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Notes -
To extrapolate on my initial question about the reputation of the Promise Keepers organization:
Back in the days I remember reading a succinct definition on one of the Manosphere blogs that used to exist: the patriarchy is [in a broad and very simplified sense] a system where men are responsible for women and women are accountable to men. (More accurately, it’s a system where women are accountable to their fathers/husbands and men are responsible for their daughters/wives.*) When this system is dismantled as oppressive and outdated, as it has very obviously happened throughout the developed world already (contrary to the loud protestations of die-hard feminists), we inevitably end up in a social rule set where women are no longer accountable to men and men are no longer responsible for women.
As it was also observed on said blog, it’s safe to conclude if you have eyes and ears that society is generally OK with the former and doesn’t even think twice about it but is ambiguous at best about the latter. This ambiguity manifests in various attempts to compel men to claim responsibility for women one way or another**, and is exacerbated when there’s an ever taller mountain of evidence to observe that the brave new world of sexual equality and freedom is failing to materialize in the way normies imagined it would***.
One obvious consequence of this is that anti-feminist public figures appear. They include both men and women from the onset already, but anyone can observe that the only ones getting any positive attention are women, of course. And society is generally structured in a way that a critical mass of women advocating for something is perceived as a sign by men that it’s also safe and even beneficial for them to advocate for it. And since said women are generally promoting some murky concept that can best be described as a new positive masculinity****, you’ll inevitably see men’s groups appearing with the aim of promoting the same concept.
As far as I know, the Promise Keepers was just one of these and not even all of them had a religious profile, and there were/are many outside the US as well. Their common denominator is that they are nebulously pushing a narrative that rejects both radical feminism and rigid old patriarchal norms and endorses a new positive view of masculinity that is designed to appeal to normies, especially women, without antagonizing lipstick feminism (they claim no allegiance with PUAs, for example). As you can imagine, this is largely doomed from the start already for the simple reason that defining masculinity in any form would also necessarily entail defining (and thus restricting) femininity as well, and as you can imagine, that is today a big no-no. As I alluded to above, any message such groups carry is thus destined to be rather murky.
(On a sidenote, I even find the name cringy. “Promise Keepers” implicitly means that other men do not keep their promises, the scoundrels they obviously are. I guess the naming was designed to gain sympathy from single mothers. Then again, maybe I’m just a dick.)
Before I continue I should mention that the organization briefly had a sort of heyday in the ‘90s but has long been defunct in a practical sense, as many of you might have already noticed and commented on (I assume they still exist in the legal sense). That is no coincidence, and I’m sure the main reason is that their leaders made the most obvious rookie mistake there is in politics: when their opposition (in this case, some radical feminist talking heads) denounced them in the press for some made-up reason, they apologized. (Take this with a grain of salt though, as I’ve only read this claim on a long-gone blog.) They thought they need to apologize to some feminist loudmouths, even though their entire public image hinged on being as inoffensive as possible, which clearly renders any idea of publicly apologizing a really bad one (why would you want to give any impression that you need to apologize when you’re a bog standard church org?). Anyway, even if this incident didn’t happen the way I remember it or if it didn’t happen at all, I think the general point still stands: it’s clear that the Promise Keepers were treated with either indifference or scorn and ridicule by the mainstream media, and only found sympathy within their own culture war tribe / wagon fort. This is a general rule of society: a man making any complaints about women, no matter how indirect or mild, is a sign of low status. Or to quote a former Manosphere blogger: a man pointing out the pettiness of petty women is actually seen as a sign of he himself being petty. For further proof just look at what public image fathers’ rights groups and activists have; they are basically lepers.
(end of Part 1, I suppose, as at this point I’m just rambling maybe)
*In reality it went even further than that. It was generally expected of young men to keep socially undesirable men away from their sisters, and it was normal for said sisters to act as matchmakers for their single bothers etc. But that is largely beside the point here.
**Exhortations by Christian preachers and so on for single men to marry single mothers and gamers/slackers to man up, man-shaming in the media in general, the endless denunciations of “deadbeat dads”, the Bradley Amendment, affirmative consent laws, the Duluth model etc. are all examples of this, I’d say
***I guess this included the notion that promiscuous women will be able to live without sexual shame and that “average” women will have casual sex with “average” men because they actually want to have sex for the sake of it; then again, I’m just guessing (I’ll explain the quotations marks if anyone is interested)
****Believe it or not, a handful of sympathetic women did visit these Manosphere sites back when these existed, at least for a while; they generally agreed that while the post-patriarchal age means that women don’t need men in their lives per se, they still generally want [some of] them, and that it should be possible to be a functioning masculine man in a feminist cultural milieu still
I think there's a simpler explanation for the demise of the Promise Keepers than wicked feminist scheming: it's religion, Jake.
As a religiously-based and affiliated organisation, it was never going to get traction in the mainstream. And within its own little sphere, later on new fads came along and this faded. Anybody else remember the foofarah around Purity Rings and Purity Balls and the rest of it? They may still be going, but it's years now since I read shocked denunciations of the incestuous vibe of it all on social media.
Re: the Duluth model, I had to look this up and by the Wikipedia article it's been much criticised. I'd be a tiny bit more sympathetic about your complalnt there, save that I read this story in the news very recently. Ex-partner attacks woman with axe, sets fire to house, drowns himself. "Why this foolish notion that women are at risk from men?" you ask, and I point to this. Except for some guys who really are walking around with "I'm trouble" labelled on their face, how do you know that if you take up with Joe and then break up with Joe, Joe is not going to try and axe-murder you? It's a gamble!
I have to say that while I'm sympathetic to part of this, things like this model likely contribute to a zeitgeist that overinflates the danger that women face and underestimate the danger than men do.
I recall trying to find statistics about intimate partner homicides years ago (using US data), and found that while women do get killed significantly more than men do in these situations, it was more on the order of male victimisation rate at ~60% of the female level (which seems to be already down from 75% in 1992, at least according to this), rather than orders of magnitude more. Looking at other developed countries doesn't help either, since while it isn't as close as the US, IIRC it's still "only" on the magnitude of, like, 20-50%. The statistical data doesn't fit with the far higher subjective concerns that women have with getting murdered by their spouses. (I found this in a brief search, which suggests a skew of 2:1 in female:male victimisation globally on page 14, but doesn't seem to distinguish between intimate partner homicide and other family-related homicide.)
I could be convinced that generally, murders aside, women are orders of magnitude more at risk of severe bodily harm than men do without dying, simply due to biology, but I'm not sure the data supports that women are astronomically more at risk than men are from intimate partner homicide than men are, and I think men barely think about their partners murdering them (at least compared to women thinking about the same).
Just today read a story in the news about a guy who poured boiling water on his sleeping wife and hit her over the head with a claw hammer. No further details as to why he did that, and he's awaiting a psychiatric report, but the general rule of thumb is: if you see a story about "partner attacked by current or ex-partner", it's female attacked by male. Women seem to attack children (see that murder of a child by the stepmother I mentioned on here before). Sometimes yes, it's the woman attacks the man, but mostly it's man attacks woman.
And it's hard to tell! Forty years married, then one night he pours boiling water on top of you! Very few people can foresee this happening if the person has otherwise been normal all their life.
Your link is interesting, thanks for providing it. Reminds me of the golden age of British murders, where women were as likely to bump off husbands as husbands to bump off wives.
On the other hand, this data set claims that for intimate partner homicide, it's majorly women:
The potential explanation for the difference in American spousal homicide sounds untested:
EDIT: [Another](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/104398629401000303 paper has an interesting hypothesis - class and race:
That might also explain the number of trans people killed by ex-partner/current partner in the list I posted before; the majority of the trans people on that list were BIPOC. If there are higher intimate partner rates of homicide among black Americans, that translates over for trans as well as cis.
I don't think we disagree, as from what I found men do kill women in relationships anywhere from 2 to 5 times as much, and in fact Wilson and Daly is one of the sources I cited; but given such a low base rate...
Which leads me to think that it might be one (or more) of men under-responding to the danger they're in, women over-estimating the danger they're in, or the self-defence clause is largely true and men really are astronomically less likely to be killed as long as they aren't violent.
For what it's worth, I think the third is almost definitely true to some extent, but I can't imagine it being the entire story, given that intimate partner violence in general also follows a similar trend, at least going by mainstream org press releases (something like 1:3 to 1:4 with likely significant male under-reporting); though there is an interesting part of the literature that contends that most domestic violence is reciprocal, and cases with unilateral domestic violence usually have the woman as the perpetrator, but still finding that violence causing injury (esp. severe injury) is still generally male-dominated, though again not to the extent that we usually assume it is. That aligns with my perception that murders and homicides aside, women are still more likely to be injured purely from biology.
(The review by Straus seems to suggest that actual cases of violence in self-defence are actually quite low:
so I wonder how the >50% self-defence stat for women comes from. Maybe self-reporting?)
Someone could probably do a systematic review on this. I can't imagine that the studies are generally high quality, though.
That is the question that remains to be answered. Along with what sounds like "things we don't want to contemplate" about 'greater chance of women killing men in domestic violence if they're poor, black and cohabiting not married" which is the kind of explanation that will ruffle one hell of a lot of feathers. It would be very racist to point out "white women don't kill white men in the same proportion as black women kill black men", for instance.
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