Dave Pellowe
Dave Pellowe is a Christian writer & commentator, founder of The Good Sauce, convener of the annual Australian Church And State Summit and host of Good Sauce’s weekly The Church And State Show, also syndicated on ADH TV.
I think it’s entirely uncontroversial to state quite clearly that all criminal violence is wrong, and all murder is wrong, and every reasonable effort should be made to mature our society to the point where such behaviour is unthinkable. So why it is so hard to say without qualification?
[First, an aside. I’m not trying to offend anyone, but I am trying to be critical and constructive about the widespread vilification of men by feminists and so many unthinking others just regurgitating the “current thing”. Offence is a choice, so if you’re certain I’m wrong, don’t be unhelpful – persuade me and other readers in the comments with logic, data, sincerity and civility.
This is longish, but persevere because I’ll offer a real solution to the real violence problem beneath my analysis of the popular narratives. Yes, there will be many reactionaries who dismiss my solution ideologically, but their ideas are already proven failed/destructive.]
“Women are victims, men are violent”
IF YOU’VE BEEN listening to the Lying Harlot Media, politicians or feminists for the past few weeks, you’d have noticed an increasing volume of complaints about “violence against women”.
One headline shocks:
A woman is being violently killed in Australia every four days this year.
Is there any other way of being killed – “non-violent murder”?
The article uses the same gendered, exclusive language as is seen everywhere – men are killing women. It quotes a professional lobbyist whose organisation only exists to end violence against women:
“…Another woman has been killed allegedly by men’s violence…”
“…A shocking rate of violent deaths of women this year that exceeds anything Australia has experienced in recent years.”
Last year saw 64 Australian women “violently killed”: a rate of one per 5.7 days. Of course, anything over zero is terrible.
This year, after 114 days, 26 women have been murdered: a rate of one per 4.4 days.
But that’s including the psychopathic mass murder event in Bondi which any responsible statistician would exclude as an outlier, not part of a relevant sample of endemic male behaviours. If you do exclude Joel Cauchi’s psychotic rampage in honestly assessing our culture, the rate reduces to one per 5.4 days this year, just slightly higher than last year.
But we’re told this is a “crisis”, and I can’t help noticing our media and governments love using that word.
Here’s why I’m not buying that narrative.
Only 31% of homicides in Australia in 2022 (most recent data from ABS) were women.
Let me interpret that for you.
Men are being killed at more than twice the rate of women, and no one thinks that’s a crisis. No one’s holding rallies or protests or marches or vigils or starting DV shelters or getting government funding to “solve” the problem or getting wall to wall media coverage or high profile, major party politicians speeches clutching their pearls about violence against men.
The modern proverb “follow the money” might cause critical thinkers to observe the federal budget is only weeks away, the perfect time to pressure governments to be seen to be “doing something”. Like every grievance industry, real solutions only mean an end to rivers of cash from government to charities, so this won’t end well for any victims of violence or vulnerable others.
Actually, it’s not that simple
Men are being “violently killed” at a rate of one per 1.4 days. And do you know what the feminists and their useful idiots say when I point this out? It’s not, “Wow, I had no idea, that’s shocking,” or “Gee, you’re right – violence and homicide is a way bigger problem than I knew.” What they say, dripping with condescension and venom, is:
“Yeh, but men are doing it.”
They are saying men deserve it, or at least don’t deserve any concern or active interest in solutions because men are the identity group which is disproportionately represented amongst perpetrators, and the data is undeniable.
95% of male victims of violence and 94% of female victims have experienced violence from a male perpetrator.
It’s worth noting though that feminists frequently deny female violence is a problem at all, or give mere lip service to the phenomenon. Yet 28% of male victims and 24% of female victims of violence in Australia have experienced violence from a female perpetrator.
The rates of men suffering domestic violence or abuse is less than women, but still significant. Add to those rates the fact that men are much less likely to report being abused by a women.
The ABS reported as recently as 22 November 2023 that:
- 17% of women and 5.5% of men have experienced domestic violence
- 23% of women and 14% of men have experienced partner emotional abuse
- 16% of women and 7.7% of men have experienced partner economic abuse.
The problem isn’t just that women experience violence, or that men are violent. All violence is a serious problem that deserves to be taken equally seriously.
Transparent excuses for creating division
The first example of feminist hypocrisy is observed in the double standards of calling one woman killed every four days a national crisis but calling a man killed every day undeserving of comment let alone activism.
The second example of feminist hypocrisy is the rationale for alarmism over violence amongst the male identity group is thrown out the window when applied to violence amongst the Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander (ATSI) identity group. Have you seen feminists en masse marching in every capital city about rates of domestic violence and child sexual assault experienced in remote indigenous communities and a greatly disproportionate rate, and labelling every politician not there as not caring? No, because they’re hypocrites.
The third example of feminist hypocrisy is their arbitrary scale of horror which holds violence in the home as more evil than violence outside the home, the place where about 70% of female victims experience violence, as opposed to male victims, 70% of whom experience violence elsewhere.
The inconsistent standard is their typical, shameless, political support for a cultural normalisation of making the womb the most dangerous place in Australia for anyone.
Cancer killed 29,300 Australians, heart disease killed 24,400, and dementia killed 13,700 in 2017. These top three causes of death according to the ABS killed 67,400 people, while the number of living humans killed in abortion clinics numbered between 70,000 to 100,000. That’s at least 95 little girls, deliberately killed, every day.
No, the home is not even close to the most dangerous place in Australia to be a female.
The godless amorality of feminism dares to claim a vain right to “violently kill” (poison and/or tear limb from limb) a unique, living human being at any stage of gestation for literally any reason – including just being female – and then has the two-faced audacity to say that violence in the home is worse than all other violent behaviours.
Every argument “violence against women” alarmists offer is hypocritical at best, and maliciously divisive at worst.
Every innocent human life, at every stage and in every circumstance, is sacred, is inherently entitled to freedom violence, and is worth defending. If you can’t agree and join the fight for justice for all equally, you are part of the problem.
“It’s the culture, stupid”
Let’s talk about what feminists seem incapable of: a real solution to violence against women specifically. First, we must identify the real problem.
The problem isn’t masculinity, it’s the corruption of culture. To reform masculinity, we must first know the design and right ordering of masculinity as well as femininity. The last place men should look to define masculinity is feminists, the likes of which call it “toxic”.
The sexual revolution was as harmful to Western society as the Bolshevik Revolution. was to Russia. It was an upheaval of right ordering and an abandonment of virtue.
Leftists have waged a war of attrition on the British identity, institutions and virtues which made Australia largely prosperous, happy and culturally coherent. Discarding as liabilities the assets which made us a destination of choice for immigrants and refugees, we’ve becoming culturally amorphous.
Christianity, traditional marriage and family, patriotism and civic duty, personal responsibility and voluntary charity in strong communities have been character assassinated. They arbitrarily decided every other culture should be reverenced and ours should be apologised for and force diluted until it was unrecognisable and nobody knows what our identity is.
Women are now popularly celebrated in pop’ culture as sex objects for male gratification. Not in so many words to be sure, but nevertheless the public sexualisation of women in outdoor billboards and public shopping centres means the message that women appease appetites is subliminally inculcated from well before the first crush.
This message is comprehensively reinforced by the ease of access to the most explicit, gratuitous pornography for anyone with an internet connection at any age without any gate. The images seen there treat women with gross disrespect, as mere flesh for the gratification of any male appetite, including violence.
The social rush to fully liberalise prostitution in Queensland and other Australian states is just the latest symptom of the normalisation of abusing women.
Just as no one can validly consent to being a slave (the proper understanding of “inalienable” rights and freedoms) no one can validly consent to the dehumanising commodification of their sacred sexuality.
The Biblical conception of the tri-part nature of man is that people are more than the sum of their saleable parts. Your identity is far beyond intersectional identity points exhibited in your body.
You are an eternal spirit, you have a soul (mind, emotions, intellect) and you exist in a body until you pass through the veil of physical mortality. In totality, you are made in and bear the Image of God, and this separates you from the rest of Creation as uniquely beyond value.
To reduce someone to flesh for sale or rent – or any other abuse – is to profane the sacred. This teaching alone would raise the bar of culture and consequential public policies so significantly that sustained reductions in abuse of women must ensue.
Our lack of national identity, cultural nihilism and moral relativism has created the perfect storm for the kind of extremes feminists complain loudly about – but along with other critical theories, they created the storm.
Go back to where you went wrong
Feminist delusions about sameness between genders must be actively overthrown.
Boys must be raised to be chivalrous gentlemen: to stand for their sisters and mother, then all ladies when they enter the room, get on the bus or enter the train carriage. They should open the door and wait for ladies, and ladies must thank them for the gentleness and good manners, and never take offence or rebuke them for it.
The society which scorns chivalry has absolutely no right to feign surprise about degradation of respect for women.
Feminists and “femicide” alarmists chide all men for the extreme violence of some, claiming it’s all men’s responsibility to encourage men and boys to not slam doors or make rude jokes about women and other lessons in “toxic masculinity”.
Everyone scorns wife beaters – it’s one of the most humiliating things a man can be accused of. No one approves of hitting women, so insisting we do more to teach boys and men the obvious is entirely redundant.
Instead of seeing other men treat women as literally the same, boys should see their fathers, uncles and more men treat women with special honour.
Instead of seeing their mothers, aunts and more women flaunt their sexuality, draw attention to their cleavage and reveal far more skin of their chest and thighs (if not bottoms) than any one would ever think appropriate for a man in a workplace or public street, boys should grow up considering any man or woman’s sexuality as not a thing for public consumption.
Pornography, if not banned, should at least be an opt in, age restricted industry like online gambling.
Buying a prostituted person should be a criminal charge with mandatory disclosure to family and employers, instead of the abusive misogyny of dignifying such sexual violence as a legitimate career choice. The slogan “sex work is real work” is as morally incomprehensible as “slavery by consent”.
Feminists reading this far are by now incandescent with rage. But multiple decades of promoting gender “equality” (sameness) and sexual promiscuity hasn’t helped one bit. If anything, it’s created a monster.
Men and women, having been told they are the same, should work the same, be paid the same, play sport the same, vent the same, and in endless ways expect the same as their gender opposites are experiencing an inexpressable yet understandable frustration.
Many dare not attempt to articulate the latent dissatisfaction with an inability to relax into gender norm’s, having been indoctrinated to resent and reject them by a reality-resistant social upheaval.
“What?! You want to stay home, have babies, educate them yourself, nourish your husband and children, run the home and be a full time mother?! What’s wrong with you?!”
That’s the voice of toxic feminism in the heads of so many mothers who devote all of their lives to the harder work of traditional family, instead of gilded factories.
The sacred institution of family has been vandalised by moral relativists in utter ignorance of the failed Bolshevik experiments in undefining marriage and traditional gender roles.
A century ago, they abolished inheritance and legalised abortions. In some cities, more babies were killed than born. Yet following the normalisation of “free love”, juvenile delinquency rose to such rates that laws had to be passed punishing parents for their kids’ crimes.
Women were freed from the “slavery of the kitchen” and released straight into the factories to compete with men. Divorce became so easy that even the hard left communists introduced increasing fees for subsequent divorces!
The Russian government claimed a superior wisdom in raising children. Bolsheviks claimed state institutions show that “the social care of children gives far better results than the private and irrational care of individual parents who are loving… but ignorant” about their own children.
Does any of this sound familiar? By the mid 1930s even the fearfully politically correct Russians had denounced the “family revolution” as a “Left deviation” and sought to restore the institution of traditional families.
The proof is in the pudding. If my arguments have merit, one would expect to see less abuse of any kind in fundamentally Christian households.
Sociologist Brad Wilcox, from the Institute for Family Studies, contradicted some terrible reporting from the feminists’ ABC. He writes:
My research suggests that wives married to churchgoing evangelical men are comparatively safe. In the National Survey of Families and Households, husbands and wives were both asked if their arguments had gotten physical in the last year, and, if so, if they or their partner had “become physically violent.” By these measures, churchgoing evangelical Protestant husbands were the least likely to be engaged in abusive behavior.
The narrow path
Men, if you want to be a better man; ladies, if you want to be safer in your home – become a churchgoing, Bible-believing Christian and marry one. God-ordained masculinity isn’t “toxic”, it treats women and children as Christ loves His Bride the Church.
The Godly, Christ-like husband isn’t a bombastic bully let alone violent towards his bride, but is safe, self-sacrificial and generous. Fathering as well as mothering needs to be honoured as a high calling, not vilified by culture.
How much of this conversation is due to broken homes and marriages? I dare to suggest, a disproportionate amount of it.
This cultural revolution has been as spectacularly unsuccessful as the Bolshevik one. Feminism is the opposite of Christianity, and you have to choose your culture and pass it on intact.
Don’t choose what’s sold as popular and easy – the wide gate and broad way – because it leads to destruction. Do what’s right and good, even if hard and unpopular.
To reiterate my salient point, the corruption of culture is at least a significantly contributory, fundamental underlying cause of the problem feminists now selectively complain about so loudly, divisively – and ironically.