Can’t argue with this. I’m no stranger to domestic violence myself. I was married to a six-foot hillbilly who was a little too fond of using her fists. She’d listen to country music and the lachrymose lyrics would set her off. There’s apparently something about a pore lonesome cowboy bellyaching about his pickup truck that makes some people want to get drunk and start throwing punches.
That said, it’s a thousand times more likely for a man to hit a woman than for a woman to hit a man. Anything that goes without saying needs to be said, so I’ll say it: Violence against women is massively underreported. Go ahead and rage about that all you want. It’s publicly expressed anger like that that has made so many bad things not just illegal but socially unacceptable.
But we might also consider this: Scientists say humans invented fire 40,000 years ago, based on carbon dating. That’s 1,600 generations, give or take. Men have treated women unchivalrously for at least that long. Who knows, men might have been doing that ever since our ancestors first emerged from the primordial soup.
Only sixty years ago Humphrey Bogart said a woman needs to be struck regularly, like a gong. Can’t imagine anyone in public life saying that today.
Changing something that’s been accepted as the norm for thousands of years — and to demand it immediately — is asking a lot. The four billion men alive on this planet don’t all inhabit the same point in evolutionary time. Not everyone has gotten the memo that violence against women is not OK, so they’re not going to turn on a dime like synchronized dancers in a Broadway musical. Some of them won’t change their behavior until they realize that what they’re doing is a guaranteed way to find their ass in jail.
At the same time it’s astonishing that we’ve seen even some social change in the space of a single lifetime. Score one for Lamarckian gene theory. Darwin might not have thought this possible.
I’ll say one other thing: Men have got to stop calling themselves feminists. Stop it, guys. I mean it.
