SAUCE FOR THE GOOSE 10 - 'Getting beaten up is part of growing up'

Maybe you don't know but here in the UK crime stats show that men are just as likely to be attacked as women and twice as likely to be murdered. Women are mostly attacked by people they know in private but very rarely attacked by strangers in public places. Men should be much more afraid than women but we're not because men are brought up to not show fear, where women are brought up to be afraid of all sorts of things and it's considered attractive and sexy. Men are brought up to take risks - women aren't. So the fact that women 'don't feel safe' is based on conditioning - not reality. It's in the culture. And in reality it's a great way to keep women in their place - afraid to go out, afraid of men, afraid of sex - and feminism is endorsing it. 
Some people have tried to make out that the fact that men are mostly attacked by other men somehow makes it ok - like it's consensual or recreational violence ('He got into a fight'), or violence is a normal part of male behaviour so we're all guilty (in reality most crimes are committed by a small minority of re-offenders. Most men are not violent - it's not normal behaviour), or we're 'more evenly matched' (in reality, the thugs like violence, they're good at it, they get a lot of practice at it). Or us men are all so very powerful that we could change it if we wanted to - we just don't want to. I'm so powerful - I have SO much influence on how the world works. [sarcasm]
I was attacked a few times as a lad and I'm here to tell you that that's not how it is at all. I was terrified, but there was no point reporting it - it was their word against mine, and it I'd have just been told to learn to stick up for myself. So I just lay there and hoped they'd get bored. 'Getting beaten up is part of growing up' as the song says. I was a soft boy - never been violent in any way and I was attacked by the local hard lads because I was alone and I looked a bit different. I didn't stand a chance. I know two men with brain damage from being kicked in the head. Have a listen to The Special's Concrete Jungle, or The Jam's Down in the Tube Station at Midnight.

I often see the Margaret Attwood quote - "Men fear women will laugh at them - women fear that men will kill them" on social media and think it's a daft thing to say. I generally like her books but this is not worthy of her. It's not comparing like with like. The fact that people get killed doesn't mean humiliation is not a problem. Ask any oppressed group - humiliation is a huge problem, and men (who are traditionally supposed to be powerful) take it very badly. Humiliation is a powerful force in history - ask 1930s Germany. Under one such post recently I commented that, actually, murder is a very rare crime - it's about 1 in 100,000 per year over most of the Western World, which is historically very low - and two thirds of the victims are men. When it happens of course it's always terrible, but it's not very likely - far less likely than dying in a car accident for example. Obviously my argument was considered irrelevant, even offensive by the women in the group - clearly I'd missed the point but that was deliberate. There's a question about how we assess risk when we decide whether or not to do something. We do some sort of mental calculation about the seriousness of the threat versus the likelihood of it happening. Some things are absolutely horrible but rare (plane crashes) while others are trivial but common (stubbing your toe on a corner). In both cases we usually take the risk. We are lucky in the West that we live in a time and place where horrible things are mostly rare. Road accidents are probably the worst. Murder is horrible but very rare, and yet women won't go out at night. The problem here is probably the way violence against women and girls is reported. "If it bleeds it leads" so they say so people get the idea that murder is happening all the time, but it plainly isn't. Women are being conditioned to believe that life is far more dangerous than it is. Historically this was about men keeping women under control - 'safe' in the home -  but now it seems feminism has taken up the cause and women are once again the weaker sex, needing care and protection from men, by men. It wasn't like this last century - the women I knew were fiercely independent and weren't scared of anyone. One woman I knew regularly hitched from her home in Sussex to her university in Lancaster without any real trouble. I met another women backpacking on her own around Mexico. This new fearful feminism baffles me. I think maybe the idea is that if women make it clear to men how scared they are of us, that we'll do something about it - we'll 'call out' the violent men, as if we all know who they are (because we have the same genitalia) but we're covering for them - letting them get away with it. The problem with this idea is that most of us don't hang out with violent men if we can possibly help it. It's like telling men to 'call out' their burglar friends, or their people-smuggling friends. We don't know these people - or if we do they're keeping very quiet about it. I've also been told I should 'own' all men's behaviour, but I'm sorry - I don't take responsibility for anyone's behaviour but my own (and maybe my kids if I had any). In the end though, if your belief is that men's power is down to us having (on average) greater strength than women, then it's a dead-end, because short of some sort of eugenics campaign, men are not going to be weaker than women any time soon. Thankfully for feminism, I don't think male power does reside in our greater strength any more, and women are quite capable of standing up to us as equals without it coming to blows.

 Violence against men and boys is hardly reported at all and has never been taken as seriously. These campaigns against violence against women and girls are banging against an open door because most people already take crimes against women more seriously than crimes against men. This has been true since long before feminism became a thing - it's called chivalry. It could be argued that domestic and sexual violence are seen as especially heinous compared to death and mutilation, precisely because they're the kinds of crimes mostly women suffer from. Crimes against men just don't really count. 

Girls are also brought up to be more fearful (or show their fear more) than boys. It's even considered attractive, cute or sexy when girls shriek at a spider or a mouse, but apparently they react similarly to men. Men however, who should be more scared are usually pretty blase about it. We assess the risks, look out for signs of danger, and avoid certain situations. It is remarkable how often women set up home and have kids with men that we know are dangerous ("Pretty women out walking with gorillas down my street"). Some women report that they've had 'a string of abusive relationships' and I try to sympathise but am left wondering how they can have missed the signs over and over, and then not got out of the relationship as soon as the warning signs appear. I've had quite long conversations with women about this and I still don't get it. In a few cases there is the fear that man will go really mad if she leaves and she fears for her life, but those are very rare, and often there is a house and children and joint finances at stake by the time the women is ready to leave. Surely the man was not such a great actor for all those years, pretending to be a decent chap, before turning into a murderous psychopath? I've come across a couple of these guys over the years - one I shared a flat with - and the scariness manifested itself pretty quickly. Nevertheless they never had any trouble finding female company. I have to assume that there's something so compelling about these men that some women just can't resist them. Maybe that's the deal - maybe at some level they accept it - "If I want to be with a man who truly excites me, I have to accept that I'm going to get hurt." Maybe it's like climbing Everest, or breath-play, or back-packing in Sudan - some people accept the risk to get the stimulation they need. Those people though don't usually complain about how hard their life is on social media. They know it's their choice.

So maybe boys should be advised to run to a grown-up shouting 'daddy' when they're being chased by the local thugs. I can't see that happening. Crimes against men are not taken as seriously as crimes against women - we all know this - 'women and children first'. Boys are told they mustn't hit girls, but other boys - that's ok. The entertainment industry is strewn with the bodies of dead men - it's a laugh - but if you want to make a film that really upsets people - have a female victim. Men are far more likely than women to die young by every means except child-birth. We die at work, by addiction and suicide because we're not allowed to ask for help, by crime and by taking stupid risks trying to prove ourselves. If that were true for women it would be a major plank of the women's rights campaign, but it's just men so it doesn't matter. Everything's worse for women so forget it.

But now a girl dealing with some guy she doesn't fancy trying to chat her up is a campaign issue. We see some big numbers about attacks on women but not how many men were beaten up of knifed or otherwise attacked during that time for comparison. We (and I include myself in that 'we' because until quite recently I was an uncritical women's rights advocate) simply quote how things are bad for women and sort of assume that things are better for men - we don't check - we're only looking at half the story - we don't feel we need to look at the other side because we simply believe everything must be better for men. Seeing that UK murder rate stat was a kind of wake-up call for me. Not everything is better for men. Actually quite a lot of things are worse. All the while I called myself a feminist I had mental lists of 'crappy things that happen to women' but somehow completely ignored all the crappy things that happen to men. Some of these things are much the same for men and women, or comparable, but some major ones are definitely worse for men. I was just in denial, because I wanted to be a good feminist. Now I just call myself an egalitarian and leave it at that.
The other thing we do is unconsciously assume that crimes against women, especially sex crimes, are worse than other violent crimes - even death! Why? Probably partly because men don't show their hurt so we assume it doesn't bother them much, but also because of some traditional sense of chivalry where hurting women is very bad but hurting men just doesn't matter very much. Why? Why do we still believe that? And why is rape worse than, say, being knifed? or kicked in the head? It seems invidious to compare different sorts of trauma but I'm pretty sure most people would submit to sexual assault if threatened with violence. They know which is worse.
I really just want crimes against men to be taken as seriously as crimes against women. That doesn't seem like it should be controversial to me.