Having a hard time reconciling something...

[Tee2072]

I am not sure this is the right part of the FWR area but I can ask it to be moved!

So today my son four year old punched two people at school. He has been disciplined at school (thinking chair and had to go inside from playtime) and at home (major lecture and loss of TV privileges) for this behaviour.

The issue is that one of the people he punched is a girl.

My first instinct was to be more angry with him for hitting a girl.

I literally stopped in my tracks on the walk home as it occurred to me that my feminist tendencies were at thinking hitting a girl was worse than hitting a boy.

My husband is furious he hit a girl. He's mad our son is punching anyone, but the fact that one of the anyones is a girl has him really riled up. I asked him why it was worse because it was a girl and he answered 'old fashion values'.

So where do I go from here? Do I emphasize that hitting a girl is worse? Why is it worse?

What's the feminist answer?

Interesting but I have always taught my boys it is wrong to hit girls, simply because if it is ingrained there is a hell of a better chance they won't hit their partner at a later date. Teaching boys to me is preparing them for when they are adults and if they believe it is cowardice to hit a woman then hopefully they never will.

Yes but you are simply endorsing the message that boys/men are intrinsically violent, sausages If it is cowardice to hit a woman then that imples it is bravery to hit a man. You are giving them the message that men do use violence, that it is part of their nature, but they just need to accept that it's wrong to hit women. No, men need to accept that violence is not part of their nature and they shouldn't be doing it. By using the word cowardice, you are also suggesting that women are somehow lesser than men because they are no match for men due to their weak and feeble status. In fact, male violence against women often succeeds, not because women are physically weaker, but because they have may less psycholgical reasons for wanting to comit violence, they do not want to use violence. Therefore it is not cowardice to it a woman, rather it is very heroic of women not to hit back. It's probably the same with male on male violence - the "winner" is the most aggressive/angry person rather than the physically stronger one.

"it is wrong to hit a woman" is a very old traditional message that, oddly, dates from times when hitting the woman you lived with was considered quite acceptable by many people. Odd.

The idea that "women are weaker" doesn't seem that silly to me when I think what pregnancy, bfing, and having small children around does to me, and how it makes me feel, and that my grandmothers' generation routinely 12-odd children - I think there must have been a lot of women staggering about who could have been blown over by a puff of wind. On the other hand, they all did their washing in twin tubs if they were lucky and on washboards if not, and beat carpets by hand, so who knows.

The point of that little rambling discursion into Lives of Mid Twentieth Century Women was just that I don't believe that identical treatment = equality. Women do sometimes need to be actively treated differently, and better, because the default seems to be that they are so often, so terribly, at risk of being treated so much worse.

And I have a problem with the hushed sanctimony around physical violence as the very very very worst thing in all cases. I honestly think it is worse - as a general rule of thumb - for a man to hit a woman than for a woman to hit a man. A man hits a woman with the force of the billions of fists of a million years of patriarchy. A woman hits a man right here, right now, only with her own fist.