Do you think that men are oppressed?

dittany: "Women do currently share one common experience, apart from our biology - there isn't a single woman on this planet who has escaped male supremacy and its oppression of us."

scottishmummy: "no not all women have a shared experience of escaping male oppresssion.what a preposterous thing to say"

You do both realise that you are agreeing with each other, don't you?

ElephantsAndMiasmas, I have no problem with women (and men) campaigning against DV/abuse against women. As you will probably have noticed, I've repeatedly acknowledged that more women are victims than men are. As I have said, though, is that my personal feeling is that pursuing DV as a gendered crime tends to bring with it the associated thing that, as such, DV/abuse against men can be ignored.

As for which women's DV groups insinuate that DV against men doesn't happen much, and is mainly a gay thing, and doesn't count as the injuries aren't as bad: HerBeatitude earlier gave a link to a Women's Aid page that read (to me at least) as saying pretty much exactly that.

"If there were 100,000 female victims of a crime, and 20 male victims, you would still get a lot of people trying to shut up the women who called it a gender crime."

Yup, and they'd be wrong. But if it's 60:40? Or 70:30?

i suppose the detail is in the nature and degree of how one experiences oppression. i am uncomfortable with a complete blanket commonality.i think it is way more complex. with high subjective componenet too.some women will vehmently deny they have been oppressed at all.Add class,status,role and women oppressing other women in the mix.someone was discussing whether a prosperous woman employing a female cleaner is exploitative,oppressive

it is all really interesting but complicated too

Sorry dittany, I missed where you said that.

I agree of course about the mra type groups blowing it out of proportion in order to distract from the real situation. I just don't want to be hard-hearted towards the few victims there are either, especially when I feel so strongly about victims of rape for example being believed and not dismissed :( There is a dynamic that undermines female victims, and it's difficult to talk about because what's happening I suspect is that some bastards men, are taking advantage of the situation of a few victimised men and using it to their advantage.

That male shelter story was an eye-opener, bloody hell!

Or maybe it mirrors the fact that pretty much every thread on here about domestic violence/rape/anything (not counting this one as it's for boys) gets at least a few people coming in and saying it. If it was live and let live I wouldn't mind. It's the "no! stop women! you cannot talk about gendering of crime!" silencing thing that disturbs me. I don't mind men campaigning about violence against men, apart from the obvious risk of it tempting the kind of psycho abusers who pull the "but you're abusing me line" (see Relationships section). But a lot of men and some women seem to mind us campaigning about violence against women.

Which female DV groups say those things, Snorbs? It sounds like you are mistaking "posters on this thread" with "female DV groups".

If there were 100,000 female victims of a crime, and 20 male victims, you would still get a lot of people trying to shut up the women who called it a gender crime.

Women do currently share one common experience, apart from our biology - there isn't a single woman on this planet who has escaped male supremacy and its oppression of us.

so what did you mean by shared comon experience then?or assertion that no single woman has escaped male supremacy

i read your statement and i dont get what the common shared experience you allude to is

no not all women have a shared experience of escaping male oppresssion.what a preposterous thing to say

I'll be honest in that I've not seen much, if any, "form an orderly queue" behaviour for quite a while.

What I have noticed is male victim DV groups saying "men are victims as well as women although we know it doesn't happen as much to men as it does to women. But while rates of DV against both sexes are scary and so maybe we need to look at this in a broader context rather than just as a male-on-female problem."

By contrast, a small number of the female victim DV groups seem to put quite a lot of effort into saying "the number of male victims are so small as to be insignificant. And they're probably being beaten up by other men. Or had started it. And they weren't badly hurt anyway. So they don't count. And although we consider emotional abuse against women as a form of DV that can be just as damaging as being hit, we will only count actual physical violence against men as being important and ignore any emotional abuse they may get."

Maybe our different perceptions of who is claiming what mirrors our different views of the importance of the issue.

female is an identifiable gender,but not all women are same.different lived experiences,different personalities,different class.the commonality is gender. what "category" of women is a socially imposed construct drawing from class,age,status ,role

I get that, Snorbs. If people are going through a horrible situation at home, I'm not going to be the one to tell them to shape up and get over it.

Dittany I know what you're saying, but I'm really not a fan of the "you complaining about [milder form of behaviour x] makes things worse for people suffering [worse form of behaviour X]" argument. Ironically it's the argument that one of those men's groups was using, and I posted about it above. Do you really not believe that any men are victims of DV? I do. And I don't want to think that being a feminist and recognising the essentially gendered nature of DV, prohibits me from sympathising with the very few male victims of DV. I also believe there is a sliding scale where the more serious violence is overwhelmingly directed at women, as someone posted earlier. But DV without beatings and killings is still DV, and I absolutely believe that there are women who intimidate, hit, threaten and control their partners.

What really really pisses me off, however, is the fact that men and men's cheerleaders so often target women's groups, rather than the government/whoever. There is an assumption that women's groups should a) campaign for men too, and b) shut up about women suffering from a problem until every single man is free from that problem. I'm going to call it the "form an orderly queue" theory.

anyone can be oppressed,discriminated.isnt gender dependent

just as women arent a homeogenous mass who can be categorised and lumped together and assumed to be experientially/socially the same .nor can men be assumed to be exempt from maltreatment/oppression

class
age
gender
socio-economics
all factors in oppression

unfortunately many humanitarean organisations can attset to male and female oppression/discrimination/maltreatment - Médecins Sans Frontières, Amnesty

Men have organised battered men shelters.

I've been thinking about what HerBeatitude meant about context and I can see her point. So, in turn, I thought a lot about why I feel uncomfortable about pushing the DV is gendered line. I think my issue with it is that, often, such an approach seems to come with an attitude of "...so DV and/or emotional abuse by women men can be ignored".

As a victim survivor of woman-on-man DV and emotional abuse that attitude makes me cross. To be fair and before I'd lived it, I never gave much thought to female abusers because, hey, it's not like they can do much damage, is it? I was wrong.

And, yes, I know I'm putting forward a "what about the men" argument here. I thought that was what this thread was about.

Snorbs, the thing is, while I see your point, what men have to do is organise battered men shelters NOT tell women that they shouldn't complain about DV bein gendered because the odd man experiences DV too.
DV is overwhelmingly men against women, as is murder and rape (always). When women murder men it is usually self-defence

So you see, while men do have problems you are putting forward a "what about the men" argument here. Battered-men shelters are the way forward