I did all this research to refute Exador’s misguided wrongness last night, but my heart just wasn’t in it, and so I ended up deleting the post. I thought, “What’s the use in pointing out the errors of his ways if he’s never going to talk to me again?” But since he claims he will, I just can’t let this nonsense stand.
So, the point of his little rant is that, supposedly, women are twice as domestically violent as men.
This is interesting, I thought. What does the government say?
My, my, my. Looky here. If a woman is murdered, there’s a one in three chance it was her husband, ex-husband, or boyfriend who did it. Two-thirds of the people who are killed by an intimate partner are women. Two-thirds of the people who kill their intimate partners are men.
I don’t mean to point out a huge flaw in the Wayward Boy Scout’s beloved data, but since the study interviewed 1615 co-habitating couples, it by definition didn’t interview anyone who had fled an abusive relationship or anyone who had killed his or her partner. So, you cannot say that women are more violent than men (though good try); you can only safely say that in ongoing partnerships, women tend to be more violent. We might surmise that, in relationships that have come to an end due to violence, such as when your partner kills you or makes you so afraid that he might kill you, then the more violent partner is usually male.
Tiny Cat Pants 
It also measured the past year, which may or may not be an appropriate proxy for rate of violence over the lifetime of a relationship. It also ignores violence against non-cohabiting partners or acquaintances.
Twist the data all you want, man-beaters. You won’t intimidate me into hiding the truth.At least you had the misguided confidence to post the link to the data. Your readers can make up their own minds.
Your points only suport my argument.How many of the murdering men of which you refer, murdered their wives after receiving years of physical abuse?Perhaps they saw that as the only means to escape the abuse?
Considering that most of my readers aren’t drunken misguided right-wing gun nuts, I’m not that worried about them looking at that study and drawing the obvious conclusions.
I’m not on either side, but…My Redneck cousin’s 3rd wife beat the shit out of him and left him bleeding and unconscious on the floor just before she trashed their house and r-u-n-n-o-f-t with some man she met on the internet. She called his parents(her in-laws) from the new man’s cell phone as she was leaving town and told them to go by the house to pick up the kids and by the way, call an ambulance for the Redneck cousin. I don’t know what their domestic situation was, but the rest of the family found it pretty darn funny. I think because of the stigma attached to female domestic violence it’s not reported as often.Of course, I once knew a lesbian couple that beat the shit out of each other pretty regularly too so maybe it’s not gender based at all. Just damaged people repeating what they learned from their parents.
Oh, Saraclark, how can I fight with my favorite right wing crazy if you come along all serious?I honestly think, and I have no statistics to back this up, but it’s just a gut feeling, that most abusive relationships are abusive both ways. Both parties beating the shit out of each other is probably much more common than the controlling abuse where one partner terrorizes the other. But again, this is another instance of how the patriarchy hurts men. Men do get beat up by their partners and those instances remain under reported because the stigma is so enormous.
As an (ex) prosecutor. . . I have seen my share of serious domestic violence. And no matter how serious the injury – men are always embarassed to admit their wife or girl got the best of them. DV is an issue that spans both genders. To bash one side over the other. . . make it a left or right issue is irrelevant when it comes to DV. A man vs woman or woman vs man issue is just plain wrong. Until our society gets over the whole "men are more powerful than women" – wome are going to continue getting away with completely unacceptable behaviour. And, that, folks – just ain’t right. It takes a strong man to ask us for help when he’s gotten the shit kicked out of him (or stabbed or shot) by some crazy baby’s mama he’s been fu*&ing around with. And trust me – there are some crazy ass bitches out there!
I think in your average relationship women are a little freer to be agressive and semi-violent. If a woman slaps her husband it’s just her way of protesting something stupid he did (and if on TV it’s funny). If a man slaps his wife it’s spousal abuse and he can be arrested.I realize it sounds paradoxical, but women may feel a little freer to express their stronger feelings because a man is less likely to feel intimidated and need outside help when she does. Now that assumes we’re talking about regular people and not abusive people who are prone to violence.So you may have a higher incidence of low level violence from women in a relationship, but the serious put-you-in-the-hospital violence is more commen to men.
It’s a shame that the study excluded gay couples. Like saraclark said, I’ve heard of male and female couples that tear into each other.Again, though, the "fights are more evenly matched", so people don’t think of it as abuse.That brings this point: If a smaller, weaker man attacked a much larger, stronger man, and got pummelled for it, everybody would respond that he was stupid to do that.But if the smaller, weaker attacker is a woman, society expects the man to just take it, or at most, respond in the slightest way possible.Equality is a two-way street.