The domestic violence gender trap: Hope Solo, Ray Rice and the tired myopia of “women do it too”

[Triana]

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Perhaps we aren’t talking about domestic violence in women’s soccer to the same extent we are talking about the NFL’s violence problem because women’s soccer is not a sport with a long history of players being arrested for or accused of domestic violence. Or, perhaps we aren’t talking about domestic violence in women’s soccer because … we never talk about women’s soccer. Hess makes the point nicely. “But isn’t it more likely that the lack of public pressure in Solo’s case simply represents the relative lack of attention that women’s soccer receives as compared with pro football?,” she writes. “A mixed martial arts fighter who goes by the name War Machine is facing 32 felony charges in the brutal beating of his ex-girlfriend Christy Mack. Based on a Nexis search, that vicious assault has been covered in Macur’s New York Times in just one microscopic AP news brief. Might that be because mixed martial artists are less prominent cultural figures than NFL stars?”

So this is the trouble, in general, with false equivalences. They do a great disservice to both of the issues drawn in through the comparison. Hess calls the conversation demanded by the Times piece myopic, and I’d agree. A conversation about whether or not Solo should be on the field right now does not require smug finger wagging about inconsistently applied standards of outrage, it requires a grappling with how sports leagues handle violent offenses. (That’s a far more complicated conversation to have than many of us are willing to concede.) Condemning what Solo is alleged to have done does not require erasing a history in which men have systematically used manipulation and physical violence to dominate, humiliate and kill women. And scrutinizing the top brass within women’s national soccer for their calculus around Solo does not require us to insincerely argue that women’s soccer and men’s football are sports that receive equal attention in the media — that somehow it’s just this one time that the public has fallen silent in an otherwise robust conversation about the women’s national soccer team.

We are often asked to divert our attention from the systemic violence that women face with cries of “women do it, too” or “sometimes women lie about abuse.” When this happens, we are asked to take these claims — statistically and historically different — as the same. These are derailing tactics, more often than not. When we read about sexual assault, we are asked again and again to consider the incidence of false allegations. When we learned each new detail of Ray Rice’s brutal assault, we were asked to remember that Janay Rice hit him too. And now that we are using the NFL as the lens through which we can view our culture’s deadly domestic violence problem, we are being accused of unjustly focusing our anger. It seems that the only time people want to talk about the violence that women commit is when we seem to, for once, be talking about the violence that women experience.

Macur and Boren seem interested in “equality.” That the public have the same outrage over Solo’s alleged violence as we do over Rice’s brutality. I’m a fan of equality. But the conversation unfolding right now around the NFL and domestic violence is a conversation that, to me, centers on justice. (I was reminded of this crucial distinction again this morning by Brittney Cooper’s excellent analysis of the “future of feminism.”) It’s bigger than a handful of incidents, it’s bigger than the Ravens or the Panthers. It’s about the NFL, and it’s about the rest of us. Grapping with that requires an examination of context, history and power, precisely the elements that are lacking from the “where’s the outrage” critique Macur and Boren pushed.

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THE REST:

http://www.salon.com/2014/09/25/the_domestic_violence_gender_trap_hope_solo_ray_rice_and_the_tired_myopia_of_women_do_it_too/

[seabeyond]

1. excellent article and stated well. thank you. nt

[Donald Ian Rankin]

2. Punishment *should* ignore "history and context", but social response shouldn't always.

I think it's not unreasonable to treat the social issue of male-on-female domestic violence as different to the social issue of female-on-male domestic violence.

But every individual case should be judged purely on its own merits, not on the grounds of what "traditions it's associated with".

The difference is that cases of men beating people up are (much) more common than cases of women beating people up, not that they're more serious on a case by case basis.

So I think it's perfectly reasonable to spend more time talking about Rice than Solo, but not to talk about them both and advocate different treatment when you do.