Why violence?

Where does male violence toward women come from?

Since I started blogging about the subject a few days ago, I've been racking my brain trying to come up with an approach to it that seems useful to others, particularly to men who sometimes experience anger toward women that can erupt as violence.

I can't make this a first-person account of my own struggles with misogyny — meaning: "hatred of women" — since the best I can do in that regard is catalog some of the low-level, mostly hidden antipathies toward women that I've discovered in myself at various points in my life. To take one example: a man knows there's something of that sort buried somewhere within him when he laughs at sexist jokes he shouldn't find funny, for example.

But there's a huge difference between laughing at sexist jokes and committing spousal abuse or date rape.

Or is there? A big question in my mind is whether both things have the same root cause, and if so what is it? Where does male antipathy toward women come from — assuming that male-on-female violence is rooted in attitudes ranging from strong, pervasive hatred to mild, situational antipathy?

In search of answers I turned to the Violence Against Women section at Feminist.com. It says in the VAW introduction that:

• young women of ages 15 to 44 have more injuries from battery than from any other cause
• the (low) official estimate of the number of women who are raped each year is in excess of 100,000; the actual number is more like 683,000
• approximately 50% of the homeless women and children in this country are on the streets because of violence in their homes
• one-fifth to one-half of U.S. women were sexually abused as children at least once, most of them by an older male relative
• nearly two-thirds of women who receive public assistance ("welfare") have been abused by an intimate partner at some time in their adult lives

"Women are statistically safer out on the street than they are in their homes," the VAW introduction laments.

Looking again at the list above, stop a moment to reflect on the degree to which sex and man-on-woman violence are so intimately related. The VAW intro says, "Sexual violence is particularly insidious because sexual acts are ordinarily and rightly a source of pleasure and communication. It is often unclear to a woman who has been victimized and to society as a whole whether a sexual violation was done out of sexual desire or violent intent or whether these motivations are even distinguishable, because violence itself has come to be seen as sexual or erotic."

Meanwhile, "family, friends, and public institutions have been cruelly insensitive about" rape and other violence against women. That in itself impresses me as being very hard to explain. Women make up half of the adults in the population — including everybody's family and friends — and I'd guess that at least half of the employees of public institutions are female today. Why do so many eyes get averted when violence against women happens?

More later ...