After seeing post after post of people rallying for women's
rights and equality I found myself compelled to look deeper into the
subject. I found many empowering videos on
YouTube and Facebook with thousands and even millions of hits and
comments supporting the calls to stop domestic violence against women.
Then I stumbled upon 2 different videos, one from the UK and one form
the US. Both depicted social experiments where men and women publicly fell victim to their partners of opposite sex physically. Both were filmed in largely
populated urban areas, the disparity being that the UK video was posted
in late May and the US version was posted in September.
As
both videos show, the social norm is to stop violence enacted by a man
against a woman immediately. These two videos do demonstrate that the
acceptance of male on female violencethat feminists have striven to reduce over the last few decades has diminished greatly in urban areas. They also show the social norm that it's acceptable for women to beat up and abuse their partners with very little interference while out in broad daylight. I believe there are two key contributing factors to this inequality, one is the concept of masculinity and the other is the social norm that is in place today.
Masculinity, or the preservation of it, is the reason so many cases of men physically falling victim to their partners go unrecorded each year. Men don't want to admit they've been beaten up or pushed around by women because they're supposed to be physically stronger and better able to protect themselves, based on today's social norms. A lack of action or reaction enables further confrontations and incidences to take place with greater regularity and force just as it happens with women in the opposite situation.
The other contributor, the norms set in place about what types of contact between men and women are acceptable. If a woman is being assaulted and reacts with violence and defended herself by harming the man physically, its accepted and even encouraged. Every college has a "Woman's self defense class" where they learn to protect themselves from such a situation. What if the tables were turned? And the man who was being assaulted struck back at his perpetrator and punched her out of self defense while in public. I strongly believe that would not be followed by cheers and applause from the surrounding people. Though this is not supported by either video because they did not factor this reaction into the experiment, I still think it would pan out with the man being heckled and possible fall victim to more violence from the people surrounding the confrontation.
On a side note, the differences in support of the two videos within their own countries is intriguing. The UK video received 6 million views within a month of its posting, the American counter part has only 8,617 in a month and a half (both posters have an similar number of subscribers). This disparity suggests that in America, we are less informed on the phenomena or may simply not care as much about it when compared to the UK.
I noticed that in the Brittish version, the bystanders of the woman imposed abuse seemed amused by the situation. Truly fascinating that it seems as though they think that a woman can't even pose a serious threat to a man whereas it's a huge violation when the man is even a bit less violent than the woman is to the man. This reminds me of the misunderstanding of the word "feminism" and how important it is that we as a people come together to promote the welfare of the human race rather than a specific subset of the human race no matter how disadvantaged certain groups may be, nothing can change unless we change the whole.
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