There’s a fallacy that abuse is about individual acts, and that you can measure the abusiveness of a relationship by tallying what people did to each other.
This ignores a basic truth about abuse, which is that you can’t abuse someone unless you have power over them.
The academic version of this fallacy has been doing the rounds in New Zealand. It’s being promoted by men who are terribly upset that there’s even one day a year where men are expected to take a stand against Violence Against Women. This coverage from the New Zealand Herald is fairly typical:
Professor David Fergusson and Associate Professor Richie Poulton said their respective long-term studies of people born in Christchurch and Dunedin in the 1970s showed that most domestic violence was mutual.
“In a high proportion of these couples, we are seeing mutual fighting. It’s brawling,” said Professor Fergusson.
In contrast, the commission is backing White Ribbon Day on November 25, which asks men to wear a white ribbon to show that they do not condone “men’s violence towards women”.
These men’s views of domestic violence and abuse are limited by the tool they used to measure it. Both studies used the Conflict Tactic Scale (CTS), a scale that measures individual ‘hits’, and the people who designed the scale have specifically rejected its use to compare men’s and women’s violence. I’m not going to argue the academics of the CTS; Ampersand did a very good job of this and Trish Wilson has a page of links. I want to make my point in a more basic way and I’m going to start with a really obvious example.
One of the questions the interviewees are asked is if a partner had ever: “Called you fat, ugly, or unattractive.” They seem to believe that statement is ungendered – it is equally abusive if a man says it to a woman as it would be if a woman said it to a man. To me, that is so unrealistic to be almost surreal.
I have known several couples where a woman does make comments about her male partner’s size (usually in the context of them both getting more exercise or eating differently). I have a problem with those conversations, and would rather not be around them, but the women are not being abusive, psychologically aggressive, or exercising any form of power (in fact it’s usually tied to the idea that women are responsible for their partner’s health). Whereas, I was at a pub six years ago with a couple I didn’t really know, and I can still work up rage at the man for telling his partner not to eat particular fries, because they were ‘fat sticks’.
Women are not set up to be the judges of men’s appearance and self-worth, so most women who comment about their male partner’s appearance are usually not exercising power. Whereas, men are given that power, and so such comments are far more likely to be abusive.
Obviously, there are many factors that could change this dynamic. Non-heterosexual relationships would obviously have a completely different dynamic, and the power related to appearance would likely to be much more varied. But that doesn’t stop that question being a really useless way of measuring psychological aggression.
I’d go further, I’d say other acts on the CTS list take different meaning depending on the power within the relationship. Let’s imagine a couple in a heterosexual relationship who are having an argument and in the course of this argument the man hits the woman. He doesn’t hurt her, but he’s stronger than her. This could be an assertion of power: “I could have hurt you, but I didn’t. No-one would believe that I hit you, no one would care if they did. Everyone knows that it’s wrong to hit your girlfriend, but I can hit you.”
Now let us reverse the situation: this time the woman hits the man. In this context hitting him could be a statement of powerlessness: “I can’t stop you, I can’t hurt you, I can’t do anything to make this stop.”
I’m not saying that everytime a man hits a woman it means something similar to my first example, and every time a woman hits a man it means something similar to my second example. What I am saying is that the meaning (and abusiveness) of individual actions is found within the power dynamic of that relationship, and in our society power dynamics within heterosexual relationships are going to be gendered.
Unfortunately it’s not just researchers who believe that you measure abuse by examining individual actions. I’ve found the idea all too common in people who are confronted with abusive relationships among their friends. Rather than looking at the power dynamic involved in an abusive relationship, I’ve seen people too easily slip into the classification of ‘mutually abusive relationship’ or ‘fucked-up situation.’
Power within a relationship isn’t a zero sum game – both parties can have, and misuse, lots of power against each other. I’m not arguing that mutually abusive relationships don’t exist, but that no-one should come to the conclusion that an individual relationship is mutually abusive without thinking about the power involved first.
‘Mutually abusive relationship’ as the default setting creates the idea of a perfect victim. If anyone who fights back is in a ‘mutually abusive relationship,’ then the only way you are entitled to support is if you don’t fight back. But if you react to the abuse, physically defend yourself, act jealous or fucked up by what’s happened to you, then you don’t deserve support, and people around can wash their hands and walks away from what they term a mutually abusive relationship.
As a feminist, as a human being, it is my duty and my desire, to support the powerless against the powerful, and to not wash my hands of women who fight back.
i’m not so naive to believe that the “mutual combat” idea has disappeared from the consciousnesses of MRAs (and the general public), but it’s sad to hear that excuse for violence against women trotted out time after time.
a good resource for information on this fallacy is a book called “Issues in Intimate Violence.” while the title continues the unfortunate practice of making “domestic violence” gender neutral, while most of it is committed by men against women, the text is much more sophisticated. the book includes critical analysis of the CTS and reports that men are much more likely to overstate “abuse” committed against them (by women) and that women are more likely to under report actual violence. (there are also a couple chapters on same-sex intimate violence)
it’s not a fun read, but it’s a good one.
Excellent point. As long as the role of power in abuse is ignored the problem won’t be understood in any meaningful way.
How is a woman hitting a man any different from the other way round? Or indeed a “weaker” man hitting a “stronger” man.
Surely to condone any violent, abusive behaviour is wrong and not what we should be doing. I would like to think we live in a equal world where I have a right to respond to any violence against myself irrespective of its source, a woman or a man hitting me is no different, its still someone hitting me.
Chris, you may like to think you live in an equal world, but that would make you a fool, painfully out of touch with reality. Maia wrote nothing condoning violence. Not a word. She does point out that attempts to measure and compare violence must be nuanced. Not just the obvious, that the vast majority of adult women are much smaller than the vast majority of adult men, and accordingly are far less likely to cause physical damage to their victim, but the more subtle: if the man is the sole breadwinner and hits the woman, it doesn’t just mean physical pain and emotional pain, it also means a threat about the entire future of the family.
In my experience, abusers tend to make a great issue out of the partner’s lack of control, all the times the partner raised a hand, how crazy and unpredictablethe partner was, and how they only ever responded in defense. The victims tend to report an escalating series of events, a clear pattern with prominent warning signs (if only they had been recognized at the time), and an array of behaviors used to exert control, few of them physical. I imagine I could tell within three seconds of listening to someone whether that person was the abuser or the victim, since the victim carries an enormous burden of guilt, and the abuser carries none.
Chris,
I was in a relationship… I don’t call it abusive but there were frequent physical interactions that were not to my liking. Anyone counting individual acts of violence would come to the conclusion that if anyone was abusive, it would be me. For instance, I made him bleed a couple times, even, and he never did me that kind of injury. He never even hit me. But he would restrain me, not let me leave the bed when I wanted to, hold me down when I was angry at him and wanted to walk away. He would pin me down such that I had bruises on my arms and legs. Hitting him, kicking him, or biting him was the only way I could get him to let me go.
I am not proud of causing him injury. But I certainly don’t think that what I did to him was anywhere near as wrong as what he did to me.
Thank you for this Maia. It’s interesting to think about these points in the context of the recent discussion on this site about how some feel that a woman can’t claim rape unless she fights back…
Thanks for the excellent discussion, Maia.
Attempts to quantify domestic violence will always be frought. The acts occur largely in private and can only be recreated verbally by both parties. This takes the violence out of the home and into the realm of language, and I think women and men are conditioned by society to talk about the violence differently, and to conceive of violence done to them in different ways (which was highlighted in the discussion of men’s and women’s recounting of verbal abuse).
It’s also a reality that in heterosexual couples very rarely does the woman have superior physical strength to the man. It is very true that a woman’s hit can be an expression of powerlessness as much (if not more often) than it is an expression of power – women who have ever had to try and brawl with a man may agree with me on this one… it makes you feel very powerless when you strike someone will all your strength and it doesn’t even leave a mark. Men’s physical violence is rarely an expression of powerlessness. Even if the hit does not do visible damage, it sends the message “I’m not using all my strength, I could do worse if you continue”, as Maia pointed out.
What I’m trying to get at is that even in a brawling situation the violence (or the *potential* for violence) is not equal.
Ah yes, the “women are just as bad” myth. Generally coming from men I suspect are hoping that their former partners’ attempts to fend them off are somehow “abuse”. I recall being held down on the ground once by a lover, with his hand in my mouth so I couldn’t scream or escape and I thought to myself, “I could bite him and maybe escape.” But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Had I done it, though, then that would have been the sort of thing used as MRA evidence that women are “worse” because my “abuse” to him to escape may have left a mark that his violence towards me did not.
Chris did you read my post – within the context of a relationship (or outside it) the person with more power hitting the person with less power, means something different than vice-versa. If you disagree with that statement argue against that, rather than something I never said.
Span, you make a great point about the catch-22 in many people’s attitudes about rape and abuse. Women who are sexually assaulted by partners can be called liars no matter how they respond. If she doesn’t fight back she can’t be a true victim, but if she does fight back, she’s a co-abuser.
Maia, you and others are right I did miss read the post thus my above comment is slightly dubious (though I do believe that neither side should abuse the other, and that building a tit for tat scale is perhaps not the most useful tool since people respond differently to different stimuli).
I can easily agree that a power differential in a relationship can make a violent or threatening act more effective, however the point I was trying to make is that I also don’t discount the effect of the other party as “not abuse” just because they hold less power, the effect on the other party may be different however it is likely to not be completely ineffective.
Chris has a point which cannot be ignored- that it is possible for a weaker person to be abusive to a stronger person. Call it the younger sibling dynamic- a weaker personaint of the abuses the restraint of the stronger person by hurting him or drawing blood, while the stronger person may not ethically respond. Like throwing rocks at police officers- there’s nothing brave about a woman slapping a man or biting him if she does so expecting him not to respond- which he absolutely shouldn’t.
Also, even though it’s uncommon, women are sometimes the bigger, more powerful person in a relationship (older, stronger, the main wage earner, etc. – less common, but it happens). Taking away the gender neutral language could be harmful to men who are in the less common situation of being abused, and I don’t really see how using it hurts women. The fact is that abuse is really about power, not gender. We all know which gender usually has the power, but that’s not the case in every realtionship.
“‘Mutually abusive relationship’ as the default setting creates the idea of a perfect victim. If anyone who fights back is in a ‘mutually abusive relationship,’ then the only way you are entitled to support is if you don’t fight back. But if you react to the abuse, physically defend yourself, act jealous or fucked up by what’s happened to you, then you don’t deserve support, and people around can wash their hands and walks away from what they term a mutually abusive relationship.”
This dynamic fits my experience as a child abuse survivor. When I didn’t fight back, I was seen as mewling fair game, incl. by authority figures outside the home; when I became withdrawn and troubled, the abuse, disguised as tough, no-nonsense parenting, was seen as justified, incl, by authority figures outside the home, at a point when I was trying to tell; when I finally said, no, and became actively angry, it was the apparent apex of defeat, and I “became” an unconscionable, inexcusable, bad-and-sick-in-the-head, and calling me shit, stupid, freak was seen as prescient, as victory. By that time, no one stood up for me, including a minister who admitted the whole church thought my parents were a little peculiar. I’d been seen the whole time as inviting it. Doctors, teachers, social workers, saw me as the only problem. I was being told to toady to stop the abuse, whereas people who psychologically need a scapegoat and whom no one is acting to stop will ALWAYS find something to abuse about. One is seen as toady-complicit, or rebelling and therefore the problem. Reactions to abuse highly OFFEND people who “rationally” know better. They get in on the chicken peck. Everyone washed their hands of me.
I’ve heard “if I did X to you, no one would ever believe you” outta people due to this, around bullying, which worked, the main perpetrator being favored by the teachers and very socially intelligent, and with my first boyfriend (did not start a pattern).
I didn’t know why the world though it was “ok” that things happened to me that I knew the world did not think were “ok.” I didn’t know why, what my “mark” was, or what affect and script to follow to not have it happen.
I think in part people want to placate abusers, because they don’t think they’ll change, and because they think the abusers are the more dangerous. I think this is what a lot of people think of men and women deep down, which is why so much control and blame women, and I think very, very deep down they are dimly aware that it’s a projection.
That being said, I can absolutely imagine a relationship in which two horrid people pick and crap at each other foully for decades. It could be equal picking and crapping. If they break up, or if one of them does get hurt, it might be parsed through stereotypes. I had a wicked mother and a soft enabling father, but have never, ever gone to the “women are as bad as men or worse and there is no social gender power dynamic” position. I’m between that view and “abuse is always unilateral and the woman is always the weaker.”
I don’t think I’m the weaker of the parties in that abuse, although nothing that I ever yelled back at my parents or did to them was even truly “delinquent.” I haven’t continued the cycle of abuse. I win. I live with all the anger and all the violence and ingrained deprecating messages and memories that come back to me daily like recurring trauma, and I live with them. I stare down revenge ideation and suicidal ideation every day and tell it no, I do not want to play, I don’t write it down because I will not play, there are things I don’t say because I will not play, and I go out with approximate dignity and treat others with general respect. I win. And now, I will not play.
This is exactly the sort of attitude that MRA’s go wild for. No matter what the action, the female did it because she is a victim. I think, just for fun, someone should interview kids and or young adults with this question. For now, just answer it for yourself. Who was more violent in my household as I was growing up, my mother or father? I PROMISE you there are violent women that are mean for the sake of being mean..not because they are victims. You condemn the mutually violent comment because you think it only works one way. Why do people insist on wearing those blinders? There ARE women that hit first, hit harder, hit more often, and hit with less reason then the men they are with. Methinks Chris is not the only one painfully out of touch with reality.
c, that comment was not directed at you in any way…appologies if it appeared that way. Trust me, I know mothers can be mean as spit. That is part of the reason I truly hate the current DV laws. If a father gets between a raging mother and her target he can be thrown in jail for DV, how is that for the ultimate in irony.
Ed:
Actually, what was condemned was making “mutually violent” the default assumption so that limited data isn’t used to prove something that isn’t true. As c.’s experience shows, the victim can easily be mistaken as the source of the problem.
Ed:
Who was more violent in my household as I was growing up, my mother or father?
Are you aware of how badly skewed the answers to your question will be because of the sheer number of fathers who show no interest in their children?
I, personally, do not believe that there are many women who are mean for the sake of being mean. If you observe it that way, you’re missing a lot.
“Actually, what was condemned was making “mutually violent” the default assumption so that limited data isn’t used to prove something that isn’t true.”
Ok, so in areas of violence you want “he did it” as the default assumption? This is better how? Everywhere you turn you hear about how the stories of female violence are justified or straight out lies. They are not either in many cases. I am not sure if it is mothers feeling entitled to whoop on the children because they “came outta me, dammit!” or what. With most of the people I talk to about growing up they recall being afraid of their father getting mad and punishing them. And they recall their mother GETTING mad and punishing them. Almost everyone remembers a version of “the stick” or “the flyswatter” or “the strap”. And more often then not it was wielded by an angry mother.
As for the power issue, what is a more uneven power base than ” I am going to take your kids” to a father who really does care? So quit playing the men have all the power card, it is old and lame. Women are just as sarcastic, biting and condencending of their partners as well. Unless you feel it is ok for wives to criticize husbands just not the other way around? Stealing someones dignity and respect from his/her peers or children is as bad regardless of the gender of the target. If you think women don’t powertrip, if you think there are not female control freaks in relationships, if you think you have to be male to feel entitled, you probably havent looked very deeply into the world.
As to the comment about the number of men who “show no intrest in their children”. You will sit there and say women are not mean for the sake of being mean and in the same breath say deadbeat dad’s are the default situation? Gee, we don’t have a skewed perception of the world, do we? I barely even sound bitter compared to coments like that. And what is no intrest? How many fathers have you ever personally met who was allowed or encouraged in his child’s life and wanted nothing to do with them? Are there men who don’t care? Sure, I am sane and can admit a fact. Is it more than the number of women who use their children as legal leverage, paydays, welfare tickets, or excuses for pity? That I doubt. So I guess one question to ask is it worse to be passively negligent or actively abusive? Neither is a good thing to the child.
So, ask only children who grew up in 2 parent homes, if it makes you feel better. Two parent homes with biological parents. See who gets pegged as more violent.
Is there a society somewhere in which power dynamics within heterosexual relationships are not gendered? Has such a thing ever existed?
You’re assuming that all women are so much weaker than all men that any physical violence from a woman to a man has to be “I’m weak and powerless and can’t really hurt you!” And then the man isn’t hurt and should shrug this off.
I have actually seen the mutual abuse up close and personal. My husband is legally blind, skinny, and was physically abused by his father as a teen. His ex-wife had a pathological anxiety disorder that led her to lie to avoid conflict. Based on what I’ve *seen* them do, what he’s done to me, and what they’ve both told me, here was the dynamic:
She would lie to cover up that she hadn’t done something she needed to do that she was too anxious, too distracted by ADD or simply didn’t want to do. Such as pay the electric bill.
He would find out when the electric was turned off, with two small children and no money in the house to get it back on because he thought it was paid and hadn’t accounted for the money. He would ger verbally abusive and confrontational and would block her in, berating her.
She would overload with anxiety and respond with full-bore physical violence — punching, bodyslamming, head-butting.
He would go all PTSD from having been beaten near death as a teen and would respond with equal force.
At one point they got into a confrontation because she had run off to have an affair and claimed she’d been carjacked. They fought. She tried to strangle him. He locked her in their office to escape and called the cops… who arrested him for locking her up.
I know, from spending seven years with this man, that he can be verbally extremely nasty when he’s upset, and that he has an unpleasant tendency to try to prevent people from leaving the scene of an argument. But I also know that he never hits first. Having been beaten many times in his life, being a skinny guy, and being legally blind, he will respond as if his life is in danger if he’s physically attacked, unless the attacker is *plainly* not able to really hurt him — like our children. But he doesn’t ever throw the first punch.
By the logic presented here, he was the abuser because he was verbally nasty (though it wasn’t abuse that she kept endangering their family by lying to avoid confrontation), and when she hit him, she was just expressing her powerlessness. And then when he hit back, he was simply an abuser attempting to control His Woman. The idea that he could have considered her an equal and been genuinely in fear for his life and safety from a person with better vision who weighed more than he did, because his upper body strength was superior to hers, is impossible because he has a penis. He has to take anger management classes and has to be taught that it is misogynistic and wrong to hit a woman or get angry at her; however, she is justified in slamming him to the floor and trying to strangle him because she was afraid of his abusive language.
Let me be clear here — I don’t exonerate either of them. They were poisonous for each other, but I recognize that my husband certainly *could* have stopped this cycle at certain points within it, and I hold him responsible for his tendency to be verbally abusive when mad and his desire to keep people he’s arguing with from leaving and cooling off. That’s bad. So is hitting a man who hasn’t hit you first. Full stop. You don’t get the right to hit first just because you have ovaries and you “feel” powerless. And if you do hit first because you “feel” powerless, what happens when you hit a man who also “feels” powerless? And why does a woman get a free pass for hitting because she “feels” powerless but a man who hits because he “feels” powerless is an evil abuser?
Abuse follows power. Well, what happens when both parties have power? If one party can drive and the other can’t, who has power? If one party has a job and the other doesn’t, who has power? We envision power dynamics as always going male -> female, unless they very explicitly go the other way around. But in an actually egalitarian relationship *both* parties have power. If money is a joint property and one person is responsible for paying the bills, that person has power, even though the other person *could* step in and start paying them. Whenever we trust, we give power to another.
I have considered myself a feminist since I was 3. But to me, being a feminist means that men and women are equally human. If in the middle of a verbal fight, a short guy hauls off and belts a big guy, and the big guy hits back, legal culpability usually states that the short guy is at fault for starting it, and the big guy fought in self-defense, unless his return attack was so brutal that it was excessive force. We can’t have a separate rule for women because women “feel” powerless. We’re not children. If we hit first and in the resulting fight we end up getting injured worse, IT IS STILL OUR FAULT unless the force used against us was in great excess of the force we delivered. And in the absence of other abuse markers (jealousy, controlling behavior, isolating from friends and family), we cannot say that the man in a “mutually abusive” situation is invariably and solely to blame.
So no. I will agree that men are responsible for *worse* abuse than women, I will agree that men are responsible for more abuse than women, but I will not blanketly exonerate any woman in a “mutually abusive” relationship because she happened to be a woman. If you slap someone and they punch you, I’m sorry, you had fault in that. Maybe reasonable force would be that they slapped you back rather than punching you but you can’t claim you did nothing to provoke the punch either. Just as if you insult and berate someone and they hit you, you had fault in that. (Though I personally think that the bright line for the *most* fault is always who hit first.)
You’re projecting things onto the post that aren’t there. No where does Maia say, or imply, anything like “all women are so much weaker than all men.” No where does she advocate “blanketly exonerat[ing] any woman… because she happens to be a woman.”
You seem to be determined to assume anti-male prejudice whether or not it’s actually there.
As to the comment about the number of men who “show no intrest in their children”. You will sit there and say women are not mean for the sake of being mean and in the same breath say deadbeat dad’s are the default situation? Gee, we don’t have a skewed perception of the world, do we? I barely even sound bitter compared to coments like that.
That was bitter? I’m not only confused, I think we’re talking at cross-purposes. how are ‘women are not mean for the sake of being mean’ and ‘many fathers show no interest in their children’ mutually exclusive?
You clearly live in a very different world to the one I’ve seen. Frankly, if women were as you say I’d be terrified of encountering one.
My comment on fathers not showing interest was based on 2-parent homes that I’m familiar with.
But back on-topic – I’m with Maia on this one. Mutually abusive should not be the default presumption in cases of DV even where the woman has reacted physically towards her partner. The situation is much more complex in many cases.
For one thing, I recognise Denise’s scenario. I also punched and scratched a male several times when he didn’t hit me. All he did was hold me down and rape me. What sort of ‘equal power, mutual brawling’ scenario can you call that? And who is more at fault – me for defending myself or the guy who was able to use his weight to control the situation?
There’s a huge difference in lashing out in self-defence or to protect someone, and hitting for punishment.
(note that the guy concerned did later say he wished he had hit me, because he thought I deserved it)
Mutually exclusive? Are you sure you understand that term? I never said they were. I said that assuming men are unintrested in their children is a negative assumption to human nature and assuming women are never mean for the sake of being mean is quite the opposite. It shows extreme bias against the males and that you are probably even more bitter than I am. Of course I live in a different world than the one you have seen. It has long been known and recognized that a man (person for those of you that dont like using the masculine as the default in the english language) “can not live outide his own mind”. We see the world as ourselves regardless of how much we try to do otherwise.
My real problem with all of Maia’s assumptions are that she recognizes male power but refuses to recognize female power. I think that it was said best so far by Jane. When we choose to trust someone we give them power over us. When we love someone, that gives them power. When we share property or children with them..THAT gives them power. Physical strength is one type of power amid a multitude of others.
If you truly believe men don’t feel powerless in relationships I pity you for your lack of understanding of people, not just men.
Ed: I didn’t say ‘never’ and I didn’t say ‘all men’.
You claimed a problem that I had said both at the same time – I presumed you meant they must be mutually exclusive (cannot exist in the same sphere).
I don’t think saying that men, in general, are uninterested in their children is biased. I could name one man who I know who does spend a lot of time with his daughter and is protective of her. I’d have to think really hard to find any more.
That’s the world I live in.
The power argument is a whole different issue. Perhaps a few men do feel powerless – but I don’t believe it’s comparable. Legally things have got a lot better in the last decade or so (divorce laws etc) but it appears to be swinging the other way now.
A decade ago, a woman who walked out on her husband could lose everything except, in most cases, the children.
Economics and the law are not the sole domains wherein power resides.
Power doesn’t just come from societal distinctions between men and women. Individual characteristics such as insecurities, talents, abilities and proclivities can affect power as well. A woman might not have the power as a woman to denigrate a man as a man, but she might as an individual have some power to take advantage of some weakness that he as an individual possesses.
I claimed that a blanket MEN BAD in the same breath as a blanket WOMEN GOOD makes you sound even more bitter than I am. I said nothing about one comment contradicting the other.
That only works if you think that “women don’t tend to be mean just to be mean” = “women good”
which is sort of damning with faint praise, i think. my rats are not axe murderers. that does not make rats = good.
also, “many men i know are not interested in their children” does not = “men bad.”
i suspect, though i’m not sure, of course, that sophie would agree with the statement “men don’t tend to be mean just to be mean.” i doubt, however, that this means she thinks men = good and men = bad simultaneously, as would have to be the case were the statements she’d made so easily reducible to superlatives.
Thanks mandolin.
Making blanket statements like female=good /men=bad doesn’t help any-one. It can be hard to avoid when you’re talking generalities.
My first statement was to call Ed out on his suggestion that asking who children experienced more violence from would ‘prove’ women were as mean as men.
I think he’d get the results he’s looking for. But not for the reasons he’s expecting. The burden of child-care falls almost wholly on women, and in almost every culture physical discipline against children is approved and encouraged.
I’ve never heard a man accused of being mean for the sake of it. It might be helpful to everyone to drop the ‘for the sake of being mean’ entirely and be open to the reasons behind individual incidences of violence.
“I’ve never heard a man accused of being mean for the sake of it. ”
Good point.
I agree witb your others, too.