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V Day: The good, the bad and the ugly

Feb 14th was of course V day, an awareness day for plight of women suffering from violence.

The good:
  • Anything which helps to reduce human suffering is a very good thing.
  • Women are still disadvantaged far too often, and society has been too slow in redressing this.
  • Women suffer terribly from violence.
  • In many types of violence, particularly sexual violence, the suffering of women is far greater than that of men, in terms of both quantity and severity.
  • Some types of violence, when divided into type, culture and region, are genuinely single-gender.
  • Many types of violence, including violence against women, are underreported, and it’s a good thing to raise awareness of this so we can do something about it.
  • Violence against all people of any race, colour, creed or gender is unacceptable.
  • Feminists do a tremendous amount of good in helping women, and this is rarely to the detriment of men.
The bad:
  • Violence overall affects men and women in roughly equal measure, but differently. So picking a gender is largely arbitrary.
  • Very few subcategories of violence are single gender. For example Google “male war rape” (no, really do), and rapes against men (perpetrated by males, obviously) are estimated at 1 in 8.
  • Outrages are committed against both genders. Women get raped in war, but men get killed.
  • There is the danger of perpetuating unhelpful and untrue stereotypes about which genders suffer from which types of violence.
  • Treating cross-gender issues as single gender may not actually be that helpful. But I should respect the fact that many people do find it helpful.
  • It discriminates against victims based on their gender. This is known as sexism. I feel compassion for all victims, regardless of their gender.
  • Victims who are the “wrong gender” for a crime feel particularly helpless that they are not even recognised.
  • An issue which is 10% male, 90% female, is not a single gender issue.
  • Even stereotypes about perpetrators are an approximation. For example I read quite recently about a woman who had CS-gas sprayed into her by a female police interrogator in Egypt.
  • Breaking things down by gender is too simplistic.
The ugly:
  • Unhelpful and untrue gender stereotypes are indeed held and perpetuated by the feminists I know, judging by recent and past comments.
  • Feminists show a distinct lack of compassion when a victim is male, even for the same crime.
  • I would feel outrage at any situation where someone is discriminated against. I’m not convinced that this is true of all feminists. In short, many feminists are sexists.
  • Feminists are not engaged in men’s issues. They fail to recognise that men suffer too (just look at the suicide rates), both from the same issues as women, but also different issues and different forms of violence.
  • Feminism does not really seem to be about gender equality. In practice, it’s about making things better for just one gender.
  • After 15 years of being a feminist, I have stopped being one. The main reason for this is the duplicitous nature in which many feminists (rightly) demand sympathy and action when females are victims, yet sneer, dismiss, discount, play down, ignore, poo-poo and generally applaud situations where males are disadvantaged. It has to be a two-way street. I feel very sad and betrayed by this.

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