they exist in the public conscious. Abuse is most often being defined by the very same people as something men do to women to a lethal degree. Rape is defined as being forced penetration by a man, and yet these assumptions conveniently forget that in the UK, forced sexual activity by a husband on his wife wasn't considered rape until 1992. Male rape wasn't on the statute books until 1994. Would we call forced sexual activity that happened before those dates rape just because they weren't legally defined as such back then? No. So why do we do the same thing here?
Let me also remind people that Amber Heard said to Johnny Depp "tell the world, I, Johnny Depp, a man, am too an abuse victim, and see how many people believe or side with you". Oh, how telling!
If we live in a society that is NOT accepting of male abuse victims and shows not nearly enough sympathy or support to them, we can't by definition expect male abuse victims to speak up on their own part because what's in it for them?
"I wouldn't let myself be abused by a woman/he could've defended himself."
That's a broad assumption based on nothing. Abuse doesn't happen because someone is weak, but because the abuser is at fault. Besides, if a man is being slapped by his wife in public and he does defend himself, what do you imagine will happen? Most likely he'll be confronted by bystanders or even attacked.
"Women commit abuse in self defence"
By definition, abuse is NOT the same thing as self defence. There is little to no evidence for this either, and is based on ugly prejudices and unbelievable ignorance and stupidity by the writer.
"Most statistics that show parity are cited by MRA misogynists"
The favourite boogeyman, the "MRA misogynist". Unfortunately for them, the evidence goes quite a long way beyond the depths of reddit and Paul Elam &c.
Actually, stats are changing as time goes on and as we learn the ugly realities of abuse. Stats like these are changing. According to the CDC in the U.S. if we exclude rape for a moment (again, defined solely as an action performed by penetration by the legal statutes) and stalking, all other forms of violence against males were perpetrated by females.
http://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/pdf/nisvs_report2010-a.pdf,
To wantonly blame some imaginary "MRA" (or better still "incel") conspiracy is frankly, pathetic.
"Male abuse victims take resources and attention away from the more urgent plight women who are killed every year"
It is a tragedy what happens to these victims.
Having said that, you don't have to be left a literal corpse to be classed as an abuse victim. There is absolutely no evidence that male victims of abuse take away attention or resources (particularly in one of the richest countries in the world). Beating male abuse victims over the head with the corpses of dead female victims isn't just disgusting, it isn't just damaging to male abuse victims, it's an insult to the women who've been killed. It's crass and disrespectful to both parties, and shows nothing more than a selfish and fragile ego on part of the speaker.
"Most studies showing male abuse victims don't ask how many of them are in same sex relationships."
Considering how much smaller the LGBT community in the U.K or the U.S is compared to the non-LGBT population, this would have to rely on the idea that there is a lot of violence in LGBT relationships. I believe that abuse among same sex couples doesn't get nearly enough of a look-in, but there's just not enough same sex couples to account for that idea.
"Men are abused by other men, not women"
See above the CDC. Also, when it comes to rape, it seems that even changing the law to include forced to penetrate cases, there is opposition in some places that is quite telling:
https://www.jpost.com/israel/womens-groups-cancel-law-charging-women-with-rape
https://www.deccanherald.com/content/309399/womens-groups-reject-ordinance-threaten.html
Again, I'd like to remind people of the shocking fact that male rape and marital rape weren't even on the statue books in my country until the early 1990s.
"Men who are abused by women have probably done something to deserve it."
Now we're going down 4th and Amber Heard street. This is victim blaming, pure and simple. Nobody deserves to be abused, and anyone who says disgusting crap like this is part of the problem. Dismiss it.
If you come across these bullshit arguments yourself, hopefully this will help. Certainly they'll probably double down on their arguments, but don't let that sway you. You probably won't change their mind, but if it changes the mind of someone else listening to you, then all the better for it.
Sincerely,
The Invisible Man
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