How did you cope with the fact that even if he loved you, even if he made no sexual demands upon you, your husband or male lover was likely to kill you?
I'm sorry, but this is utter nonsense.
No,
iam3KBS, you are wrong on a point of fact. Feeling no need to repeat what I wrote up-thread about high rates of maternal mortality, I content myself to stating the obvious. These rates indicated a near-permanent and lethal female vulnerability to men that men in no way share, and is in no way offset by another male vulnerability to women.
Maternal mortality is not a monocausal explanation of male-female relations. Culture matters hugely. Individuality matters hugely. I am inclined to discount the role of testosterone almost entirely, despite the obvious and real difference it does play in characteristic male vs. female patterns of aggression in species or situations with dimorphic patterns. Physically healthy human males of the same culture can and do vary hugely in their attitudes towards women, sexuality and violence. Antony Beevor, who is one of the few military historians to pay serious attention to rape, is very instructive here: in
Berlin , he tells the story of, if my memory serves, a Soviet tank lieutenant who had lined his platoon up to rape a German woman. Coming upon the crime, his divisional commander shot him on the spot. (I have the Soviet Army on my brain these days.)
Furthermore, as a writer whose past work has focussed on military matters, I have found that men with high decorations for valor strongly tend to be unusually kind and gentle in their interpersonal dealings, a finding I've verified by asking veterans who have trained other soldiers.
In other words, maternal mortality is key terrain. It does make male violence, even lethal violence, against women look normal and natural, if not right. It does make man look like so natural-born a killer that he even kills his mate in childbirth---
and then has to somehow live with that aweful knowledge, and somehow redeem himself if he can.
This is a far cry from implying that I think, as you did when you wrote,
Some few men are brute barbarians, but the vast majority are most definitely nothing of the sort.
Any argument that depends on the assumption that vast majority of men are just itching to brutalize women is null and void...
Wholesale demonization of half the human race does not strike me as a useful means of protecting anyone...
ETA: If I
thought that most men were brute barbarians and if I wished to engage in wholesale demonization of half, or even the entire species, I would do so unmistakably. I intensely resent any attempt to mischaracterize my writing to that end.
Erin Solaro