By David Futrelle
Men’s Rights activists really do seem intent on finding justifications for men to punch women. There’s the “jokey” slogan they like to use: “Equal Rights mean equal lefts.” There was Paul Elam’s “Bash a Violent Bitch Month,” in which he imagined men responding to physical abuse from women by “beat[ing] the living shit out of them. … I mean literally … grab[bing] them by the hair and smack[ing] their face against the wall.”
Now a Redditor calling herself Tozae222 seems to suggest that men should be allowed to hit their partners in response to verbal abuse that pushes them to their “breaking point.”
Apparently that’s what happened with a friend of hers who, as she explains in a post on the Men’s Rights subreddit, has “just been jailed because his ex has finally gotten what she wanted.” By which Tozae222 presumably means enough of a beatdown to leave visible bruises behind, because cops generally don’t arrest anyone for domestic violence if there aren’t physical markings on the victim. But in Tozae222’s mind she made him do it.
“If its never okay to physically abuse a woman, it should never be okay to push a man to breaking point,” Tozae222 writes.
If a woman has got the balls to be in a man’s face being verbally abusive, even physically they should be prepared to cop the same back.
You’re not entitled to respond to abuse with abuse of your own. And you’re definitely not entitled to escalate — to respond to a finger wagging in your face with a punch –which is presumably more or less what her jailed friend did.
NO one deserves to be screamed at in nose to nose distance. NO one deserves to be constantly threatened that they’re going to leave or going to take their kids away. NO one deserves to be belittled infront of family and friends.
Well, no. All that is clearly abusive behavior. But what it isn’t is an excuse to respond with a punch — even if, in your mind at least, you’ve been “pushed to the breaking point,” whatever that means.
And just who in this scenario gets to define what this “breaking point” is? Some men see any “backtalk” as such a threat to their fragile masculinity that they respond with physical violence. Should these men be able to tell the cops that “she pushed me to the breaking point” and thus wiggle out of any arrest for physical violence? Violence is never the answer, even if the woman in question has been shrieking like a banshee in her partner’s face. Even if someone on Reddit thinks the victim “has finally gotten what she wanted.” This is the case regardless of the genders of those involved.
Hell, even if the woman in question resorted to physical violence herself, the response must be proportionate. You can defend yourself; but you can’t give someone a concussion.
Naturally, this being the Men’s Rights subreddit, most of the regulars responded warmly to Tozae222’s argument, and her post got 100 upvotes. “You’re a really good person and I don’t get to say that often,” wrote one new fan of hers. “That really nice to hear,” wrote another.
Only one commenter had the temerity to suggest that escalating a verbal fight into physical violence was a bad idea.
Maybe there’s a good reason why some people call the Men’s Rights movement an abusers’ movement,
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So how exactly can we be sure Tozae222 is in fact a real woman and not another LARPer? Call me cynical, but that’s the kind of thing I’d expect from that lot.
It’s funny how MRAs are always super eager to find a loophole that will allow them to hit women. That’s not a red flag at all.
@Anonymous
I share the skepticism. This sounds an awful lot like another MRA cosplaying as a woman. Though there are some awful women MRAs as well, so that’s still a possibility.
Same here. I don’t believe Tozae222 is a woman, either, anymore than I believe Roosh V was an “attractive young woman” on some of the comment spaces for his blogs.
My comment got eaten by the mammoth ?, potentially due to the density of linked sources, but the gist of it is that if you read the posts on that user’s Reddit profile, she’s a 31 year old mother of two, currently based in Australia, with a 28 year old boyfriend who had an abusive controlling ex with whom he has a daughter who he is not allowed to see, which she uses to justify her response to this matter. So far so neatly ticking the boxes of MRA talking points (women are also abusive, check, women estrange men from their children, check, men should be allowed to hit back, check).
She was also institutionalized 10 years ago in an institution that had “African nurses” (not many of those in Australia, so potentially she moved in the intervening time, oor…), and was diagnosed with Type II bipolar disorder 8 years ago, which she is currently controlling with medication and meditation. Not immediately pertinent, but potentially interesting for verifying bona fides.
It’s not beyond belief she is a real person – not like there’s an acute shortage of women who still hold to the belief a man has the right to “chastise” his partner when they get out of line. Especially if the partner is his previous one (not them, of course) who they’ve heard chapter and verse about “that witch” for months or years.
(I’m writing this in 2020? People make me despair, sometimes.)
Just in case there was any confusion, the person who she is writing about in this post (the one who was jailed for hitting his ex) is another mutual friend, not her current boyfriend. She is (correctly or otherwise, I can’t really tell from the details volunteered) noting the parallels in the two situations, which informs her sympathetic view towards men who “hit back” (which I absolutely do not agree with under any circumstances, potential parallels be damned).
I think it was “Ian Ironwood” (or a fan of his) who said, years ago, that men are expected to put up with verbal abuse from women that, if committed by a man, would result in a punch to the face.
Somehow, whoever said that didn’t seem to realize that it isn’t legal to hit a man for verbal abuse, either – and yes, the hitter CAN get arrested for that.
That’s a bit of a stupid argument. It could be used with the same effect by the woman in the scenario above. Should it be legal for a man to push a woman over the edge and get her shouting at two inches of her boyfriend face? That’s why any “right to escalation” is ridiculous. You can regress them to the absurd. If a couple is engaging in a shouting match, both need some therapy or one of them needs to end the relationship before one gets seriously hurt.
@Ariblester
Unfortunately it’s not like we can independently verify any of what Tozae222 said about herself is true. At minimum, we’re seeing a hell of a lot of internalized misogyny at work.
MRAs have the breaking point of a sandcastle.
Yes, very true, independent verification is impossible, but arguments in favor of her being real would be her activity being spread over several (not solely MRA-related) subreddits, though the low age of the account is suspicious. And yes, there is a lot of internalized misogyny here.
At the risk of starting a fight, imo yelling in someone’s face can in some cases be physical abuse, and not just verbal abuse, if the abuser is also blocking the other person’s path, or their ability to leave, even if no physical contact is being made. Of course, escalation isn’t ok, and you aways want to de-escalate, or use a proportionate amount of force. But it’s pretty easy to accidentally (or purposely) bodily corner someone in a building when you are literally in their face yelling at them.
Having been in a situation like this, having an abuser bodily block your escape when you try to go around them and scream in your face is terrifying. Luckily for me I had my cell phone in my pocket so I was able to call 911, but I don’t know how things would have ended up if I didn’t have my phone. I might have had to push them back, or even hit them to get away and out of the house.
*edit to add, in case you guys wonder, I never hit them, or threatened to do so. (Although I did threaten to call the police a few times). Luckily for me I was smart enough by that time to realize that they were trying to get me to hit them, (DARVO at it’s finest), and that particular incident was the last time I was, or will ever, be alone with that person for the rest of my life. It’s funny that realizing that they were setting me up legally was the last straw, but you know, all the other abuse wasn’t.
Huh…??? Yes they will, if it’s a white woman accusing a Latino. You’d best believe I know a controlling abusive psychopath that is a pathological liar who had her husband arrested twice this very way.
@big Titty Demon
Not always true, depends on the cop.
I hear you, but in that situation you would be acting (justifiably) out of self-defense, not retaliating in anger. That’s a very different situation from what is being described here. I see no indication here that the man felt that he was in imminent danger.
The OP wrote:
Note their choice of words. “cop the same back”. This implies that in their mind physical violence and verbal abuse are interchangeable actions, and that aggression of one sort was met with aggression in equal measure, not in self-defense.
So men are abused by women. To add insult to injury, the women have their abused male partners put in jail. Also, these women take all the abused men’s money. The abused guys give up. They contemplate suicide or resort to drugs and alcohol to numb the pain.
That explains why, in the rabble-rousing 1960s, some brave, dedicated men started shelters for abused men and their frightened children, established hotlines for abused men, and created groups for abused men to discuss how they’d faced violence from women — and ways out of those terrifying situations.
@Kat – Not sure who you’re quoting (word search on the page only comes right back to the quote; maybe it’s something by the OP elsewhere?) but on its own and out of context, the text you’re quoting doesn’t look so bad.
It doesn’t say that “men are abused” (umm, does this count as a NotAllMen? ?), it says that men who are in abusive relationship have a problem expressing their issues in a productive manner.
That sounds true; some men are, indeed, in abusive relationships. And often they are not believed when they try to express it, because of toxic masculinity (the idea that a man has to “control” his wife, and that if he doesn’t then he’s weak and contemptible) and general misogyny (the idea that all women are naggy and manipulative etc., so his situation must be “normal” rather than abusive).
Toxic masculinity also often means a man in a situation like that won’t have a good productive support network – by which I don’t mean ranting to the violent assholes on MRA forums, but an actual group of friends he can be emotionally open with and get actually good advice from. Men are encouraged to try to deal with things alone, for fear that not doing so will make them seem (or be) less of a man. This also leads to dealing with problems badly – either by responding in violence (which is seen as the main “manly” option) or by trying to just bear things silently, sometimes until the point of suicide.
These are actual problems. They’re a product of the same things that feminism is working to solve – it’s a good example of how sexism hurts men too.
It’s from the full text of the Reddit post being discussed. So in context, it’s “don’t be surprised that men use their fists to do the talking because society doesn’t allow them any other outlet”.
Ah, okay. I usually prefer not to go read these full things, because what’s quoted here is bad enough. Sorry for jumping in like that, Kat.
Well, in that case, OP seems to have said a right thing among her horribleness, and to have then used it in her very wrong conclusion.
The distinction between verbal abuse and physical abuse here is a red herring, and while I overall like the article, it’s important to say that abusing emotionally someone isn’t less important or less problematic than beating it up.
It’s not okay to respond to abuse with abuse, period. We should have gone past eye for an eye and remember that abuse is never okay, regardless of the situation.
Note that using force to defend itself isn’t using abuse to answer abuse. Also, people actually rarely do only one type of abuse. I didn’t looked up for more context here, but it’s likely it was the man who was abusive emotionally before being abusive physically, since generally speaking with emotional abuse it’s quite often the abuser who become violent. That being said, exceptions do exist.
@Kat
AFAIK the only groups that have ever created shelters or support groups for abused men were feminists. The solution to abuse of men isn’t letting men abuse women back, it’s helping victims get out of a situation. But of course, MRAs just want to make apologia for men assaulting women and have actively tried to shut down men’s shelters.
O/T; but I found this so distasteful I felt obliged to comment.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-election/trump-rnc-charlie-gard-natalie-harp-right-to-try-cancer-baby-speech-biden-a9686616.html
Just to debunk the argument though; the court did not make a decision based on costs of keeping the child alive.
Every expert, including (eventually) the one instructed by the parents, agreed that there was no possibility of successful treatment and that keeping artificially prolonging life could only risk further suffering.
So the court held that the ‘best interests of the child’ (which is the test to be applied) was to let nature take its course.
Well, there was Earl Silverman, who has since become a martyr for the MRM.