Elle Beau ❇︎
3 min readMay 8, 2023

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And none of that excuses or negates that A) we all suffer in a domination-oriented culture and B) the vast majority of the violence is still being perpetrated by men - much of it as a way to control women or somehow force them to submit. You keep wanting to deflect from that rather than to acknowledge it. Violent domination and control of women is a central aspect of American masculinity. The fact that women also sometimes act out in these same ways doesn't erase that. In fact, most women who engage in sexual or domestic violence have themselves been the victim of it.

And overwhelmingly, the type of DV that is about domination and control is being perpetrated by men against women. It's also typically more violent.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4201052/

"For example, Bonem and colleagues (2008)examined the self-reported antecedents and consequences of IPV in a sample of male batterers. Results indicated that the most common motive for IPV was partner behavior (e.g., partner annoyed the assailant; partner yelled at the assailant; partner criticized the assailant). Furthermore, Hamberger and colleagues (1994) interviewed men arrested for domestic violence prior to their participation in court ordered BIPs and found that the most common reasons provided by men for perpetrating IPV were power/control (e.g., assertion of dominance, control of physical and verbal behaviors and emotional responses, punishment for unwanted behaviors), pent up anger, and desire for control. In addition in a qualitative study of 36 martially violent couples, Cascardi, Vivian, and Meyer (1991) found that men were more likely to report that they perpetrated severe IPV to control their partners.

Makepeace (1986) found that the most frequently endorsed reasons women perpetrated IPV was for self-defense (35.6% of cases) and uncontrollable anger (24.2 % of cases)."

Edit: In addition, we don’t actually have an accurate sense of how much domestic violence is going on inside lesbian relationships. “Literature and research regarding domestic violence in lesbian relationships is relatively limited, including in the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia. Many different factors play into this, such as “different definitions of domestic violence, non-random, self selected and opportunistic sampling methods (often organisation or agency based, or advertising for participants who have experienced violence) and different methods and types of data collected”.[11] This causes results to be unreliable, thus making it difficult to make general assumptions about the rates of lesbian domestic violence.” (emphasis mine)

I really find it curious that since you've had some bad experiences at the hands of feminists (which I don't condone in the least) suddenly all feminists are to blame. But when men are pervasively doing things to nearly all women from a very young age as a part of the culture of masculinity, suddenly that's just human nature and it's unfair to blame all men for that -even though the ones who don't do the actual things either turn a blind eye or otherwise allow it to go on. Yet, you have no qualms at all about blaming all feminists for what happened to you. It's "human nature" when it's the culture of masculinity but when it really is just a few "rotten apples" doing things that are not in the least an accepted part of that culture, the "human nature" card goes out the window.

Perhaps this is a function of trauma, but what it's not is a productive way to deal with that trauma or to help to create a safer society for everyone - your kids included. Whataboutism is a deflection. We can and should have conversations about all violence against anyone, but not as a defensive deflection from recognizing that violence in this country is overwhelmingly a male problem based in a culture that not only supports but romanticizes that. Pretending that isn't so is a large part of why it continues.

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Elle Beau ❇︎
Elle Beau ❇︎

Written by Elle Beau ❇︎

I'm a bitch, I'm a lover, I'm a child, I'm a mother, I'm a sinner, I'm a saint. I do not feel ashamed. I'm your hell, I'm your dream, I'm nothing in between.

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