Week 17: Understanding Violence
Reforming abusive men isn't going to be easy. The state may need to show them who is boss.
This weekend in Australia there has a number of protests across cities against male violence. Australia has experienced a horror past few months with the murders of women by men. Aside from the Bondi stabbings which actively targeted women, other murders have been mostly been committed by women’s current or former partners.
Domestic violence is intimate terrorism. But it is also a form of social terrorism. It is driven by a set of political or social ideas – even if these are instinctive, rather than consciously expressed – and it sends a shockwave through all women in the country.
The protests were designed to place pressure on not only governments and justice systems to do better at addressing this violence, but also as a signal to violent men that their behaviour is intolerable. The response of justice systems is one thing, but the objective has to be one where the justice system is unnecessary due to violence against women being eliminated.
Yet the latter may be too hopeful, as there is a fundamental problem that we need to acknowledge. This is that there is a predatory instinct within many men. There are men who are actively seeking to harm and dominant women, and that this is the very reason why they pursue relationships with women. They see it as their natural right to hurt and control women.
This can be difficult for younger women to comprehend – that these men don’t think about relationships in the same way they do. Women don’t pursue men who they don’t like. Which is a logical approach, but not one shared by men. If I can be blunt about it, no woman is “hatefucking” any man, but this is a central concept in male sexuality.
A culture that expects and even encourages male sexual aggression makes this even more difficult to navigate. Our culture seeks to distinguish between acceptable forms of violence (“rough sex”) and other forms of violence like punching, coercive control and murder. We fail to see how the former informs the latter. Who men are in the bedroom is exactly who they will be in the rest of the house. Our current sexual culture is one of subterfuge. A way to normalise and then expand violence.
When love and kindness isn’t considered cool we’ve got ourselves a serious problem.
Although this is a culture that can be difficult to navigate, I think what it really is has become clearer to many younger women now. Movements like 4B in South Korea or Boysober, indicate that many younger women are seeing the risks of getting involved with men and choosing to simply to avoid them instead. This is a demonstration of agency within a culture that is clearly not beneficial to women. And one we should respect.
The problem is that this seems to be making men worse. Believing themselves to being denied a natural right.
While there is definitely a need to build healthier forms of masculinity, these instincts of violence, control and domination of women run deep. Many of these men will only understand the counterforce to their own fists as being a justice system that clearly demonstrates zero tolerance their behaviour. To these men – with their puny little brains obsessed with dominance and submission – the state has to prove that it is the alpha.
Moving the state to understand this, however, is difficult. As I wrote recently, the implicit bargain the state has made with men is one where the household is deemed men’s own domain. This a culture that runs deep, and even shifts in legislation have trouble changing it.
It will only be when the state sees its own capabilities through the capabilities of women that men’s violence will be understood as the social cancer that it is and tackled accordingly. Hopefully this isn’t too far off.
This Week’s Reading
Strengthening Australia’s Indian Ocean Engagement
Asia-Pacific Development, Diplomacy and Defence Dialogue (AP4D)
This week at AP4D we released our latest options paper on Australia’s engagement with the Indian Ocean, with a particular focus on South Asia. The paper is an attempt to flesh out some ideas in response to Australia’s recent-ish reconfiguring of its “immediate region” to include the Northeast Indian Ocean, alongside the Pacific and Southeast Asia.
We held a symposium to launch the paper on Wednesday. I crawled out from behind my keyboard to provide an overview of the paper and facilitate the Q&A section with some of the experts we consulted for the paper. We also had the honour of the Assistant Minister for Foreign Affairs, Tim Watts, providing a policymaker response to the paper.
This Whole King Trump Thing Is Getting Awfully Literal
Jamelle Bouie – New York Times
“Whether motivated by sincere belief or partisanship or a myopic desire to weigh in on a case involving the former president, the Supreme Court has directly intervened in the 2024 presidential election in a way that deprives the electorate of critical information or gives it less time to grapple with what might happen in a federal courtroom. And if the trial occurs after an election in which Trump wins a second term and he is convicted, then the court will have teed the nation up for an acute constitutional crisis. A president, for the first time in the nation’s history, might try to pardon himself for his own criminal behaviour.
In other words, however the Supreme Court rules, it has egregiously abused its power.
It is difficult to overstate the radical contempt for republican government embodied in the former president’s notion that he can break the law without consequence or sanction on the grounds that he must have that right as chief executive. As Trump sees it, the president is sovereign, not the people. In his grotesque vision of executive power, the president is a king, unbound by law, chained only to the limits of his will.”
The Mythical Masculinity Of Donald Trump
Frederick Kaufman – Unherd
“While Bly tells us that in order to mature we must return to origins, Trump simply asks us to regress. For it is not the lawgiver who rules the manosphere, but greedy child-men. Thus do infantile archetypes loom large in Iron John — and endure in the myriad of “Baby Trump” memes — Trump in diapers, Trump throwing a tantrum, tiny Trump cradled in Hillary Clinton’s motherly arms, Trump as the miniscule “MAGAlorian”. Such memes underscore one of the most harmful misunderstandings that set the modern male on his toxic path: Trump wants his followers to remain children — for children aren’t particularly interested in reasoned arguments, nor easily swayed by them.
“My power is great, greater than you believe, and I have gold and silver in abundance.” That was Iron John’s promise to his acolyte. It is also Trump’s promise to MAGA and the manosphere. Thus do hordes of Redditers, Snapchatters, Xers, Instagrammers and sundry other amo-packing denizens of incel message boards feel the pain of the billionaire who now stands trial for hiding hush money payments to a porn star. And here, too, Trump will rely on truths Bly articulated decades ago — that much like infants, his followers will “refuse to remember ugly facts”, that they will “look away from disorganisation, abuse, abandonment”.
Andrea Kendall-Taylor & Richard Fontaine – Foreign Affairs
“Global orders magnify the strength of the powerful states that lead them. The United States, for instance, has invested in the liberal international order it helped create because this order reflects American preferences and extends U.S. influence. As long as an order remains sufficiently beneficial to most members, a core group of states will defend it. Dissenting countries, meanwhile, are bound by a collective action problem. If they were to defect en masse, they could succeed in creating an alternative order more to their liking. But without a core cluster of powerful states around which they can coalesce, the advantage remains with the existing order.
For decades, threats to the U.S.-led order were limited to a handful of rogue states with little power to upend it. But Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the restructuring of interstate relations it prompted have lifted the constraint on collective action. The axis of upheaval represents a new center of gravity, a group that other countries dissatisfied with the existing order can turn to.”
Xi’s Imperial Ambitions Are Rooted in China’s History
Michael Sobolik – Foreign Policy
“The one unchanging constant in America’s China policy since Nixon’s meeting with Mao in 1972 is the steady commitment to regime change, either by commerce or competition. The underlying belief in the universal power of democracy has proved intoxicating. “If we can just make them like us,” the thinking goes, “we can turn an enemy into a friend.”
Perhaps this self-delusion is inevitable. America’s national identity is steeped in beliefs about liberty, equality, and opportunity. But the CCP’s heritage raises an uncomfortable question for the United States: Even if modern China were to become a democracy, would it cease to be the Middle Kingdom?
If the CCP collapsed and China followed Taiwan’s path of economic and political liberalization, would it suddenly lose its appetite for hegemony? Maybe. Then again, perhaps simplifying Beijing’s behavior to its current Communist Party overlords ignores thousands of years of China’s own history, as well as the strategic culture that informs those decisions.”
Luke Hallam – Persuasion
“Kant was also adamant that we have to make room for another type of reason, which he called “public” reason. There are spheres of life in which we should think, speak, and act as autonomously as possible. The paradigmatic case for Kant was that of the scholar. “By the public use of one’s own reason,” he wrote, “I understand the use that anyone as a scholar makes of reason before the entire literate world.” So even though, for example, “a pastor is bound to instruct his catecumens and congregation in accordance with the symbol of the church he serves … as a scholar he has complete freedom, indeed even the calling, to impart to the public all of his carefully considered and well-intentioned thoughts concerning mistaken aspects of that symbol.” (Emphasis added.)
Kant wasn’t saying that it is possible for a person to ever be completely free of external influence. But he did think that any age worthy to be called “enlightened” should foster the conditions in which independent thought can emerge—in which a diverse range of people might inhabit the role of “scholar.” Doing so requires putting aside factional, religious, political, and other prejudices and speaking for and to an audience that potentially encompasses the whole of humanity. In such cases there can be no tailoring the message, no yielding to ideological pressures or financial incentives. Kant argues that this is the difference between acting like a dignified human being and acting like a machine. When we think independently, without the influence of others, we are at our most human.”
Over on Lunch Hour Pops I’ve written a piece on the 20th anniversary reissue of the Manic Street Preachers album Lifeblood. An album that failed to gain much respect nor public attention when released, but one that time has proved very kind to.
