Namehere said:
In my country it is presently legal for a battered wife to kill her husband at any time in any convenient manner. I'm not kidding. A battered man does not have this luxury.
No. It isn't. That may be what men's rights movements have told you because, as mentioned, anger is fun and profitable, but it actually isn't remotely true.
In the early 90s, a woman named Angelique Lyn Lavallee shot and killed her boyfriend during an episode of abuse. Her trial revealed that she had been subject to a long history of violent abuse throughout the relationship. Her defence argued that she believed she had no choice but to shoot her boyfriend otherwise he would kill her.
The Canadian Supreme Court initially acquired Lavallee of murder, although the decision was later overturned on the grounds that without Lavallee's own testimony it was impossible for the jury to reach a verdict regarding her state of mind, so your claim doesn't even hold up in the case which set the precedent. However, this case set the precedent for the admission of evidence to the effect that someone may have been suffering from what was then known as "battered women syndrome" as a defence against the charge of murder.
Nowadays, we know that what used to be called "battered woman syndrome" is in fact a form of very serious post traumatic stress caused by prolonged experience of abuse, and the precendent set by R v Lavallee would apply equally to men and to women provided it could be demonstrated that a "battered man" was actually suffering from this form of post traumatic stress. On that note..
In 1976, 1596 women in the US were murdered by their spouses or partners, compared to 1348 men.
In 2006, these numbers had dropped to 1159 women and
385 men.
I expect you'd find a similar trend if you looked at most developed countries, including Canada. The thing is, MRAs love to argue that the increasingly serious attempts to tackle domestic violence over the past few decades have somehow discriminated against men, when in fact they seem to have saved vast numbers of men's lives, far more so than they have saved women's lives. How could this be? After all, there are few shelters to protect men from these hordes of murderous women who must surely exist..
Simply put, when women are given options to safely and securely leave an abusive relationship, when services are able to provide security and psychological treatment for them and their children, they somehow become vastly, vastly less likely to kill their partners. The single biggest risk of men being killed by their partners was the risk that women trapped in abusive relationships would be faced with no choice but to defend themselves or their children. Take away that risk to women, and the vast majority of intimate partner homicides against men simply stop happening.
Most women who are killed by partners are killed during or after they have attempted to leave an abusive relationship, most men who are killed by their partners are killed by women whom, through coercion, they have deliberately prevented from leaving an abusive relationship. #Not all men, of course. I am a domestic abusive survivor myself and yes, I am anatomically male. But if your idea for tackling domestic violence does not include a concerted reexamination of the cultural practices behind this inequality, then I rest my case. It's time to ask yourself: are you interested in building a society which is better for men, or a society in which violence by men (which, in total, describes almost all violence in this society) is treated with casual indifference lest we make men feel bad by pointing it out?
Namehere said:
Major issues for the Mens Rights Movement included child custody, reproductive rights, recognition of battered males and places for them to turn to from shelters to overall support, boys education... It's a rather large and long laundry list. None of it has anything to do with not being able to get laid, and none of it requires a 'revolution' outside of maybe the educational issues.
Alright. Let's take another one. Child custody.
How many men who talk angrily about the bitter injustices of child custody and fathers rights actually talk about fatherhood?
How many talk about what they have actually, concretely sacrificed or would be willing to sacrifice for their children (beyond the purely financial "breadwinner" role)?
How many talk with passion about the experience of changing nappies, of getting up in the night to feed or comfort a crying baby? How many talk about the times they've dropped their kids off for school, the efforts they've gone to to make sure their children eat a healthy diet, the material labour of cooking and cleaning?
A few, sure, but generally these things are entirely absent from a movement which nonetheless insists that fathers are important. It turns out, more often than not, all that it means for a father to be important is for a father to be there. For a father to have "quality time" with his children when it suits him. For a father to know his children love and respect him and all he does for them.
To go beyond that, after all, would require a "revolutionary" statement, it would require us to go beyond merely "fathers are important and should be in their children lives as passive role models" to "men and women have an equal right to share in the rewards of their growing children
because they have an equal responsibility to perform the material labour of raising children". Did these men, who believe so passionately in their rights to have access to their children, sacrifice their career advancement when they became parents? Did they go part time or try to cut down their working hours so they could share equal child-caring responsibilities, or did they simply assume that that's something their partners would do?
How exactly do you expect a "fathers rights" movement to function without eliciting a broader transformation in the whole relationship between men, women and children? How do you expect men to be able to assume that their children are a woman's responsibility right up until the point they separate and then suddenly demand that they be equally included in the lives of a family they've ultimately shown no real interest in before that point? Feminists in the 70s were demanding that men take on a greater share of responsibilities at home, including caring for children, there have been numerous attempts to induce or promote men to take a more active role in the home and family life. Men, as a whole, have not been listening. The material labour of raising children, and the responsibility to make the sacrifices required to do it, still falls overwhelmingly on women.
If you want to have "rights" over your kids, then the empowering response is to make your fatherhood of your kids a point of principle deserving of those rights, preferably before it goes to court. The disempowering response is to sit at home and feel angry about how unfair it all is. There's no guarantee that if you do the right thing everything will go your way, of course, but that's why it's not the easy road and at least when you face problems they will be real problems. It still beats numbing yourself to sleep with empty platitudes about imaginary victimhood and fantasising about non-existent activism.