Through my membership of the group ...stop violence against women... on facebook I've been made aware of a group by the name of Fuck Sexism: Punch Women Too! Claiming to be a civil rights group to "Support true equal rights and fight sexism" it advocates the equal treatment of women through violence. It has 475 members.
I'm astonished that such a group would be allowed on facebook. Complaints have been made and the group reported by a number of people, but it seems facebook is unwilling to act. When submitting a report, it is made clear by facebook that "Groups will not be removed as a result of disagreement with the subject matter." It has been suggested that this group is a parody, and that is why it has not yet been removed. If it is a parody, I'm not sure what it is parodying.
There has been some debate here on Feministing about whether the rape joke in a recent episode of The Office was appropriate. Understanding the humour of The Office is an important part of understanding the purpose and message of the writers in presenting this scenario.
There does seem to be attempts at humour on this facebook group. It is, however, rather gauche and a miserable failure. I do suspect that it is not serious in its advocacy of violence against women. Just what is it's point? What is it's message, if not the advocacy of violence against women.
The claim of rape made by Kelly in The Office was very dark humour. The humour failed for some viewers, and succeeded for others. But whether it failed or succeeded, I think it has acheived the part of the intent of the writers: it got us talking about the issue, exploring not only the appropriatness of the joke itself, but the use of humour to highlight important social issues and how best it is achieved. Just where is that invisible line?
I think that joke in The Office was on the appropriate side of the line, and support the writers' inclusion of it in the episode. I think that the joke - if that is what it is, though I'm not sure what it is aimed at - of the facebook group has crossed the line. But am I guilty of an unfair standard? If the attempt at humour succeeds then it is okay, but if the attempt at humour fails then it is not okay? The groups offends me, and I have reported it, but I do wonder if I am guilty of a double standard because I don't get the joke.
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It isn't pretty, and hitting ANYONE certainly isn't right, but at the end of the day, does it do any good to get a facebook group banned?
How many times have you overheard someone being told that it's not okay to hit girls? There's definitely some sexism there, and from the group description I'm pretty sure that's what this group is making fun of.
A lot of the members don't seem to get it, though. There's a guy who gets called out for being a douchebag in one of the discussion posts.
"If it is a parody, I'm not sure what it is parodying."
It's parodying chivalrous patriarchist fools like me who'd be okay with slugging another guy under certain circumstances (self defense) but would never ever hit a girl.
i could have believed that this group is fighting the sexist treatment of girls as delicate, but right in the description it says that men can't do anything whilst women throw "hissy fits." i guess the creator of this group didn't pass sexism 101, which explains why the group is so misdirected.
i think the right way to fight the sexist treatment of women as delicate is not to encourage men to beat women, but to encourage men to stop beating other men. violence hurts everyone.
I don't watch The Office, but I've heard this 'joke' mentioned a couple times before. Can someone give me a description of what happened? I'm curious now.
Righty then. Let's start encouraging little girls to brawl and get scrappy. We want them to grow up knowing how to hit back, after all.
Anybody wonder why the "don't-hit-a-girl" mantra usually starts in childhood? Why not just say, "don't hit"? I suspect that the sexism goes both ways here. Before puberty, a girl has a reasonable chance of winning a tussle and delivering a beat down to a boy. By giving a boy a way to opt out of fighting a girl, we spare him the potential humiliation of losing to a girl.
Not that adults are any better. The idea that women are too weak to inflict harm is married to the idea that a man shouldn't hit a woman. Thus, there is a lot of shame surrounding intimate partner violence when the male is the victim as well.
I've actually heard people talk down about domestic violence by saying "haven't you heard 'don't hit a lady'"? This is definitely the wrong (and sexist) way to go about it. We should be teaching kids of both sexes "don't hit anyone." I've actually accidentally caused my boyfriend pain because I feel like I can rough-house and wrestle however I want. I feel like I can't actually hurt him cause I'm a skinny girl and therefor weak.
My cousin lets his 3-year-old son Ethan beat up on his 3-year-old cousin, his father, and his uncle, but won't let Ethan fight his 23-year-old aunt. After telling him boys shouldn't fight girls, Ethan replied "But auntie Tine is a rough girl, so it's okay." Could it be that this 3-year-old thought for himself that girls can be strong, too? Or should I feel like my 2nd cousin just wants to fight everybody and will learn violent tendencies toward everyone he meets?
As a standard fraternity tool, I'm fairly certain this is specifically parodying the times when women angrily attack men physically, and men are expected not to respond physically.
Basically, the entire course of human history has taught us that violence is an acceptable last resort for males who have a disagreement. This is certainly no different today, and regardless of how calm a particular male is, the reality is that he may eventually be confronted with some belligerent violent man, and in that case, I think a perfectly moral response is violent self defense.
The satire is that when men attack other men in anger, the appropriate response is attacking back. When women attack men in anger, striking back is wrong, because they are indeed perceived as weaker, and men should simply ignore or subdue the women.
Finding a gender neutral solution to this is difficult. Men of widely differing size tend not to actually fight. The stronger would look weak for provoking an obviously inferior opponent. The weaker are hopefully just not that dumb. Of course, if the weaker man does provoke a fight, he's simply going be roundly trounced. And obviously, even in fair fights, the weaker loses.
Women can still violently attack men in public now because they know that they aren't likely to get their noses broken in front of other people, specifically because of the prohibition on hitting women.
So the question this satire asks is... "Given that violence is an appropriate response to violence from another man, should it also be an appropriate response to violence from a woman?"
If women are to be treated the same, there will presumably be fewer drunk girls slapping men in the face.
I think doubleb's explanation is pretty right on. In my mind, women shouldn't be held to different standards than men. That said, as many other poster have said, society shouldn't be condoning violence in the first place.
Also, it should be noted that while domestic violence where men are abused are serious and do occur, the number of cases where women are abused by men is so much greater. This historical consciousness of women being beaten by men makes the satire fail as it's trying to fight one method of sexism (having different standards between men and women) with another worse solution (violence against women) that occurs with alarming frequency.
I do not mean to represent Vice Magazine as the paragon of equality - because it's most emphatically NOT - but they did have sort of an interesting article in one of their "how to" articles. It was about fighting and included a section on what to do when a woman attacks you physically.
I couldn't find a quote, but the general gist was that it's a difficult situation to rectify; either you don't fight back and allow yourself to get beat up, thereby becoming the butt of all your friends jokes for at least three or four years, or you do fight back and end up pounding some girl while the rest of the bar looks on in horror.
I'm not advocating any sort of stance on the issue - truthfully, it's a weird one for me and depends VERY MUCH on each individual situation - but I thought it was sort of a funny insight on the confusion that must result from situations like this.
I could be far off on this, and I am sure there would be cases where it is not an option, but couldn't the man simply "restrain" the woman? That is, if the man is larger, or stronger?
I do agree that violence shouldn't be tought to any gender period, however it is a cultural norm that is so deeply ingrained in the male population that for now we need to find other ways to combat it. It is interlaced with masculinity, and power.
Also, while I see where this group is coming from, and that more men are actually taking abuse from their women (and certainly this should be addressed), statistically, there are still far more women who are abused on an even greater scale (many of them are putting their lives at risk by simply walking away) by their husbands and boyfriends, and so undermining the latter is just wrong on so many levels.