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It is Domestic Violence Awareness Month in the U.S. and here is a website devoted to publicising that.
1. Domestic Violence is, it seems to me, the violence done by the U.S. government and corporations and individual oppressors to the oppressed who live within the U.S. and its "territories". Or to it's "territories" and the land and the air and the water. Poverty, for example, is a form of Domestic Violence. So is institutionalised racism, heterosexism, and misogyny.
2. Domestic violence is distinguished from Off-shore Violence. And in looking at the latter what we may note is how warfare is part of each: warfare against women by men who seek patriarchal/male supremacist control of women and girls, and also to regulate and restrict the behavior of boys so that they grow up to be "good patriarchs", meaning mass murders, serial rapists, and batterers of anyone in punching range.
3. Domestic Violence was the name chosen when discussions about the many ways men dominate women through intimate violence because too specific for contemplation, let alone resistance work and activism to stop men's violence against women. It is the generic term for something that isn't at all generic or ungendered. Yes, we need to acknowledge that there is such a thing as battery in lesbian and gay relationships. And of course there are many ways adults in families do violence to children. But the most common form of gendered-sexual violence in families is fathers and father figures incesting/raping/molesting their own daughters or girls they are supposed to be parenting, not preying on.
4. Why doesn't the Anti-Woman Revengelical Fundamentalist Christian White Right [Wrong) acknowledge that their unwritten and unspoken moral code is this: "The Family That Preys Against Female Family Members, Stays Together Due to Stockholm Syndrome and other effects of Dominance and Control"? And realise that feminism is only anti-family if your idea of family includes men dominating women, heterosexism, and violence against women and children, including sexual violence?
5. Why doesn't the Anti-Woman Libertarian Liberal "Left" acknowledge that their unwritten and unspoken code is this: men should have as much freedom of access and rights to violate girls and women as men desire to have, to do whatever it is men wish to do to girls and women that men learn from predatory men and pornographers and pimps. What is are the liberals and libertarians doing to stop incest and rape? Not a whole helluva lot. Why is that? Because rape and incest aren't worth stopping? Or because liberal men believe that in a liberal society incest and rape are part of the price paid for "freedom"? Too fucking high a price, I say.
6. Why isn't homophobic and anti-girl bullying and battery understood as part of Domestic Violence? How many girls and boys have to take their own lives before conservatives and liberals wake up to the fact that children hurting, degrading, humiliating, and terrorising other children isn't socially good or socially necessary. Clearly anti-bullying and anti-battery policies and education programs could be in place in every school system. Sure, there'd have to be less military massacres going on non-domestically, to liberate funds to pay school systems to implement such policies and programs. But the problem with that would be what? Less profit in Dick Cheney's, Donald Rumsfeld's, and David Petraeus's pockets? Those "poor" men will just have to get along with the millions they already have acquired through mass rape and mass murder of "foreign" people of color.
7. Why isn't the violence boys do to girls in school systems and outside school systems discussed? I sporadically hear about is anti-gay bullying, usually by boys against boys, or anti-girl bullying, usually by girls against girls. I'm not suggesting each isn't a serious social problem--both are, as is anti-lesbian violence against girls, which I hear little to nothing at all about. But we also need to focus on the problem of boys sexually harassing, stalking, physically and sexually violating girls, throughout grade school and on into adulthood. And anti-lesbian violence among children too.
8. There's a simple way to end married het men battering women in their home. It is to remove forever from the home any man who is found to have beaten up a woman in the home. And to prevent him from ever having contact with his female spouse or his children, as beating up a child's mother is or ought to be grounds for losing all rights to ever see your child or your spouse again. Sound harsh? To the men who think that's too harsh: Try not beating up women and avoid the harsh consequence. Any man that terrorises or systematically dominates and controls a woman in their home has no right to raise their children, to have custody of them, or to visit them. Sound harsh? To them men who think that's too harsh: systematically demonstrate regard and respecting for women and children; don't terrorising or ridicule anyone; don't dominate and bully anyone; and don't demean and controlling anyone systematically. Try being non-abusive, compassionate, and caring, not vengeful and vindictive and then, guess what? You get to raise your own children! See how easy that can be? It's all, quite literally, in your hands, fellas.
9. As for the men who declare the "equal" problem of women beating men, show me the thousands of x-rays of those men's broken bones, please. Show me the thousands of photos of their badly battered faces. Show me the shelters. Because it's not that class-privileged men aren't economically posititioned to purchase and set up "safe homes" for men abused by women. No. Straight men can do that if need be, what with all those allegedly advanced construction skills (to compliment all the destruction skills). The reality is that there is no need. Meanwhile, men down-play the violence men do to women and up-play the violence women do to men. (Yes, women can and do hurt men (and women) in a variety of ways. I've seen women who have been abused and neglected by men lash out in frustration and pain and say hurtful things to men, sometimes even to their faces. What I haven't ever seen or heard about is this: a woman abuse a man who was never been abused by a man. Not once. I accept that it is often the case that men who batter women witnessed men beating up women somewhere earlier in their lives. But not that they witnessed women beating up men earlier in their lives. So no matter how you look at it, the source problem here is men's violence against women, not women's against men.
10. Funny (not ha-ha funny, and not ta-ta funny) how the major media might mention something about Breast Cancer Awareness Month--never enough, while generally ignoring Heterosexual Husbands and Boyfriends Beating The Shit Out of Women and Their Children Awareness Month. I know queer battery happens too; I'm gay. But I'm all for naming what the endemic problem is that's part of an overall systemic reality of men subordinating women, which is men battering (and raping) women, intimately. And anyone beaten, even in lesbian and gay relationships, is called misogynistic names, which tells you a whole lot about the gendered foundations of domestic violence. The problem is not, as too many abusive het men proclaim the problem to be: "spouses hitting each other". I raised the issue in a recent post: why it is that anti-abortionists don't seem to give a shit that men beat up pregnant women causing untold miscarriages? I mean even if they only care about unborn female foetuses and don't give a damn about out-of-the-womb girls and women, you'd think they'd be overtly anti-battery and anti-rape (including anti-incest): two reasons for unwanted pregnancy and unwanted loss of pregnancy. Two main methods of terrorising and dominating women through force and violation. How about Pernicious and Predatory Patriarchal Privileges Awareness Month? Let's see the morning shows and evening news deal with that issue honestly in town hall meetings.
Darth Paul | 6 October, 2010 at 3:57 pm 
