QotD: “‘Sex positive’ sex education is harming children”
Most parents approach children’s questions about sex with careful thought. We know that our period chat, puberty Q&A, our bleakly vital guidance on sexting and porn won’t just affect their present happiness and bodily ease, but future relationships too. We entrust schools to make up for our shortfalls or embarrassment, to further our conversations with sensitivity and fact.
We’d expect RSHE (relationships, sex and health education) lessons to be conducted by trained teachers, schooled in biology, alert to pornified and misleading internet content. We’d hope our kids learn not just where babies come from but that sexuality is diverse, that sex isn’t just about problems, like STIs and abortion, but a source of joy.
Instead your child may be taught by the School of Sexuality Education which asked kids to Google then draw masturbating animals. Or the Proud Trust, whose dice game asks 13-year-olds to speculate how various body parts and objects will pleasure their anus. Or Diversity Role Models, which promoted the message beloved of paedophiles: “Love has no age limit.”
Because any organisation can now teach RSHE, including activist groups with political agendas. Staff don’t need education or child development qualifications. There is no professional register or regulation of their curriculum. The Department for Education (DfE) says it is a school’s responsibility to oversee lesson content but many don’t have time, often entrusting outside speakers to address classes with no teacher present. And if parents demand to see teaching resources, groups often cite copyright law and refuse.
RSHE teaching, as Miriam Cates, a Tory MP and former biology teacher, noted in her Westminster Hall debate on Thursday, is “a wild west”. Indeed it is a deregulated, privatised, quintessentially Conservative mess.
The government’s response to criticism about inadequate sex education was to make it mandatory from September 2020 for both primary and secondary pupils. The DfE advocates a “programme tailored to the age and the physical and emotional maturity of the pupils”. But instead of providing funds to recruit or train RSHE specialists, it left schools often to outsource lessons to groups, some newly formed to win these lucrative contracts. Since then many parents have voiced concerns. First at the inappropriately sexualised content of lessons for young children: 11-year-olds asked to work out from a list if they are straight, gay or bisexual; ten-year-olds told to discuss masturbation in pairs. Compelling pre-pubescent children to talk about explicit material with adults transgresses their natural shyness and is a safeguarding red flag.
Many groups brand themselves “sex positive”, a confusing term which doesn’t mean “relationships are great” but that no sexual practice is off-limits and the sex industry, specifically pornography, is wholly liberating. BISH Training’s website entry on “rough sex” dismisses the notion that online porn is responsible for a rise in choking, hair-pulling and spitting as “annoying”. Although 60 British women have died of strangulation during sex, BISH simply tells young people to go slow “at first”.
Reading RSHE groups’ online material, and most is hidden from public scrutiny, none addresses the fact that boys and girls are fed different sexual scripts from increasingly violent mainstream porn. Those being choked, violently penetrated in multiple orifices are rarely male. Yet there is no feminist critique or much focus on female pleasure.
Such teaching is supposed to uphold the 2010 Equality Act in which sex is a protected characteristic, yet much of it blurs biology. The Sex Education Forum divides us into “menstruaters” and “non-menstruaters”. Just Like Us states that sex can be changed. Amaze suggests boys who wear nail varnish and girls who like weightlifting could be trans.
Researching my report on the Tavistock child gender service, I spoke with parents of girls on the autistic spectrum who’d always felt like misfits but after listening to outside speakers at school assemblies or RSHE classes now believed they were boys. Gender ideology, with no basis in science or fact, is being pushed in schools, as Cates says, “with religious fervour”.
In its carelessness and cheap-skatery, the government has enabled teaching that is well out of step with public opinion. More In Common polling of 5,000 people found that while 64 per cent of us are happy for schools to teach that some children have two dads or mums, only 31 per cent believe primary schools should teach about trans identity. Parents know it is confusing, unscientific and predicated upon gender stereotypes.
The government’s present hands-off policy also leaves schools vulnerable when challenged by homophobic religious groups, as in Birmingham when extreme Islamists stirred up parents to oppose teaching about gay parents. Head teachers then said they’d have welcomed more prescriptive government guidance so parents could hold elected politicians, not individual schools, to account.
At Thursday’s debate, the chastened schools minister Robin Walker noted that parents should have ready access to all RSHE teaching materials and said the equality and human rights commission is working out guidance on how gender identity should be taught in schools. Such lessons must include evidence of social contagion, the harms of puberty blockers, warning about irreversible treatment and the experience of a growing number of “detransitioners”.
But the government needs to go further, with a register of outside groups and close monitoring of misleading materials. It should also teach critical thinking, so children can evaluate the porn-suffused culture in which they live. There’s no point parents putting such care into how we teach children about sex if the government gives none at all.
Declaration of Sex Based Rights
Join us in Leeds for a U.K. Launch of The Declaration of Sex Based Rights.
Academic, author and activist Dr. Sheila Jeffreys, sociologist and author Dr. Heather Brunskell-Evans, and lawyer and legal academic Maureen O’Hara will be presenting The Declaration on Women’s Sex-Based Rights, for the first time in the U.K.
The meeting will be Chaired by Sarah Field, Leeds City Councillor for Garforth.
The Declaration re-affirms that women’s human rights are based upon sex.
Our panellists will speak about how the idea of ‘gender identity’ is eroding the notion and practice of women’s rights.
‘Gender identity’ is increasingly being used in an official capacity – for example the ability to change your ‘gender marker’ on the Leeds City Council website, with no checks or documentation.
They’ll explore how the official adoption of gender, as opposed to sex, endangers the rights of women and girl children to safety and dignity, and leads to discrimination against women in areas such as political representation, freedom of speech and association, sports and culture.
Join with women around the world to make a stand to defend our sex based rights, as laid out in the 1979 U.N. Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), ratified by the U.K. in 1986.
Sat, May 25, 2019, 12:00 PM – 4:00 PM BST, tickets available here
QotD: “How To Disappear Patriarchy In Three Easy Steps”
So, as many of you are aware, the high-priestess of genderology [Judith Butler] decided to momentarily descend from her exalted academic plinth and relay her ‘thoughts’ on the ongoing internecine shitshow that she, probably more than anyone else, has helped to create. Except of course that, with her usual intellectual integrity, the thoughts she decided to relay about said shitshow totally ignored what is really going on, in favour of pretending that this is a conflict between the wibbly-wobbly-gender-and-sex-is-fluid-rah-rah-liberation crowd, and, basically, um, the Pope. Despite being entirely predictable, this level of disingenuous erasure, is, nonetheless, pretty staggering. As Judy is actually more than well aware, this is a conflict which turns, fundamentally, on the fault-line in feminism that she, in fact, inaugurated – a fault-line between those of us who think patriarchy is a system of sex-based male dominance enacted through cultural mechanisms which we could call – if we can still stomach the word – ‘gender,’ and those who think that patriarchy is…like, seriously, what the fuck do they even think it is….some kind of free-floating cultural system that has nothing to do with actual bodies or their appropriation and domination, a randomly generated set of signs and signifying practices that shape our subjectivity, a thought which leads, in practice, to staking feminism’s whole liberation project on the epic transcendent power of some spectacularly superficial idea of gender-fucking.
Look, I’m a feminist, and a Prince-fan. I like superficial gender-fucking as much as the next woman. (I actually think Prince’s gender-fucking wasn’t merely superficial, but that’s another story). BUT, and this in some sense points towards the heart of the problem here, superficial gender-fucking has fuck all effect on the fundamental patterns of male dominance. As someone said to me yesterday on Twitter, the wires are currently full of male people running around stanning for the absolute progressive power of gender fluidity, who seem to think they are the living breathing instantiation of ‘smash the patriarchy’ because they dare to pair some nail-varnish with their beards, all while acting like exactly the same entitled, narcissistic, dependency-denying, mind-over-matter, female-erasing assholes that they always were. If gender isn’t just a penchant for gold lamé pocketbooks and lace and is actually something to do with the psychic, material, ontological and economic structures which underpin male dominance, then, lo, it turns out you still need an analysis of male dominance if you’re going to actually do a bloody thing about it. And I’m sorry Judy, I know you were traumatized by Dworkin and MacKinnon trying to ban porn, but having an analysis of male dominance doesn’t actually make me, y’know, the fucking Pope.
[…]
This week there’s a conference going on at Brighton University, in which a load of ‘critical thinkers’ will sit around and think very critically. Judith Butler is doing the star turn. I was supposed to go with a friend, and put on my polite academic face, and listen while she is lauded by room full of people, many of them male, who cannot get over how fucking psyched they are that ‘feminism’ no longer asks them to even acknowledge, let alone challenge, male dominance. I cannot and will not do it. At this moment the thought makes me rage. And so what I want to do, instead, is to sit here, and try and channel my rage into a (partial) excavation of how, and why, Judith Butler performed the magical and much-rewarded feat of making patriarchy – and the critique of patriarchy – vanish from feminism.
QotD: “Vancouver gender identity event a roaring success”
In case you weren’t able to attend the sold out Gender Identity Ideology and Women’s Rights talk at the Vancouver Public Library, it was, in a word, beautiful. On Thursday, myself, Lee Lakeman, and surprise speaker Fay Blaney spoke truth to power, shutting down any possibility of discrediting the independent, grassroots women’s movement. Blaney challenged the myth of numerous “genders” in Indigenous cultures, wielded by trans activists in order to justify post-modern, academic theories about “gender identity,” and claim them as “non-Western” for identity politics points. Blaney said, “There are people who are talking about how Indigenous nations had five genders. That’s absolute B.S.” Lakeman reminded “those of you who can imagine bullying us into submission, you’re clearly unfamiliar with us.” I argued that it is unnecessary to trample on women’s rights in order to also argue that those who step out of traditional gender stereotypes should not be harassed or discriminated, and indeed, challenging gender stereotypes is always what feminists have encouraged. No one in attendance could argue, with any integrity, that any of the panelists were “hateful” or interested in harming others.
While many protesters shouted unrelated, nonsensical slogans outside, none had the strength of character or intelligence to address the panelists in good faith, inside. The few trans activists who did attend limited their “protests” to giggling at concerns about fascism and cheering when Blaney — a long time Indigenous feminist activist committed to fighting male violence against women — shared that she had been pushed out of the annual Women’s Memorial March, which honours the lives of missing and murdered women lost in the Downtown Eastside. One trans activist who did speak began by insulting another woman’s hair, before launching into a confusing lecture about race.
Three hundred people attended the event — many more wanted to, but could not get tickets, as the event sold out. Thousands more watched online. The vast majority of the audience was in support of either our positions or, simply, the need for an open conversation about the issues. It is clear that Canadian politicians and the Canadian media are failing the general public in their efforts to distort, censor, and ignore that this is a conversation people desperately want to have, and that most in Canada are not on board with gender identity ideology and legislation, nor do they support trans activist tactics, which rely on using bullying, threats, and libel to silence and smear detractors.
Watch the talk and Q&A in its entirety here:
‘Neuromyths’
Claudia busts some myths in neuroscience. She meets scientists attending the British Neuroscience Association’s Christmas symposium on Neuromyths. She talks to Professor Chris MacManus about myths around left and right and how we use the different sides of our brain. She discusses with Duncan Astle from Cambridge University about the brain myths that have been used in education in primary schools. Cordelia Fine from Melbourne University discusses the myths about the differences between male and female brains. Anne Cook from the BNA talks about some historical myths which have been busted but why others still persist. Emma Yhnell from Cardiff University talks about whether brain training really works.
QotD: “Male and Female Brain Differences – Must We Keep Doing This?”
A recently released study from the university of Cambridge claims to show that male and female brains are clearly very different. In a huge study of over 600,000 people, the data obtained showed that men tend to be more analytical and ‘systemic’ while women tend to be more emotional and empathetic, thus providing clear evidence for controversial theories about the differences between male and female brains.
I know this, because I was on Sky News being interviewed about it earlier today (at time of writing).
Those who saw my interview will probably have noticed that I am not exactly supportive of the study or its findings.
In fairness, it’s not the first study to conclude that male and female brains are different based on questionable data. Nor is this the first time I’ve argued against such efforts. And yet, here we are, caught in another press cycle that provides needless ammunition to the battle of the sexes.
So, what’s wrong with this particular study? Quite a few things, as it happens. But there are also some major issues with the ways it’s being reported. Here’s a basic rundown, from my perspective.
It doesn’t look at brains, at all
A lot of the coverage states that this study shows clear differences between male and female brains. But… they didn’t even look at anyone’s brain! All the data collected was obtained via questionnaires, usually no longer than ten agree/disagree questions long. That’s hardly the most rigorous assessment. Not to say it’s totally without merit as a method, but to take information from a short list of questions with binary options and declare that this reflects the underlying structure of the brain itself, that’s quite a leap.
It’s tricky to do this with information from intense scanning studies, so to do it with the marks in a few tick-boxes is quite a ballsy move.
Hefty study, minimal applications
A lot has been made about the size of the study. Over 600,000 participants is pretty impressive, and will undoubtedly yield a lot of information to work with. But, as the previous point shows, this information is only as useful as the methods used to collect it, and if those are limited in scope and application, then any conclusions are going to be similarly limited.
Basically, even if you got as many as 100 million men and women to toss a coin, you couldn’t use this data to show one sex is better with financial issues.
Nature vs nurture, again
The researchers in the press release do confirm that the data from their study doesn’t actually reveal what the cause of the sex differences demonstrated. It could be genetic, it could be hormonal, it could be influences and pressures from the culture in which we develop.
However, this admission is rather brief and offhand in all the coverage I’ve seen, which instead focuses on the ‘clear differences’ between male and female brains, despite the whole ‘not actually looking at brains’ aspect.
But the possibility that this is purely a cultural thing cannot be overstated, and is, in my informed opinion, a substantially more likely explanation for any differences in the data. As many have pointed out, the conclusions being declared are based on averages, which is standard practice. But the data itself is all over the place.
As Professor Cordelia Fine (author of Testosterone Rex) pointed out; “sex differences are such that were you to choose a man and woman at random, their scores would be counter to expectations, with the man scoring higher than the woman on empathy about four times in ten”.
Basically, if men and women’s brains were fundamentally, structurally different in the ways argued here, you’d surely expect to see a much more even tendency towards being analytical and systemic? Same with women and empathy. But you don’t.
A much more realistic explanation is that we live in a society with a strong gender divide which is reinforced from day one, so all the adults in the study have developed in such a context and unavoidably internalised, to varying degrees, many of these cultural norms, i.e. women report being more emotional because they’re so often told by the world that they’re supposed to be, despite this being bollocks.
This also further highlights how the vast size of the study is of limited use and doesn’t automatically make the findings more valid. If I were to run a study 10 times this size in, say, India, and then declare that everyone has a Hindu brain, I’d be laughed out of the room.
But that’s not really that different to what’s going on here.
QotD: “Enough of the neurosexist bilge”
In a week of dismaying news, there was a ray of sunshine: a scientific breakthrough with the potential to change lives. Men and women’s brains have finally been proved, by actual scientists, in a massive study, to be completely different! This, you gathered, was the substance of a prominently reported new study that made the front page of the Times: “Men and women really do think differently, say scientists.”
In another paper, the headline specified how: “The sex divide: female empathy vs male logic”. Dr Varun Warrier, of the research team, was widely quoted, saying: “These sex differences in the typical population are very clear.”
Rarely, if ever, since social impact was added to official measurements of academic excellence, can a psychology study have enjoyed a reception as extensive, and thus far as warm, as this new contribution, from four Cambridge researchers, to the scholarly literature on sex difference. Perhaps discouragingly for their colleagues, it appears that the findings, rather than the field itself, account for the paper’s remarkable appeal. To date, no equivalent headlines – Men and women’s thinking can be surprisingly similar! – have welcomed contradictory work, such as Cordelia Fine’s, on the destructive fallacies of gendered minds.
Admittedly, the new study had its critics: Gina Rippon, professor of cognitive neuroimaging at Aston University, had reservations about its reliance on self-reporting (to a Channel 4 online questionnaire, in which subjects identified, or not, with statements such as “I am good at predicting how someone will feel”). Rippon noted that the respondents, aged between 16 and 89, would have had “plenty of time to have absorbed the gendered messages to which they will have been exposed”.
Elsewhere, the neuroscientist and author Dean Burnett pointed out, in a comprehensive demolition, that the study of sexed brain difference “doesn’t look at brains, at all”.
Broadly, however, the reported message remained, like the original research, supportive of pink/blue thinking on human behaviour and, incidentally, of the employment status quo. In fact, given the prominent and, for the most part, respectful coverage of this research, its cultural impact could surely go beyond news headlines and broadcasts, to the point of shaping thinking on fixed behavioural traits, even to influencing policymaking, or employment, especially if the study’s “very clear” sex differences can be aligned with covert sex discrimination. You can imagine, for instance, the utility of the Cambridge research at the BBC, where women have long been diagnosed as temperamentally unsuited for some journalistic work; yet more so in the City, where companies are currently defending themselves against findings of the Hampton-Alexander review. It has just revealed a decline, last year, in the number of women CEOs in the FTSE 350, from 15 to 12.
QotD: “This is not acceptance … In fact, this is rejection”
The final part of ITV drama Butterfly airs [this evening], marking not so much the conclusion of a TV show but the climax of a social justice event, at least if you believe the show’s makers and the largely rapturous notices. Starring Anna Friel as the mother of Max, an 11-year-old who’s born male but identifies as a girl, and broadcast in the last weeks of the government consultation on reforming the Gender Recognition Act, it’s clearly been conceived as an intervention on the side of the angels. Or rather Mermaids: Susie Green, CEO of the charity for families of trans children, was a consultant on the programme.
[…]
Butterfly, though, is storytelling. It’s emotionally appealing. It’s accessible. It’s simple. In fact, it’s very simple indeed, which is why it’s quite boring, and also why it’s dangerous.
That’s a strong word to use of a primetime drama, but consider what Butterfly is telling its audience. It offers a starkly segregated version of childhood: boys do active, sporty things and girls are decorative and pretty. Max’s parents first of all try to “fix” him into having the appropriate interests – his dad with corporal punishment, his mum by treating the “girly” things as a shameful secret to be kept to the bedroom – and, when that fails, they solve the problem instead by recategorising him as a girl. The possibility that Max, like 60-90% of children with gender dysphoria, might simply turn out to be a boy who likes pink, isn’t given house room here.
Then there’s that jaunt to America for treatment. In the show, it’s a high-stakes decision for Max’s mother to make, but one that we’re never supposed to doubt is in Max’s best interests. The Ferrybank, with their advocacy of “watchful waiting” rather than filling out a shopping list of prescriptions, act as the story’s primary antagonists. After all, viewers have already been told unequivocally that Max really is “a girl in a boy’s body”. In the context of the show, any resistance to that isn’t sensible clinical caution, it’s just cruel. The lesson for distressed children and their anxious parents watching the show is: don’t trust the experts who won’t give you what you want.
In the real world, though, things aren’t so easy to call. Gender dysphoria has complex, multiple causes, and in children that usually involves the family dynamic. NHS clinicians, trying to address these delicate cases, increasingly find that anything they want to explore has been pre-empted by the pressure on parents to “affirm gender”: parents have often socially transitioned their child long before they reach the consulting room. Sometimes, parents have even started the medical course privately, via clinicians such as Helen Webberley – convicted this month of running an unregistered clinic, but still linked to by the Mermaids website.
The argument for rushing to treatment, as put forward by Mermaids and repeated by Max’s mum in Butterfly, is “better a happy daughter than a dead son”. In other words, children with gender identity issues are supposedly so prone to suicide that the only option is to stall puberty immediately, starting cross-sex hormones as early as possible. (This maximises the child’s chances of eventually passing as the chosen sex; it also costs them their adult fertility and sexual function.) In the first episode of Butterfly, Max follows this script by making a graphically portrayed suicide attempt.
But the script is false. The startling figures offered by Mermaids for suicidality in trans children are taken from self-selecting surveys that don’t control for comorbidity of mental health conditions. The NHS gender identity development service reports that less than 1% of its patients have attempted suicide; meanwhile, Swedish research has found that transitioning doesn’t remove trans people higher risk for suicide. In other words, the Mermaids version overstates the risk and then demands a cure that doesn’t work.
This isn’t just inaccurate. It’s damaging. In Max’s story, a child questioning their gender will see that suicide gets results: not just medical treatment, but ultimately the reconciliation of Max’s parents (the final scene of the last episode sees Max getting the longed-for blocker injection as his parents hold hands in the foreground, everything as it should be in the straightest of all possible worlds, the violent man back in the family fold). This presentation of suicide goes directly against the Samaritans guidelines for preventing the spread of suicide. Reckless politicising of self-harm is what endangers young people’s lives, not delaying irreversible medical treatments.
[…]
As one gender identity specialist who watched the programme points out, Max is told persistently, insistently and consistently by his parents that he’s “wrong” as a boy. “This is not acceptance,” she says. “In fact, this is rejection.” Under the lipstick smile, Butterfly is a charter for something very regressive, and very cruel: the credo that children who can’t perform the “correct” sex stereotypes must change their bodies, or die.
Government consultation on reform of the Gender Recognition Act – open until the 19th October
The UK government’s consultation on reform of the Gender Recognition Act closes on the 19th of October.
The government form is here, and Fair Play for Women’s guidance for completing it is here.
This consultation is run by the government (it’s not some zombie petition), filling it in is important and does make a difference.
If you are not sure why this matters, have a read back through the ‘trans issues’ category of posts on this blog, or look at the rest of Fair Play for Women’s website, or A Woman’s Place, or Transgender Trend, or Gender Trender, or 4th Wave Now.
‘Cherry-picking’ and academic studies on women’s violence against men
There is a misconception that ‘equality’ means pretending everyone is ‘the same’, that everyone has the same needs and the same abilities, and that, for the sake of ‘equality’, society should treat everyone the same. We do not, in reality, for the sake of equality, insist that everyone uses a wheelchair; we also do not, for the sake of equality, deny wheelchairs to the people who need them. ‘Equality’, a meaningful equality, means saying everyone has the same moral worth, and that everyone has the same right to participate fully in society.
The ‘Men’s Rights Movement’, better understood as a misogynistic, male supremacist, movement, started out as the ‘fathers’ rights’ movement, peddling the still-believed myth that family courts disproportionately favoured women (it doesn’t, see here, here and here). It then moved on to claim that violence against women was exaggerated, and that false rape allegations were common (they aren’t), now, the front line of MRA ‘activism’ is pretending that women are just as violent as men (this has not been proven, see below), and that women who do commit violence are treated leniently by the courts (they’re not, see here and here).
This matters. This matters because, as this 2015 US paper from the William & Mary Journal of Woman and the Law shows, MRAs are not powerless and marginalised, as they love to keep claiming, and their activism has real-world consequences:
I have been in communication with several MRA’s recently (see here, here, and here), who claim that men are more oppressed than women, and that women commit just as much physical and sexual violence against men as men commit against women. Neither of these claims are true. The claims regarding physical violence rely on cherry-picking certain papers; some studies do show that women commit as much violence as men, but others don’t, and other academics criticise the methodology of the studies that show equal rates of violence. the only thing we can conclude, with any certainty, is that there is no definitive proof that women are just as violent as men.
I am educated to a graduate level in a STEM subject, I understand the basics of how research is conducted, but I can’t do a ‘deep dive’ into a social science paper and critique its methodology.
Type ‘intimate partner violence’ into Google Scholar and there are over a million results; no one, even if it was their full-time job, could read all of those, understand them beyond a superficial level, and integrate them into an active body of knowledge.
No single academic paper definitively ‘proves’ anything, and no legitimate academic would claim otherwise. The scientific method is sacrosanct, always, but it is carried out by flawed and fallible human beings; the solution is more and better research.
There is a reproducibility crisis across the sciences, particularly in psychological/behavioural studies, but also in the hard sciences. There is also the issue that only ‘exciting’ results get published; this is why we keep on seeing new Brain Sex! papers – a study showing no meaningful difference between the cognitive functions of men and women is not ‘interesting’ and unlikely to be published. Men’s violence against women is old hat, but women’s violence against men is new and exciting and offers more opportunities for an academic to make a name for themselves.
Academics do not reside on a higher plane of existence, they are flawed, fallible human beings just like the rest of us. Gaining a PhD shows that a person is capable of conducting and writing up research to a professional level, it doesn’t mean they have access to esoteric knowledge, and a PhD is the start of a research career, not its high-point. Academics can be lazy, incompetent, biased, partisan, even criminal. The po-mo gibberish coming out of queer/gender studies departments, shows that academics can also be (fully peer reviewed) charlatans.
There have been many, many academic papers published around the world on the subject of intimate partner violence, over decades, below is a small selection, I would recommend reading the papers in full where they are available:
From the 1999 summer edition of the DVIRC [Domestic Violence Resource Centre Victoria] Newsletter, Michael Flood’s article Claims about ‘Husband Battering’ says:
Take note of the Conflict Tactics Scales (CTS) here, it will keep appearing. What this 1999 newsletter tells us (besides the fact that MRA’s have been at it for a long time), is that in order to find parity in violence between men and women, researchers in the 1980’s and 1990’s (the CTS may have been updated since then) used a flawed research method that excluded much male violence against women, and exaggerated female violence against men.
From the December 2002 volume of the journal Violence Against Women, the paper ‘Are Physical Assaults by Wives and Girlfriends a Major Social Problem?: A Review of the Literature’, says in its abstract:
This paper reports similar problems as the 1999 newsletter, including use of the CTS, “The critiques of the CTS are very important to consider, given that almost all of the studies in major reviews (e.g., Archer, 2000; Fiebert, 1998) use the scales or very similar scales. A possible effect of the sampling differences and screening biases noted above is that two distinct types of violence are being uncovered, what one team of researchers calls “intimate terrorism” and “common couple violence” (Johnson & Ferraro, 2000).” And again, sexual violence was often not included in studies, “Another problem with most studies is that they neglect to include sexual abuse. Rates of sexual abuse of women by an intimate partner were more than 5 times higher than rates of sexual abuse of men by an intimate partner in a large-scale study of college students (Makepeace, 1986), from 2 to 60 times higher in high-school samples (Molidor & Tolman, 1998; O’Keefe & Treister, 1998), and 20 times higher in a random survey of the U.S. population (Tjaden & Thoennes, 2000). Thus, inclusion of sexual abuse is likely to show clear gender differences. In response to criticism that the CTS did not include sexual coercion items, they were recently added to its latest version (CTS-2) (Straus, Hamby, Boney-McCoy, & Sugarman, 1996).”
From the November 2006 volume of Journal of Family Violence, the paper ‘Victim or Offender? Heterogeneity Among Women Arrested for Intimate Partner Violence’ says in its abstract:
This is a smaller, detailed, study, compared to those referenced above, and does not rely on the CTS; it is a useful contribution towards establishing an overall picture of the nature of male and female interpersonal violence.
From the December 2009 volume of Journal of Interpersonal Violence, the paper ‘Sex Differences in Intimate Partner Violence and the Use of Coercive Control as a Motivational Factor for Intimate Partner Violence’ says it its abstract:
This, again, appears to be different type of study, not relying on the CTS; its results are another useful contribution towards establishing an overall picture of the nature of male and female interpersonal violence.
From the May 2015 volume of Journal of Family Violence, the paper ‘Men’s and Women’s Experience of Intimate Partner Violence: A Review of Ten Years of Comparative Studies in Clinical Samples; Part I’ says in its abstract:
Here we have another paper showing a disparity in intimate partner violence between men and women.
From the 2016 volume of Psychology of Violence, the paper ‘Self-report measures that do not produce gender parity in intimate partner violence: A multi-study investigation’ says it its abstract:
Here we have the reappearance of the Conflict Tactics Scales (CTS), still with the same criticisms against it. This study adjusted the wording of the CTS, and found that there was no longer parity in intimate partner violence between men and women.
My conclusion, from this admittedly small sample of papers, is that studies that show parity of violence between men and women, rely on a flawed methodology, the CTS, which has been criticised by academics for decades.
The specific type of sexual violence against men called ‘made to penetrate’ (which is sometimes referred to by more hysterical MRA types as ‘envelopment’, as if the vagina were some kind of Giger monster that can detach itself from the female body and go hunting for penises), is another MRA obsession. The claim that men are ‘made to penetrate’ as frequently as women are raped, comes from an amateur interpretation of a 2010 study by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), an interpretation rejected by the CDC.
The CDC says this about ‘made to penetrate’:
And this:
1 in 14 men have been ‘made to penetrate’ (completed or attempted) and nearly 1 in 5 women have been raped (completed or attempted), therefore almost 3x as many women have been raped as men have been ‘made to penetrate’, and of those men, 21%, over a 5th, reported male perpetrators, so it is not true to say that women are committing sexual violence against men at the same rate as men are committing sexual violence against women.
The only fields where men unequivocally outperform women are physical and sexual violence. There have been “almost 50 deaths […] linked to incels across North America in recent years” with the latest killing in Canada being treated as a terrorist attack.
There is not a single case in all of recorded human history of a woman going on a killing spree because she couldn’t get laid; the number of female serial killers and spree killers is tiny compared to the number of men, even tinier when you look at women who weren’t acting with/for a male partner.
I will conclude with the challenge I give to all MRA’s who insist women are just as violent as men: show me the bodies! Show me the two men a week in England and Wales murdered by a current or former partner; show me the three men a week in the USA murdered by a current or former partner; show me which country in the global south has an epidemic of ‘androcide’ (men being murdered by women).