Beaten by Women

An interesting article on the "battle of the sexes" posted last week at the Ethics and Public Policy Center is Christine Rosen's "Female Fight Club: 'Pummel-me feminism' is the latest Hollywood trend." From Sandra Day "O'Connor's comments about the President's failure to appoint a women to the Supreme Court to Hollywood's latest take on female power, Ms. Rosen makes some interesting observations about the culture's latest take on the feminine side of humanity. Films noted include the recent "Mr. & Mrs. Smith" in which a husband and wife beat each other up and try to kill one another, and "Kill Bill." An excerpt:

So why has the rather outlandish image of physically aggressive women -- so wildly at odds with the messages we claim we want to send about appropriate behavior by and toward women -- taken hold in contemporary cinema? Perhaps it is simply a form of wishful thinking. After all, the idea that women are as physically strong as men satisfies our desire for genuine equality between the sexes. That such a claim is impossible to sustain appears not to bother Hollywood in the least. Worse, audiences are expected to accept unflinchingly images of women being beaten to a pulp.

Time for a true confession: I was pummelled soundly by a girl back in about the 5th or 6th grade. I have no memory of why it happened--it was unclear even at the time--only that I could not defend myself other than to block some of the blows. I had learned--apparently quite well--to never strike a girl (or a lady, even when she's not being a lady). If one of them wants to do me in, I'm a goner.

The truth is, I suspect, feminism prospered and survived, if we can put it that way, in part because there were many men who were taught to treat women differently than they treat men. It's that very difference in treatment, so boo-hooed by the feminists, that helped men to allow the women--whom they were taught to respect, to defer to, even when those women were fighting mad--to have their way, even at times when they shouldn't have. One of the appeals of the "pro-choicers" is that restricting abortion is an abuse of women, which is in part an appeal to an older view of the sexes--men should protect women.

But now we're told we can just beat each other up. Do we really, really want to go that route?

Comments

[Dcn. Michael D. Harmon]

I must confess that I had exactly the same experience, at exactly the same age (which would have been around 1956 or so). My mother wanted to report it to the principal, but I was very reluctant. To have it known I was beaten up by a girl (even if she was older and bigger than I was -- and I never raised a hand to her while she was hitting me, for the reasons you expounded) was beyond embarassing.

Where will it end up? With women in the infantry, dragging down their units and exposing men to even more danger than they are already. And imagine the NFL, the NHL and the Major Leagues with women players forced upon them....

[William Luse]

Mr. Kushiner, really, you should also have been taught that you have a right to self-defense. Just remember that the force applied to the delicate thing must not be disproportionate to the end desired.

[Mark]

> you should also have been taught that you have a right to self-defense

"Whoever hits you on the cheek ... "

[Gabriel Sanchez]

"Where will it end up? With women in the infantry, dragging down their units and exposing men to even more danger than they are already. And imagine the NFL, the NHL and the Major Leagues with women players forced upon them...."

Touching first on sports, I would have to say that you will find nothing of the sort in any major professional sport *unless* there are women out there capable of performing at the level the male athletes. Women have already tried to compete in the NHL and have not performed well, nor have they fared much better in the non-professional sports scenes. While I do not discount the possibility that with advanced techniques in physical training, a woman athlete may emerge who can compete with men on a comprable level, I don't believe we need to worry about a forced invasion of them into men-dominated sports. The fans simply would not stand for it and in the end, the money is what counts; the P.C. mindset gets checked at the deposit counter.

As for women in the military, the argument against it becomes harder to forward as technology improves. While the current situation in Iraq is proof positive that ground combat with real live troops in combat situations is still a necessity, I'm not so sure we can say that will be the case in ten or even twenty years. The amount of automation which already goes into our military efforts is astounding, even compared to what we had available to us a decade earlier during the first Gulf War. While many of us may shudder at the idea of the "gentle gender" being exposed to death or severe bodily harm--a risk still caried even by those who operate military machinery at great distances from the field of battle--I suspect that there is no reason to believe a woman could not operate a piece of technical equipment less competently than a man. I think the concern you have identified is diminished significantly so long as women's roles in combat are restricted to branches where their inferior physical capacity in relation to men is not an issue.

[Tony]

I agree with Gabriel's comments above about sports -- and must wonder, with regard to the military, why we would even bother with basic training, if what he says is true? Or are infantrymen no longer carrying bodies from the field, or moving forward on elbows and bellies, or carrying 100 pounds of hardware on their backs, or running zig-zag across a field of fire? If that's the case, then 50 year old men, or 60 year old men, could do the job just as well, too.

But there are all kinds of important social and anthropological reasons to suggest that having women in the military is a terrible idea. I wonder, for instance, how on earth you could ever instill in the young man what Jim's father instilled in him, that a true man never raises his hand in anger against a woman? What, is she a cop on Monday, and a damsel on Tuesday? Boys especially are relentlessly "logical" about such things. You can't say, implicitly, that you enjoy the fight on Monday, when you get paid for it, and are abused on Tuesday, when you don't. For every biggish woman who can run a little bit and swing a nightstick, there are about fifty who can't, and whose claims upon the protection of men are undermined by the "liberated" example. For the soldieress ends up liberating not only herself from her womanhood, but all her sisters too, whether they like it or not. Women used not long ago to understand this matter ... And then of course there is the other sex and their health to worry about.

Tools may change, but the basic natures of men and women have not changed, and will not change. Helen of Troy is immediately recognizable by us, as is Dido, as is Esther, as is Mary Magdalene, and Martha of Bethany, and Saint Monica. Credentials don't change us either. Some years ago a member of my English department proposed a course on the Holocaust and the different reactions to it by male and female authors. She named it by what to my ears sounds like a chillingly frivolous jingle, "Gender and Genocide." When another of my colleagues objected, in a departmental meeting, to its unwitting levity, she stood up and shouted and wept a lot. When I suggested that a course so specialized should not be offered regularly, but only as a "nonce" course, she accused me of thinking less of her because she had no Ph.D. Which fact until that moment I had never known. It was my worst moment as a professor -- and I've had a few that weren't too good.

The gallantry of guys who are trying to be gentlemen requires something from the ladies, too -- and maybe somebody else will be better than I am at identifying what that something is.

(The course title stands, and the course itself has been offered year after year.)

[Theodora Elizabeth]

This "beating each other" up thing in the movies is NOT new. Does anyone else remember "The War of the Roses" from 1990 or so? Starring Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas, it is about a couple who pursues their dreams - Douglas as a high-powered something and Turner as a SAHM who decorates. When she finally "finishes" the house, something snaps. They have a battle in the house, and end up killing each other, after swinging from the chandelier which falls from the high ceiling. At the end one of them slaps away the hand of the other as they lay dying.

No, not new.

[lisa]

I have feminazi friends who are an embarrassment to me when in public. They actually are hostile to men who open doors for them and heaven help the man who calls us "girls". I will never understand it. And these women are the first ones to call for a man when something needs moved or fixed. As if they couldn't be bothered- being women and all.

I can remember my mother saying back in the 70s that women used to be on a pedestal and the feminists knocked them off.

There is no respect for a woman who stays home and yet there is no respect for those who work.

I think to be a woman in this day means doing what one thinks is right and dutiful and living with somebody somewhere thinking you're letting them down.

I respect chivalry. I know my physical limits but don't exploit them. I think equal pay for equal work is only logical but that's as far as I support any sort of feminism. I am ridiculously fulfilled by a clean home and good kids. And I think that women in the military is just a bad, bad idea. For a multitude of reasons.

The gallantry of gentlemen needs to be met with respect from the ladies. The "ladies" need to assume innocence on the part of the gentlemen. These men were raised to give certain deferrment to women. It is not patronization. It is not condescension. It is an old fashioned thing..called being polite.

Forgive the length of my comment. The gap between femininity and feminism is, I think, ironically huge and growing. And could very well be our undoing.

[Gabriel Sanchez]

Just to clarify...

I would not assert that the state of the military today reflects a situation where physical capacity does not matter. However, that is the direction we are moving in and, quite frankly, the whole world is moving in. If it becomes possible that physical capacity will no longer matter in war, then you have a situation where the brightest minds or the best strategists will be the ones staging the campaigns from start to finish. However, I do worry that if war should move into a far more mechanistic style, where will the casualties be found? How will victories be accomplished?

I suppose that's for another discussion.

[Dcn. Michael D. Harmon]

Perhaps I may be permitted to add a comment regarding combat. Before my ordination, I spent a bit of time in the Army -- 27 years to be precise, between active and reserve service. I was in the infantry (airborne) and am a Vietnam vet. While I understand that reading some of the things in the popular press may have led some to conclude that technical means are well on the way to canceling out the stresses of combat, I want to assure all and sundry that this simply is not true. Nothing will ever remove the necessity for tired, wet, cold, hungry soldiers to reach down into themselves for the last bit of determination it will take to grab a piece of dirt from another group of tired, wet, cold, hungry soldiers who will die before they give it up. And if you think women are suited to that task, you are mistaken.

Regarding sports, perhaps fans would rebel at the inclusion of women in contact sports. However, we have seen at the college level that a federal law, Title IX, has been so interpreted to favor women that hundreds of men's sports teams at various campuses have been elimnated in favor of (far less popular) women's teams. Admittedly, there's a lot more money in pro sports. But are you willing to predict that a court which is now willing to overturn a 4,000-year-old definition of marriage on the basis of a spurious view of "equality" would refrain from imposing a similar ukase on pro sports? You have more faith in liberals than I do.

[Gabriel Sanchez]

If you were to ask a commanding general on the eve of the Civil War if there would ever come a point in time where you wouldn't line up your brigades on the field of battle and march them in a line towards the enemy, he would have likely scoffed at you. If you told him that the great wars to come sixty years from then would involve digging trenches and using chemicals to chase the enemy out of position, he probably would have laughed himself half to death.

It seems to me no more asinine to assert that there may come a time when soldiering as we understand it now is eliminated than holding that it will always be a necessary part of military operations. If we could send carry out all campaigns from a distance or use automated robots to operate vehicles or stage close encounter fighting operations, we would. The fact the government already invests so heavily in that direction and has already made leaps & bounds in it is testimony to that being a very real possibility.

Again, on the women in sports things...

I stand by my belief that the market transcends liberal/conservative ideology and that pro-sports will continue to look to what sells tickets and not what is P.C. The ability for courts to touch sports programs as you mentioned above is limited by those which are funded by public money. If a school or university is going to dip into the public well for funding for its sports programs, it unfortunately has to deal with the consequences that come attached to such funding. Professional sports, as a private industry, does not.

[Jim Kushiner]

Just to clarify my original post and the matter of "self-defense" raised by William Luse: by instinct I defended myself more or less and do not recall being injured! The pummelling was mostly against arms raised in self-defense. No blow was returned; while most, if not all (I don't recall, exactly) were turned back.

[Tony]

Gabriel,

You are mistaken in your interpretation of how Title IX is applied. Recall that in the Grove City College case, the Supreme Court ruled that ANY college that accepted a dime of federal funding, even by way of student loans, had to abide by all of the federal regulations, including Title IX. That means that my own private Catholic college, which accepts federal money only by way of student loans, has to adjust its sports lineup to reflect the ratio of men and women on campus. The market has absolutely nothing to do with it. Indeed, market and community be damned, as far as the interpreters of Title IX are concerned: we scrapped a baseball team that perennially made the NCAA's, but took one of the last remaining areas on campus for intramurals and turned it into a fancy softball field, complete with press box and manicured grass and 190-foot fences, almost the distance, I think, of that nice Little League field in Williamsport. All kinds of people from the community used to wander over to watch the baseball; nobody cares about the softball.

A thought experiment: do away with athletic scholarships for college, let colleges fund (at modest levels) only such teams as command genuine interest, and what happens? Women's sports evaporate overnight. Men's sports? They enjoy a resurgence. Remember something called Junior Varsity? Nationwide there are probably tens of thousands of young guys who do not require the bribe of a scholarship to play the sports they love at a highly competitive level.

[Gabriel Sanchez]

Tony,

I appreciate your remarks, but I'm still unclear how anything I said is contrary to your explanation. It still does not extend to professional sports which is a private industry. College sports is another matter altogether.

Honestly, if a college is going to accept a dime of public money, then it has to be prepared for the legal and policy regulations that come with it; end of story. While I may not like the idea of women competing in men's sports in college and/or women's sports receiving more funding despite their lack of popularity, those are the rules. If a college wants to avoid them, it can go the route of Bob Jones University and remain exclusively private.

[Juli]

Quote:
For every biggish woman who can run a little bit and swing a nightstick, there are about fifty who can't, and whose claims upon the protection of men are undermined by the "liberated" example.

Some men are less equipped than others to defend themselves against other men. Should the biggish men avoid protecting themselves lest they undermine the safety of their smaller brothers? Isn't it better to avoid bullying altogether?

These sort of comments sometimes seem to refer to some imagined golden age in which all women were revered and protected by all (or even most) men - in which no women were abused or treated roughly or suffered as civilians during war. That naive picture does an injustic to the women who did suffer such abuse.

If we're worried that our (male) soldiers might lose some of their regard for women by serving alongside "soldieresses" (!), shouldn't we be equally worried that they might have to inflict violence on female civilians, however indirectly or reluctantly?

[Renee Zitzloff]

Backing up a bit to Lisa's comment on August 20. Lisa, I was wondering if you could define "feminazi" for me?

[Tony]

Juli:

I never said anything about a golden age. Why is it that people demand perfection every time somebody recommends a return to some form of sanity we have lost? Am I to refrain from outlawing abortion merely because I know that some people will manage to get one done anyway? I'm well unaware of that thing called sin. But your analogy simply does not hold. A big man who protects himself does not at all undermine the status of his smaller brothers; if anything, he serves notice that men can be counted on to fight when needed. And a small man can be a formidable opponent for a teenage thug. (Consider what you cannot have experienced: every man can tell about when he first realized that he was stronger, not to mention faster and more agile, than his mother. For me, age 11 -- but I was a late bloomer. At what age is the girl stronger than her father? For most, it's when HE'S near death.)

The same is not true of the female soldier. She is not protecting herself; she has entered a profession that demands fighting on behalf of others. She undermines the claims that women legitimately make for protection by serving notice that they don't need it to begin with. I'm not saying that men have always protected women -- no more than women have always kept their own souls spotless. But you cannot teach boys to protect women if at the same time you are teaching them that women enjoy fighting. And if you don't, on some level, enjoy fighting, then you have no business being either a cop or a soldier.

You are still illustrating a point I made on a previous post. I know I'll probably call down upon myself quite a lot of wrath here, but you really do not understand, in the marrow of your bones, the difference between enjoying a fight and being a bully. I don't blame you for that; it's something that most women will only understand from the outside, by observation, just as I can only understand the bond between a mother and a nursing child from the outside, by observation.

And what I'm saying is no more than the natural law. Even the pagan Lucretius said that when the savages first got together to fashion a social contract, they set aside the women and the children as not to be harmed in battle, as was just.

[lisa]

Renee,

I suppose "feminazi" is a take off Seinfeld's "soup nazi". I don't think there is an accepted definition. It's a word that slipped off my fingers. As used by me, it refers to women who resent being referred to in any way that connotes that they are different from men. They don't want to be called "the ladies", "the girls", "the fairer sex", "the weaker vessel"...they don't want doors opened for them (as they are perfectly capable of opening doors themselves), they feel completely alienated by the use of the word "man" or "mankind" and demand that all such instances of the word be changed to some gender neutral one.

Perhaps it's an unfair use of the word "nazi". At any rate, that's my definition.

[Juli]

"Feminazi" is a term popularized by Rush Limbaugh ... not exactly a master of subtle nuances.

[lisa]

I listened to Rush back in the days before he became an apologist for the Republican party. Perhaps that's where I picked it up. To focus on the coined term is missing the point, I think.

The point is that there are women who don't feel that God somehow slighted us by not making us men.

There are women who do feel slighted and resent those of us who do not.

There are women, women who are my friends, who poke fun at me for accepting my husband's role as head of the household and for deferring to him in major decision-making. (These women complain about being alone, ironically.)

"They" have changed my hymns, often refer to God as "mother", jokingly refer to God as "her" in my presence with no regard to how it offends me.

They want total acceptance of their views while they belittle my own.

Age is a wonderful thing. With it comes the ability to see one's life apart from society and it's most popular points-of-view. One realizes, finally, that the people who are yelling most loudly are not necessarily saying anything of value.

[r. hassler]

My wife fought me one time in anger - she beat me up. - enough said

[Bill]

My wife is and always has been capable of beating me up. Trust me, it only took one time, while i was disrespecting her, for her to prove her point. She was a college athlete and continues to work out daily. We have been married 15 years and I have never again challenged her role in our relationship.

[smithra]

So then, perhaps it should be established that in marriage, the man is required to be the physically stronger (probably also bigger) of the partners. I would think then that this should apply also to mental "strength" and agility. Often, the greatest protection and the greatest harm is a function of the mind. Let's get some serious physical prowess comparison standards and acceptable pairings ranges in place for marriage license approvals. This seems to me to be consistent with the general line of thought in this thread.