Saw somebody I know share the mugshots of a woman who was purportedly arrested for beating her boyfriend with a belt for not wanting sex. She said "meee I'm not even joking lol." I think about how that's rape. How I've been subject to things like that. Been abused for not providing sex. This isn't the first time I've seen this treated as a joke. I see it a lot, actually. Joking about physically abusing men is an extremely common thing. You don't have to look very far to find it. Even here. There's a particularly high-profile poster that's gained a lot of traction over the past year or so. I followed her early, before I noticed other large and popular blogs cozying up to her. She would post about how she would hit her boyfriends, talking about it like it's just a quirk. She was being honest about it. Sometimes just posting things like "I beat my men." It wasn't super common, but common enough to notice. But she has that sort of chic mean-girl feminist thing going on, so everyone ignored what that really meant and just laughed along with it. I don't think it's productive to call her out. I don't think she's, like, necessarily a piece of shit for it, or deserves to be ejected from the space. By her admission, she has issues she's trying to work on. But it's there, and it's happened, and it's tolerated, even rewarded by the culture on here. And it's not uncommon. It's pretty easy to find a lot of places.
My friend is in a physically abusive marriage. Photos of red marks on their body are saved in my phone. I've thought they were going to be murdered before. The thought has crossed their mind. Their wife constantly accuses them of cheating, among other things, because that's her idea of what a man does. She has stabbed their mattress when she was angry to "see what it feels like." They showed me a tiktok she sent them. It's a woman out in the woods captioned something like "burying him here so nobody will ever find him ♥️♥️". This kind of memetic mean-girl feminist stuff has, as a part of the overall erosion of effective and principled feminist discourse, devolved into truly abusive personalities joking about harming men at its edges. This is rewarded and celebrated. My abusive ex did a lot of the same stuff. Would dig around these quasi-rad or outright radical feminist spaces to essentially find rhetorical ammunition to abuse me over. Then would fall back onto the plucky mean-girl feminist memes when I tried talking to her about the emotional and sexual abuse. I support mens rights to shut the fuck up. Same thing happens to my friend. Doesn't have anything to do with the actual person being hurt. It's just an expression of these gendered resentments. Spending time in communities literally listing off reasons for a woman to be angry at a man, and then taking that out on their partner. Happened to me. Happens to lots of people placed in the social role of "men." It makes a war-like philosophy out of gender. Turns it into an order of violence. Justifies violence.
I recently saw a post going around here about how men suffer abuse so rarely that there's no reason to adjust language about intimate partner abuse to include men. That the suggestion is simply men being big babies and trying to reframe every conversation to be about them. That my experience -- that my abuse on the basis of my perceived manhood, no less -- is literally a marginal experience, an outlier that shouldn't be incorporated in the conversation about other people going through the same things I did. That it just isn't deserving of discussion or concern. And it was being shared by mutuals, long time mutuals, people I respect and enjoy. People who are better than that. This isn't something that makes people irredeemable monsters. I don't want their heads on spikes. But this kind of cruelty is horrifyingly common.
In the end, this is the cost of harshly reifying gender. Resenting men as a class grows into a social infrastructure to justify and even gamify abuse. It becomes fun. It becomes jokes. It becomes blood for blood. There's a perceived justice to the suffering being doled out to the supposed abuser class. And, in doing so, patriarchal masculine standards are recreated and maintained. The abuse is perpetual. Men are belittled for having feelings about the way they're treated, for trying to talk about their emotions, and they are continually expected to simply bear the burden of abuse and not complain. The masculinized body and spirit is a vessel of abuse. This is its purpose.
I wish it could stop.
