Maryland Commission for Men's Health Report on Domestic Violence (2010)

MenAreGood

July 23, 2024

I wrote this report when I was the vice-chair of the Maryland Commission for Men’s Health in 2008-2010. This was one of three reports that The Maryland Department of Health tried to deep six. It took us a year to track down what they had done and the reports finally made their way to the legislators. (The story of this event was a chapter in Janice Fiamengo’s excellent book Sons of Feminism: Men Have Their Say.) They really didn’t want this to get out and they succeeded since it was a year late. It was written with the idea of giving legislators a good sense of the bigoted path the domestic violence industry had taken in Maryland. It continues to be a good summary of how the feminists have built a lethal anti-male industry. It is amazing and shocking how little has changed since that time. Sad too.

The attached image was not a part of the original report. lol I couldn’t resist.😀

Perhaps the most confusing, perplexing, and controversial area in which men’s health needs are overlooked is the issue of male victims of domestic violence. One immediately noticeable trend is the strong tendency to focus solely on female victims and ignore male victims. This tendency is seen repeatedly. Most media, whether print or electronic, focuses on female victims of domestic violence and all too often fails to mention male victims. Almost every article in the newspaper and every program on TV about domestic violence focuses on female victims. We see the same focus in academia: courses in sociology and women’s studies repeat the message that women are the primary victims of domestic violence and rarely mention male victims. If you look on the internet at web sites of domestic violence agencies you will likely see a similar bias.1 One oft-quoted statistic is that according to a Department of Justice report, there are 1.5 million women each year in the United States who are victims of domestic violence. What you don’t see is that the same report also found that there are 834,000 male victims of domestic violence each year in the United States.2 Rather than adding the two and saying 2.3 million Americans suffer from domestic violence each year, all too often the only statistic highlighted is the one about women. One side of the story is told and the other side is ignored, as 834,000 men are omitted. Nationally, we have the “Violence Against Women Act” which boldly excludes men from its name. The National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges (a national group that teaches judges on the issue of domestic violence) offers a typical description which includes women but seems to minimize men: “Domestic violence puts millions of women and their families at risk each year and is one of the single greatest social ills impacting the nation.”3 There is no mention of men who might be at risk. Most organizations promote the idea that females are the overwhelming majority of victims of domestic violence. The general public has heard that message for decades and believes it to be the sole truth. But is it?

The National Council Against Domestic Violence (NCADV) offers a similar message that women are the vast majority of the victims of domestic violence. According to their definition of domestic violence: “There is not a typical woman who will be battered – the risk factor is being born female.”4 If “the” risk factor is being born female, that seems to exclude men from sharing the risk. But a look at their own statistics compiled from state governments tells a very different story. In the state of Maryland, according to NCADV statistics, men comprise 23% of the victims of domestic violence, and women are 23% of the perpetrators.5 Maryland State Police statistics reveal similar estimates, listing men as 25% of all victims of domestic violence.6 These numbers are confirmed and even exceeded when compared with peer-reviewed research. What you find is that men are a sizable portion of the victims of domestic violence, a much larger portion than is usually mentioned through a variety of sources. In fact, peer-reviewed research reveals that most domestic violence is characterized not by one person abusing the other, but by what is termed as “reciprocal” violence: a brawl between two partners.7 The bulk of the research also suggests that women are more often the initiators of the violence.8 This sharp contrast between the commonly-held public view of women as the vast majority of domestic violence victims with men as the sole perpetrators, versus the research and statistics compiled by authoritative sources, paint pictures that are hard to reconcile.

The domestic violence agencies in Maryland are obviously comprised of a compassionate group of people dedicated to fighting a horrible problem. The Maryland Commission for Men’s Health wholeheartedly agrees with them that domestic violence needs our attention and our resources. The issue that the commission finds worrisome is that it appears that only a part of the problem of domestic violence is being addressed in earnest: the female victims. The other parts are taking a back seat: male victims and female perpetrators. Due to this imbalance, some Marylanders go unserved and left in great pain.

There is a saying among NASA engineers that “an ounce of thrust at takeoff can mean thousands of miles down course.” The ounce of thrust that has thrown the domestic violence industry off course is the idea of holding men and masculinity solely responsible for the incidence of domestic violence. In its early years as a cause, many of those working in domestic violence assumed that men were the sole cause of domestic violence and, of course, women were seen as the only victims. It was this contention that has limited their vision to see the complexity of domestic violence and its many victims both male and female, heterosexual and homosexual. Over the years, various organizations and individuals have tried to offer feedback that males are in need of treatment as victims and females are in need of attention as perpetrators, but all too often their voices go noticably unheard.

How did things get to this point?

When domestic violence activism first started in the 1970’s, the leaders were mostly feminists who were rightly concerned about the lives and safety of women. What they saw was shocking: situations where muscular men were beating innocent women. Very quickly these stories started making their way to the media. People were shocked and outraged. The activists kept the stories flowing to the media and the media continued to alert the public to the truly awful horror stories. The feminist activists applied their ideological template to the issues of domestic violence. In the 1970’s, the feminist template presumed men were a major cause of women’s problems and were a large inhibiting factor holding women back from a variety of opportunities. Phrases like “all men are rapists” and “men are pigs” were commonplace. Men were routinely disdained and blamed. The horror of males committing domestic violence gave some reason to believe that these early misandrist stereotypes of men might hold some truth. Uncaring men, using their power to control and beat women, were observed repeatedly in these domestic violence situations, and this led to the assumption that it was men who were the underlying cause of a grievous social problem. Sadly, we now know that this idea of men being the underlying cause of the problem represents a truth but simply not the whole truth. What we now know is that although the stories of women being beaten by bullying men were certainly true, they told only part of the story. Researchers today characterize domestic violence as being 25% men beating women, 25% women beating men and 50% being more of a brawl between the two people.9 The brawling and the violent women had been overshadowed by the more shocking and outrageous examples of helpless women being beaten by bullying men.

This statistical breakdown of 25%-25%-50% is a shock to many and very difficult to believe. However, we have already seen how the premier national domestic violence organization, the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence (NCADV), verifies that in Maryland, for example, men comprise 23% of the victims and females 23% of the perpetrators of domestic violence. Why would people not believe this to be the case? Could it be that an ideology that holds men as the primary culprits in incidences of domestic violence continues to inhibit them from seeing situations in which men are victimized by abusive women?

The feminist idea that men are wholly responsible for domestic violence found immediate traction. The horrible situations that were being reported were all of abusive men terrorizing defenseless women. This sort of scenario struck a chord in both men and women who heard these reports. The women were moved due to their own compassion for other women and children who might be vulnerable and in need. The men were moved since an important part of the man’s biological and social sex role is to provide and protect for women and children. Seeing women abused by out-of-control men was a very strong call to action for most men. It is little wonder then that most states quickly developed laws and the beginnings of support for these female victims. By the 1980s, only a few short years from the early activism of the 1970s, many states had already put domestic violence laws on their books. That’s moving pretty fast, for legislative bodies, who are known for their tendency to be circumspect when introducing whole new classes of penal laws.

What prevented evidence of other forms of domestic violence from coming to the surface? One answer to this question comes from one of the original domestic violence activists, Ellen Pence. Pence was the author of an important book about domestic violence and the influential Duluth Model (discussed below). She was also the founder of the Duluth Domestic Abuse Intervention Project. Pence admits that there was an effort to avoid issues related to women’s violence and highlights the neglect of female abusers:

In many ways, we turned a blind eye to many women’s use of violence, their drug use and alcoholism, and their often harsh and violent treatment of their own children.10

Why would the original activists “turn a blind eye?” Did they not see that turning a blind eye put many innocent people in jeopardy? One of the reasons was surely that the theoretical framework of men being the “only abusers” left no room to see women as anything but victims. The norm for viewing female abusers came to be that a female abuser was considered to have been “abused in the past” and was acting this way out of hurt and self-defense, not evil or anything else. Their view of domestic violence simply did not allow room for the possibility of the woman as the abuser, plain and simple. As in all things, if your theoretical framework doesn’t account for a phenomenon to exist, it is much less likely to be recognized. It is also probably true that the media showed more interest in the stories where women were abused by men. These stories touched a cultural nerve and therefore sold more papers and air time. People wanted to read about female victims, but were not so interested in hearing about males who were abused by women. The early activists must have found that they could get the word out much more quickly and more powerfully by focusing on stories about men beating women.

The focus on male batterers and female victims has left us knowing a good deal less about female batterers. How could the less-physically powerful women ever batter or intimidate men? What we have since found out through research is that violent women make up for their lack of physical strength by using weapons and the tactic of surprise.11 In domestic violence situations, women will often use weapons when men are vulnerable. Think of Lorena Bobbitt who severed her husband’s penis while he slept or Mary Winkler who shot her husband in the back with a shotgun while he was sleeping, or Clara Harris who ran over her husband with her car as her daughter sat next to her. All are examples of women committing domestic violence by using the element of surprise paired with lethal weapons. Interestingly, none of these murders or incidents was ever portrayed by the media as domestic violence. The words “domestic violence” seem to be reserved exclusively for male-on-female violence only. When women do choose to be violent as in the above examples, muscles simply don’t matter. A shotgun will beat muscles every time. The national figures for the United States show that 30% of spousal murders, the most lethal form of domestic violence, are committed by women against their husbands or partners.12

It wasn’t just the domestic violence activists who intentionally ignored women’s violence. Our culture also tends to look the other way. For whatever reasons, a woman’s violence is simply not as upsetting to see. Just watch television shows or movies to see the frequency of women hitting or kicking men. In today’s world it is a given for women to hit men on TV but not the other way around. Everyone sees this but few seem to get upset or to protest. We are living with a huge double-standard where a woman’s violence against a man is something we see in cartoons, movies, commercials, or TV as innocuous or even comical. We see plenty of violence from men towards other men but when we see violence from men towards women it is seen as anything but comical or innocuous; it is seen as deadly. This double-standard likely increases the chances for women’s violence in relationships to be overlooked by the media, the general public and by domestic violence workers.

It is also likely true that once these activists were looking for funding for their endeavors from the government or private institutions, the stories about “vulnerable women in great need of safety” brought much more attention and promises of funding than did a similar story of a man being abused by his wife. Every politician wanted to be seen as the one helping solve this problem by “making women safe in their own homes”. Those stories about men as victims simply didn’t have the same traction. No politician wanted to touch those. For them, rather than help male victims in their lobbying for funds, the stories of abused men would likely muddy the waters and detract from the powerful images of women-in-need. The stories about men-in-need were also completely counter to the growing ideology that men were the source of all domestic violence. An abused man simply didn’t fit into that framework and would likely have decreased the success of any unisex funding efforts.

It is easy to see how the ideology of men as the source of the domestic violence problem likely developed over the initial years of domestic violence activism. It fit with the image that the media was helping to portray. It fit with the feminist idea that men were “the problem” and it surely helped in advocating for domestic violence funding. There were good reasons simply to not bring up men-as-victims.

The Duluth Model

In the early 1980s an important event transpired in the history of domestic violence prevention. A group of domestic violence activists met in Duluth, Minnesota after a particularly gruesome murder of a wife by a husband. The group started to put together what would eventually become the “Duluth Model”, which has since become a staple ideological protocol for most domestic violence agencies in the US. In some states, its use is mandated. In many ways it has become the handbook for those working with domestic violence victims and situations. It is important to understand the initial questions asked by the Duluth gathering at the inception of the Duluth Model theory. Here are questions asked by those at the initial gathering: “Why is she the target of his violence” “Why does he think he is entitled to have power?” “How does the community support his violence?”13 As you can see from the questions, the Duluth Model at its very beginnings was only about male violence towards women. It was never about mutual violence or a woman’s violence towards a man. It was only about men beating women. It had no remarks or suggestions for abused men or about female perpetrators. The flagship theory of the industry only focused on women as victims and men as perpetrators. Australian author Tom Graves has evaluated the Duluth Model and lists its major problems. Here are the first three:

1. It believes that violence is masculine and that men are responsible for violence
2. It refuses to remark or address the fact that men can be the recipients of violence
3. It holds only men responsible as change agents.14

These three errors play a huge part in the failure of the Duluth Model to address the needs of male victims and the needs of female perpetrators. Let’s hypothesize a possible example of the damage that can occur from stereotyping victims of domestic violence: Imagine both wife and husband have been drinking. The wife, in a burst of anger, throws a wine bottle at her husband who was hit on the arm as he blocked the bottle. The wife next comes after him with a wine glass and tries to throw wine in his face. He blocked that also and in the process, the wine glass breaks and cuts his wife. The police arrive. They find a bleeding and crying wife and a husband who claimed that he had been attacked. Their Duluth Model training has taught them that the vast majority of victims of domestic violence are female and so, what do they do? Arrest the man and put him in jail! No matter how much the man might try to explain his actions, the police would likely refuse to listen. In fact, once the wife realizes her husband was going to jail, she would probably start to tell the truth, that she was the attacker. The police would of course hear none of it and off to jail the man would go.

This man would be placed into a mandatory Duluth Model domestic violence “educational” group. He would not be allowed to speak the truth of what had happened. When he would try to explain that it was his wife who had attacked him, he would be told to be quiet and focus on his violence. The truth of his being abused would be seen by the group leaders as an “excuse” that keeps him from taking responsibility for his violence. He would be forced never to mention his wife’s violence. He would have two choices. One would be to tell the truth and not “graduate” from the educational sessions, which would leave him legally vulnerable. The other would be to lie and say he was the abuser. We could guess that this man would choose to lie simply in order to ”graduate” from the “training”.

This sort of example shows how the system can take on the role of what is being called a “third party” abuser. The spouse no longer has a need to batter. The police and community agencies are now taking over that role by treating the falsely-accused man in a manner that lacks respect for him as a human being who has been abused or as a citizen with the right to be presumed innocent or to have his side of a given unwitnessed incident fairly considererd. This is what can happen when pre-judgments arising from stereotypes are used instead of impartial mindsets coupled with factual analysis.

Since its inception, the Duluth Model has been reworked and made more “gender neutral”, but it continues to fail miserably in its capacity to address the needs of men who are victimized and of women who are violent.

If you visit the Duluth Model web site, you can see that their primary focus on female victims continues to this day. The Duluth site claims that women account for as many as 97% of the victims of domestic violence.15 We know from both police reports and from peer-reviewed research that this is far from the truth. It does however show that the Duluth Model continues to be focused on female victims and has failed in taking current thinking and research into account, thus placing male victims at risk and allowing female perpetrators to go unchecked or psychiatrically untreated for their abusiveness.

The Duluth Model spreads to the community

As the domestic violence industry grew, the Duluth Model took a greater and greater hold on the theoretical practices of domestic violence agencies. As it took this greater hold, the ideas of domestic violence being only about men beating women spread farther. As funding grew for domestic violence agencies, the funding for trainings grew correspondingly. The 1994 federal Violence Against Women Act started pouring about one billion dollars per year into domestic violence endeavors. A part of that money was spent on trainings given to the court systems, judges, police, lawyers and domestic violence workers. The message the workshops broadcast was founded on the Duluth Model ideology that women were the vast majority of domestic violence victims and men were only a tiny minority. More and more, the ideas of the Duluth Model became the standard. It was presented as fact that domestic violence is pretty much only about women being abused by men. That ideology is now set firmly in place. The early work of the activists has focused exclusively on abused women and now the theoretical framework that guided their work is firmly planted in an ideology that focuses on female victims but ignores the needs of male victims and the actions of female perpetrators. Now these ideas have been spread successfully into our community agencies and public institutions.

Opposing Voices to the Duluth Model — Researchers

Murray Straus, Richard Gelles, and Susan Steinmetz are early researchers on issues of domestic violence. This group published a book in 1982 that ran counter to the feminist ideology. The book, Behind Closed Doors,16 said clearly that domestic violence was a two-way street with both men and women responsible as perpetrators and victims. The response was swift and powerful. Upon publication, Straus, Gelles and Steinmetz were immediately seen as enemies. Prior to their findings that there is gender symmetry in domestic violence, they had been praised and held in high esteem as instrumental in the early research on domestic violence. But once they found data that contradicted the feminist belief that men were the only perpetrators and women the only victims, things changed drastically. At that point, they lost their glow and became villains to those who supported the ideas of women as the only victims of domestic violence. Death threats and other avenues of intimidation were used to try to silence them. Murray Straus, Ph.D., describes his struggle with intimidation and explains his own reluctance to publish his results that went counter to the feminist domestic violence ideology:

Researchers who have an ideological commitment to the idea that men are almost always the sole perpetrator often conceal evidence that contradicts this belief. Among researchers not committed to that ideology, many (including me and some of my colleagues) have withheld results showing gender symmetry to avoid becoming victims of the vitriolic denunciations and ostracism. Thus, many researchers have published only the data on male perpetrators or female victims, deliberately omitting the data on female perpetrators and male victims.17

In essence, these researchers were being bullied. In fact, Straus published a paper in 2006 that describes not only the intimidation they suffered but also chronicles the specific ways that the feminist researchers made certain that their own data only produced the desired results that reflected the ideology that women were the primary victims of domestic violence.18

The research by Straus, Gelles, Steinmetz, and many others which clearly shows that men are victims has been available through journal articles for years.19 Some activists have drawn from the statistics and findings and tried to use this information to change the system to encourage existing services to include focus on male victims of domestic violence. When activists make such attempts, they are usually met with the same results most every time: the domestic violence industry claims that the peer-reviewed research is inaccurate and cites numbers from their own clinical settings, hospital settings, and emergency rooms. The numbers they cite are very different from the research numbers and clearly show that domestic violence is indeed primarily a “men beat women” problem. So who is correct? The quick answer is BOTH. The research numbers from scientists such as Strauss, Gelles, and Steinmetz are correct from their perspective and from the populations they studied. These numbers were usually drawn from the general population and reflect the “average” person or family.

But how about the domestic violence agencies numbers? Well, they are correct also, but one must note that the sample they draw from is very biased. They draw from a population that has been utilizing services specifically built for women who were abused. It is little wonder that they would therefore be more likely to show greater numbers of female victims. Imagine a hospital that was built specifically for the treatment of caucasian diabetics. When they look at their own numbers and stats they would assuredly say that the majority of victims of diabetes are white! Since their services are built to serve whites, that is exactly what their stats will show. One would also assume that they would be teaching in the community about whites and diabetes and also do Public Service Announcements for whites who might have diabetes. The same thing happens within the domestic violence industry. The entire system was originally built for women. The name of the law the Violence Against Women Act makes that very clear. It is little wonder that the statistics they compile and the research done within the domestic violence industry on their own populations would reflect that women were the primary victims. You see this idea filter down to the clinical level where almost every group for domestic violence victims in Maryland is for women only. The treatment groups are almost always built for male perpetrators and female victims. The overwhelming majority of public service announcements on domestic violence are focused on female victims. When you solicit for a certain type of victim, it is no surprise that your statistics, trainings and treatment will center around that particular type of client.

Opposing Voices to the Duluth Model — Clinicians

While the peer-reviewed research has been noting male victims for years, the clinical side of the equation has now started getting noticed. In 2007, the American Psychiatric Association published an article in the August issue of Psychiatric News titled: “Men Shouldn’t be Overlooked as Victims of Partner Violence.”20 The article cited some of the research findings about women being more likely then men in relationship to initiate domestic violence and focused on issues of reciprocal interpersonal violence versus nonreciprocal violence. Here is a quote from the article:

Regarding perpetration of violence, more women than men (25 percent versus 11 percent) were responsible. In fact, 71 percent of the instigators in nonreciprocal partner violence were women.

And another:

As for physical injury due to intimate partner violence, it was more likely to occur when the violence was reciprocal than nonreciprocal. And while injury was more likely when violence was perpetrated by men, in relationships with reciprocal violence it was the men who were injured more often (25 percent of the time) than were women (20 percent of the time). “This is important as violence perpetrated by women is often seen as not serious,” Whitaker and his group stressed.

The word is getting out that both men and women are perpetrators and victims of domestic violence.

Opposing Voices to the Duluth Model — The Courts

The courts are also starting to take notice of the discrimination that men face in the domestic violence industry. In the Woods et. al. vs California case in 2008, a Superior Court in Sacramento, ruled that male domestic violence victims had been unconstitutionally denied services. The court held that state laws violated men’s equal protection rights by excluding male victims from state-funded domestic violence services. The court found: “domestic violence is a serious problem for both women and men” and that “men experience significant levels of domestic violence as victims.”21 The court also found a percentage of state-funded programs deny men services they are entitled to receive.

Then, in October 2009, a West Virginia judge struck down state rules for regulating domestic violence shelters because they operate “on the premise that only men can be batterers and only women can be victims” and “exclude adult and adolescent males from their statutory right to safety and security free from domestic violence based only on their gender.”22

Are there men who fall through the cracks?

We have seen how the domestic violence industry has had a history of blaming men and masculinity for domestic violence. This sort of theoretical assumption has a negative impact on the willingness of men to seek help. The men, not unlike the early female victims of domestic violence in the 1970’s who were very reluctant to seek treatment, are certain that no one cares about their situation and are highly unlikely to seek out services when not invited. What compounds this problem for men is that their gender is blamed for the original problem.

We have learned from Maryland State Police statistics that men comprise about 25% of the victims of domestic violence in Maryland.23 What we don’t know is the percentage of males seeking treatment as victims of domestic violence. In checking with a number of Maryland Domestic Violence agencies, they often say that the number of male victims is very small. Some of the treatment centers claim that men are only 4% of their clients. If the State Police count men as 25% of the 20,000 victims of domestic violence recorded annually in Maryland and the agencies that offer treatment for domestic violence say that men are only 4% of the victims that request treatment, that seems to leave a huge number of men who are untreated victims. It seems likely that a large percentage of the 5000+ men who are reported by State Police as victims of domestic violence in Maryland are falling through the cracks and not getting the help they need and are entitled to as citizens and residents.

What once started as a righteous cause to help battered women has evolved over the years to be something that seems to help battered women but also seems to neglect the needs of violent women and battered men and ignores the imperatives that the fundamental demands our tradition of justice holds dear. Both the media and academia seem to focus solely on female victims of domestic violence, with a much smaller focus or none at all on male victims. Researchers doing peer-reviewed research have consistently found evidence that men and women are both victims of domestic violence, but this finding has not been translated to changing the treatment that men receive in domestic violence agencies. Clinical groups such as the American Psychiatric Association are beginning to alert the public and clinicians that men are indeed a sizable percentage of domestic violence victims. The courts have also started pointing out the discrimination that is present in many domestic violence agencies that treat men and women differently.
This report is not claiming that men are never served through domestic violence agencies in the state of Maryland. It is however claiming that Maryland’s domestic violence services have traditionally been created for women only and this has a chilling effect on men’s usage of these facilities.

A Proposal For Practical Change

There is a domestic violence group named “Safe For All” that offers trainings nationwide and is particularly aware of the many issues around domestic violence, including those of male victims and of people in homosexual relationships, also an under-recognized and under-served group. Their web address is http://safe4all.org/24 The National Family Law Legislative Resource Center, www.nfvlrc.org25 represents the nation’s leading authorties, clinicians, and researchers on domestic violence and could also offer trainings and consultations.26

Although calls to Maryland shelters and crisis lines to test for discriminatory handling of reports have at the present time not been conducted, there is no question such testing can be conducted and most likely will be conducted in order to support lawsuits similar to the successful ones used in the legal cases in California and West Virginia cited above. The results of such testing in Maryland would likely mirror these results: In a national poll by Clark University, female researchers studied 302 abused men who sought help. Their key findings were that 63.9% of men who called hotlines were told they only helped women, and 68.7% said the hotlines were not at all helpful. Of those that contacted a local domestic violence (shelter) program, 95.3% said the program gave the impression that they were biased against men, 78.3% said they don’t help male victims, and 63.9% suggested the male caller was the batterer. (See; http://clarku.edu/faculty/dhines/results.htm.27 )

Therefore, in order to avoid costly and time-consuming lawsuits, it behooves the State of Maryland to require all domestic violence service organizations that receive pass-through federal funding or state funding of any type to receive training in non-discriminatory but practical approaches and techniques for handling domestic violence cases and suspected or reported cases. Such training is available via the two organizations referenced above, and also from others.

Whether or not gay and heterosexual men represent a small minority, a large minority, or an equal number of such victims as compared to women in the population is immaterial. The State of Maryland by its policies and procedures is obligated to encourage and support only those organizations that practice inclusion, diversity and non-discrimination. However, not even very large urban areas can financially support “separate but equal” domestic violence facilities and services for men and women. Not only is it not practical, but such a policy does little to combat discrimination and only encourages conflict over funding resources. 1. The purpose of this training is to provide guidance and directives in how to implement a non-discrimination policy in all service areas. 2. As part of this training program, a compliance coordination methodology shall be developed to assure that the non-discrimination policy is being carried out by agencies who participated in the training. 3. The training will provide cost-effective, implementable, and practical steps that each agency or organization can take to eliminate discrimination and incorporate gender and sexual orientation inclusive policies.

We respectfully request the Office of The Governor to immediately begin the implementation of such a training program.

REFERENCES

1 One example is the Allstate page <http://www.clicktoempower.org/> linked from the Maryland Network Against Domestic Violence (MNADV) web page that rightly claims that 3 women each day (actually it is closer to 4) die of domestic violence in the United States. They fail to mention that nearly 2 men die each day due to being murdered by their female partner. This is a glaring omission. In 2007 1640 women were murdered by their male intimates and 700 men were murdered by their female partners. http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/index.cfm?ty=tp&tid=971 Why are the male victims omitted?

2 “Prevalence, Incidence, and Consequences of Violence Against Women: Findings From the National Violence Against Women Survey | National Institute of Justice.” Office of Justice Programs. N.p., n.d. Web. 20 Dec. 2009. <http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/nij/pubs-sum/172837.htm>.

3 “Family Violence.” National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges . N.p., n.d. Web. 18 Dec. 2009. <www.ncjfcj.org/content/view/20/94/>.

4 “National Coalition Against Domestic Violence.” National Coalition Against Domestic Violence. N.p., n.d. Web. 20 Dec. 2009. <http://www.ncadv.org/learn/TheProblem.php>.

5 “Domestic Violence Facts: Maryland.” National Coalition Against Domestic Violence. N.p., n.d. Web. 18 Dec. 2009. <www.ncadv.org/files/Maryland.pdf>.

6 “Maryland Network Against Domestic Violence (MNADV).” Maryland Network Against Domestic Violence (MNADV). N.p., n.d. Web. 20 Dec. 2009. <http://mnadv.org/DV_Stats/ucr_stats.html>.

7 Whitaker, Daniel. “Differences in Frequency of Violence and Reported Injury Between Relationships With Reciprocal and Nonreciprocal Intimate Partner Violence.” Journal of Public Health 97.May (2007): 941-947. Print.

8 Ibid.

9 Ibid.

10 Pence E. Some thoughts on philosophy. In Shepard M and Pence E (eds.): Coordinating Community Responses to Domestic Violence: Lessons from Duluth and Beyond. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publishers, 1999, p. 30.

11 McNeely, R. L., Cook, P. W. & Torres, J. B. (2001). Is domestic violence a gender issue or a human issue? Journal of Human Behavior in the Social Environment, 4 (4), 227-251.

12 “Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) – Intimate partner violence.” Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) . N.p., n.d. Web. 12 Jan. 2010. <http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/index.cfm?ty=tp&tid=971>.

13 Paymar, Michael, and Ellen Pence. Education Groups for Men Who Batter: The Duluth Model. 1 ed. New York: Springer Publishing Company, 1993. Print.

14 Graves, Tom. Power and Response-ability: the human side of systems. London: Tetradian, 2008. Print.

15 Domestic Abuse Intervention Programs, Home of the Duluth Model.” Domestic Abuse Intervention Programs, Home of the Duluth Model. N.p., n.d. Web. 20 Dec. 2009. <http://www.theduluthmodel.org/wheelgallery.php>.

16 Gelles, Richard J., and Murray Straus. Behind Closed Doors: Violence in the American Family. New Ed ed. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2006. Print.

17 “Processes Explaining the Concealment and Distortion of Evidence on Gender Symetry in Partner Violence.” University of New Hampshire. N.p., n.d. Web.18 Dec. 2009. <pubpages.unh.edu/~mas2/V74-gender-symmetry-with-gramham-Kevan-Method%208-.pdf>.

18 Ibid.

19 “REFERENCES EXAMINING ASSAULTS BY WOMEN ON THEIR SPOUSES OR MALE PARTNERS: AN ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY.” California State University, Long Beach. N.p., n.d. Web. 20 Dec. 2009. <http://www.csulb.edu/~mfiebert/assault.htm>.

20 Arehart-Treichel, Joan. “Men Shouldn’t Be Overlooked as Victims of Partner Violence.” APA Psychiatric News 42.15 (2007): 31-33. Print.

21 “Appeals court decision supports battered men.” San Francisco Bay Area — News, Sports, Business, Entertainment, Classifieds: SFGate. N.p., n.d. Web. 20 Dec. 2009. <http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/10/15/BA3S13HOLS.DTL>.

22 Press, The Associated. “W.Va. domestic-violence program regulations voided – News – The Charleston Gazette – West Virginia News and Sports.” – – The Charleston Gazette – West Virginia News and Sports. N.p., n.d. Web. 20 Dec. 2009. <http://www.wvgazette.com/News/200910080509>.

23 “Maryland Network Against Domestic Violence (MNADV).” Maryland Network Against Domestic Violence (MNADV). N.p., n.d. Web. 18 Dec. 2009. <http://www.mnadv.org/DV_Stats/ucr_stats.html>.

24 “Welcome!.” Stop Abuse for Everyone. N.p., n.d. Web. 18 Dec. 2009. <safe4all.org>.

25 Robinson, Michael. “National Family Violence Legislative Resource Center.” National Family Violence Legislative Resource Center. N.p., n.d. Web. 15 Jan. 2010. <http://www.nfvlrc.org/>.

26 Please consult with the Chairman or Vice-Chairman of the Maryland Commission for Men’s Health for more information on these organizations.

27 “Results from Study on Men’s Experiences of Partner Aggression.” Clark University | One of 40 “Colleges that Change Lives”. N.p., n.d. Web. 15 Jan. 2010. <http://clarku.edu/faculty/dhines/results.htm>.

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tgolden@tgolden

September 03, 2026

False Allegations - What the Numbers Don't Tell Us

We are getting a head start on International Falsely Accused day on Sept 9th!

How many false allegations of sexual abuse are there? We are often told they are extremely rare—perhaps only one to three percent. But those numbers depend on an extraordinarily narrow definition of what qualifies as a false allegation. They usually count only allegations proven to have been deliberately fabricated. Mistaken identity, contaminated memories, misunderstandings, suggestive interviewing, unsupported accusations and even recanted allegations may not be included.

In this conversation, Janice Fiamengo and I speak with Dr. Felicity Goodyear Smith, a physician, forensic medical examiner and professor at the University of Auckland who has studied wrongful allegations for more than three decades. Felicity explains the many different ways an innocent person can be accused, separating deliberate fabrications from allegations that are sincerely believed but untrue.

We also examine how “believe the victim” has ...

01:09:20

tgolden@tgolden

July 15, 2026

The Women's Health Narrative Meets the DATA

What if one of the most common claims in health policy simply isn’t true?

We’ve all heard the refrain: women are underfunded, under-researched, and left behind by the medical establishment. It’s repeated so often that most people never stop to ask for the evidence.

In this roundtable, Jack Kammer, Ed Bartlett, Ed Stephens, Jim Nuzzo, and I compare that narrative with the available data. We examine research funding, clinical trial participation, life expectancy, and the unintended consequences of policies that consistently prioritize one sex while neglecting the other.

This isn’t an argument against women’s health. It’s an argument for evidence, fairness, and a healthier future for everyone.

Link to the Feminist pdf that calls for 20 Billion dollars for women’s health!
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1IKEEZMGXtRNxU4n5K_M1d6k2w-ZP_wVT/view

Jim Nuzzo

The Nuzzo Newsletter on Substack http//jameslnuzzo.Substack.com
X: https://x.com/JamesLNuzzo

Jack Kammer

Jacks Substack Men’s ...

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tgolden@tgolden

July 11, 2026

Mantoon: A Visit to the Doc

A visit to the Doc.

00:00:14

JuanGoodman@JuanGoodman

October 14, 2026

It seems that one famous plaster body of mother and child was wrong. The “mother” is actually a man and the child is not related to him.
For years the famous image of a mother protecting a child was projection. The DNA shows a man protecting a child that is not related to him.

JuanGoodman@JuanGoodman

October 05, 2026

As I stated before women who actually see men’s rights and general fairness as valid, tend to be the mothers of boys. This video is a great example of them pushing back and it is great to see.

tgolden@tgolden

August 10, 2026

Feminism Cannot Be Reformed: It Must Be Destroyed Root and Branch

Janice Fiamengo’s new book is out, and this excerpt from the Foreword gives you a pretty good idea of what to expect. Janice goes straight to the heart of feminism and gives ample reasons for its demolition.

This is an important book. I hope you’ll get a copy for yourself—and maybe send one to someone who is even a little bit open to seeing the reality of feminism rather than the equality mask presented by feminists and so much of the media.

https://fiamengofile.substack.com/p/feminism-cannot-be-reformed

FIAMENGOFILE.SUBSTACK.COM

Feminism Cannot be Reformed

It must be destroyed, root and branch

tgolden@tgolden

November 05, 2026

When Men’s Grievances Become a Public Health Threat

The Lancet acknowledges men’s suffering, but what happens when men question the causes of that suffering?

When Men’s Grievances Become a Public Health Threat

The Lancet acknowledges men’s suffering, but what happens when men question the causes of that suffering?

In a remarkable article published October 29, 2026, in The Lancet, one of the world’s most prestigious medical journals, authors Sarah Hawkes and Kent Buse make this extraordinary claim:

“The manosphere, a diffuse commercial ecosystem and loose collection of online communities united by shared beliefs about masculinity, misogyny, and male victimisation, is an under-recognised determinant of health harms.”

Think about that. The manosphere is now being described as a public-health harm. Not just a collection of websites where men talk about their problems, but something that supposedly damages people’s health. And as we will see, the authors make this claim while admitting that they have very little solid evidence that the manosphere actually causes these harms.

Something interesting is happening in the way our institutions respond to the problems facing boys and men. For decades, these problems were largely ignored. Boys fell behind in school. Men died by suicide at dramatically higher rates than women. Fathers struggled with family courts and separation from their children. Male victims of domestic violence often found little help. Yet these problems rarely received the attention given to similar difficulties facing women and girls.

But things are changing. The problems facing boys and men have become too obvious to ignore. There is simply too much evidence, and too many people are talking about it.

So what happens now? Instead of ignoring men’s problems, institutions are beginning to acknowledge them. But there’s a catch. They seem quite willing to recognize that men are suffering, as long as men don’t question the accepted explanations for that suffering.

The Lancet article is a perfect example. The authors acknowledge boys’ educational difficulties, men’s loneliness, economic insecurity, and social isolation. These are real problems, and the authors recognize them. But when men suggest that feminism or institutional discrimination might have something to do with these problems, things change.

The authors say that misogyny, or hatred of women, is what unites the manosphere. But they also identify criticism of feminism as one of its defining beliefs. This raises a troubling question: Are they treating criticism of feminism as hatred of women? They acknowledge that men have real problems, but when men question whether feminism has contributed to those problems, their complaints risk being treated as part of the very problem the authors want to eliminate.

The article, titled Reframing the manosphere: a public health response to a commercial ecosystem, compares the manosphere to industries such as tobacco. The authors go on to recommend public-health campaigns, government involvement, stronger content moderation, and using algorithms to promote what they consider positive messages.

In other words, they aren’t simply telling us that the manosphere is dangerous. They are proposing ways to change what people see and hear online. And that raises some very serious questions.

They Admit the Evidence Is Scarce

One of the most astonishing passages in the article begins with these words:

“Although rigorous causal evidence is currently scarce”

Read that again. The authors admit that they don’t have much rigorous evidence showing that the manosphere actually causes the harms they are describing.

You might think that would lead them to be cautious. Perhaps they would say more research is needed before reaching conclusions. But that’s not what happens.

Instead, they go on to associate the manosphere with misogyny, violence against women, rape-myth acceptance, sexual aggression, and online harassment. The reader is left with the impression that the manosphere is responsible for a long list of serious problems.

But where is the proof?

Suppose researchers find that men who visit certain websites are more likely to hold negative attitudes toward women. Does that mean the websites caused those attitudes? Or might men who already hold those attitudes be more likely to visit those websites?

Those are two very different possibilities. And there are others. Perhaps men who have experienced rejection, mistreatment, or isolation are drawn to communities where they find people who understand their experiences.

None of this means that genuinely hateful online communities are harmless. But if you are going to claim that something causes a public-health problem, shouldn’t you be able to demonstrate that it actually causes the problem?

Apparently, the authors believe the available evidence is sufficient to begin proposing solutions. And some of those solutions involve regulating what people are allowed to see online.

A “So-Called” Crisis?

The authors describe manosphere communities as being concerned with a “so-called crisis of masculinity.”

Why “so-called”?

That phrase is a subtle way of casting doubt on something without directly denying it. By referring to a “so-called crisis of masculinity,” the authors signal skepticism about the crisis before even examining the evidence.

Boys are struggling in school. Men account for most suicides, workplace deaths, and prisoners. Fathers face serious challenges following family separation, and male victims of violence often struggle to be taken seriously. These problems are real, whether or not someone wants to call them a crisis of masculinity.

The authors also tell us that manosphere communities share the belief that feminism has systematically disadvantaged men.

But what if that belief is true?

Could feminist ideas have influenced policies that disadvantage boys? Could feminist theories of domestic violence have contributed to the neglect of male victims? Could decades of portraying masculinity as toxic or dangerous have affected how boys see themselves?

Why aren’t these possibilities being investigated?

So if you believe feminism has harmed men, does that make you part of a dangerous online movement? Is questioning feminism now evidence of a dangerous ideology?

Men’s Problems Are Real, but Their Explanations Are Wrong

Here is another revealing statement from the article. The authors say that the manosphere redirects blame for men’s problems toward women and feminism rather than the structural and economic forces responsible.

Notice what they are doing.

They acknowledge that men have problems, but they seem quite certain about what is causing them. Economics and social structures are acceptable explanations. Feminism apparently isn’t.

But why can’t feminism be part of those structural forces?

Feminist organizations have influenced laws, government policies, schools, universities, domestic violence services, and the way we think about men and women. These are not minor influences. They are part of the institutions that shape our lives.

Could some of these influences have harmed boys and men? Isn’t that worth investigating?

Of course, blaming women as a group for men’s problems is different from criticizing feminist ideas or policies. But the article does not clearly explain how it separates those two things when discussing the broader manosphere.

And that is a serious problem.

The authors describe men in these communities as trapped in narratives of grievance and hopelessness. But what exactly is wrong with having a grievance?

Women had grievances about discrimination. Black Americans had grievances about segregation. Workers had grievances about unsafe conditions and unfair treatment. Those grievances helped produce important social changes.

Why should men’s grievances be viewed differently?

Surely the question should be whether the grievance is justified, not whether the person expressing it is a man.

Nine Out of Ten People Are Biased Against Women?

Here’s another jaw-dropper.

The authors tell us that nearly nine out of ten people hold at least one fundamental bias against women. That’s an extraordinary number, and it certainly makes the world sound overwhelmingly hostile toward women.

But let’s look at where it comes from.

The source is the United Nations Development Programme’s 2023 Gender Social Norms Index. Researchers used seven measures involving attitudes about political leadership, education, employment, and gender roles. If someone crossed the researchers’ threshold on just one of those measures, that person was counted as having at least one bias against women.

And here’s the part the Lancet authors don’t mention in that passage.

According to the UNDP, approximately 90% of men and 87% of women were classified as holding at least one bias against women.

Yes, you read that correctly. By this measure, almost nine out of ten women also have at least one bias against women.

Does that mean almost every woman is a misogynist?

Of course not. It means the researchers have created a very broad definition of bias. Someone who believes men make better political leaders, or college education is more important to men, or being strongly anti abortion, can each be counted as having at least one bias against women, even though these attitudes are very different and seemingly not so directly connected to bias against women .

The statistic is not made up. But presenting it without explaining what it measures can give readers a very misleading impression. Is this an attempt to frame a narrative or is it just sloppy writing. You be the judge.

And here’s something else worth considering. What would happen if researchers created a similar index measuring negative attitudes toward men?

What percentage of people would be classified as biased against males if they were asked whether men are dangerous, emotionally deficient, less deserving of sympathy, or responsible for society’s problems?

Would we get another enormous number?

We don’t know. But wouldn’t it be interesting to find out?

Even a 2024 UN Women discussion paper recognized important problems with the way gender norms are measured, including unclear definitions and weak links between some measurements and policy recommendations.

The larger point is simple. When researchers present an extraordinary statistic, we need to know exactly what they measured before accepting the story they attach to it.

When Complaining About the System Becomes Suspicious

The authors cite a survey of domestic violence workers who reported that some men expressed ideas associated with the manosphere.

Among those ideas was the belief that the legal system is stacked against men.

Now think about that.

A man complains that the legal system treats men unfairly. Instead of asking whether his complaint might be justified, the researchers include that belief among examples of manosphere-associated thinking.

What if the man has actually experienced unfair treatment?

What if he is a father who believes he was treated unfairly in a custody dispute? What if he is a male victim of domestic violence who could not find help? What if his experiences have given him good reasons to question the system?

Are those experiences evidence of a dangerous ideology?

The survey may tell us what workers reported hearing, but it does not establish whether the men’s complaints were true or false. Nor does it demonstrate that the manosphere caused those beliefs.

Yet this is how a legitimate grievance can begin to look like a symptom of something unhealthy.

Instead of asking whether the system is unfair, we begin asking what is wrong with the man who thinks it is unfair.

That is quite a reversal.

From Ignoring Men’s Pain to Explaining It Away

I have written before about what I see as a change in the way our culture handles male suffering.

For years, the suffering of boys and men was largely invisible. Men were expected to endure difficulties, solve their own problems, and keep going. Their pain simply did not attract the same concern as women’s pain.

I have described this through the idea of gynocentrism, the tendency to place women and their experiences closer to the center of our moral concern.

But something changed as the problems facing boys and men became harder to ignore.

Now we hear much more about boys falling behind in school, men’s loneliness, male suicide, and other disadvantages. That’s good. These problems deserve attention.

But look at how they are often explained.

Boys struggle in school because of restrictive masculinity. Men are lonely because they lack emotional skills. Men die by suicide because they won’t ask for help.

Sometimes these explanations identify real contributing factors. But why do they so often focus on what is supposedly wrong with men?

What about the institutions serving them? What about policies that may disadvantage them? What about the possibility that some feminist ideas have influenced how society responds to male suffering?

The Lancet paper fits this pattern remarkably well.

The authors acknowledge the problems. But when men question whether feminism or institutional discrimination might be contributing to those problems, their explanations become suspect.

The suffering is real. The explanation becomes the problem.

This is a significant change from simply ignoring men’s pain. Now the pain is recognized, but the discussion about what causes it may be steered away from certain possibilities.

Six Strategies to Combat the Manosphere

Having acknowledged that rigorous causal evidence is scarce, the authors nevertheless propose six priorities for responding to the alleged health harms of the manosphere.

Some of their recommendations are sensible. They want to address boys’ educational problems, loneliness, and social isolation. They even warn against portraying masculinity as inherently toxic.

I welcome those ideas.

But their fourth recommendation is especially troubling.

The authors compare regulating the manosphere to regulating the tobacco industry. They argue that public-health efforts should target the structures and incentives that promote harm rather than simply blaming the people exposed to them.

They acknowledge that the comparison is imperfect. The manosphere is not a single product, its harms are harder to demonstrate, and online communities can serve useful purposes.

Nevertheless, they recommend stronger content moderation and using algorithms to promote positive messages and norms.

Think about what that means.

They want online platforms to do more to limit certain kinds of content while promoting other kinds of content.

But who gets to decide what is harmful and what is positive?

Who Gets to Decide What Men Can Say?

Suppose a man argues that feminist policies have contributed to boys’ educational difficulties. Suppose he believes family courts disadvantage fathers or that male victims of domestic violence receive inadequate support.

Are these legitimate subjects for discussion?

Or are they examples of the harmful grievance narratives the authors want platforms to address?

Now consider someone arguing that patriarchy and toxic masculinity are responsible for men’s problems.

Would that message be treated as harmful? Or would it be promoted as positive and constructive?

The authors don’t explicitly say that criticism of feminism should be censored. That’s important to recognize. Their stated goal is to reduce harmful online environments.

But they also identify criticism of feminism as a central belief within the manosphere, which they describe as a public-health harm.

So where exactly is the line?

There is an enormous difference between threatening women and criticizing feminism. There is an equally enormous difference between encouraging violence and questioning whether institutions treat men fairly.

Any system that fails to make those distinctions risks suppressing legitimate criticism along with genuinely harmful behavior.

And remember, ideas don’t have to be banned to disappear from public view. Algorithms can make some messages more visible and others much harder to find.

If platforms are encouraged to promote approved messages about masculinity while limiting supposedly harmful ones, who decides which ideas deserve to be heard?

That should concern anyone who values open discussion.

What If Feminism Is a Public-Health Harm?

Here is a question the Lancet authors don’t appear to consider.

What if we turned their argument around?

They believe that ideas circulating within the manosphere can contribute to poor mental health, harmful attitudes, and social problems.

Fine. Let’s examine that possibility.

But why not apply exactly the same standards to feminism?

What happens to boys who grow up hearing that masculinity is toxic? What happens to male victims of domestic violence when services are organized around theories that primarily identify men as perpetrators and women as victims? What happens when boys repeatedly encounter messages portraying males as privileged, dangerous, or responsible for society’s problems? What happens to fathers who are unjustly removed from their children’s lives?

Could these messages and institutional practices have consequences for male mental health and well-being?

Why wouldn’t we investigate them?

If researchers believe that ideological environments can damage health, then feminist ideas and institutions should be examined just as carefully as the manosphere.

The authors acknowledge that rigorous causal evidence connecting the manosphere to some of the alleged harms is scarce. Yet they propose a broad public-health response.

Would they support the same level of investigation into the possible harms of feminist-influenced policies and cultural messages?

Or would asking that question itself be considered another example of dangerous manosphere thinking?

That’s the question I would like to see answered.

If the manosphere can be investigated as a possible public-health harm, why should feminism be exempt from the same examination?

What Exactly Is the Manosphere?

Another problem runs through the entire article. What exactly do the authors mean by the manosphere?

The term is used to describe a remarkably broad collection of online communities. A minority may have misogynistic views. Others sell questionable dating advice. Still others discuss fathers’ rights, male victims of domestic violence, boys’ educational difficulties, or men’s mental health.

Are all these groups really the same?

Does a man become part of a dangerous movement because he believes fathers deserve fair treatment in court? Is someone promoting misogyny because he questions a feminist theory? What about a psychologist who believes traditional masculine characteristics can sometimes be healthy and useful?

The label doesn’t tell us whether any of these people are right or wrong.

Yet when very different groups are placed under one negatively charged label, the worst behavior associated with that label can cast suspicion on everyone else.

That’s particularly troubling when researchers begin proposing interventions that could affect what people are allowed to say or how widely their ideas are shared.

Before deciding how to regulate the manosphere, shouldn’t we be clear about what it actually includes?

A Better Way to Help Boys and Men

There is an irony in this Lancet article. The authors recognize that boys and men have serious problems. They acknowledge loneliness, educational difficulties, insecurity, and social isolation. They even warn against treating boys and men themselves as the problem.

Those are welcome observations.

But what if one reason some men turn to online communities is that they believe established institutions are unwilling to listen to them?

What if some of their complaints are justified?

And what happens when researchers describe those complaints as part of a harmful ideology?

Wouldn’t that make some men even less likely to trust the institutions supposedly trying to help them?

A better approach would be to take men’s experiences seriously without requiring them to accept a predetermined explanation for their suffering.

Investigate their complaints. Examine the evidence. Challenge false claims, but don’t assume a complaint is false simply because it criticizes feminism or another influential institution.

From Ignoring Men’s Pain to Managing Men’s Grievances

I think we may be witnessing a new stage in the way our culture responds to the suffering of boys and men.

First, their problems were largely ignored. Then, as the evidence became harder to dismiss, those problems began receiving more attention, but were often explained in ways that placed responsibility back on men themselves.

Now we may be entering a third stage.

Men’s problems are acknowledged, but some of the explanations men offer for those problems are treated as potentially harmful narratives that need to be corrected or controlled.

The Lancet paper is an example of why this development deserves attention.

The authors may genuinely want to help boys and men. Some of their recommendations suggest that they do. But good intentions do not replace solid evidence, and concern about harmful online behavior should not become an excuse to discourage legitimate criticism of powerful institutions.

The question is not whether some corners of the manosphere contain hateful or dangerous material.

The question is whether we can address genuine harm without treating men’s complaints about feminism and institutional unfairness as evidence of something unhealthy.

Men deserve more than acknowledgment of their suffering. They deserve to have their explanations taken seriously, examined fairly, and challenged when the evidence warrants it.

And they deserve the freedom to question the causes of their problems without having those questions treated as a public-health threat.

Sources

Hawkes, S., & Buse, K. (2026). Reframing the manosphere: a public health response to a commercial ecosystem. The Lancet.
United Nations Development Programme. (2023). 2023 Gender Social Norms Index: Breaking Down Gender Biases.
UN Women. (2024). Measuring Social Norms for Gender and Development: Lessons and Priorities.
UN Women. (2025). Women’s Rights in Review: 30 Years After Beijing.

Read full Article

tgolden@tgolden

October 31, 2026

Part 3: Consent, the Only Sexual Norm Left

Follow the public argument over the Cornell case, or almost any campus sexual assault case, and you’ll notice something. It turns on a single question: was there consent? Other moral questions about the same night barely come up. When someone raises them, they’re usually heard as irrelevant, or as blaming the victim.

Why is consent the only question we can see?

Three ideas, briefly

The Family Archetype is the moral logic of a family: protect the vulnerable, care before proof. The Society Archetype is the moral logic of public life: fair procedure, evidence before judgment, individuals responsible for what they did. Matrisensus is the family’s logic taking over public life. It treats groups as victims or villains, and it keeps those it sees as vulnerable innocent by placing all the guilt elsewhere.

Consent, and one other

Consent isn’t quite alone. One other sexual norm still gets attention: power. Universities ban relationships between professors and students even when both consent, and #MeToo focused heavily on bosses and subordinates. But power and consent have the same shape. Both put all the moral responsibility on one person’s conduct toward the other: the one who initiated, the one with more power, the one who didn’t get a clear yes.

What disappeared

The norms that have faded have the opposite shape. Dignity, sobriety, modesty, fidelity, prudence and self-respect are norms of self-governance. They ask what each person owes to herself, as well as to the other: Did I keep my judgment clear? Does this honor what sex is meant to be? Am I protecting my own worth?

For most of history, these norms did most of the work of sexual morality, and they applied to both people. They didn’t wait for harm and then assign blame. They shaped behavior beforehand, so harm was less likely.

Why only consent survives

Here’s the key. Consent is the only sexual norm that fits Matrisensus, because it’s the only one that keeps the protected person completely innocent.

A norm like sobriety or dignity can’t do that. It looks at the choices of the person Matrisensus wants to protect: what she drank, what she risked, what she agreed to. Even mentioning such a norm puts some responsibility on her, so the norm simply stops being seen. Nobody argues against it. It just becomes invisible. Consent passes the test perfectly. Whatever happened, the moral question becomes what the other person did to her. An ethics of consent alone is the only sexual ethics in which innocence and guilt always belong to different people.

There’s a second reason. Consent is the only sexual norm decided by feeling. Sobriety and fidelity are about what you do, which others can see. Consent is about an inner state: did she want it? No one else can check that, and it can be reassessed afterward, as feelings about a night change. When consent is the only standard, what an encounter meant is no longer fixed by what happened. It depends on how one person later feels about it.

And there’s an irony. Consent actually comes from the Society Archetype. It’s a kind of contract: a mutual agreement between adults, judged by what each did and said at the time, with each responsible for their part. What Matrisensus keeps is a version stripped of what made it fair. The mutual agreement becomes one person’s inner state, the time of agreement becomes any later moment, and the shared responsibility falls on one person.

How we got here

This isn’t mysterious. The sexual revolution rejected marriage, chastity, modesty and courtship as tools of control. Consent was what was left, because both sides of the new culture could accept it. For those who wanted freedom, it was the limit: anything goes between consenting adults. For those who wanted protection, it was also the limit: no harm without consent. Consent is where “anything goes” and “protect the vulnerable” meet.

Three levels of desire

It helps to see desire as working on three levels, each meant to guide the one below it. The first is appetite: wanting pleasure, comfort, recognition. The second is self-control: the desire for order and mastery over ourselves. The third is meaning: the desire for purpose and for contributing to something beyond ourselves. A healthy life doesn’t abolish appetite. It puts appetite under self-control, and self-control in service of meaning.

Consent is permission between two appetites. It lives entirely on the first level. The older sexual morality guided that appetite from both levels above. Chastity, sobriety, modesty and prudence belong to the second level: they’re practices of self-control. Dignity, fidelity and the sense that sex is sacred belong to the third. They place sex inside something larger than one night: a committed relationship, the beginning of families and generations, the worth of a person and not just her pleasure.

An ethics built on consent alone has thrown out both upper levels at once. Self-control is dismissed as repression, and meaning as superstition. What’s left is appetite, with nothing above it but permission.

What this costs

The older norms protected in advance. Staying sober, taking time, staying among friends, all made harm less likely before any question of permission came up. Consent only protects after the fact, by judging what went wrong. Women lost protective norms and were given a courtroom norm in their place.

Harms that aren’t consent violations — degradation, being used with your agreement at the time, the emptiness of a night both people regret — no longer have any moral language. The only way to name them is to call them a consent violation. So ambiguous encounters get forced into two boxes: assault, or nothing. That’s why cases like Cornell become battlegrounds, and why the definition of consent keeps stretching to cover harms it was never built to carry.

This isn’t only a conservative argument. Christine Emba, in Rethinking Sex, argues that consent is necessary but not enough, and that a consent-only ethics has failed women. Louise Perry makes a similar case in The Case Against the Sexual Revolution.

To be clear: consent matters, and violating it is a serious wrong. The point isn’t that consent is unimportant. It’s that a culture that can see only consent has lost the norms that protected women before consent was ever in question, and has lost the language even to notice what that has cost.

One pattern

Across this series, the same thing has happened three times. Hard cases become battlegrounds because their meaning is open, and open meaning is where the fight between protective feeling and fair judgment gets fought. Juries falter in exactly those cases, because a shared moral story produces the shared blind spot that defeats the reason juries exist. And sexual morality has shrunk to consent, because consent is the one norm that keeps the protected person innocent.

Each time, feeling has moved from signal to verdict. The answer isn’t less feeling. A culture that stopped caring about the vulnerable would be worse than ours. The answer is putting feeling back where it belongs: the first word, not the last. Mercy after truth, not instead of it. And judgment that can still see a particular person and a particular act, rather than the story they seem to fit.

David Shackleton

____________________________

David Shackleton is a writer and cultural commentator whose work focuses on identity politics and gender. His books, Matrisensus, The Hand That Rocks the World: An Inquiry Into Truth, Power and Gender, and Daughters of Feminism: Women Supporting Men’s Equality, are available on Amazon. His website is genderhealing.com.

Sources for the series

Part 1

Charles G. Lord, Lee Ross, and Mark R. Lepper, “Biased Assimilation and Attitude Polarization,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 37, no. 11 (1979): 2098–2109.

Part 2

Marquis de Condorcet, Essai sur l’application de l’analyse à la probabilité des décisions rendues à la pluralité des voix (1785).
Franz Dietrich and Kai Spiekermann, “Jury Theorems,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Christian List and Robert E. Goodin, “Epistemic Democracy: Generalizing the Condorcet Jury Theorem,” Journal of Political Philosophy 9, no. 3 (2001): 277–306.
Reporting on the Clancy jury by NBC10 Boston, CBS News, NBC News, and the Boston Globe, August–September 2026.

Part 3

Jesse Graham, Jonathan Haidt, and Brian A. Nosek, “Liberals and Conservatives Rely on Different Sets of Moral Foundations,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 96, no. 5 (2009): 1029–1046.
Nick Haslam, “Concept Creep,” Psychological Inquiry 27, no. 1 (2016): 1–17.
Christine Emba, Rethinking Sex: A Provocation (Sentinel, 2022).
Louise Perry, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution (Polity, 2022).

Read full Article

tgolden@tgolden

October 30, 2026

When Feeling Becomes the Verdict Part 2 (David Shackleton)

Part 2: Can a Jury Still Judge?

When the Clancy jury deadlocked, eleven jurors wanted to find her not guilty by reason of insanity. One man refused. Afterward, several jurors described him to the press as “closed off” and unable to explain himself. His lawyer called him heroic for holding his ground. One juror described confronting him forcefully. The defense asked the court to remove him from the jury.

What he was actually thinking is still disputed. But the scene raises a question worth asking: when a whole culture has already sorted people into victims and villains, can a jury still do its job?

Three ideas, briefly

The Family Archetype is the moral logic of a family: protect the vulnerable, care before proof. The Society Archetype is the moral logic of public life: fair procedure, evidence before judgment, individuals held responsible for what they did. Matrisensus is the family’s logic taking over public life, judging people as members of victim or villain groups instead of by what they actually did.

Why juries work

We tend to think of juries as a democratic courtesy, a way of letting ordinary people have a say. But there’s a more precise reason they work, and it was worked out in 1785 by a French mathematician, the Marquis de Condorcet.

His insight was this: if each person in a group is a little more likely to be right than wrong, and each judges independently, then the majority of a group is far more reliable than any one person. Twelve independent judgments, pooled together, beat one expert.

Notice the key word: independently. That’s where it all depends.

When everyone shares the same blind spot

If the jurors don’t judge independently, if they all tend to make the same mistake for the same reason, the advantage disappears. Philosophers who study this have shown it can get worse than that. A jury that shares one blind spot can be less reliable than a single sensible judge, because instead of correcting each other’s errors, the jurors magnify the same one. A bigger jury just repeats the mistake more confidently.

Matrisensus creates exactly this condition. It doesn’t produce twelve people weighing the evidence separately. It produces twelve people applying the same ready-made story to the same facts. A dominant moral outlook doesn’t make people err in different directions. It makes them agree.

And jury selection can’t catch it. Lawyers screen jurors for bias they’re aware of: a conflict of interest, an opinion already formed. But a dominant moral outlook doesn’t feel like bias to the person who holds it. It feels like plain good sense. A juror who holds it will honestly answer “Yes, I can be fair,” and still be wrong in exactly the way the mathematics predicts. You can’t ask someone to disclose a distortion they can’t see.

What the Clancy jury shows

It helps to remember how a criminal trial is built. It doesn’t shut out compassion. It puts compassion in its proper place.

The trial answers a narrow question: did the person do it, and were they capable of being responsible for it? That question is answered from evidence and deliberately protected from sympathy. Only afterward, at sentencing, usually before a judge, do the defendant’s circumstances, history and suffering get weighed in full. Truth first. Mercy after.

An insanity defense brings one narrow question forward into the trial: because of mental illness, could she tell right from wrong, or control what she did? That’s a specific test, decided on evidence.

Several Clancy jurors described reasoning that went around that test. She had been “failed by everyone,” they said; she was “lost in the system.” One said that testimony about what a loving mother Clancy had seemed weighed on her more than the clinical evidence about her state of mind when she killed. That’s sentencing reasoning — sympathy for a whole life — brought into the place reserved for a narrower, harder question.

Then there’s the shape of the deliberations. The jury was nine women and three men, and the lone holdout was its only minority member. Eleven people converged quickly and emotionally on one account. The one person who didn’t was treated less as someone with a view to be considered than as a problem to be fixed. That doesn’t prove the eleven were wrong. It shows what shared judgment looks like from the inside, and how little room it leaves for the one kind of voice a jury most needs: the independent one.

How far this goes

It’s important not to overstate this. In an ordinary contract dispute or burglary trial, nothing triggers a shared moral story, and juries probably work as well as they ever did. The problem shows up in a specific kind of case: one where the parties can be sorted by identity into categories the culture has already judged. That category isn’t small. For those cases, the reason we trust juries may have quietly stopped applying.

Is there a fix?

Not an easy one. Replacing the jury with a judge just puts the same vulnerability in one person, who comes from the same culture. Better instructions can’t reach a bias the juror doesn’t feel as bias. Appeals courts share the same assumptions.

The only real fix is the one that works anywhere: people capable of independent judgment, who can see a case on its own facts instead of the familiar story it seems to fit. That’s a much higher bar than the jury system was designed to require. But it’s the bar we now face.

Next: Part 3 asks why, in arguments about sex, consent is the only question anyone seems able to see.

David Shackleton

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