Blindness
You know, talk about housework, and you always hear the same excuses: "Oh, I'm cleaner than he is" and "I just notice more." Worse yet, you hear the same statement from guys, "She's cleaner than I am, why should I live up to her standards?" and "She just notices it more." Noticing is an interesting thing. Once you see something wrong, at least morally, you're responsible for dealing with it. 'Not noticing' is no excuse but everyone uses it. Many people therefor develop blindness. Then they expect other people to take them by the hand and lead them around while they passively resist and protest innnocence; they didn't know, they didn't mean it, it's not their fault they didn't notice half the human race. It's not their fault that they never once questioned any sexist thing that made their lives conveniant. It's not their fault that they're really not interested but they sure want to fool people.

Women are the primary objects of this blindness. When we get blamed, it's front page news, yet to read the papers you'd think that women were frumpy heads of state or child murderers and rape victims, with nothing in between. In some areas, however, blindness is not enough. In order to deal with the awful reality of wife-beating people resort to all kinds of camouflage so they don't have to deal with the fact that one half of the population---the bigger, stronger, half that also makes up the majority of government, law enforcement and politicis---regularly beats up the smaller half. This is bullying. In smaller populations of minorities, one sees the same phenominon, with the added complication where men who have been subjected to abuse themselves turn around and turn women into their punching bags. As long as they keep it to themselves, no one much cares.

Approximately three thousand women die every year at the hands of men who love them, attempting to escape or having finally been beaten to death. One unasked question looms large:

What would society be like if these men did not have women as their punching bags?

One thing which people are particularly eager to turn a blind to is the way an abusive man has many faces, and that these are deployed for different people. He deals with frustration by beating his wife or girlfriend, then when the cops show up, he is calm and peaceful, having gotten rid of all that aggravation. His wife, however, may very well be a mess, the picture of a bad victim, nagging, hysterical, shrewish. Yet the stereotype of the overly emotional woman works against her; this is the type of women that manly men are apt to denounce as whiney. No one likes a tattler, either. The victim of the batterer, therefore, runs afoul of so many stereotypes that she gets no sympathy at all, and no one notices the stereotypes because they make it possible for everyone to feel good about dismissing a victim. These stereotypes also make the battered woman so revolting, so beaten that in fact they encourage men to abuse her.

The abusive man will show you the face of the section of his character that he needs you to see. He assesses people, especially women, according to what he needs from them, and so there are always women he treats very well. He does not abuse his boss, his friends, or his coworkers. He is very skilled. His wife is the only one who sees his fist, and because people see the pleasant face he shows the outside world, they find it impossible to believe such a change can occur. The same problem occurs in date rape cases, where the rapist has some women friends, and regards others as prey. Men who are lower on the social ladder may lack the sophistocation to pull off this level of manipulation, and may be generally anti-social to all. Even so, there will be a marked division between the way they treat men and women. Men are potential friends; women are the enemy, yet they are necessary to have children and to have keep men from engaging in homosexuality, which is a constant fear amongst men who hate women. Because he loves and respects only other men---even as he fears them----the feelings he has toward women are complicated and negative. The woman exists for him, for his purposes: she is to have no needs of her own, and to require nothing of him. Should she make demands, in fact, she is the one who has transgressed, and deserves punishment for such effrontery. This also presents the ability to bond with other men, which to a certain extent crosses all boundaries. Men who hate women will enjoy the company of other men who hate women, and hatred for women is the norm and not the exception. Men have to hate women, otherwise what they do to them would make them monsters. This is why stereotypes of women are so intractable and must be resisted so ferociously. These stereotypes justify hatred of women, and hatred of women is the excuse both for more abuse and for male bonding of the most loathsome sort.

Women, in all their loathsomeness, serve as a passive reflector of male identity. What women are primarily supposed to do is be the opposite of men. His identity is confirmed, and all with the least amount of effort on his part. This passivity makes him lazy, yet also infuriates him, because it puts him in the position of reacting to an awful thing like a woman. This is why sexist men constantly complain that women have so much power, because they must react against stereotypes of womanhood in order to prove their masculinity. While it benefits them becuase it requires they merely be better than a revolting stereotype, it also places them in the position of responding to creatures they find disgusting. They cannot relate to wmoen, because women are the things they need to find revolting to use. Their yearning for male company is a constant nagging thing, and yet because they have concieved of sex to be an act of conquerer/territory, they cannot see sex between men as anything but an act of emasculating one of the men. Gay men, and their relationships of equals or human beings, terrify the abusive man as much or more than does a woman's demands that he regard her as a human being. Humanity would require that he take an active role in shaping his own character, that he not merely bounce off others his whole life, that he be an individual who must care about others, even while he must assess everyone. He has been made an empty shell by his own sexism with nothing individual left after a lifetime of adhering to masculinity's rules---which, after all, give him amazing amounts of social power if he knows what he's doing.

The abusive man is incapable of seeing women as anything but stereotypes, whether good or bad, and often thinks in extremely simplistic terms. There are good women and bad women, and he is the sole judge and jury who determines their fate. Sex is the primary method of judging a woman's character, because she is a thing like a car, and her value goes down the more owners she's had. As a consequence, he cannot show her off, either. She must be something valueable. It's all about his standing amongst other men. Whatever else, if he a master of women, then he is a man, and in the end while that might be all he's got, it links it to other men, no matter who they are.

No abuser of women is ever honest about it. No abuser goes to a first date and says flatly that he will treat her well to get her hooked, then slowly start wearing her down, separating her from her family and friends, and finally start hitting her and blaming her for it. This also enables the abuser to claim that it just happened, that their relationship is bad and look what she made me do.

While all women can be abused, women in abusive relationships tend to buy into traditional gender roles more often as well. They believe that a good woman's love can change a man, that if they were just more patient he'd change. After all, he says he loves you. Between beatings, he is a nice guy, and she might relax, believing it's finally over. He never makes announcements as to his plans for her, though, so she's always responding to him, wary of inciting another blow. Nothing, it should be said, will enrage these guys more than a woman who fights back, unless it's early and decisively. By the time she's beaten down he's gotten used to having total control: resisting and leaving are threats to his identity as her master. He's put in a lot of time and effort to creating the perfect woman.

Sexist men are not just blind to doing housework 'if you just ask me'. They're also blind to what other men do to women. If they get away with it with small things, they will move onto larger things. Then they complain about women's responses to both active and passive sexism. While they don't 'see' the acts of other men, they are very conscious of the way women react. They get angry not at rapists, for example, but at the way women respond to the threat of rape. They get angry at women defining for themselves the acts that men force upon them---the debate over political correctness is all about who defines what, and why the powerful should not be allowed to define the powerless.

Sexists must be blind to any one woman and any one man becuase there is a sameness, a normality, to every rape and every rapist. As has been said before, most rapists are, in effect, the boy next door. They are not traumatized, they are not abused, they are not intoxicated. To notice one is to notice how unnoticeable he is. To notice one rape victim is to see them all. Women are told they must merely protect themselves while absolutely nothing is said to men. This leaves rape unchecked, with women stuck in the position of responding, yet again, to male acts while society does nothing but blame them. Eventually, if we do nothing, every woman will be a rape victim, and the definition of the crime must be changed so that only the most severe cases are punished. With society determined to be blind when it comes to the acts of men, passive or active, women are left highly visible. Men not only attack them, they then hide behind them.

The key fact, the most desperately-avoided facet of this whole system is this: the reality of size and strength. Men are bigger, stronger, faster. They often have more military experience than do women. More than that, they are taught to be confident, while girls are taught to be humble, demure, well-behaved. When men abuse women, they face male cops, male judges, a male system. Most of all, though, they are choosing as their punching bags people who are on average forty to fifty pounds lighter than them, who do not know they are about to be attacked, and who would not be permitted to get in the same boxing ring with them were they another man. That is merely fairness. How come when the victim is female, we don't see the brutal size difference, when elsewhere her smaller size is used to justify protecting her from good jobs, promotions, and various things which do are never held against men of the same size?

The next time someone cries blindness, remember that it's apt to be self-inflicted. There's no longer any excuse for this.