Yesterday, we took a look at Ferdinand Bardamu’s manosphere manifesto “The Necessity of Domestic Violence,” a thoroughly despicable piece of writing that concludes:
Women should be terrorized by their men; it’s the only thing that makes them behave better than chimps.
I decided to take a look at Bardamu’s post yesterday after running across a discussion of it in Reddit’s new FeMRA subreddit, a forum ostensibly devoted to what “women can do to advance men’s rights as women.” It’s a strange little subreddit, started by a man and dominated by some of Reddit’s most unsavory MaleMRAs, some of them banned in the regular Men’s Rights subreddit.
Recently one of the most unsavory of the bunch, calling himself JeremiahGuy this time, posted a link to Bardamu’s domestic violence manifesto, which he hosts on his website. Jeremiah naturally used the discussion as an excuse to post more apologias for domestic “discipline” along the lines of the quote from him I featured yesterday.
But I was a little surprised to see GirlWritesWhat, the blabby FeMRA video blogger who’s captured the hearts of Reddit’s Men’s Rights crowd, step into the conversation with something of a defense of Bardamu’s noxious views. After reading Bardamu’s manifesto – the one advocating that men “terrorize” their women to make them behave – GWW blithely concluded:
I don’t really find too much in the article that strikes me as seriously ethically questionable.
Have I taken that remark out of context? Yes. In context, it’s worse. Here’s the entire quote from her, and a further clarification of her position.
She wasn’t the only one in the discussion to get upvotes for suggesting that men slapping women around from time to time isn’t really such a big deal. MaunaLoona (a MaleMRA) wrote:
Lots of MRAs like to pretend that they care about male victims of domestic violence. But the Men’s Rights movement hasn’t done shit for them. And here, I think, is why: too many MRAs are less interested in helping male victims of domestic violence than they are in providing excuses and justifications for male abusers.
Oh, right, the Domestic Violence Wheel Law, that one where Congress passed a diagram as a law and the diagram says that if you do anything on the wheel you’re breaking the law and have to go to Diagram Jail.
Also GWW’s story never fuckin’ happened. Partly because the “I could tell it was the woman throwing things, it sounded like a feminine smash” detail makes no sense, and partly because the psychological dynamics are unbelievable. Emotional abusers don’t turn sunshine and roses if they’re slapped–they massively escalate. This isn’t some 40s melodrama where you can just “snap someone out of it.”
Also, GWW seems to imply that the man shouldn’t be getting out and getting a restraining order, he should just continue “disciplining” his wife with physical violence. Do you think that’s a good idea?
Tough. So we have to leave our typos in. We’ve got trolls here who will totally go back and edit their posts after a big blow-up, if they could. I don’t know that that’s why we can’t edit our posts.
You’ll just have to live with it. Everyone’s crappy grammar on display for all time.
As far as your questions: No. None of the above.
You’re likely going to say, but all those things happen to men!
Yeah, those things happen to men. After they beat their women, possibly put them in the hospital. Sometimes those men have guns. The TRO order forms I see all the time have great big pictures of handguns in one corner, for high visibility so the victim and the cops can get on the same page as to whether the subject of the TRO has a gun and might be dangerous.
Men who scream, yell, stomp and throw things aren’t hauled right off to jail. If the cops are called, they should calm the situation down, maybe give a warning or something. But you probably have listened to someone when they told you that cops are required to arrest someone on a domestic, any domestic.
There is no evidence that GWW’s case is an instance of the woman committing DV. It could very well have been the man creating the disturbance. We just don’t know enough about this case.
If you’re trying to prove something, find a better example.
Is it unreasonable for us to wonder if a guy whose nym is Some guy bored with your schtick is not, perhaps, going to fit in?
@cloudfish, I didn’t read the original justification by Ferdinand. It struck me as disgusting and certainly bullshit and not worth my time.
Responding ONLY to what David wrote about GWW and then reading the piece from GWW that he quoted, I do not see the problem with what GWW wrote.
My take is that this young couple may need therapy and are both co conspirators in domestic violence, but if this is a common situation and does not end up in the hospital, well sad as it may be, it probably doesn’t require court intervention either or mandatory arrests.
If what GWW is accurate, that the young woman repeatedly starts this behavior, then I don’t understand David’s condemnation of GWW or his misrepresentation of what occurred as “men slapping women around”
The truth is, if you take what GWW’s representation as accurate, that modern domestic violence theory and law says the young woman is the perpetrator and the man, while his actions are wrong, is acting in self defense.
Funny, because GWW’s take is that the man is solving his problem by hitting the woman, no therapy needed because she’ll learn from being hit.
Do you maybe wanna take that up with her, or does MRA Solidarity trump all?
Hey, she probably slammed doors in a really girly way! That’s definitely a thing you could hear, in Magical Misogyny Land.
@someguyfish
Citation (to a credible source) needed.
Crap, now all I see when I look at the page pic is Rock Paper Scissors Lizard Spock.
@Cliff,
“Funny, because GWW’s take is that the man is solving his problem by hitting the woman, no therapy needed because she’ll learn from being hit.”
I don’t see that anywhere in the excerpted portion.
@cloudiah, I apologize for quoting you as @cloudfish.
Hitting a person who is yelling at you is not self defense.
Oh fuck no it doesn’t say that at all. It is NEVER self defense to use physical violence in a non-violent situation. This is pretty basic stuff, if someone starts hitting me I can use physical force to make them stop but I can’t use physical force to stop someone from yelling at me (and in general self-defense requires that you stop using force as soon as your attacker stops, you can’t keep beating them or use excessive force).
Actually, this sounds a bit like my mum and dad’s relationship. She’d get into moods once in a while, verbally torment him for hours, mostly he just took himself off somewhere but once he hit her with an alarm clock, though he was mortified and embarrassed and never did it again. He died a few years ago, and mum was very depressed for ages, she really missed him. God only knows what that was about. She once told me that she regretted my childhood had been so blighted by their fighting. To be honest, they were as bad as one another. Dad could do the same thing – just be horrible to her or me for hours at a time. I firmly don’t believe anyone should abuse anyone else, but to be frank, I absolutely can believe that most domestic abuse and violence is reciprocal and even that women initiate it on an equal basis to men.
You know, obviously this isn’t going to go down well here, but the fact is that women and girls can be really, really vicious; but in different ways to men. My experience is that men and boys use their fists and physically fight, but at least most of the time they just make up and move on. Women and girls on the other hand are more likely to be verbally/emotionally abusive. You see it all the time with girls friendship groups – they’re often excluding one girl or another or being catty and playing power games.
I know it would be really difficult to prove, but I have a feeling this continues into adulthood. You look at the stats for the number of men who commit suicide during or after separation and divorce, and think about what it must be like to suddenly be stopped from seeing your kids, lose your home, slashed income etc. – frankly, doesn’t it look like the ultimate form of domestic abuse?
@cloudiah
When I google for “what is domestic violence” this is the first non-sponsored link I find.
http://www.thehotline.org/get-educated/what-is-domestic-violence/
The description on that page certainly describes the woman’s actions (and the man’s as well) as domestic violence. But taking GWW’s account as accurate, she is the initiator.
Yeah, fuck the wheel, some dude. You left out the hitting part on purpose to try and construct your little gotcha.
You’re totally here to troll. Run along.
You may be in a physically abusive relationship if your partner has ever:
Damaged property when angry (thrown objects, punched walls, kicked doors, etc.).
Some guy, what are you trying to prove, that women can be abusive? Catch the fuck up, no one here has every denied that.
Please shove your whole disingenuous “just asking” routine. There’s a shtick I’m over.
Hold up, Some Guy- assuming worst case scenario and the woman in question was being emotionally abusive to her partner, you yourself said slapping her in ‘retaliation’ was not an appropriate response. You might not share Dave’s outrage at physical violence, but you show some semblance of understanding there is an escalation to assault and battery happening in this situation that legally needs to be resolved differently. Now put yourself in the shoes of someone who deplores physical violence, especially when perpetrated against a physically less powerful person. Surely you can understand David’s outrage now. As far as misrepresenting the situation as men slapping women around, that was pretty much the situation described by GWW- nothing was misrepresented here. A man slapped a woman around. GWW used it as an example of ‘acceptable DV’ (not a verbatim quote, just indicating I don’t believe such a thing exists).
Can we talk about how this shit doesn’t happen?
The whole “woman throws a tantrum until man hits her and that fixes everything” thing is Hollywood bullshit. The truth is more like “man throws a tantrum until his tantrum has worked him up so much that he hits the woman.”
(This can also be “woman throws a tantrum until she’s so worked up she hits the man” but that’s not what GWW described as perceiving with her Magical X-Ray Vision Ears.)
Emotional and physical abuse aren’t opposites; they’re usually practiced simultaneously by the same partner.
“One does the yelling, the other does the hitting” scenarios, while as beloved of MRAs as “but what if we’re both drunk when I rape her?”, just don’t happen that much in real life.
No one is saying that if the woman did that it couldn’t be abusive. You are claiming that it is violence that is justified in using physical force to stop, and it is not.
@cloudiah: Now that you’ve had puppies, wanna try a little bebe skonklet?
@Cliff, the example that GirlWritesWhat gave doesn’t even sound like DV to me and ccertainly isn’t “beating them into submission”
To me it sounds more like a game they’re playing. She pretends to misbehave by annoying him, slamming doors, and he pretends to hit her. Then they have sex.
@Vitamin D, I honestly didn’t read Ferdinand’s article — the title alone was repulsive — and I only refer to him as Ferdinand here because I can remember his first name, not his last. That I didn’t read the article may place me in a position where I truly cannot comment accurately on the reddit thread that followed.
I do think that in using the clips David used, and no others, he fails to prove his point about GWW. I do believe his description of a man slapping women around is a misrepresentation of what she wrote using those clips alone.
Perhaps GWW was accurately represented and David can support that using other quotes of hers.
I also believe there are several comments in this thread in response to mine that demonstrate a good deal of either ignorance of domestic violence or are actively apologizing and excusing domestic violence when it is initiated by a woman.
Lawgirl, you must be even more psychic than GWW if you figured all that out from a description of some slamming noises and some yelling.
Maybe they just watch really loud movies about DV on a regular basis, and they have a really good sound system, maybe that’s it! As long as we’re making ridiculous assumptions.
@ Cliff- Thank you for talking about how that shit doesn’t happen. I was so caught up in how unjustifiable GWW’s take on her imagined scenario is I completely forgot about her questionable reliability as an impartial thump-noise interpreter.