Like vampires, the mainstream media feast on blood. If it bleeds, it leads, is an old journalistic proverb. This leads anyone who relies solely on the MSM to develop an excessively skewed worldview. Academic Wilfred Reilly has pointed out, for instance, just how radically disconnected the world seen through the prism of mainstream media is from reality.
For instance, Reilly says, the firmly-held narrative of the MSM is (often explicitly stated) that “there’s an unarmed or totally innocent black man that’s murdered basically every day, and that this happens hundreds of times a year”. In reality, the number is about 10–17 in a really bad year.
Similarly, the hyperfocus of the MSM on blood and mayhem grossly exaggerates many people’s perception of murder. Especially the murder of women. Every deplorable story of a murdered woman is met with a shrieking chorus that there is a ‘femicide’ – a ‘crisis’ of woman-killing.
In actual fact, women in Australia are safer than they have ever been in the last 200 years. Despite a recent – and entirely predicted – short-term blip in violence following the social calamity of lockdowns, the murder rate for women is still well below even recent history.
More notably, far less women are murdered than men. Men still outnumber women as victims of violence by about three to one. Yet, ask the feminists that obsessively count the number of women murdered how many men have been killed, and you’re met with furious ignorance.
In any case, the script goes, men are murdered by men. Male violence is the problem. Men have a monopoly on violence. But, do they, really?
The stereotype often invoked by the mainstream media about domestic violence is of a bullying and domineering man. No doubt there are men around who abuse their women and children. This needs to be stated clearly: there are, indeed, dangerous men who abuse their partners. But this should not make people oversimplify the problem.
Like the ‘femicide’ narrative, domestic violence is constantly presented as a ‘man’ issue.
It has served mainstream feminism both socially and politically to simplify and reduce the violence continuum to include only physical abuse perpetrated by men. Mainstream feminists made domestic violence unilateral. A violence that was a facet of a family or domestic scene was portrayed as an inevitable, if unfortunate, expression of patriarchy.
One solution presented by radical feminists to eliminate “patriarchy” is the abolition of traditional marriage.
But there’s a big counter-example to the ‘domestic violence is a male problem’ narrative: lesbian relationships.
The brute statistical fact is that lesbian relationships are by far the most violent. One study found that nearly 60 per cent of American lesbians had been sexually victimised by their partners, and 65 per cent had experienced either physical or emotional aggression from their female partners (45 per cent physical). An Australian study also found disturbingly high rates of lesbian physical and sexual violence – and concluded that even that was likely an under-report.
How is this even possible – unless we confront the possibility that women are no less inclined to violence.
Although violence by women against men is a phenomenon that has received little attention in the media and in government, for nearly five decades the best research reveals that men are also frequently the targets of violence by abusive partners […] that among relationships with nonreciprocal violence, women were the perpetrators in a majority of cases, regardless of participant gender.
Social stigma skews the data in another way: men are less likely to admit being the victims of female violence.
The official figures notoriously underestimate the number of male victims of domestic violence. One reason for this is that men are quite reluctant to disclose that they have been abused. Culturally it is still difficult for men to bring these incidents to the attention of authorities. ‘Men feel under immense pressure to keep up the pretence that everything is OK,’ says Alex Neil, a Scottish politician and Secretary for Health and Wellbeing at the Scottish Parliament between 2012 and 2014.
The anecdotal examples cover the gamut of coercive abuse to appalling violence. Dr Elizabeth Bates, a senior lecturer in applied psychology at the University of Cumbria, argues that such female violence is not unusual. Nor is public and official humiliation of male victims.
She has heard many such stories from male victims who have been laughed at or dismissed by police. ‘The reality is that men don’t seek help as much. That’s partly because society strongly condemns violence against women but has few sanctions for women’s aggression towards men,’ Dr Bates says.
Abusive women also have a nuclear weapon when it comes to coercion: children.
Abused men often do not leave the abusive relationship because ‘this would mean putting their children at risk by leaving them with a frightening mother’, says Bettina Arndt. The fear of never seeing their children again keeps many men with their abusive partners. According to Amanda Major, a counsellor at Relate, a relationships advice service, ‘refusing access to children is sometimes used as a way to control and ‘punish’ the other person’. Fathers4Justice founder Matt O’Connor comments:
‘It is a tragic reality that many mothers weaponise their children by controlling a father’s access to their children … We call this ‘revenge parenting’ because mothers know fathers have no legal rights to see their children, and they can act with impunity. This coercive behaviour extends to parental alienation, where mums manipulate children and turn them against their dads.’
All in all, the best evidence is that domestic violence is likely equally split between male and female perpetrators and victims. Yet, public campaigns and MSM reporting portrays the exact opposite.
It’s almost as if the female-dominated public health bureaucracy, feminist academia and the feminocracy of the mainstream media is engaging in a society-wide gaslighting campaign against men.
But that’s surely just a crazy conspiracy theory.
