There has been a bit of back and forth because of this. I decided to respond to the response, because some of it is just so fucking stupid. It’s just beyond what I can leave unanswered.

Here it is:

I know, complaining about dumb MRAs being dumb is like complaining that rain is wet. But since an MRA has gone to the trouble of ‘critiquing’ our What’s Wrong with Pornography page, and since we’ve had a handful of hits through, and I’ve got a half-hour to kill, I thought I might as well make the most of this ‘teachable moment’.

Well, yes… complaining about MRA’s being dumb is a different matter, but since you established that you are complaining about the dumb ones being dumb, I guess we let that one slide.

The original post is here. You don’t need to click through to it (and give the guy extra page hits), I’m quoting him in full here (including, in bold, the original WWwP material he quotes).

I’m not going to re-include the original post, but only the response to the response, for the sake of brevity. Some continuity might be lost, but everything is linked.

WARNING: some of the language used here, and some of the links, may be disturbing or triggering.

Okay, I’ll repeat that, some of the language here is not great. I have already dropped a couple of f-bombs and really, really want to drop more.

The fact that the “actual physical sexual contact” is real is the point! Whether or not Chad and Randy really are qualified plumbers, or whether that really is the woman’s home and not a porn set, is really not that important.

No, the distress may not be real. In a piece of porn where a woman is kidnapped and raped, she actually wasn’t kidnapped, she drove to the set, went to wardrobe, had her hair and makeup done, and then hit the set. Very different from reality. In some cases (and yes, there are porn films out there with blooper reels and everything) the actress may have tried to do something and cracked up laughing, then the director cuts, the fluffers (if needed) come out and get the guys ready again, the camera guys finish their cigarette and they start up again. It’s a movie, and even the sex may involve many different takes, angles to make things look more than they really are, fluids that are actually special effects (yes, ejaculate is often expanded). Hell, there is often a stunt cock as the actor who was involved in the sex may be saving himself so he can perform in his next scene.

When porn is dismissed as ‘just fantasy’, it is dismissing the importance of the real lived experience of the women used to make it, it is saying they are not real people and they don’t feel real pain. Every sexual image you see in pornography has to happen, for real, to a real woman, whether it’s a woman being subjected to a triple anal, or being penetrated by ten men in a row then thrown in a dumpster in an alley, or being penetrated while having her head flushed down the toilet. Even if the only women in the world to be subjected to these things were the women filmed to make porn, it would still matter, because those women matter.

That is pretty stupid. Of course those women matter, but most of the things you are talking about are extremely rare in porn. Triple Anal? Not exactly a mainstream piece of porn there. Gonzo porn does exist. There is a market for it but it is not the majority of porn, nor even close to the majority.

The “incidents surrounding it”, if we are talking about the ‘features’ porn (which has some kind of a plot) made by the big LA production companies, will be contrived, and this is not at all important. There are also big LA production companies making gonzo porn, which is just recorded scenes with no plot and talking to the camera, which claims and appears to all be real, not contrived or scripted.

Again, you are discounting the fact that in most of the porn out there, the filming process looks nothing like the finished product. Believe it or not, many of the actors and actresses are taking breaks during a single scene.

There is also a huge amount of ‘amateur’ porn, this may be ‘professional’ porn made to look amateur, or it may simply be a recording, made with or with out all the participant’s consent/knowledge, of sex acts, that themselves may or may not be consensual.

Um… don’t know where to start with this. Amateur porn is by definition amateur and isn’t part of porn releasing and distribution channels. Quite simply, it isn’t something that society can approve or disapprove, is happens in the cracks. If it is pro porn made to look amateur, the same stuff about retakes, breaks, etc all applies.

Ah, that old canard! Let us assume that he is only talking about porn produced by the big LA production companies, that he has not considered the fact that any man with a camera and internet access can become a pornographer, and that any filmed rape becomes pornography.

Well, if you film a real rape and then distribute it (and I’m not claiming it doesn’t happen) then you are a moron. That is illegal by the way. For the record, a huge number of women have become pornographers as a result of having a camera and internet access. In fact, so many of them that it is starting to kill the mainstream porn industry. See, much of the amateur, filmed from home porn is run by the women in it. They are getting a huge slice of that pie, and working without someone telling them how to do it. I will go back to this when we talk about body types.

Let’s assume he is unaware that the women trafficked into prostitution around the world are also used to make pornography, or that US pornographers are now travelling to the developing world to make their ‘rape camp’ pornography, where they can take advantage of the desperate poverty, the lack of interest paid by the authorities, and Western males’ demands for pornography that satisfies the intersection of their racism and their woman-hating. (See: Hughes, Donna M. (2000). ‘”Welcome to the Rape Camp”. Sexual Exploitation and the Internet in Cambodia’. Journal of Sexual Aggression, 6, double issue: 29-51.)

As a consumer of porn, I can honestly say I haven’t ever seen this kind of porn. Doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, merely that it is outside of the mainstream (or maybe very far outside of the mainstream). The human traficking thing turns out to be a great deal less than it was made out to be, and many of the sources of information on it’s scope have turned out to be beyond suspect.

Just looking at the big LA production companies doesn’t paint an encouraging picture. Women may ‘chose’ to enter the porn industry (assuming you have no problem with the coercion of poverty itself), but once there, she may find she lacks real choice about what happens to her, and lacks choice about leaving.

Well, that is true of some studios. Not true of others. By driving porn underground you encourage the ones that are worse and discourage the ones that are better, but again, the internet is really acting as a leveler by allowing more women to be the content creators and distribution channels all in one. The fact that so many of them choose to do it for free doesn’t change this fact.

We have the experience of Lara Roxx, who contracted HIV on a porn set: Roxx’s interview with AVN itself shows the fluidity of “consent” in these matters. “I told [my manager] I wasn’t interested in anal at all, and I was a little freaky about the no-condom thing too,” she said. On arriving at the film shoot, she was pressured into performing the “double anal” scene by the director, Marc Anthony. She says: “So I get there and Marc Anthony tells me it’s a DA, which stands for double anal. And I’m like, ‘What? I’ve never done a double anal’. And he was like, ‘Well, that’s what we need. It’s either that or nothing’. And that’s how they do it… I think that sucks, because he knew double anal was dangerous.” Later, she says, she was in pain and could not sit down.

Yes, this is unfortunate and I feel really bad for Lara. I think that the director was a bad human being and a complete shithead. Again, the further from the mainstream you are, the more shitheads. Cockroaches run from the light.

All the women in the industry have ‘managers’ (who act more like pimps) who have an interest in having them do more and more extreme acts because they get a cut of the money. They work in collusion with the pornographers to manipulate and coerce the women to do more and more extreme sex acts.

No, not all women have managers who act more like pimps. Some women have managers who act more like managers and some self manage.

This was the case with Felicity in the documentary Hardcore. She started out saying she wouldn’t do anal, or work without a condom. Her manager/pimp took her to see a porn shoot where ten men where having sex with one woman, and he was filmed by the documentary makers constantly trying to bully and manipulate and wear her down. Eventually he took her to see Max Hardcore: When Max Hardcore finally arrived, he took Felicity into his office for what she, and I, thought would simply be an interview. But it wasn’t. Within seconds of their meeting, he pushed her over his desk, unzipped his flies, and began having sex with her. Felicity was obviously very scared. And yet I kept my camera running. During the later shoot, Felicity ran off set because Hardcore had forced his penis down her throat to cause her to suffocate. Hardcore followed her, and tried to get her back on the set, first of all flattering her, telling her how unique and special she was (disturbingly, these are the exact same words another woman who had worked with Hardcore used to describe herself during an interview in the documentary). When that didn’t work, he stared screaming and swearing at her, at which point the documentary crew intervened to get her out of there (which is something that professional documentary makers will very rarely do). There is no reason to think that there is anything unique about any of the above. A blanket statement like ‘they chose to be there’ is meaningless.

There is a huge reason to believe that these experiences are not the rule, they are reported by some women in some circumstances, but I think that if Vivid or NinnWorx ever did something like that, it would destroy them. Again, make it so that a porn actress can actually have Max Hardcore arrested by making porn more common and accepted.

No, a construction worker is not paid, specifically, to fall off scaffolding, and a soldier is not paid, specifically, to get killed. Both are unintended consequences of the jobs of being a construction worker or being a soldier, and health and safety measures, such as correct training and proper equipment will minimise these risks (more so with the case of construction workers than soldiers of course; being a soldier will never be ‘safe’ in the conventional sense, and the above statement is in no way an endorsement of the military, militarism or the military-industrial complex. Nor is it a dismissal of how poverty acts as a de facto draft, in the US in particular). With pornography, the risk, the violence, the damage, is not an unintended consequence of the work, it is the work. A woman is not subjected to a triple anal without condoms by accident, because there was a temporary slip in h&s standards, she is subjected to it because it is the work.

A porn actress is paid to have sex on camera. That is the job. For many it is a horrible job, for some it is a job they enjoy. There are responsible, 100% condom companies and there are slimebag companies and everything in between. Again, driving it underground kills vivid and lets max hardcore keep raping actresses.

This is a feminist blog, which means being unapologetically for and about women. Yes, porn is bad for men too, they go bankrupt paying to access it, they can’t form meaningful relationships after using it, and some men may feel bad about their bodies because of it (which wouldn’t be surprising, as women are already getting their genitals mutilated to conform to the porn standard), (although men do have Ron Jeremy). This is not a good thing. But it seems to me that whenever men bring up a ‘what about the poor men?’ argument, they have no real interest in the welfare of other men, they just want an excuse to bash feminists. If you think porn harms men, do something about it.

Maybe that’s part of the problem. Maybe when you decide that one gender is worth protecting and the other one isn’t you lose the moral high ground. Addressed more in a moment.

It’s women that the porn industry chews up and spits out, as anonymous when they started as when they finished. Women have a very short ‘career’ in the porn industry, due to the demand for ‘very young girls’ and the very physically gruelling nature of the work itself. Women become ‘veterans’ of the porn industry in their early 20s. This is just more ‘what about the poor men?’ whining.

Men tend to have heart attacks as a result of ingesting mass amounts of Viagra since they make roughly a tenth of what women do in the industry and in order to make it financially viable they need to perform a lot. The ones that do make a decent living (like Ron Jeremy) still earn a lot less than the women (Ron is the biggest male name in porn, who do you think makes more, him or Jenna Jamieson).

Well it clearly is, for any woman who has experienced men being manipulative and forceful, and has been subjected to cruel and degrading treatment.

You seem to think that the men who subject women to cruel and degrading treatment are doing so because of porn. History doesn’t seem to bear that out. Some men are cruel and like to degrade women (for the record some women are cruel and like to degrade men). Those men may like to watch porn about women being degraded and treated in a cruel manner. Some men would never treat a live woman that way, but it may be part of their fantasy life for whatever reason, and they like to watch it on film. Hell, some people are into S&M and enjoy watching that, and that includes both men and women.

One of the main tenets of MRA ‘thought’ is that violence against women (physical/domestic/sexual) is rare and shocking, and the few times it does occur, it occurs outside of the context of mainstream society, and is perpetrated by psychopaths, not otherwise ‘normal’ men. (The other main tenet is that evil feminists invent the vast majority of incidents of violence against women, for the sole purpose of going against nature and using the state to control men.) There is a lot of this minimisation and denial in what this MRA is saying, and I will deal with each instance as it occurs.

This is not a main tenet of MRA thought (and believe me, I have issues with MRA’s as well and took a pro feminist tack in a guest post on Glenn Sacks at one point so I’m not just saying that to defend my own camp). It is a tenet of the Mens Rights movement that there is exaggeration as to the amount of abuse. There is evidence to back up that claim as well. The one in four stat is simply a bad stat and the numbers are actually much different. Also, the amount of female violence against men is much higher than we are led to believe and according to a recent study done in Scotland, female on male domestic violence is actually higher in couples under 30 than the reverse. This is a cultural shift, but not as big a one as you might believe as the two were always fairly close (men are less likely to initiate single partner violence, but often do more damage in unarmed violence, women are more likely to use weapons and are more likely to initiate single partner violence).

But it clearly has that function. Robert Jensen, in his book Getting off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity describes attending sex industry trade fairs, and meeting lots of young men who think porn is great because it shows them what women like. Young men are completely open about ‘learning’ sex from porn: “Basically,” agrees Lee, “you’re copying what you’ve seen, but you’re trying to turn it into your own, put your own twist on it. That’s how I’ve experienced life, really, through porn. It’s like a seed that gets put in your brain.”

True, many young men learn about sex (at least to some degree) from porn. That isn’t actually an indictment of porn, but instead is an indictment of the lack of meaningful sex education. It’s actually kind of a stupid point

Those making the comparison between porn and violent films often miss the point. Yes, anyone old enough to watch a violent movie is old enough to understand that it is faked, the explosions and blood and guts and starships and aliens are all fake. But there is still an underlying message, an act of propaganda to all media; for example the representations of Arabs in US movies post 9/11 (and not only post 9/11) acted as propaganda for invasion. The propaganda of pornography is one of male dominance and female submission, in other words, the status quo.

No, the image of porn isn’t male dominance, the image of some porn is male dominance. The fact of the matter is, that there are a lot of movies showing women in the dominant position. It’s a common thing and really, it’s a fantasy for many men. It does lead to some confusion of sexuality though. The fact of the matter is that by and large men are more sexual than women. I have know a few who were very sexual but for the most part, other women didn’t like them. Porn shows women who are as sexual as men, and since some men believe in it, they end up feeling rejected when life doesn’t bear it out.

As blogger Violet Socks points out: Humans are cultural animals. TV/movies/records/pornography are a means of cultural transmission, just like any other medium or form of communication. Nowadays, in fact, these are our primary means of cultural transmission. And everybody knows that. That’s why people object to racist depictions or homophobia or even the absence of positive onscreen role models for minorities. Because all that’s part of our cultural transmission, part of how we share and exchange and teach values and ideas. The advertising industry is a multibillion-dollar industry as well, and manufacturers spend that amount of money because it works, it makes us want things. Add to that the physiological and psychological reinforcement of orgasm (as blogger Kenzie points out: “Oxytocin is know as the love hormone. Mothers and babies both have extraordinarily high levels of this hormone in the period just after birth, when they are experiencing a period of powerful bonding […] it’s the biggie that we produce when we orgasm”), and you have a pretty powerful form of propaganda in pornography.

Wow, that was just a huge load of nothing. Thing is, the variety of porn that exists is huge. You talk like it was all the same, but it isn’t, and it doesn’t send the same messages. Check out NinnWorx sometime, or the new Miss Lucifer productions. Very different messages.

Well thank goodness for that! Some poor man isn’t going to have his life ruined by “having some early trips in how reality works”! Forget the consequences for the women he ‘trips over’ he’s going to be ok!

The man in question is probably not going to be a rapist who destroys a woman before he wakes up, he’s probably just going to suck in bed until he meets a woman who is self confident enough to tell him what he’s getting wrong. Odds are good that women will be one who watches porn.

We have never claimed that violence against women occurs solely due to pornography. We live in a patriarchy, and there are lots of messages about how men are supposed to treat women. Pornography is patriarchal propaganda, and powerful propaganda too, it makes domination sexy.

A whole lot of porn doesn’t make domination sexy, and, sometimes, domination is sexy. Both sexes have that urge at times. There are men who love to be tied up, and there are women who love to be tied up. It’s just part of our sexuality. It’s also not wrong. Also, many males have grown up in a world where feminism has been a major part of their life, with mothers who are feminists, teachers who are feminists, friends who are feminists. Truth to tell, I believe the tales of the past, but can’t really understand them on an emotional level because I have never lived in a world where women were expected to cook, clean and get coffee. In my world the women were actually the power and to a large degree men were second class citizens. This is true for many men today, and it means that those cultural patriarchal messages you are talking about just aren’t part of our wold.

What we have here is a massive amount of rape denial and victim blaming – if a man is “overtly aggressive” the woman can just tell him to stop and he will! The number one rape myth is that rape happens because women don’t say no clearly enough.

Being a bit overly aggressive during sex and raping someone are two totally different thing. Most men will stop if they are going too far, the ones that won’t are rapists. Most men really, really don’t like rapists. Rapists have a hard time of it in prison, because they often get raped… even if they aren’t really rapists, but were falsely accused (and yes, it does happen, it looks like it might happen in 25% or of the cases out there).

What counts as “overtly aggressive” behaviour? A man pestering his partner for sex after she has said no? A man going into a woman’s room and getting into her bed after she has let him sleep on her couch? A man grabbing a woman around the throat (a common act in gonzo porn) once they have initiated sex? A man, with two of his friends, grabbing a woman and dragging her off into an alleyway?

Some girls like to be grabbed around the throat. There is nothing wrong with them. A man who pesters his partner for sex after she has said no is probably being rude, but there are subtleties there. If a man gets into a womans bed after being allowed to sleep on the couch and she hasn’t given him an indication that she is cool with that, then he is wrong, buts signals get crossed and a strong no may need to happen sometimes. It happens the other way around too, more than you might think. Grabbing a woman and dragging her into an alleyway is simply rape unless the whole thing was done by prior arrangement and is a fantasy fulfillment (his or hers by the way).

Some women can and do talk or fight their way out of attempted rape, but lots of women can’t, for reasons for which they are absolutely not to blame. A woman may be frail, or disabled, or ill, she may be drugged or drunk, a young child may not understand what is happening to her. It may simply be the case that the “overtly aggressive” behaviour has terrified her, and she doesn’t fight back because she doesn’t want to be killed.

Overly aggressive behaviour that is part of a consensual sex act is different from overly aggressive behaviour to initiate a sex act. Put another way, if a man and women are in the middle of the act and he starts calling her names, she might be into it, but if she isn’t then it’s probably going to ruin the experience for her (again, goes both way, both genders do it). If it overly aggressive behaviour to get her into bed, that’s probably rape.

Surveys of teenage girls show that they are facing high levels of relationship violence including pressure to engage in sexual activity.

Yes, that is true. It has always been true. It’s also not due to porn, and in fact it turns out that societies with more access to porn often have far lower levels of rape and domestic abuse.

His claim only works if you believe that rape and sexual violence are rare or unusual occurrences; that we don’t live in a rape society (one of the main forms of propaganda for which is pornography).

Prove that we do live in a rape society. Levels of rape and domestic violence are much lower in westernized society than in much of the world or most of history.

So he is admitting that there is violence against women after all, even that plenty of men do it! But nope, it’s nothing to do with the society the person was raised in (a patriarchal society that includes pornography and a saturation of pornified images), it’s “simple problems” (but where do these “problems” come from?) – as if violent men just need to be taken aside and given a quick talking to – which is more minimisation of male violence; or we can blame the mother (I’m willing to bet that that’s the real meaning behind the gender neutral ‘parents’).

Oddly enough our saturated society has less rape than other places or times. So yeah, the issue lies with the individual in that we are in a society that has made rape far less acceptable than it ever has been anywhere. Also, by jumping to we can blame the mother you are setting up a strawman. Unless you have actual evidence that this is what he meant, saying it is worse than useless.

This is complete and utter nonsense, you cannot define masculinity without also defining femininity; they are two sides of the same coin. Why do men desire to be masculine? Where do the ideas for what is and isn’t part of ‘masculine culture’ come from? Even if your only definition of ‘masculine culture’ is ‘hanging out with the boys’, you have already made a distinction between people who are men and people who are not!

This is where the stupid gets really thick. If you can’t define masculine without defining feminine then you can’t define feminine without defining masculine, but you can actually define either one independently. I am involved with martial arts and enjoy sparring a great deal. This is masculine, a certain love of physical contest, a love of challenge, of pitting your strength and speed against another. Note, I have never referenced feminine in that piece of definition. Why would I define myself as what you are not? Why should I even care. I hate to say it, but that’s a very, very feminine response. I don’t define myself by my traits relative to others, but by my traits. If other have those traits, cool. If most of the others who have those traits are male, then those traits are masculine.

There is plenty of fetish porn showing men being dominated, but this is still for men, and about men’s sexual pleasure in being dominated. The dominatrix is there for the money as much as any other ‘consenting’ porn performer and her pretend power ends when she is no longer being paid to dominate a man. Men have no interest in giving up their power and privilege in the real world, but plenty of interest in keeping it.

What freaking power and privilege? I grew up with a feminist mom, feminist school teachers, feminist colleagues and feminist friends. I grew up with the joke “What’s fifty men under the ocean? A good start”. Leaving my own trauma out of things, the men in the videos are there for the money and their pretend power ends when the movie ends. Also, studies have show that lesbians are more likely to watch porn aimed at men than they are to watch so called feminist porn (or erotica).

So, things are they way they because it’s the way they are because it’s the way they are and so on in infinite regress. The status quo is normal, natural and inevitable, so let’s just ignore how much the status quo benefits men and harms women.

Yes, people like to watch other people fuck. No, lets not ignore how the status quo benefits men and harms women, lets look at whether that’s true or not. My rather complex answer is that porn in itself doesn’t harm women, but that irresponsible porn of the kind that thrives when porn is driven into the shadows often harms women.

Again with the infinite regress, they want it because they want it because they want it!

Well, yes. Sometimes things keep coming up because they are true and no matter how much we want them to be false they are still true.

The old ‘better porn’ argument! I’ll believe in this mythical object when I see it.

Look into Ninnworx, look into Miss Lucifer Productions, there are many others. I won’t claim that they are feminist erotica, because, frankly, most feminist erotica is simply not sexy to a man (an apparently to most lesbians).

I have covered the propaganda argument above so will not reiterate it again here.

You have, but you haven’t determined that porn is propaganda. You have just said propaganda is common, and that is true. How is it that a large number of different people who are all trying to compete against each other for money are all working on the same set of propaganda? Is it a conspiracy? Are there meeting? Do they serve a fruit try, because if so, I could be up for joining (just for the fruit tray, fresh fruit is delicious)

No, they are shown as fetishes, reduced to a single part (their fatness, their wrinkles, and, since all pornography is racist, their black skin), not a whole person. Not that any woman in porn is shown as a whole person, or as ‘desirable’ in the everyday sense of the word, they are shown as objects, existing to be used by men, and that using them is desirable. Often, porn using not-conventionally-attractive women will be playing on the ‘grossness’ of those women, and the grossness of having sex with them.

Some of that is true, but a lot of it is bullshit. Amateur porn is the fastest growing segment of porn, and more natural actresses are proving to be more popular. Ironically, most of the women I know who watch porn (and I know quite a few) are more narrow in the body types they accept. Hell, I have never had a problem with pubic hair but most of the women I have dated hate it and remove as much of it as they can. My male friends relate the same thing, except that a not small number of them find the lack of pubic hair kind of disturbing.

It is easy to imagine, because we all live in a pornified rape culture and come up against misogyny and male violence every day. We do understand men very well, because we have to negotiate with them every day in order to survive.

Can you back that up? Do you have anything behind that claim? You keep claiming rape culture while living in the society and point in history where rape is the least acceptable. If you read the bible, rape was a crime if the woman was married (but a crime against the husband) or if the rapist was unwilling to marry the victim afterwards. I really don’t see a lot of support for this point of view amongst the people I know.

Men don’t dominate women because they are stupid and they think that’s what women want; they do it because society is set up in a way that allows them to do it, because they benefit from doing so, and because porn makes dominance sexy. Patriarchy is not an accident, it is a system of power and privilege that all men benefit from. He is again working from the false premise that violence against women is rare.

I said it before, I will say it again, sometimes dominance is sexy. Weirdly I have heard that more from women than from men. Have you heard the thing about how nice guys have trouble with attracting women? Well, it’s true. I can say this because when I was younger I was fairly successful with women and many of my friends were not. I was also kind of a dick and pretty messed up (some stuff that happened in my life, a lot of it is in this blog so feel free to read around). The fact is that a lot of men of my generation have major issues with that because we weren’t raised with the same attitudes as previous generations and have trouble seeing women that way. My damage wasn’t targeted at women by the way, but also affected how I treated other males.

He accuses us of wanting a world without violence or aggression (which we do, unapologetically), then insists that we just have to put up and shut up because it’s all natural and inevitable, and anyway it isn’t that bad, and even if it is, porn isn’t anything to do with it. The fact is, the vast majority of violence against women is socially acceptable, and a lot of men do do it. Not only is this MRA an apologist for porn, he is an apologist for male dominance and male violence in general.

Violence against women is acceptable? My ex wife attacked me and then called the police and told them I had attacked her. Despite all the physical evidence backing up my side of the story I was arrested and charged. It wasn’t until the trial when all of the evidence (including an impartial witness that neither of us had ever met) came out that I was acquitted, and then only because not only had I not attacked her, I had not even struck back in self defence, instead relying on confining her as much as possible. Had I been convicted the odds are strong that I would have had to go to jail. She had to be charged at that point (again, there was a witness I had never met who saw the entire incident including the part where she ran up behind me and punched me in the back of the head, plus the dozen or so time I tried to walk away only to be punched in the face and body repeatedly) After being convicted my ex wife was sentenced to 100 hours community service (of which she performed 0 with no repercussions) and an anger management course (that she never ended up attending, again with no repercussions). She also has sole custody of our son. Now, her current husband has primary custody of his two daughters, but his ex wife still has some custody rights and she actually abused one of the children on the street in front of hundreds of witnesses. Women are often violent, towards each other, towards men, towards their children. It isn’t a male, female thing, it’s a monkey brain thing. Trying to move away from violence is great, but realize that you aren’t fighting a patriarchy that is trying preserve our right to hit women (most men don’t believe we have the right to hit women and most of us don’t do it), you are instead fighting a fundamental piece of human nature and that takes a very different tactic.

Wow, I guess this ran long. All non-spam comments welcomed as always.