Remember that bumper sticker, "There's no excuse for domestic violence"?  I haven't seen one in a while, so maybe they've gone out of fashion.  Truth to tell, I suspect they have.  Because after all, we've got plenty of excuses for domestic violence.  Indeed, pretty much any excuse will do as long as it's a woman hitting, slapping, stabbing, taking a sand wedge to... a man.

Did Elin Nordgren give hubby Tiger Woods a few shots?  We don't know, but that doesn't stop people like columnist Sally Kalson of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette from reveling in the fantasy that maybe, just maybe, she did.  Read it here (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 12/6/09).  And read here another columnist's response (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 12/9/09).  After all, Tiger seems to have committed adultery, so isn't domestic violence a justified response?  Kalson seems to think so, and if she doesn't, she scrupulously avoids saying so.  Maybe she was just engaging in a little juicy revenge ideation that no one's meant to take seriously, but she never got around to mentioning the fact.

Slate's excuse for Nordgren's domestic violence, if it occurred, was to tell us that women's DV is so rare as to be unimportant and, anyway, it's all done in self-defense.  Now if those claims were true, they might have a point.  I don't know of anyone who would deny to another person the right of legitimate self-defense.  But Slate's claims are contradicted by huge amounts of social science done over many years.  And besides, I also don't know of anyone who claims that that's what Nordgren was doing.  So Slate's whole exercise was aimed at (a) purveying disinformation about DV and (b) excusing Nordgren's violence if there was any.

Saturday Night Live's skit on the incident makes out female-on-male DV to be a joke.  Again, it's not something to be taken seriously, and therefore, excused.

And as Donald Jeffries points out in a piece on Helium, about which I've posted my own article, popular culture still routinely depicts small women knocking the lights out of large, strong men.  And in every case, of course, the men "deserve" what they get.  So violence against men by women is excused by what the men did or who they are.

Meanwhile, in the real world, there's this (New Orleans Times-Picayune, 12/9/09) and this (MSNBC, 12/10/09) that have come across my screen in the last couple of hours.  In the first, a woman poured boiling grits on her boyfriend while he slept.  Her excuse?  He had announced he was breaking up with her.  The second woman hit and slapped her disabled male partner because she wanted him to eat a piece of bread and he wanted a roll.  I'm not making that one up; it's right there in the article.

Now, as we so often see, the last two articles linked to never get around to calling domestic violence by a woman against a man "domestic violence."  So maybe there's some confusion about that.  Maybe the writers are so steeped in our cultural disinformation about DV that they truly can't see it when a woman does it to a man.  Or maybe they see it but just want to perpetuate the false notion that women don't commit DV and men aren't victims of it.  But as any propagandist can tell you, the simple refusal to acknowledge facts that contradict your point of view is one of the most effective tools of propaganda ever dreamed up.

Refusal to admit the existence of female-on-male violence - what's a better excuse than that?

Thanks to Tim for the heads-up on the Pittsburgh articles.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 15th, 2009 at 10:05 am and is filed under Domestic Violence/DV System, Media.