A Woman Should Never Hit A Man

But they do. A lot. 

A man has very few options when faced with a violent woman. A man has to exercise precise self-control when defending himself from a woman who goes all out to injure him. Even under full attack, men rarely hit back, but when they do the woman often gets hurt. Sometimes badly hurt, as happened to Ray Rice's wife, Janay Palmer Rice.

And the media is having a White Knight orgy with this one. They are clamouring to outdo one another and demonstrate their commitment to defend innocent women and condemn Ray Rice. Unfortunately no one was innocent in the battle between Ray Rice and his then girlfriend Janay Palmer. The evidence is crystal clear in the video itself. The two can be seen before they enter the elevator by the pillar: he appears to spit on her and she backhands him to the chin. Another exchange of hits occurs by the elevator buttons, whereupon Ray Rice backs away to the other side of the elevator. Janay is not the slightest bit afraid or hesitant at that point, and she literally lunges
across the elevator at Ray Rice. You can't make out his hand movements, but he obviously made a punch at her as she was lunging toward him, which would definitely have increased the force of the punch, and she went down.

I do not condone violence of any sort, but this was a fight between two mutually violent people. Tragic as it is that she was hurt, she is not an innocent victim. And if we are ever going to address domestic violence in any meaningful way we are going to have to face the fact that domestic violence is almost always a two-way street, as Erin Pizzey, founder of the world's first Women's Shelter (known as Women's Refuges in the UK) has been saying for 40 years.

The news reporting is nauseating. NOT ONE news person has been willing to point out that Janay and Ray Rice were both hitting one another or that Janay clearly lunged at Ray Rice with the intent to hit him before she went down. Is everyone blind? This is an eerie, and powerful example of the "Emperor has no clothes" phenomenon: there it is in plain sight, but everyone in the media pretends they didn't see it. Can they really be that blind? This is a clear sign of our cultural psychosis when it comes to gender equality, and we have it bad. The news reporters are NOT doing their jobs, they are protecting their jobs, which is why we should never trust the mainstream media: they are cowards who lie for money. But I digress.

Tonight on CBC's Power and Politics with Evan Solomon, Ian Capstick, a commentator with no where to turn in order to out-White-Knight his colleagues, summoned up the "Rape Culture" bogeyman (1:22:45 in the video) and lectured at length about how horrible our society is to women. He claims that we ignore abuses that women face, and he actually objects to the fact that the courts require evidence of a crime against a woman. Evidently he believes that the requirement for evidence should be waived and the woman's word should be enough to convict a man. This is CBC! Listening to him I would have had to believe that women everywhere must be living in terror of rapists behind every tree. His speech seemed copied from a women's studies textbook. It was one of the biggest loads of crap spewed out to appease the emperor that I have yet witnessed on a news show, and I have seen an awful lot of grovelling in the media. This rape culture hysteria is spreading, and it promises to become one of the worst examples of mass hysteria in the history of mankind. The media loves a juicy dramatic go-to narrative and feminists are delivering "Rape Culture is everywhere, even in your sock drawer."

Of course, anybody who fails to fully denounce Rice and the NFL, or who even hints at the fact that this was a two-way physical argument before she was unfortunately, and likely accidentally, knocked-down, will be instantly fired, and never seen again on television. Not one of them is willing to risk their cushy high-paid jobs for something as trivial as the truth. This is the principal reason that we are not getting anywhere with the domestic violence problem: no one will tolerate an honest discussion about it.

The social training to "never hit a woman" runs very deep in men and it begins in childhood. Men are extraordinarily reluctant to hit a woman, but there is no such reluctance instilled into women. 


Most men have been hit by women and the first woman to hit him is usually his mother, and Stefan Molyneux has a lot to say on the role that mothers play in the cycle of violence. Growing up I witnessed women throwing things at men, kicking men in the groin, slapping men, and yet I never saw a man hit back. That is the norm in our culture: men rarely hit back. Women feel fully within their rights to hit a man, and they are confident that there will be no consequences when they do. In fact there were no consequences for Solange Knowles when she pounded on JayZ, and she exercised no self-restraint whatsoever. In fact some in the media speculated that JayZ must have done something to deserve this (blame the victim much?). 

Women hit men. They do it a lot. Even when the physical damage is not great, the inner damage is huge. It destroys his trust in her, it undermines his self-confidence, his confidence in the future of his marriage to her, his confidence in their social life together, and it makes him fear that ultimately he will be eliminated from the lives of his children. He has seen it happen to his friends, he knows it can happen to him. These worries will never go away for him once she has started hitting him. The fear will grow, and frustrate him because there appears nothing can be done about it and he has no one to turn to. 

If a man does hit back, even in self-defence, he will be treated like a monster, a wife beater, and a social pariah for the rest of his life. His only other option, and it's the one I recommend fully, is to leave her completely at the first sign of violence from her and never, ever look back. We have to teach this to every male. The reason is simple: no one will acknowledge her violence as a problem, so it will continue and it will get worse, and you, the victim, will be punished for her violence to you.

An abused man will never be able to defend himself so his fate with a violent woman is either the social-lynching that he will receive if he snaps after years of abuse, or the slow, almost imperceptible, soul-suicide as the message of his utter worthlessness seeps relentlessly into every pore of his being until he has fully internalized the self-image of a slug and is reduced to a spineless, soulless, empty husk of a man, unable to make even a simple decision without his wife's permission. In the process he may also turn to drugs or alcohol, further exacerbating his problems. His children will not respect him, either. There will be nothing for him to look forward to but death, that ultimate end to all suffering. This is the real face of domestic violence, and I have seen this more than a few times.

Stefan Molyneux is correct to suggest that women can stop domestic violence because they are just as often the instigators of DV as are men. Molyneux traces this back to child rearing in some detail, but it continues into adulthood.

Is it really so difficult for women to restrain themselves from hitting men? Is it really that difficult to understand that teaching women not to hit men is an important part of the solution to domestic violence? 

Maybe the admission that women are just as violent as men is too much because it would force us to face the violence in our own mothers, sisters, wives and girlfriends, risking their rejection and the loss of their love by pointing out that they are not innocent victims but active participants in their own intimate conflicts. Risking the loss of a parent's or a spouse's love is unthinkable to many people. So instead, we turn away, and pretend once more, that women are victims, and men are villains. It's an easy narrative with good guys and bad guys. The women in our lives go back to being morally infallible, a role we love for them as much as they love for themselves. We preserve our jobs, our reputations, our marriages, and the love of our mothers with this one simple culture-, and soul-destroying, lie. We all stay in Neverland, and the emperors reign of terror continues, as does the scourge of domestic violence.