Around 50 years ago there was an apparent gender parity between the number of husbands murdered by their wives, and the number of wives murdered by their husbands. Domestic violence research was just getting started, and very early during the 1970s, it came out that men were effected by domestic violence equally as often as women were. Despite this, the first domestic violence centers were all created for women. And the people who tried to advocate for male victims of domestic violence started receiving bomb threads and death threats from feminists who had vested interests in defending their narrative of male oppression. To this day, there are still very few resources for men who are abused.
Well something very interesting has happened in the wake of all of this. The number of women murdering their husbands has decreased substantially. And an academic concept has been created to explain this drop: the battered wife syndrome. It was argued that women weren't evil, murderous people, hellbent on killing their husbands. No, you can only ever say stuff like that about men. When a woman murdered her husband, it was because of self-defense. She was a victim who was pushed into a corner with no way out except to kill her abuser. This logic was so powerful that organizations were created to free wives who had been convicted of murdering their husbands.
What was overlooked in all of this was the equivalent concept of a "battered husband syndrome". It's not that men are killing their spouses at greater rates today than in the past. Men are simply stuck where they were in the 1970s. There are very few resources available to help men get out of abusive, and often legally / financially constraining relationships (due in part to the discrimination that men face in family court).
Nobody ever suggested that if we fought against domestic violence when it effected men, and gave men better options to leave those types of relationships (including better divorce options that don't ruin them financially), that there would be fewer wives being murdered. Not even people who supposedly care about the safety of women dared to make this suggestion. Instead, they went on a campaign to paint men as evil, villainous people, who would stop at nothing to abuse and murder women.
And where has this left us? Wives are still being murdered. Men are still put into situations where murder becomes their best option. And the kind of hatred and bigotry that men face from people who pin the blame on them has continued to run rampant and unchecked in society.
Where is the compassion for men? Or for women, for that matter? Is pushing a false narrative about violent men so important that we don't care about the actual victims? Could it be that when women are murdered, they are only used as pawns in this war to spread a narrative of hatred against men?
Men need better options in life. Men are unfairly discriminated against and unfairly put into situations that often result in either murder or suicide. And instead of helping men live better, more productive lives, all we care about is turning this around into a narrative of hate.
Men are not toxic, evil people. Men are suffering. And society has turned it's back on them.
