Ojnab

Your tale is harrowing. I can't begin to imagine what you went through and still go through.

My own mother was wonderful (as was my father), but I've seen many examples of toxic mothers (and fathers) such as yours. They may have been abused as children or they may have some kind of sociopathic personality disorder, but their behaviour is ultimately inexcusable.

Killarney, I reject your assertion that I have treated you as a misguided fool at any point. You have taken a dislike to the term dogma, which you have taken to imply some irrational aspects, but that is not at all the implication. A dogma is a set of heuristic rules that have become entrenched within a particular model of thinking about a topic. It is based on some axioms which are rarely challenged.

In the case of the feminist model you tend to espouse, those axioms include that violence in the home is a problem mostly experienced by women and perpetrated by men; that there is a cultural structure that is called patriarchal, which is hierarchical and subordinates people along gender lines; that women are no different to men in any way other than reproductively and that this difference is not a significant one. Of course there are others, but you get the point, I'm sure.

Most of the basis for this "second wave" feminist model is derived from Marxian ideas of class struggle, which is not surprising given that Friedan and Abzug, two of the most influential figures in the formation of the dialectic were both strongly Marxist both by inclination and education. It was supplemented by Fabianism as middle-class women sought a political dialectic they felt comfortable with and by the colour political ideal of communitarianism. The mishmash of these somewhat different ideas has then mixed with elitist New Left intellectualism to produce the "progressive" feminist model we see today.

That model is mostly concerned with personal advantage in individual outcomes, not with 'lifting all boats' through a 'rising tide' of a better cultural paradigm and because there is no coherent philosophical basis, it has become an amorphous idea that can mean anything and hence means nothing very much. It is reactionary, not proactive and it cannot admit real progress, because it is cast as a struggle.

We boys and you girls are all in this together, you know. Try to think beyond the dogma, on both sides.

Craig Minns- re feminism : "Sadly, it has degraded into just another form of political dogma that allows people to apply labels so they don't have to actually think about things."

So you ''...think about things.', but feminists don't?
Do you not think that is belittling women like Killarney and myself for daring to have different views on the treatment of women in our society than you?

As for the 'axiom' "violence in the home is a problem mostly experienced by women and perpetrated by men; ...", this fact is shown in all the police statistics, and we can add that the violence in all other ares of society are overwhelmingly perpetrated by men.

These statements are facts, and not made up by feminists or anyone else.

@Suseonline

"As for the 'axiom' "violence in the home is a problem mostly experienced by women and perpetrated by men..."

Your statement with regard to police statistics is erroneous.

The police role in domestic violence matters is, inter alia, to collect evidence and so that it can be presented to the court...whether there has been domestic violence and perpetrated by whom, is determined by the courts and then when it comes to issuing AVO's the minimum standard of proof is applied ie "on the balance of probabilities". So the statistics you talk about do not show anything as fact...at best they are only indicators.

Suseonline, you say that police statistics show that "violence in the home is a problem mostly experienced by women and perpetrated by men". This is true but not overwhelmingly so. The NSW Auditor General found that 34% of domestic and family violence incidents recorded by Police in 2010 involved male victims and 30% involved female perpetrators. More recent NSW Police stats back up this data.

Source: Audit Office of New South Wales (2011). New South Wales Auditor-General's Report: Responding to Domestic and Family Violence, Performance Audit. Retrieved May 17, 2013, from http://www.audit.nsw.gov.au/ArticleDocuments/143/Responding_to_Domestic_Family_Violence_Full_Report.pdf.aspx.

@MHA. Thanks for posting that link. I found it a very interesting to read:

"In 2010, NSW Police recorded 126,325 domestic and family violence incidents involving 92,215 victims and 81,772 perpetrators. There were twice as many female victims as male and twice as many male perpetrators as female."

That is without doubt wrong as to purporting to show facts. The important thing that is missing here is the word "ALLEGED". The numbers show alleged victims and alleged perpetrators. In terms of actual facts, if you were to look into each of the incidents you would find an untold number of alleged victims are in fact perpetrators of violence and untold number of alleged perpetrators are in fact victims of domestic violence and\or "false allegations"

Apart from defining family violence as what men do to women, what I find interesting is that it is said in the document that " On average, domestic and family violence kills 36 people each year,..". What the gender breakdown of that is, isn't stated. But then it says in relation to 2010 that there were 92,215 victims. So it looks like for every 2-3,000 alleged victims(not including the very high number of victims they say don't report violence) there is one death. Does that suggest to you that there is a lot of battering of female partners going on with baseball bats borrowed from the man in the apartment on the other side of the very thin wall?

In fact if you look closely at the document it doesn't make much sense. On page 8 it gives separate pie charts victims and perpetrators by gender. Then in the following text is says:

"These domestic and family violence incidents included 26,006 assaults, 33,000 other offences including stalking and property damage and 66,000 verbal arguments where Police detected no offence." There you have it folks "66,000 verbal arguments where Police detected no offence. Well that blows Suseonline's argument out of the water ie that a domestic violence incident recorded by the police shows as fact that a domestic violence occurred.