Further Reading: Domestic Violence

Another addition to my "Further Reading" series. See here for an explanation.

This one is about Domestic Violence.

I'd recommend starting with my debate posts on DV, which offers an extensive list of links to academic and government studies and useful overviews.

For additional reading:


Michael Flood: Claims about husband battering

Men in fathers' rights groups and men's rights groups have been claiming very loudly for a while now that domestic violence is a gender-equal or gender-neutral phenomenon - that men and women assault each other at equal rates and with equal effects. They claim that an epidemic of husband-battering is being ignored if not silenced. ...

There are four problems with the claims about 'husband battering' made by men's rights advocates. Firstly, they only use these authors' work selectively, as the authors themselves disagree that women and men are equally the victims of domestic violence. Secondly, they ignore the serious methodological flaws in the Conflict Tactics Scale. Thirdly, they ignore or dismiss a mountain of other evidence which conflicts with their claims. Finally, their strategies in fact are harmful to men themselves, including to male victims of violence.

Michael Flood: Domestic Violence: Encyclopedia of Men and Masculinities:

Men’s physical violence against women is accompanied by a range of other coercive and controlling behaviors. Domestic violence is both an expression of men’s power over women and children and a means through which that power is maintained. Men too are subject to domestic violence at the hands of female and male sexual partners, ex-partners, and other family members. Yet there is no ‘gender symmetry’ in domestic violence, there are important differences between men’s and women’s typical patterns of victimization, and domestic violence represents only a small proportion of the violence to which men are subject.

Finally, A Feminism 101 blog: But doesn’t evidence show that women are just as likely to batter their partners as men?

A: No. This is an often repeated claim based on either faulty understanding or outright misrepresentation of a few studies made using the CONFLICT TACTICS SCALE (CTS) or similar self-report surveys. One of the authors of the original study, Richard Gelles, categorically rejects this interpretation of his research. ... Women are self-reported to be just as likely to strike their partners as men are, but they are not just as likely to batter their partners as men are. That is a crucial distinction.

Alas, a blog: On “Husband-Battering”; Are Men Equal Victims?

[T]here isn’t sex equality in serious violence. Women are battered by their intimate partners much more often than the reverse. Given the many reasons to doubt the CTS’s accuracy for measuring severe violence in families, the most reasonable conclusion is that the Straus/Gelles studies – at least, as they’re used by men’s rights activists – are inaccurate.

So should the Straus and Gelles studies be rejected entirely? I say no. The evidence weighs strongly against the “equal victimization” hypothesis, but that doesn’t mean the results of CTS-based studies should be thrown out entirely. Although it’s clear the Straus/Gelles work doesn’t accurately measure the most severe instances of intimate violence, the validity of the CTS in measuring what Michael Johnson calls “common couple violence” – minor, sporadic, non-escalating and mutual violence between spouses – has not been disproved.

Department of Justice: Measuring Intimate Partner (Domestic) Violence

A important discussion of the "women commit equal violence" myth:

Are Men and Women Equally as Likely to Be Victims or Offenders?

The National Family Violence Survey (NFVS) found nearly equal rates of assault (11–12 percent) by an intimate partner among both men and women. ... NIJ researchers have found, however, that collecting various types of counts from men and women does not yield an accurate understanding of battering and serious injury occurring from intimate partner violence. National surveys supported by NIJ, CDC, and BJS that examine more serious assaults ... clearly find more partner abuse by men against women.

For example, NVAWS found that women are significantly more likely than men to report being victims of intimate partner violence whether it is rape, physical assault, or stalking and whether the timeframe is the person's lifetime or the previous 12 months. [3] NCVS found that about 85 percent of victimizations by intimate partners in 1998 were against women. ...

A review of the research found that violence is instrumental in maintaining control and that more than 90 percent of "systematic, persistent, and injurious" violence is perpetrated by men. [8] BJS reports that 30 percent of female homicide victims are murdered by their intimate partners compared with 5 percent of male homicide victims, and that 22 percent of victims of nonfatal intimate partner violence are female but only 3 percent are male. [9]

Domestic violence and gender - An XY collection

Links to an assortment of important and useful studies.The Kimmel paper is especially helpful.

Debate Drama: Dalrock is a Lying Liar

Debating Men's Rights Activists can be a lot like arguing with a kid who puts his hands over his ears and shouts "la la la I can't hear you!"

During my abortive debate with Paul Elam on Domestic Violence, I had a hard time getting him to respond to my arguments; instead, he devoted much of his energy to arguing against experts I never cited and arguments I never made.(EDIT: See all my debate posts and some commentary here.)

Now the blogger "Dalrock" has decided to weigh in on the debate -- despite the fact that by his own admission he didn't actually read the whole thing. Not surprisingly, he completely misrepresents my argument:

His argument was that since he could point to more studies showing the orthodox feminist view, his perspective must be right.

Either he didn't read more than a paragraph or two of what I wrote, or he's incapable of understanding logic, or, well, he's a lying liar.

At the moment I'm leaning towards the first explanation; I'm being generous here.

But it's hard to see the next bit as anything but, well, that lying liar thing.

Mentioning my post responding to Elam's disgraceful "Bash a Violent Bitch Month" post, which was not even part of the debate proper, Dalrock ignores Elam's obnoxious provocation and brings up a similarly obnoxious, similarly disgraceful Jezebel post from several years back, in which several Jezebel staffers and a host of commenters there gleefully admitted to beating up boyfriends. (Elam and I both mentioned it in our posts; it was Elam's excuse for writing his post in the first place.)

According to Dalrock, my response to the Jezebel post went roughly as follows:

The feminist looked like he might come to just in time to avoid the count.  He started mumbling incoherently that the link didn’t prove anything, and there weren’t that many women eagerly recounting tales of abusing their boyfriends.  Besides, the women were probably lying and had really just been defending themselves.  And none of the comments looked that bad to him anyway.  Most of those guys probably eventually recovered with proper medical treatment.

Even aside from the dopey boxing metaphor, this is simply fiction. Let's break it down.

He started mumbling incoherently that the link didn’t prove anything, and there weren’t that many women eagerly recounting tales of abusing their boyfriends. 

I didn't say that.

Besides, the women were probably lying and had really just been defending themselves.

I didn't say that.

And none of the comments looked that bad to him anyway.  Most of those guys probably eventually recovered with proper medical treatment.

I didn't say that. He's simply making shit up. Or, as some might put it, lying.

If you want to know what I did say, you can see it here.

When I pointed all this out in Dalrock's comments, he responded with:

You mean you weren't really unconscious in a boxing ring knocked out by a commenter, and came to just before the final count?

Yeah, the fact that you made a dumb boxing joke means it's totally ok to lie about what I said.

To my regular readers: Sorry about all the drama here. To paraphrase Bob Dole, I'm just trying to get these guys to "stop lying about my record."

Also: Elam himself poked his head up in the comments to Dalrock's post to offer a response of sorts to my final debate post; needless to say, it's pretty feeble. You can read it here, and if you skip down a few posts you should be able to read my response to it; I will also be appending it to my original post.

Paul Elam's big mistake on domestic violence: A case study in MRA self-deception

I didn't think I was going to reply to Paul Elam's latest post in our abortive "debate" on domestic violence  -- see here for the details on why it fell apart, and here for details on his childish and unethical behavior since and here for the rest of my debate posts -- but he's really outdone himself this time, with an utterly spectacular misreading of an important research report on violence against women. Indeed, I've read over the relevant portion of his post several times, because I can't quite believe he's saying what he seems to be saying. If he is, and I have no other explanation for his remarks, his post becomes something of a case study in the way in which antifeminist dogma can distort even the most basic analysis of empirical data.

In the context of my debate with Elam, it's not an insignificant error. Indeed, Elam sees his erroneous conclusion on this research as a sort of trump card in our debate, the grand finale to his final post in the debate. The only problem is that he's completely wrong.

You don't have to take my word for it. To make sure there was absolutely no doubt that Elam was misinterpreting the report, I contacted one of the report's authors. She indeed confirmed that Elam's interpretation was flat out wrong. I'll get to that in a minute.

Let's get into the details, shall we?

The report in question is one I cited in my initial post, titled Prevalence, Incidence, and Consequences of Violence Against Women: Findings From the National Violence Against Women Survey. (EDIT: You can find a pdf of it here.) The paper, co-written by Patricia Tjaden and Nancy Thoennes, summarizes the findings of a massive survey on violence jointly undertaken by the National Institute of Justice and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which, despite the title, also dealt with violence against men. The researchers surveyed 16,000 people, divided equally between men and women, about the violence they had experienced over their lifetimes -- specifically, whether or not they had been raped, physically assaulted, or stalked.

Elam's ideologically driven misreading of the report starts with a misreading of the opening paragraph of the report, a brief historical summary of how the rise of feminism led researchers to start to seriously pay attention to violence against women:

Violence against women first came to be viewed as a serious social problem in the early 1970s, in part because of the reemergence of the Women’s Movement. In unprecedented numbers, scholars trained in such diverse disciplines as philosophy, literature, law, and sociology began to examine violence against women in the context of a feminist ideology.

All of this is a pretty straightforward accounting of what actually happened. But, the researchers continue:

Despite the resulting outpouring of research on violence against women, particularly in the areas of rape and intimate partner violence, many gaps remain in our understanding of violence against women. Until now, empirical data on the relationship between certain types of violence against women, such as childhood victimization and subsequent adult victimization, have been limited. Reliable information on minority women’s experiences with violence and on the consequences of violence against women, including rates of injury and use of medical services, is also limited.

So far, the meaning of these remarks is crystal clear: Though feminism inspired a great outpouring of research on violence against women, there was still insufficient reliable empirical data to measure the true extent of the problem.

The researchers then go on to present the details of the National Violence Against Women Survey, a study designed to provide precisely what they said was lacking: reliable empirical data on the various forms of violence against women.  (In order to provide more context for this data, and to provide a basis for comparison, the study also asked the same questions to an equal number of men.)

Elam, though, reads this relatively straightforward introduction to the report as a sinister statement of purpose. Highlighting the phrases "Women's Movement" and "in the context of a feminist ideology," he declares:

Yes, in this the very first paragraph of the study, they identify not as academicians, but feminist ideologues. With a profound lack of erudition that can only be rooted in hubristic hegemony, they inform readers from the beginning that this is a political action. Straight from jump.

Not a promising start for Elam. But we haven't gotten to Elam's biggest error. 

Elam's Great Misunderstanding starts off innocently enough: he cites data from the report on rape and physical assault that shows that, with the exception of the category of rape, men report suffering more violence than women. This is a fairly unsurprising result; numerous studies have found the same thing.

Note that this data measures violence overall, NOT intimate partner violence by itself. Most of the violence against men is in fact perpetrated by other men.

Elam then shows a chart from the study that looks at the incidence of intimate partner violence, broken down into various categories of violence; it shows women more than three times as likely to report being victimized by IPV than men.

It's what Elam does next that truly boggles the mind. After noting that the data did indeed seem to suggest that women are the primary victims of IPV, he firmly declares this conclusion "wrong." No, he says, what the dastardly feminist researchers did was to "factor weigh for under reporting [but] to their disgrace they did not figure it in to the graphs."

As proof for this, Elam quotes a relatively straightforward passage in the text that discusses some of these results, and specifically refers back to the chart in question:

It is important to note that differences between women’s and men’s rates of physical assault by an intimate partner become greater as the seriousness of the assault increases. For example, women were two to three times more likely than men to report that an intimate partner threw something that could hurt or pushed, grabbed, or shoved them. However, they were 7 to 14 times more likely to report that an intimate partner beat them up, choked or tried to drown them, threatened them with a gun, or actually used a gun on them (see exhibit 8).

After quoting this text, Elam triumphantly declares victory:

And so there you have it.  A rough sketch of the math will lead you to a very familiar situation.

Domestic Violence- Women are half the problem.

Huh? The first time I read this I was simply baffled. Elam posts a chart showing that women report being the victim of IPV more often than men do, then a paragraph discussing the very same results, which says exactly the same thing, and which specifically refers back to that very same chart, and somehow concludes that ... women are responsible for half the problem?

It took several rereadings for me to even grasp how he might have come to that utterly erroneous conclusion. Apparently, as best as I can figure it, he has interpreted the word "report" in the text to mean "overreport" instead of, you know, "report." (Or that it indicated in some way that women overreported in comparison to men, who underreported, or something along these lines.) So that, as Elam figures it, the numbers in the text basically cancel out the numbers in the chart. In fact, the numbers in the text reflect the exact same data as the numbers in the chart.

Thus Elam transforms, in his mind at least, an empirical report of survey results that challenge his central claim -- that women are half the problem in domestic violence -- into one that proves his pet theory, and which reveals the perfidity of devious, cunning feminists.

Just so there would be absolutely no question that Elam is completely mistaken in his conclusion, I got in touch with Patricia Tjaden, one of the key researchers behind the survey, and the co-author of the summary Elam quoted from. She told me that, indeed, his interpretation of the figures in the paper is flat out wrong. As she put it in an email:

Yes, you are right in your interpretation of our results: Generally
speaking, in our study "reported" means respondents disclosed that they had
ever been a victim of a specific type of violent victimization. So, for
example, as presented in Exhibit 3 in our report on intimate partner
violence ... 8.5 % of women compared to 0.6% of men
disclosed that they had been beaten up by an intimate partner at some time
in their lifetime.  It should be noted that some were beaten up more than
once, but these estimates reflect only if they "ever had."  Thus, (surveyed)
women were 14 times more likely than (surveyed) men to report ever being
beaten up by an intimate partner [8.5/0.6 = 14.17.]

I have no idea what your [debate] opponent means when he said our
estimates reflect over-reporting.  Perhaps he meant that women are more
likely than men to report victimization to an interviewer?  There is little
research on what influences women and men to disclose victimization during
telephone surveys.  We conducted a small study during the course of the
NVAWS to see if interviewer gender impacted male respondents' responses to
survey questions.  (We didn't do it for women because all the women were
interviewed by female respondents.)  We found that male respondents were
more likely to disclose sensitive information, such as age, income, fear and
accommodation behavior, and recent victimization, to male interviewers.
This contradicts findings from previous research that shows respondents -
male and female alike - feel more comfortable disclosing sensitive
information to female interviews in face-to-face surveys.

The paper she is citing here is this one, available online here (pdf format):

Tjaden, P & Thoennes, N. (2000).  Extent, nature, and consequences of
intimate partner violence:  Findings from the National Violence Against
Women Survey.  Washington, DC: US Department of Justice NCJ 181867.

The only real question is whether Elam has distorted the results of the NVAWS deliberately. I don't actually think so. He is enough of an ideologue to believe that a report based on a massive government study and which has been exposed to an enormous amount of scrutiny over the years in fact secretly proves his pet theory.

One final note: Elam also makes a big deal of the fact that the NVAW used the Conflict Tactics Scale (CTS) in its surveys, a research tool which I have criticized in my previous posts in the debate. As is often the case with Elam, this is a half-truth. The survey, as Tjadan noted in her email to me, "used questions similar to those in the CTS, but framed them differently," and thus got very different results.

I will end with another comment from Tjaden, which helps to put this debate in a broader context:

I know this debate over whether men and women are equally likely to
perpetrate violence against their intimate partners is very confusing and I
have spent a good part of my career attempting to convince fellow
researchers and the federal government that we need to spend time and money
figuring out why different studies (i.e. different methodological approaches)
have yielded such disparate findings.  This would be far more fruitful than
pointing fingers at each other and calling each other names.

This is a topic I will take up further in future posts.

Paul Elam's continuing childish and unethical behavior

When I agreed to debate Paul Elam on domestic violence on his web site, I clearly underestimated how childish, and unethical, he really is.

After I bowed out of the debate -- see the details here -- he decided to run the whole thing under a childish, gloating headline, and with an introduction labeling me a "fucking moron." (EDIT: See here for my posts without Elam's editorializing.)

Because of this behavior, I requested he either remove the headline and the obnoxious introduction, or remove my contributions to the debate from his web site entirely. After getting no response from him to this, I sent another email telling him to simply take down my writings from his web site.

Legally, he does not own any rights to my writings, and because of his behavior he no longer has my permission to run them. I may pursue legal action.

Paul, unfortunately, has chosen to escalate the situation, by running an even more childish post titled "David Futrelle- Covered in Pin Feathers and Clucking," in which he writes:

let it be known now that any blogger in the sphere, MRA or otherwise, has my permission to repost this debate in full on their blog or website.

Obviously he has no more right to do this than I have the right to take his car on a joy ride.

He's also apparently pitched the idea of reposting the whole debate on The Spearhead. While he doesn't have the right to do this, and I've told The Spearhead that they do not have the right to reprint my writings, I might agree to the proposition provided that I'd be guaranteed in writing by The Spearhead that it would run with a neutral headline, that my latest response to Paul's "final" post would be included, and a few other conditions.

And I would have no problem continuing the debate with Paul on The Spearhead until we each post 5 posts, as per our original agreement, were I to work out the necessary details with The Spearhead and get an agreement in writing. Or we could finish the debate right here.

I stand by everything I wrote in the debate, and have no problem continuing it, provided it be on a venue not controlled by Paul Elam and with some basic rules to guarantee fairness set forth in writing. (Paul would have to agree in writing to run the debate under a neutral headline on his site as well.)

Oh, and one final note: Paul has also removed the links back to here from the original debate, thus breaking still another condition I insisted on in order to participate in the debate in the first place. And he's banned me from commenting in the comments section under the debate posts.

This is all very stupid and very petty.

Let me offer a challenge to anyone in the MRM whose ethics are more developed than Paul's: Stand up and object to his illegal and unethical behavior. Were a feminist to pull this sort of thing on an MRA, I would certainly stand up and object to it.

Paul Elam's hypocrisy and douchebaggery bring the Not-So-Great Debate to a crashing close

Paul Elam's massive hypocrisy, combined with a bit of douchebaggery, has brought the Not-So-Great Debate to an early end. (Though not before I got in one final post since the last time I mentioned the debate here.) (See here for all my posts in the debate.)

Long story short: He threatened to ban someone who posted a comment supportive of me. I reminded him he'd promised not to do that. He refused to retract the warning. I said, I'm out. Then he changed his mind and retracted the warning. I told him I was back in, if he didn''t pull any more shit. He pulled more shit. I'm out. 

Long story long: When I agreed to debate him on his blog, it was on the condition that the discussion in his comment section would be free and open, and that people supportive of my point of view would not face any special restrictions -- normally, Paul confines opposing opinions to a special page for, as he puts it "feminists and manginas." (I know. He's a grown man, and this is how he handles people who disagree with him.) But he promised, in writing:

With respect to any people who may wish to support your POV in the debate, I am suspending the rules for post transfer to the feminist/mangina page. All comments, short of threats or advocacy for violence, will remain in the thread permanently.

Paul evidently has some trouble remembering his promises. Earlier tonight, Chris -- one of a tiny number of non-MRAs who've actually waded into the snake-pit that is his comments section to post dissenting opinions -- posted this comment:

Excellent points from David. Still, Elam will spin this in the way he believes will best move his own agenda to demonize women and restore the patriarchy (among other nonsense) forward. Most people know the truth though. A group of male supremacists is the last place most people will look to for the truth about women or domestic violence. Especially since their propaganda is so easily refuted as David has proved. And the crap spewed about women as a whole is just plain nonsense. It’s easy to see why the majority of men shun the MRM, and why NOMAS doesn’t want to be connected to it.

As anyone who has been on the Internet for more than about half an hour will tell you, this is not what you'd call an outrageous flame. It's pretty restrained, actually. It was not a threat. It did not advocate violence. But for Paul it was evidently too much to handle, so he promptly responded with this:

You get a warning now Chris. And one only. I agreed with David, offered actually, that dissenters would be welcome to this debate rather than the area I have set up for them at the FAM page.

I do want David to have the opportunity for supporters in the comment area to refute posts made by regular readers of this site.

But this is not a place where you are allowed to come in and make personal insults about me or others. Make your points about the debate. Argue the facts presented all you want.

But making generic, personal insults to MRA’s, simply for being MRA’s, is not allowed here. You have the rest of western culture for that, including the Feminist/Mangina page here.

Can it or see yourself out.

Yes, that's right, the guy who normally consigns those he disagrees with to a "Feminist/Mangina" page is complaining about insults.

This isn't the first bit of bullshit Paul has pulled during the debate. Originally, we had agreed to post two posts apiece; he changed this to five. (I went along with this, but he didn't discuss this with me before announcing it to the world.) Then he decided that he could post two responses in a row over the course of 48 hours without giving me a chance to respond. (Huh?) I challenged him on this, and he relented, but his continual changing of the terms of the debate bugged the hell out of me.

And then of course there was his post calling Domestic Violence Awareness Month nothing more than a "month long national circle jerk" and suggesting, as a "joke," that October should instead be declared "Bash a Violent Bitch Month." He helpfully illustrated the post with pictures of women with black eyes, with the caption to one of the pics reading "Maybe she DID have it coming." I'm still not quite sure why I agreed to debate anything with this guy.

Then came his "warning." Now, such a warning might make sense if Paul normally enforced a regime of general politeness in his comments section. But of course he doesn't. For proof of this, let's see some other comments that appeared in the very same thread. Remember, this is the sort of speech that he considers acceptable.

This Futrelle guy is like a pile of dogshit. Dogshit sits all by itself, fetid and foul. Dogshit’s greatest wish is to become a mess on your shoe because then you have to deal with dogshit. “Finally, somebody is paying attention to dogshit!” Even if it’s only for the amount of time it takes to scrape dogshit off your shoe.

I hope that when this exchange is over, we will not pay Futrelle any more attention. We should do what anyone else does when they see a pile of dogshit. Step around it and not give it another thought.

On Elam's blog you can vote comments up or down. That one got 8 thumbs up and 3 thumbs down from the peanut gallery. Then there was this, from a familar name, evilwhitemaleempire:

At the end of the day manboobs is just another mangina who wants to get laid at the expense of the rights and dignity of all men including himself.

That one got 17 thumbs up. Then there was this one. (I've edited out some of the more rambling bits.) You'll notice that it also contains a number of generalizations about women, not to mention boys raised by single moms:

This manboobs really hates men. I wonder if he sat at his mothers knee taking in all her version of events. I think all the worst men I have ever met, have all had one thing in common, no father. ...  Like illegitimate boys, the female roll-model-men – are always first to defend a woman’s honor against men with violence or treacherous deceit. I consider men without male roll models as illegitimate. Woman-made-men. They hate themselves as males but hate the rest of men even more. Woman love these arseholes, because they do their bidding. Feminist doctrine and female narcissistic malice are the base for manboobs attitude’s towards men.... I still have nightmares about what I went through as a boy, at the hands of a feminist bitch, who continues to be rewarded and admired to this day by woman and cowering manginas.

Then there were a number of posts that accused me of being a woman, or a group of women. Which is just, uh, weird. Of course, this is only an insult if you think that women are bad, but somehow I get the impression that Paul might possibly just have a couple of readers who do think this.

On top of this pile of crap we can place what Paul has said of me and of feminists in general in his latest contribution to the debate:

The important thing in my mind at this point is to identify and explain what is really happening with these activists, people like Futrelle, who can look at all this information and dismiss it in favor of maintaining a false set of beliefs.

We need to ask why, when male victims of DV are a well documented fact of life, would these people seek to deny they exist and even take whatever action necessary to ensure that help is unavailable to them or to their chidren.

The answer to that, at least in my opinion, is groupthink.  Futrelle and the others have had their capacity for critical thought, their human compassion and indeed their personal integrity compromised because rather than exercise common scrutiny when examining information, they have become a part of a collective of non thinkers with tunnel vision; a simple cell in a groupthink brain. It is a seriously debilitating condition with significant individual and far reaching social implications.

It is the same phenomena that allowed masses of people to justify slavery in their minds, countless wars, the collective festering and mindless hatred in 1936 Berlin, and many other forms of social malady.

Yep. Pointing out that women suffer more from Domestic Violence than men makes me a person without integrity or compassion, a "non-thinker with tunnel vision," the sort of person who in an earlier age would have argued for slavery, and yes, a Nazi.

Really, Paul? Really?

Anyway, so earlier tonight Chris alerted me to Paul's "warning," and I posted a comment that said, in part:

Paul, you get a warning from me. When I agreed to this debate is was under the condition that the discussion here would be fair and open. If you are giving Chris a warning for making generalizations about MRAs that you don't like, then I suggest you give warnings to each and every person here who has made similar generalizations about feminists. That would include you as well.

You should also give warnings to the fellow who referred to me as a "pile of dogshit," those who suggest I "hate men" and the like. Oh, and the one who suggested that I and other feminists are like Nazis. Oh, that was you again.

Either retract your warning to Chris, or give yourself and all of these other people public warnings as well, or I am out of this debate.

What followed was a weird little drama that I can only describe as "Paul Elam-esque." First he posted a comment full of Elam-esque posturing and bluster:

You were out of this debate before it started. So I really don’t blame you. If I were you I would be tempted to find something, anything to hide behind so I didn’t have to bear the continued public humiliation.

But you are a little late. You have already served the only real purpose you ever had here to begin with, which was to openly present the bigotry, intellectual cowardice, ignorance and moral bankruptcy that characterizes modern gender ideologues- yourself included.

Your giving me an ultimatum that I have to allow unprovoked ad hominem from your supporters, or you will leave, is just one more example--- a kind of bonus.

Just the same, you are free to change your mind. I am going to put up my response to your latest tomorrow, and this time I get to pull out all the stops because that porous, completely obtuse offering of drivel demands to be completely destroyed with dispassionate reason and truth. ... .

I responded with a comment saying I was out, and reminded him that he had actually promised to allow pretty much anything from commenters supportive of me short of violence and threats. I ended it by saying: "This doesn't make you look good, trust me."

Apparently me offering him proof -- in black and white, in his own words -- that he was being a massive hypocrite convinced him to change his mind. Or maybe he just felt bad that I wouldn't be around to respond to the masterpiece he is apparently now crafting.

So he relented, and retracted his "warning" to Chris. I said I would continue the debate, just so long as he didn't pull any more shit like the shit he has been pulling.

Unable to restrain himself, he responded again in typical Elam fashion:

[J]just for the record, I changed my position to honor my word, not because you hold one bit of sway or force. You are not running anything here. So I am sure you can imagine a good place to store your warning for me not to “pull any more shit.”

Now, this is settled. Get out of my comment area.

Fuck it. I have been extraordinarily patient with this guy, but I have my limits. And he's just gone beyond them. I'm not going to debate with someone who talks to me like that. I'm out.

If I respond to his next post, it will be here. And I may not even bother.

The Not-So-Great Debate Goes into Overdrive

My debate with Paul Elam on Domestic Violence continues on his web site, A Voice For Men. (EDIT: See here for all my posts in the debate.)

Unfortunately, my opponent seems to have gone entirely off the rails. I will continue to reply to him, and continue to try to get the debate back on track, but I am not hopeful about that.

As the debate, such as it is, continues, I have my hands full with Paul and his derailing tactics. Once the debate is over I will discuss some of the substantive issues that have been raised by various commenters on his site and here.

At the moment, though, I am watching David Attenborough talk about trilobites. On TV. I don't have him in my living room.

My first post in the Domestic Violence debate is up. And so is, well, see for yourself....

From A Voice for Men

My first post in my debate with MRA Paul Elam on Domestic Violence has gone up on his web site. See it HERE.

Elam, meanwhile, has made clear how seriously he takes the idea of ending domestic violence against woman and men by posting this elsewhere on his site:

In the name of equality and fairness, I am proclaiming October to be Bash a Violent Bitch Month.

I’d like to make it the objective for the remainder of this month, and all the Octobers that follow, for men who are being attacked and physically abused by women - to beat the living shit out of them. I don’t mean subdue them, or deliver an open handed pop on the face to get them to settle down. I mean literally to grab them by the hair and smack their face against the wall till the smugness of beating on someone because you know they won’t fight back drains from their nose with a few million red corpuscles.

And then make them clean up the mess.

Illustrating the post: a couple of pictures of women with black eyes, including the one I screencapped and pasted here. That of course is his caption, not mine. 

This little violent fantasy of his is ostensibly inspired by an obnoxious three-year-old post from Jezebel which basically celebrated the fact that various female staffers had beaten up boyfriends of theirs. Elam's fantasy, of course, goes well beyond anything any of them confessed to.

The Domestic Violence Debate has begun

EDIT: My first response is up, here.

As I've mentioned a couple of times, MRA Paul Elam and I are debating Domestic Violence on his web site A Voice for Men. Elam's first post has just gone up, a wrongheaded and rather underwhelming start to the debate; my response will appear in a day or two. (I will post a pointer here when it does.)

Instead of allowing open debate on his website, Elam generally segregates those he classifies as, er, "feminists and manginas" on a separate page. (I know, right?) But he says he's suspended that rule for this debate, so I urge anyone here in that particular demographic to go over there and start picking apart his errors. (Paul and I have agreed to keep out of the comments section for the debate.)
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