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feminist critique
one in a long if casual series illuminating "why i am not a feminist, but an egalitarian humanist".
this was originally written as a comment in somebody else's LJ, but i decided not to post it because the thread was too old, and because i went off on a tangent. the post that started it regarded a feminist protest of violence against women and children as "duh, like who's in favour of violence these days other than psychos". then there was a reply saying that feminists are doing it because people need to have it pointed out, that everyone accepts violence by strangers as the real thing, but domestic abuse is somehow not viewed as just as bad. and that didn't ring true for me -- but i wonder whether i am now too far removed from the mainstream to have a good feel for what they think. i'm judging mostly by what i read on mainstream news and social commentary on blogs.
i've been straining my brain and i cannot think of any people nowadays openly claiming domestic abuse against women isn't a serious problem, anywhere i read. nobody (in any significant numbers that i can see) wants women be injured by their husbands [*]. i think some feminists might be misreading a reaction against broadening the term "violence" as a denial that abuse happens. i myself do make a distinction between "violence" and "force" (and lots of acquaintance rape uses force, IMO, not violence), but i think either is inappropriate in a supposedly loving relationship; i don't make the distinction in order to trivialize acquaintance rape -- i think it is by far a more serious problem than stranger rape. i think that such protests are done simply because domestic abuse keeps happening. (i'll keep my thoughts about their efficacy for myself just now so this doesn't become about that.) i don't know a single person who thinks domestic abuse is ok, not even a little bit (excepting self-defense).
what i can think of however, is plenty of people who're upset at violence against women, who are outraged at pedophilia -- but they think spanking is ok, and is somehow a totally different thing, not violence at all, not even inappropriate force. and frankly, i don't see feminists at large actually having this on their agenda -- when they do seem to care about children as a matter of policy, it's all about pedophilia as well, and the incredibly common woman-on-child violence is a dirty little secret that is swept under the rug. google some time for hits about spanking and feminism, and you'll find vastly more hits about BDSM and its defense, together with conservative rants against all of what allegedly destroys the family (where feminism and anti-spanking movements are named separately), than you find feminist critique of spanking. i consider feminism's silence on the issue of spanking to be particularly suspicious, since it doesn't happen to fit well with the idea that men are the aggressors and women the victims.
maybe feminism shouldn't be about children but just about women; that'd be sort of ok by me -- though i find some issues hard to separate, especially in the areas of sexual abuse, and well, the battle of equality starts long before the age of majority. but then take children off the signs that purport to be against violence. it's long struck me as a token effort, and i dislike tokenism, especially when it uses children.
i agree that it seems harder for people to empathize with domestic than with stranger violence. i see it in myself; i do empathize just as much initially (if not more; i find abuse by loved ones so much more destructive than abuse by strangers), but i have difficulties maintaining that empathy when somebody stays in an abusive situation (assuming no death threats are involved), when somebody falls more than once for the abject apology route after the abuse, when somebody says "but i love him!". if anything, i think feminism needs to support those women more, because they obviously still have very bad tapes running in their heads with "stand by your man" as the soundtrack, and some fundamentally horribly damaging ideas about what love is.
and i wonder how much spanking has to answer for regarding those tapes, how much it is responsible for bad boundaries, and how much it has to do with raising men who become abusers. how can this possibly not be a feminist concern? at least be on the table for discussion?
[*] upon rereading i remembered that i've read sean connery is purported to have said that some women need slapping around. but upon googling this i see that that's not what he said. and while what he did say is questionable, i'd really like to see the full context for it before i count it as evidence.
this was originally written as a comment in somebody else's LJ, but i decided not to post it because the thread was too old, and because i went off on a tangent. the post that started it regarded a feminist protest of violence against women and children as "duh, like who's in favour of violence these days other than psychos". then there was a reply saying that feminists are doing it because people need to have it pointed out, that everyone accepts violence by strangers as the real thing, but domestic abuse is somehow not viewed as just as bad. and that didn't ring true for me -- but i wonder whether i am now too far removed from the mainstream to have a good feel for what they think. i'm judging mostly by what i read on mainstream news and social commentary on blogs.
i've been straining my brain and i cannot think of any people nowadays openly claiming domestic abuse against women isn't a serious problem, anywhere i read. nobody (in any significant numbers that i can see) wants women be injured by their husbands [*]. i think some feminists might be misreading a reaction against broadening the term "violence" as a denial that abuse happens. i myself do make a distinction between "violence" and "force" (and lots of acquaintance rape uses force, IMO, not violence), but i think either is inappropriate in a supposedly loving relationship; i don't make the distinction in order to trivialize acquaintance rape -- i think it is by far a more serious problem than stranger rape. i think that such protests are done simply because domestic abuse keeps happening. (i'll keep my thoughts about their efficacy for myself just now so this doesn't become about that.) i don't know a single person who thinks domestic abuse is ok, not even a little bit (excepting self-defense).
what i can think of however, is plenty of people who're upset at violence against women, who are outraged at pedophilia -- but they think spanking is ok, and is somehow a totally different thing, not violence at all, not even inappropriate force. and frankly, i don't see feminists at large actually having this on their agenda -- when they do seem to care about children as a matter of policy, it's all about pedophilia as well, and the incredibly common woman-on-child violence is a dirty little secret that is swept under the rug. google some time for hits about spanking and feminism, and you'll find vastly more hits about BDSM and its defense, together with conservative rants against all of what allegedly destroys the family (where feminism and anti-spanking movements are named separately), than you find feminist critique of spanking. i consider feminism's silence on the issue of spanking to be particularly suspicious, since it doesn't happen to fit well with the idea that men are the aggressors and women the victims.
maybe feminism shouldn't be about children but just about women; that'd be sort of ok by me -- though i find some issues hard to separate, especially in the areas of sexual abuse, and well, the battle of equality starts long before the age of majority. but then take children off the signs that purport to be against violence. it's long struck me as a token effort, and i dislike tokenism, especially when it uses children.
i agree that it seems harder for people to empathize with domestic than with stranger violence. i see it in myself; i do empathize just as much initially (if not more; i find abuse by loved ones so much more destructive than abuse by strangers), but i have difficulties maintaining that empathy when somebody stays in an abusive situation (assuming no death threats are involved), when somebody falls more than once for the abject apology route after the abuse, when somebody says "but i love him!". if anything, i think feminism needs to support those women more, because they obviously still have very bad tapes running in their heads with "stand by your man" as the soundtrack, and some fundamentally horribly damaging ideas about what love is.
and i wonder how much spanking has to answer for regarding those tapes, how much it is responsible for bad boundaries, and how much it has to do with raising men who become abusers. how can this possibly not be a feminist concern? at least be on the table for discussion?
[*] upon rereading i remembered that i've read sean connery is purported to have said that some women need slapping around. but upon googling this i see that that's not what he said. and while what he did say is questionable, i'd really like to see the full context for it before i count it as evidence.
no subject
no flames. just -- try to think outside the box with which you grew up. i am not trying to condemn your mother as a child abuser. i claim that hitting another human in any cause other than self-defense is abusive in its meaning of "misuse causing harm" -- i once got so drunk that i fell down; i was abusing alcohol. it doesn't make me into an alcoholic -- that would require an overall pattern. i have empathy for parents -- i took care of my younger brothers for several years largely on my own, and i am pretty aware of how difficult it is to raise children. i don't want to condemn, i want people to be better educated, to have better options.
and i strongly believe people must think much harder about the things they do to children if we are to stop the cycle of violence in which we are mired.
how about some evidence about what you said above? first off, the vast majority of parents still hit their children, so how do "badly raised" children (how is that defined, and who measures it, and how -- cites?) mean anything? would you concede an argument that states the worst-raised children are those who turn criminal? have you had a look at the statistics for their childhoods and how they were treated? do that some time. it might be an eye opener.
there is oodles of research about the harmful effects of hitting children, your anecdotal evidence notwithstanding (in fact it doesn't necessarily withstand it at all, as you yourself note; yeah, maybe you have too much of a respect for authority). we're also not talking about simplistic A->B causation. of course not every spanked child turns into a violent offender. some of us turn rather strongly away from violence. i don't hit people in large part because i hated being hit. but i can tell you in detail what hitting taught me, and it wasn't anything that my parents actually wanted to teach me. it was ineffectual for those things. me, i like to use the right tool for the job, not a jury-rigged one. i'm all about elegance as a programmer too. :)
thirdly, abuse is a continuum, not an on/off switch. breaking your child's bones is worse than causing bruising is worse than raising welts. but we don't cotton to hitting at all from other adults anymore; slave whipping went out of fashion a while ago -- should i give you a good slap to the face if you behave truculently? it won't even hurt you much; it'll just get your attention. if that's not ok with you, then ask yourself why it is ok for a 150 lb adult to hit a 30 lb child.
the fact that so many parents don't know any better is a sorry excuse, not a rational justification. they should learn better parenting! why does anyone assume one sucks in those capabilities automatically? we get training for any other difficult thing we do, but oh, parenting, that's all done the "natural" way. how silly is that? human society isn't about what's natural. if it were, we'd still be hitting each other over the head with stone axes and drag women, the spoils of battle, to our caves by their matted hair.
do you hit your dog? i doubt it. i've never hit mine. why not? because it isn't necessary. surely if you can make your authority understood to an animal who doesn't even have language, people can learn to do so towards a human child. and since there are other parents who can do it, why not learn from them how? that would seem to me to be the sensible approach.
spanking is quick, easy, requires no thinking, and parents can still get away with it while society slowly wakes up to how garbage in produces garbage out. there is no good reason to do it.
no subject
I don't hit my dogs, but I will, under certain circumstances, dominate them physically (flip them over on their back and growl in their face), and I'll treat them roughly if I have to to break up a fight. It's not a moral question; hitting dogs doesn't *work*, and it creates psychological problems because the dog doesn't get why he's being hit.
no subject
i don't know, but i doubt it. and i think there is no incentive to study that, since what's rarely used is likely not as influential anyway (unless it also happens to be hugely traumatizing, which a slap on the butt doesn't qualify as).
but while we shouldn't need a large body of scientific evidence that people who hit their kids a lot are doing something wrong, what evidence we do have is apparently far from enough. because people who spank their kids a lot are common, and remain common in the face of evidence that says "this is not effective", nevermind "this is ethically questionable". while pubic attitudes about hitting other adults have changed, they've got a much longer way to go when it comes to children.
hitting dogs doesn't work in the same way hitting young children doesn't work, but you will find lots of people who defend either with the same arguments.