Is that a Frying Pan, Or Are You Just Unhappy to See Me?

Slowly, the big lie about “wife abuse” is coming out. Barbara Kay wrote a column in the National Post last week pointing out something that has been clear for many years: studies consistently show wives are just as likely to abuse husbands as husbands are to abuse wives. (Kay also quoted the founder of the first women’s shelter in Britain as saying that for men, “Canada is the scariest country on the planet.”) The earlier studies that did not show this, and were trumpeted for years by feminists, were flawed in a simple, obvious, way: they interviewed women only. They never asked men.

The fact that there are hundreds of government-financed “shelters for battered women,” and none for men, is the most blatant example of sex discrimination imaginable. And the bias against men among social workers and in the courts on this score amounted and amounts to the state itself aiding, abetting, and matching blow by blow the abuse of men by any woman so inclined.

In response to Kay’s column, reader Amelia Elstub falls back on the last-line defense of the feminists (Letters, Feb. 28): the claim that, even if men and women are equally violent, women suffer more, because men are physically stronger.

Odd that this makes no difference, according to the same feminists, when hiring for the military, the police, paramedics, or the fire department. Yet we are properly to count it against men in court? The same act is worse when done by a man, because he is physically stronger? Would it also extend to two men—that the physically stronger is always the guilty party? Is that equal protection before the law? By the same logic, shouldn’t blacks get more severe sentences in such cases—as they tend to be more athletic than whites? It seems to follow.

In any case, ever since old homo erectus figured out a little gimmick called the tool, raw physical strength has been rather unimportant in violent altercations such as wars generally—albeit I suppose this probably was not in all the papers, and so might have been missed.

And indeed, in the typical, traditional home, who is more likely to know the exact locations at any given time of readily available heft-enhancers? Things like, say, rolling pins, mops, brooms, breakable glass bottles or porcelain vases, kitchen knives? Even power tools--who, after all, is home all day?

Those dwindling few of us old enough to remember the days before feminism, yet not too old to remember anything whatsoever, ought to be aware of the big lie. Did you, like I, grow up reading Sunday comics like Bringing Up Father? In that strip, you may recall, rolling pins and porcelain vases were regularly bouncing off Jiggs’s head, while Maggie shouted “Insect!” A popular toy based on the series was a Maggie doll complete with rolling pin.

Or Blondie? Wasn’t Blondie regularly dousing Dagwood with buckets of water to get him off the couch on his day off? Or Li’l Abner, whose Pappy Yokum often had a black eye and bandaged face from the firm discipline of Mammy? Or Barney Google’s rolling-pin-wielding Luweezy homing in on Snuffy Smith? Can you picture any strip showing the reverse, an armed man chasing a woman, or actually administering blows? Can you even imagine it?

The fact that it was comic does not mean it was common. But it does mean it was socially okay. Funny, even. But if a man injures a woman, it is a scandal. Showing a husband doing these things to a wife in a comic strip, then as now, would be unthinkable.

This may perhaps be proper; this may perhaps be best. There may even be valid reasons for extending to women now even more special privileges than they have historically had. Just as probably (or improbably) as that there may be valid reasons for a class system, or for favouring one race, creed, or colour over another.

But let’s not add dishonesty to discrimination, and insult to injury, by pretending it has any relation to “sexual equality” or (hideously illiterate phrase) “gender equity.”