Misandry's worst nightmare

I blogged about Karen Straughan earlier in the week. I decided to do it again in order to share the video below of a talk she gave in which she says a great many provocative and important things about gender and gender issues.

When I was a child, I had no particular ambition to beat up my little sister. If anything, my attitude toward her since the day she was born was protective and cherishing, as disgusting as feminists may find that.

Yet even then I thought it just a little bit odd not that it was treated as unthinkable that I hit her, but that somehow it was less unthinkable that she hit me. She knew that and realized early on that if she could only provoke me to hit her she could get away with pretty much anything she had done to provoke me with absolute impunity.

Nobody should hit anybody, and I am enough of a male chauvinist, I guess, that the very idea of a man hitting a woman makes me see red. But why should it not also be outrageous that a woman should hit a man, even more so since he is socially precluded from defending himself? Could it be that the double standard has to do with the fact- as Karen Straughan documents in this video- that parents hit boys more often than they hit girls, that males are subjected to more physical violence than females throughout their lives, and that- wait for it- men are victims of physical domestic abuse as often as women are,  but that either by statute or policy police are often forbidden to charge women with domestic abuse if the victim is male?

I don't agree with everything Ms.Straughan says. She is an atheist, and I am a Lutheran Christian. We take differing positions on a number of social issues. As a leading figure in the Men's Movement, she equates male circumcision with female genital mutilation, and I find that equation utterly bizarre. And for reasons far beyond my power to comprehend, she somehow supports our nightmare of a president.  But having said all of that, she is a ferociously intelligent and fearlessly thoughtful woman who by and large can be counted on to speak logic and common sense to a culture badly bitten by the rabid dog of Marxist radical feminism.

Movement feminists hate her with a red-hot passion. Thoughtful feminists do not. She herself eschews the label "feminist," and I respect her courage in doing so. She has some things to say about being male and being female in this world and especially in this culture which we very badly need to hear.