“Men are always whining about how we’re suffocating them . . . Personally, I think if you can hear them whining, you’re not pressing hard enough on the pillow.”Thus read the sample greeting card a recent magazine advertisement touted as “the card Thelma got from Louise before they headed out on the road.” Admittedly, this clever little quip got a chuckle out of me. Until I realized that if the roles were reversed – that is, if the card had shown a man joking about murdering his wife – my killer feminist instinct would have been violently unleashed and I would have started an anti-domestic violence crusade against American Greetings.Thus we are introduced to a staple of American culture: the double standard. As a reformed biter and scratcher (you know, the kind of little girl who got her kicks mauling young boys who wouldn’t dare hit her back), I find female violence against men sort of interesting, and rather undiscussed. You don’t hear about it much in the news, aside from an occasional Bobbit-type scandal. Violence between the sexes is usually portrayed in the news and the movies as men hitting women. When a woman kicks a man’s butt, we gals treat it like some sort of symbolic victory and hoot and whoop. But women hitting men isn’t any funnier than men hitting women. Sure, a jab from me might not hurt as much as an overpowering slam from someone as strong as, say, the studly Nathan Crabbe, but it’s the thought that counts, right?A friend told me a story about something that happened in his dorm: he got in a verbal argument with a female, and she got so mad that she hit him. It didn’t hurt awfully, but he wasn’t quite sure how to handle the situation. Should he report the attack to an authority even though the punch didn’t hurt very much, and risk being looked at as a “wimp,” or should he just ignore what she had done? If it had been the other way around, with him hitting her, you can be sure he would have been swiftly and severely disciplined.How many of you men have been hit or scratched or kicked by a female when she got really angry? How did you react? My guess is you probably didn’t do anything except get really pissed off. A lot of women, although they do not necessarily think that violence is the best way to handle an argument, seem to think it is not quite as “bad” if the assailant is a woman and the victim is a man.Several cultural factors contribute to this double standard – factors which tell us about how we feel about men and women. First of all, because of the prevalence of male-on-female crime in this country, women might be more likely to see a not-very-painful blow as a serious attack rather than an innocuous gesture of anger. Also, men seem to tolerate violence from women in a way that they don’t from men. They know that they shouldn’t hit back, but would rather ignore the attack than report it and admit that it had hurt or bothered them – they’re so manly they’re just supposed to shrug it off.Women aren’t supposed to be able to hit hard, so to admit that a punch from one was unacceptable to you might somehow be implying that you are a sissy. Of course such double standards exist throughout our culture: “girl power” and “girls rule” T-shirts with no equivalent for boys, and the countless degrading jokes and buttons about men that (hopefully) would be seen as sexist if they were the other way around. The only way to achieve equality is to apply the same codes of behavior to everyone. Violence is not OK just because it might not “hurt as much” coming from a girl or woman. Both genders should be able to control themselves equally when they become angry. So next time you punch your guy friend in the arm for saying something silly, think about how you would feel if he punched you just as hard. And next time you see one of those girl-clocks-boy-for-cheating-on-her scenes, maybe don’t whoop quite as loudly.
Jessica Weeks is a regular Lantern columnist who could quite easily kick the tar out of any other writer on this page.
