Early in last year’s movie The Holiday, Cameron Diaz’ character discovers her boyfriend is having an affair. She responds by popping him twice in the nose, knocking him down and making him bleed. You’re supposed to laugh, because he got what was coming to him, right?
I felt a little uncomfortable watching it, but promptly forgot about it until it was mentioned on an internet discussion of a new study on domestic violence. University of Washington researchers reported in the journal Victims and Violence that twice as many women admit to hitting, punching, or biting a partner over the last year than do men. Domestic violence, in other words, is not only male upon female, or even predominantly male upon female. Women are getting in on the action, too. And in other realms girls are also growing more violent. The nation was shocked back in 1997 when 14-year-old Reena Virk’s killers were discovered to be mostly teenage girls. Since then, though, we’ve witnessed so many other similar crimes it’s become almost commonplace.
Now I am not saying that violence by women is worse than violence against women. When men hit, they tend to do much more damage because they’re stronger. But none of this should suggest that therefore female violence does not matter.
And female violence is becoming both more common and more glorified, two phenomena which I’m sure are linked. Watch movies and you’ll see that a new form of female liberation is a woman kicking the living daylights out of a guy. Diaz should know this well, as she was one of the ones who spearheaded this new trend with the Charlie’s Angels movie. These girls didn’t even need weapons. Give them some stiletto heels and a bit of leather, and they were lethal.
Every woman should know how to defend herself, and I’m hoping my local YMCA will offer a female self-defense course I can take with my daughters sometime soon. I’d love to feel that I could fight back if I had to. But I’m not deluded. I only weigh about two thirds of what my husband does. He’s solid. I’m not. It really doesn’t matter how much I work out, I’m never going to be able to take him one on one. Sometimes the two girls and I all jump him at the same time just to see what kind of damage we can do. We don’t fight dirty—no nails, no biting, only brute strength. And we’ve discovered we don’t have any. We usually win only because he eventually collapses from laughing so hard.
When we glorify female violence, though, we might inadvertently make women believe that they’re safer than they really are. All over our media women are beating up men, so how hard can it really be? And it’s not only women who may think we’re capable of doing more damage than we can. Maybe men might start to think that, too. If men see women fighting back, then perhaps we’ll lose that taboo that a guy shouldn’t hit a girl. After all, if she can inflict damage herself, then what’s so horrible about it?
But women’s safety isn’t all that’s in jeopardy here. I think we’ve also discounted male pain. Think about that scene in The Holiday again. That man was knocked down and had his nose bleeding. That’s got to hurt. What if the roles were reversed? What if he had knocked her down and bloodied her nose to punish her for something? Would we have laughed? Not likely. And yet men’s pain doesn’t seem to matter. According to this study, living with a woman who throws frying pans, or scratches, or hits, is far more common than we think. And while most of these men may not be injured as badly as many female victims of domestic violence are, they still do hurt.
Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie got together after filming a movie in which they spent most of it beating each other up. In the aftermath, Brad’s marriage fell apart and his life changed completely. I can’t help feeling like the rest of us crossed a line somewhere, too. Men shouldn’t use violence except when necessary to defend themselves or someone else. But neither should women. I wonder if we can relearn that.
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