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OP is talking about a lesbian relationship. Lesbian relationships tend to be monogamous and serious. They report lower infidelity rates than straight marriages and have a predisposition towards commitment.
By your standard, why shouldn't lesbian relationships qualify for marriage status ?
Because marriage is between a man and a woman straight up. Happy for them to have equal legal protection.
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Don't they also have staggeringly high rates of domestic abuse? Though it wouldn't shock me if that were just an artifact of women being more likely to report domestic abuse and thereby the two-women relationship being more likely to report it.
I thought that this was an artifact of how the survey supposedly finding this was conducted, ie. they asked about domestic general in general, during a woman's lifetime, and then this was represented as abuse within current relationship, ignoring cases where women turn towards exclusively dating women in part because they've been with so many abusive men in the past.
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Even wiki seems to suggest that experience of intimate partner violence goes gay men (26%) < straight men (29%) < straight women (35%) < bisexual men (37%) < lesbians (43%) < bisexual women (61%).
That's an odd, relatively unintuitive result, to me. Men are usually established to be more physically violent than women, which would suggest that relationships with men in them ought to be the most violent. It sounds like, though, male-male relationships are the least violent, and female-female the most. The gap between straight women and straight men is perhaps attributable to men being more violent, but then what's going on with lesbians?
Part of it may be that women are just more likely to report violence, yes. Another may be different patterns in forming relationships - as the commenter one post up notes, lesbians are the demographic most likely to commit to a relationship early, whereas gay men are the slowest. Perhaps lesbians are therefore more likely to get into a foolish or inadvisable relationship, run on to the rocks, and end up facing violence? Sexual culture more generally may play a role - you might expect more promiscuous groups to encounter more violence, but that's counter-intuitive with gay men, by reputation the most promiscuous group, encountering the least. And something very disturbing seems to be happening with bisexual women.
Different types of violence may count differently - my understanding is that while men are more likely to be physically violent, women are usually more likely to be emotionally abusive, so if emotional or lifestyle abuse counts as violence on that study, that might be raising the figure? However, the wiki page I linked says 43.8% of lesbians reported "physical violence, stalking, or rape", and even with only two-thirds of that being exclusively female perpetrators, that's still pretty bad. Even if we consider the possibility that lesbians who have dated men are victims of male-originated violence at disproportionately high rates, female-on-lesbian violence is still unusually high.
I don't have enough to state a conclusion here, and I'm naturally somewhat skeptical of the way Wikipedia frames these results. So I'll just say that I don't know what's going on with sexual orientation and domestic violence. These figures are striking enough that it sure looks like orientation is a factor, but it's nothing so clear as "men/women/straights/gays are more violent".
I worked as a bouncer through college and for a few years afterwards. I took a lot of shifts at the nearby LGBT+ night club as the pay was better and it was not any worse than anywhere else, though the dangers were...different. I made a lot of friends there too. I can't help with stats on this stuff at all, but I can share the sort-of popular, tribal understanding of these things from within part of the community. Its well understood within the LGB community that lesbians are hitters. They were also the most likely to attack the bar staff by a wide margin. In fact I'm pretty confident that all of the people we had to call the police on were lesbians, they were definitely all women, some could have been bi. On the subject of bisexuals, they are often looked down upon by the Ls and Gs. I'm talking about people who actually experience genuine attraction to both sexes that they have acted on and continue to pursue, not self ID bisexuals who are straight in practice. They are seen as unreliable, undependable sex-addicts who lie constantly. Some parts of the community have significant anti-bisexual bias to the point of not allowing them in some clubs/events at all.
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I'd argue against this theory of men being more violent than women. They are more damaging if they are violent and they are less prone to injuries if assaulted by women, but it does not mean that women are not violent. You know, the how can she slap effect, when man using self defense is still the first one to be neutralized. You can easily show this on stats where men are not in the picture. For instance when it comes to abuse of children in their care, then mothers are far more abusive than fathers and the disparity is even larger if they are not biological parent of the child. The same goes when it comes to abuse of patients by nurses and many other cases when women can safely inflict physical abuse without risk of being confronted by men, including extreme ones like female Nazi concentration camp guards like Irma Grese, the Hyena of Auschwitz. So of course if they try the usual slapping and violent outburst shenanigans in same sex relationship, it does not fly as well especially as both of them can act as weak victims in front of the police.
In general, I think that women are actually much more callous and not at all the exemplars of fairer gender as they are portraited to be in women are wonderful reality distortion. If by any chance women could overpower men in violent confrontation, I think that they would be far, far more vicious and uncaring toward them.
Also, men who do have the most capacity to inflict damaging violence - taller, stronger, richer (easier to get away with it) - are ironically the most desired. "Short king" is still a backhanded "compliment". The evolutionary desire for superior genetics offset the fear of potential violence, I suppose.
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Those appear to be absolute figures - isn't an alternative explanation that single mothers are simply much more common than single fathers? Statista for 2024 gives us 15,720,000 single mother households versus 7,214,000 single father.
So if we have 189,635 cases of an abusive mother, and 125,493 with an abusive father, then that works out to 1.2% of single mother households being abusive, and 1.7% of single father households. That would seem to track with the stereotype of men being more violent.
I agree with you that we have to be careful of the women-are-wonderful effect here, and women have a tremendous capacity for violence and cruelty, but this particular figure doesn't seem to show that women are worse.
Where did you find information that this data is only about single parent households? In fact there is even better data in there, where women are more abusive compared to men if they are non-parent in the household by factor of almost 6.
Women are way worse and my claim is that their violence is vastly underreported. We see these things only in extreme cases with violence against children and of course in same-sex relationships where there is no bias against men.
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See my sibling comment.
Wikipedia is difficult in these topics as there are homophobic people wanting to slam dunk on the outgroup and homophilic sweeping inconvenient truths under the carpet.
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I think we might have to thank men and their inability to respond in kind to psychological manipulation. Consider the following interaction:
There are two likely outcomes:
No abuse whatsoever.
Bam, a cycle of psychological abuse.
I looked years ago into the studies, but the data is pretty bad. Alcoholism is also the main driver, so I would say there is a big class difference which can be more important. A below average working class couple who binge drink will use violence as conflict resolution more often, regardless if they are homo or hetero.
And while Gay men report lower rates of domestic abuse, there are many kitchen-psychology explanations for that:
See here for a discussion: https://old.reddit.com/r/AskGayMen/comments/1dfkn7z/gay_men_in_relationships_have_the_lowest_rates_of/
And in lesbian relationships higher rate of reporting could be because butch women internalized toxic masculinity. Or the violence rate could be higher but less dangerous and more low key (like disrespecting shoving, instead of beating up into the hospital). Or is it just an artifact of self reporting and women “exaggerating” small slights?
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6113571/#B108
Imagine a fifth of all relationships of your friends being build on fear! These numbers are so high though that I am sceptical.
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Could be, but also women are statistically higher incidence of cluster B disorders and if you have two women in a relationship you stack that chance. Not sure if significant enough to account for that.
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