Reddit reviews Equality with a Vengeance: Men's Rights Groups, Battered Women, and Antifeminist Backlash (New England Gender, Crime & Law)

>[DV] is still fairly balanced in terms of the numbers of victims and perpetrators of each sex, so referring to it as 'violence against women' erases male victims, and as 'men's violence against women' erases both male victims and female perpetrators.


This isn't true. The "gender symmetry" argument relies on bad methodologies that overemphasise low-level violence (which is either mutual or occasional) and understate the levels of really horrific battering. This latter kind of violence - which most warrants intervention and activism - is something done almost entirely by men to women.

More worryingly with regards to your comment, gender symmetry is pushed by Men's Rights groups as a way to de-gender domestic violence policy (as well as Straus, fuck you Straus), and by extension roll back the gains which have been made in addressing it (the gendered nature of domestic violence laws existing because ordinary criminal legislation on assault was not enough to prosecute or prevent batterers). It's actually the only significant danger MRAs present in the real world/at all, because on the face of it their case is convincing, especially if you're uninformed about the wider scientific consensus. Dragiewicz has done really good work at both critiquing the gender symmetrical literature, and laying out exactly why MRAs have this agenda and how they push it.


Obviously male survivors do exist and deserve special attention, but it not appropriate to design policies under the impression that domestic violence is not a gendered problem or that male survivors make up a substantial number of cases.

I have a copy of Equality with a Vengance. But I haven't read it yet.

The Men's Rights Movement is explicitly an antifeminist movement. It is rooted in being a backlash to feminism. That's, like, history of the movement 101. The single most defining aspect. How did you miss something that blatant?

Read a book sometime: http://www.amazon.com/Equality-Vengeance-Battered-Antifeminist-Northeastern/dp/1555537391

Or, barring that, Wikipedia.

Its not an issue of feminists 'screeching' so much as acknowledging reality and rejecting antifeminism on its face.