Hi Eugine. Women may be less violent than men outside the home, but not within it, and that's been known for decades. That's relevant to the point Diego made about female perpetrators and male victims of domestic violence.
Women are more likely to be abused by female partners than by male partners, the most violent couples are lesbian couples:
The Partner Abuse State of Knowledge Project (PASK) https://domesticviolenceresearch.org/ was published in May 2013 in the journal Partner Abuse and is the most comprehensive review of domestic violence research ever carried out. This unparallelled three-year research project was conducted by 42 scholars at 20 universities and research centres. The headline finding of the PASK review was that:
"Men and women perpetrate physical and non-physical forms of abuse at comparable rates, most domestic violence is mutual, women are as controlling as men, domestic violence by men and women is correlated with essentially the same risk factors, and male and female perpetrators are motivated for similar reasons."
A key numerical result from the PASK review was:
"Among large population samples, 57.9% of intimate-partner violence (IPV) reported was bi-directional, 42.1% unidirectional, 13.8% of the unidirectional violence was male-to-female, 28.3% was female-to-male."
The last point is worth emphasising. In the 42.1% of (heterosexual) couples in which one partner is always the perpetrator and the other the victim, the woman is TWICE as likely to be the perpetrator and (therefore) half as likely to be the victim.
I invite followers of Janice's Substack acoount to attend the next International Conference on Men's Issues, to be held in Budapest next August http://icmi2024.icmi.info. Janice will again be the keynote speaker.
Allow me to rephrase. The idea that women are kinder than men, despite being falsified (see Christina Hoff Sommers' video "Are men inferior to women? Let's check the data"), leads to the same outcome of treating women better even when they do wrong.
The case of women in a gynocentric culture is really interesting. It's as E. Belfort Bax said: when it's to women's advantage to be equal, that is the orthodoxy. When it's to women's advantage not to be equal, that is the orthodoxy. When women commit certain horrible crimes (killing children, killing their male partners), the machinery kicks in to say that women have special needs, women are subject to certain mental illnesses that lead away from accountability for their deeds, that women are more sensitive to certain external stimuli than men; but when it's a debate about why there aren't equal numbers of female airline pilots or high-level surgeons, then suddenly you're not allowed to say that women are in any way different from men.
As a woman, I try to think honestly: would I be comfortable studying under a professor whose main area of research interest was to prove that on the whole, there are far far fewer female geniuses than male: that women are not represented at the genius level of the Bell Curve, that women are not as driven as men, that women are not as interested in abstract math and other very high-level sorts of thinking, and so on. As a result, he would argue that (as Larry Summers famously and suicidally did back in 2006 at Harvard) that we should not be doing anything at all to help women advance in areas of endeavor where women seem to be under-represented at the present time.
I would not have any problem studying under him at all, so long as he believed that some individual women might indeed achieve at the highest level.
If he believed that no woman ever could or should, that would be a more thorny issue.
In the case of Wax, she has certainly never said that no black student can excel at the highest levels. But she has said that many black students accepted on the grounds of racial preference into the Ivy League schools are not intellectually equipped to be there. She may have said the same about some female students. If her position is correct--or even if it isn't, but is based on credible research--it needs to be discussed, and black students will have to get over their outrage.
If only society had listened to Bax, or the author of Towards a Sane Feminism.
I'm glad we could agree on the need to tread carefully with these topics.
I appreciate your willingness to put yourself into that kind of mental space. Shows a level of intellectual honesty and courage that a lot of academics, retired or not, don't have.
As for Wax's comments, I'd agree that she has a point about affirmative action resulting in less-equipped students ending up in classes they're not qualified for.
Thanks again for giving us such thought-provoking stuff Janice!
Towards a sane feminism was misguided. It was written by a woman who simply couldn't bring herself to admit that feminism would always be bunk. It started as bunk and would stay bunk.
I don't think it's cherry picking when it comes to domestic violence. I've looked into the large surveys there. Overall, women evolved to be less violent than men; they kill less often than men do (but men kill other men and themselves far more often than they kill women). But when it comes to attacking children and elders in the home, women definitely do their fair share. Here's an old article by Cathy Young on the issue. Young is no particular friend to men:
Women commit more than their fair share. They kill the majority if the elders and children.
Hard to say that women evolved to be less violent than men when infanticide is a female crime. Especially considering humans are the only mammal were the female does so rather than the male.
Men evolved to be more violent towards other men for sure.
I don't believe men evolved to be violent towards women. Before DV shelters, women killed an equal amount of their husbands. The only reason men kill more today is because they don't have DV shelters.
Male intra sexual competition has definitely always involved some violence. But it's not accurate to say that men are just more violent than women in every context.
Women commit a lot more proxy violence--getting men to do their dirty work. The man goes to jail and goes down as a statistic about male violence; the woman is excused because she's a woman.
The problem is that women are in fact less violent. Attempting to lie about this fact only causes problems.
Hi Eugine. Women may be less violent than men outside the home, but not within it, and that's been known for decades. That's relevant to the point Diego made about female perpetrators and male victims of domestic violence.
Women are more likely to be abused by female partners than by male partners, the most violent couples are lesbian couples:
https://j4mb.org.uk/2022/12/09/are-women-more-likely-to-be-abused-in-lesbian-or-heterosexual-relationships/
The Partner Abuse State of Knowledge Project (PASK) https://domesticviolenceresearch.org/ was published in May 2013 in the journal Partner Abuse and is the most comprehensive review of domestic violence research ever carried out. This unparallelled three-year research project was conducted by 42 scholars at 20 universities and research centres. The headline finding of the PASK review was that:
"Men and women perpetrate physical and non-physical forms of abuse at comparable rates, most domestic violence is mutual, women are as controlling as men, domestic violence by men and women is correlated with essentially the same risk factors, and male and female perpetrators are motivated for similar reasons."
A key numerical result from the PASK review was:
"Among large population samples, 57.9% of intimate-partner violence (IPV) reported was bi-directional, 42.1% unidirectional, 13.8% of the unidirectional violence was male-to-female, 28.3% was female-to-male."
The last point is worth emphasising. In the 42.1% of (heterosexual) couples in which one partner is always the perpetrator and the other the victim, the woman is TWICE as likely to be the perpetrator and (therefore) half as likely to be the victim.
I invite followers of Janice's Substack acoount to attend the next International Conference on Men's Issues, to be held in Budapest next August http://icmi2024.icmi.info. Janice will again be the keynote speaker.
Mike Buchanan
JUSTICE FOR MEN & BOYS http://j4mb.org.uk
CAMPAIGN FOR MERIT IN BUSINESS http://c4mb.uk
LAUGHING AT FEMINISTS http://laughingatfeminists.com
Useful referencesтАФthank you, Mike. IтАЩd also add this classic from Dutton & Corvo: http://www.mediaradar.org/docs/Dutton_Corvo-Transforming-flawed-policy.pdf
Thanks Stephen, interesting. Professor Dutton spoke at the 2019 International Conference on Men's Issues in Chicago:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FrksEyW_Lko
Allow me to rephrase. The idea that women are kinder than men, despite being falsified (see Christina Hoff Sommers' video "Are men inferior to women? Let's check the data"), leads to the same outcome of treating women better even when they do wrong.
The case of women in a gynocentric culture is really interesting. It's as E. Belfort Bax said: when it's to women's advantage to be equal, that is the orthodoxy. When it's to women's advantage not to be equal, that is the orthodoxy. When women commit certain horrible crimes (killing children, killing their male partners), the machinery kicks in to say that women have special needs, women are subject to certain mental illnesses that lead away from accountability for their deeds, that women are more sensitive to certain external stimuli than men; but when it's a debate about why there aren't equal numbers of female airline pilots or high-level surgeons, then suddenly you're not allowed to say that women are in any way different from men.
As a woman, I try to think honestly: would I be comfortable studying under a professor whose main area of research interest was to prove that on the whole, there are far far fewer female geniuses than male: that women are not represented at the genius level of the Bell Curve, that women are not as driven as men, that women are not as interested in abstract math and other very high-level sorts of thinking, and so on. As a result, he would argue that (as Larry Summers famously and suicidally did back in 2006 at Harvard) that we should not be doing anything at all to help women advance in areas of endeavor where women seem to be under-represented at the present time.
I would not have any problem studying under him at all, so long as he believed that some individual women might indeed achieve at the highest level.
If he believed that no woman ever could or should, that would be a more thorny issue.
In the case of Wax, she has certainly never said that no black student can excel at the highest levels. But she has said that many black students accepted on the grounds of racial preference into the Ivy League schools are not intellectually equipped to be there. She may have said the same about some female students. If her position is correct--or even if it isn't, but is based on credible research--it needs to be discussed, and black students will have to get over their outrage.
If only society had listened to Bax, or the author of Towards a Sane Feminism.
I'm glad we could agree on the need to tread carefully with these topics.
I appreciate your willingness to put yourself into that kind of mental space. Shows a level of intellectual honesty and courage that a lot of academics, retired or not, don't have.
As for Wax's comments, I'd agree that she has a point about affirmative action resulting in less-equipped students ending up in classes they're not qualified for.
Thanks again for giving us such thought-provoking stuff Janice!
Towards a sane feminism was misguided. It was written by a woman who simply couldn't bring herself to admit that feminism would always be bunk. It started as bunk and would stay bunk.
Thank you for this. So well said.
This is false. Depends on the type of violence. Women are as violent as men in cases of domestic violence.
In other words you want to cherry pick data and possibly redefine "violence". Hint: look at violent crime statistics.
I don't think it's cherry picking when it comes to domestic violence. I've looked into the large surveys there. Overall, women evolved to be less violent than men; they kill less often than men do (but men kill other men and themselves far more often than they kill women). But when it comes to attacking children and elders in the home, women definitely do their fair share. Here's an old article by Cathy Young on the issue. Young is no particular friend to men:
https://time.com/2921491/hope-solo-women-violence/
Women commit more than their fair share. They kill the majority if the elders and children.
Hard to say that women evolved to be less violent than men when infanticide is a female crime. Especially considering humans are the only mammal were the female does so rather than the male.
Men evolved to be more violent towards other men for sure.
I don't believe men evolved to be violent towards women. Before DV shelters, women killed an equal amount of their husbands. The only reason men kill more today is because they don't have DV shelters.
Male intra sexual competition has definitely always involved some violence. But it's not accurate to say that men are just more violent than women in every context.
Hint: look at who's thr victim of violent crimes.
Men evolved to be more violent towards men.
Women are as violent towards men as men are towards women and women are significantly more violent towards children and the elderly.
Women commit a lot more proxy violence--getting men to do their dirty work. The man goes to jail and goes down as a statistic about male violence; the woman is excused because she's a woman.