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I know it’s sort of pointless to expect even relatively grounded arguments to be found in such a comment section, but still, I can’t help but virtually don my fedora as a garbage human dudebro and notice some gems like:
• The implication that you as a woman are completely safe from domestic violence in a lesbian relationship (as far as I know, the opposite is in fact true on average, not to mention the higher levels of emotional blackmail, drama and manipulation that lesbian relationships entail on average)
• The assumption that forming a relationship with a man of your age automatically entails you having to take care of him (it doesn’t even occur on the radar that it may also happen the other way around?)
• The idea that 75% of domestic violence is committed against women (this sounds rather fishy; maybe it’s true in the case of childless cohabiting partners, or households where a single mother and her children cohabit with a new man – a scenario which, as far as I know, carries the highest average risk to women of domestic abuse, and coincidentally also is a situation these women voluntarily enter; I mean, I’m sure it’s not standard practice on the part of sneaky, manipulative, shitty men to invite single mothers and their children to live under his roof)
• The unstated assumption that women on average do know men’s bodies and how to please them, but not the other way around (questionable at best)
• The assumption that single older men would never in a million years visit museums, travel, read, hang out with their bros and have hobbies in general (I mean…really??)
Back when MGTOW online forums were not yet nuked and purged, I used to check them out after reading shrill complaints about them on the normie internet, and while some of the content did appear unhinged and extreme, I don’t remember ever coming across such utter bullshit like this.
Not the hero we wanted.
But the hero we needed.
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And/or the unstated assumption that women are passive and hypoagentic and men are active, hyperagentic, and have the burden of performance. Thus, a man is responsible for her getting off and himself getting off (not too early and not too late, though, or she might get the ick).
Could just be projection and a preemptive strike out of insecurities over their own hobbies (current or when they were younger), or lackthereof. Women have tons of interesting hobbies, and if they don’t it’s only because they spend all their time getting mansplained to and taking care of all the stupid men in their lives.
Could also be that, once again, men have the burden of performance, that they’re expected to be interesting and that includes having interesting hobbies. Although, at the same time, within a relationship, male hobbies are a selfish waste of time, because that’s time he’s not spending on entertaining her, taking her on cUtE trips/dates, making her feel like the beautiful queen she is, or grinding harder to improve her lifestyle.
Who drew that comic, it's hilarious
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I've heard incredibly conflicting takes on this. I once heard that lesbian relationships reported the highest rates of domestic violence compared to gay or straight relationships. But then I heard someone else say that this statistic had been widely misrepresented: it was that lesbians were most likely to report having experienced domestic violence, without disambiguating the sex of the aggressor i.e. many lesbians reported having been victims of domestic violence at the hands of a male aggressor. If it's really the former situation, do you have any stats?
How does a lesbian get into a situation where she's domestically abused by a man? Is that even common? I'm pretty sure lesbian couples don't usually invite any men to live under the same roof with them. Or?
#3 is difficult to take seriously, to be honest. #1 are scenarios that (hopefully) are specifically not ones taking place in the context of a romantic cohabiting relationship, which the original article is about.
Agreed, calling yourself a lesbian when you date men as well as women (maybe only date men) is stupid. Nonetheless, if the lesbian demographic includes many women who've been in (or currently are in) romantic relationships with men, that could potentially bias survey results in such a way to give a misleading impression of how common women-on-women domestic abuse is. The person conducting the survey might well assume that a person who identifies as a lesbian and claims to have experienced domestic abuse at the hands of a romantic partner has been victimised by a woman - indeed, this is a completely reasonable assumption given the standard definitions of the words "lesbian" and "woman". But just because that assumption is reasonable, doesn't mean there aren't people using those words in a nonstandard way which will bias the results. (Blood donor clinics and other medical practitioners already do this to route around the men who will give very different answers to the questions "are you gay?" and "have you had anal sex with a man in the past year?")
What you'd ideally want to do is design surveys in such a way that the results can't possibly be misinterpreted, like:
Q: In the past five years, have you been in one or more romantic relationships with:
Q: In the past five years, have you experienced domestic abuse by
Of course, inevitably you would get people failing to report domestic abuse because the perpetrator was non-binary, or inflated numbers for female perpetrators of domestic violence because some respondents were victimised by trans women and interpreted male/female to mean "gender" rather than "sex". It's turtles all the way down.
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