How is it that Elin Nordegren can (probably) take a golf club to Tiger Woods’ car, and people actually express sympathy for her? If their roles were reversed, no amount of infidelity on her part would be seen to excuse his violent behavior. I recognize that this is one of my personal pet issues, but the willingness of most people to blithely dismiss physically and/or emotionally abusive behavior if the offender is female perplexes and disturbs me. What is it that makes it less offensive? That she’s smaller or less physically imposing than him? I would think a golf club would equalize some of that.
The idea that somehow, one group’s abuses against another can be laughable or unimportant because of the nature of that group is exactly the same kind of thinking that told abused women that they deserved it and was used to justify “fag-bashing”. What if this wasn’t the only time she was violent? How would we know? How could someone as powerful as Tiger Woods come out and say he was being abused by his wife? He’d be laughed out of sports. He’d never live it down. And that is really, truly, deeply fucked up. Because the truth is, there are men all over the world abused by their girlfriends, lovers and spouses every day. It doesn’t fit our idea of masculinity, or society’s current definition of domestic violence as a crime by men against women, so those men are ignored at best and ridiculed at worst.
This issue is important to me precisely because I *am* a feminist. Pretending that women never abuse men is sexist on multiple fronts: It denies that women are capable of violence, it conflates womanhood and victimhood, and it paints men as inherently violent. It's also counter-productive. Women can not simultaneously argue for equality and reinforce a sexist idea of femininity because it makes them feel superior. Well, I take that back, because a lot of them do, but it succeeds in getting nowhere. True gender equality requires acknowledging that both genders have are human, have flaws, are capable of both great compassion and great cruelty. Denying it traps women in the kind of fake feminine identity that feminism has historically railed against. Except, apparently, when it suits them or makes them look good.
