Here is a list of ways being battered by a partner could make you feel: Betrayed, unsafe, compromised, unable to trust your partner or yourself. And here, according to one U.K. ad, is how it could make you feel if you are a man: As if you don't have a penis.
[. . .]
Of course, intimate violence affects both genders. And it's true that ideas about masculinity -- that men have to be strong, in control, unafraid, invulnerable -- can keep men from acknowledging the seriousness of their situation, or from reporting it. However, it's unlikely that a man who feels his masculinity will be compromised if he reports abuse is going to be persuaded otherwise by an ad that basically says, "so, being hit by your partner made your dick fall off."
And then, there's the other implication: That having a penis is a sign of power, that not having one is a sign of powerlessness, that penises are nature's way of signifying a totally-not-abused person.
[. . .]
People who have dicks aren't abuse victims; people who are abuse victims don't have dicks. Being a man without a penis is terrible, largely because it makes you like all those other natural-born victims out there with a reputation for dicklessness. You know: women. (Sady Doyle, “Domestic abuser ad misfires for men misfires,” Salon, 1 April 2010)
Deducting penises
Re: “intimate violence affects both genders”
Are you a mind-spirit, knowing best and first, signposts and significations -- and all else denatured and cerebral -- and now have trouble speaking for those unfortunates who've "known" spousal abuse"?
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Re: “However, it's unlikely that an man who feels his masculinity will be compromised if he reports abuse is going to be persuaded [ . . .]”
Man: "I feel my masculinity might be compromised if I report my abuse."
Other man [to himself]: "If King Kong should fall . . ."
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[1] That having a penis is a sign of power, [2] that not having one is a sign of powerlessness, [3] that penises are nature's way of signifying a totally-not-abused person
[1] Penis = possession of power
[2] No penis = possession of lack of power
[3] Possession of penis = Other's (i.e., nature's) demonstration through you that you are entirely without abuse.
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Re: “Being a man without a penis is terrible, largely because it makes you like all those other natural-born victims out there with a reputation for dicklessness. You know: Women.”
"Women" possess vagina-dentes, that chew up men altogether. Being without a dick means that you've lost yours to one of them. It can end up being empowering, though, as you join the Women-directed dickless horde that gangs up on those so proud to keep their dicks all to themselves.
Terminology
Patriarchy = invention by men and women to imagine society as father-warded against maternal claims (i.e., collapse of self through identity-dissolution). Improvement from matriarchy; enabled civilizations; but is out-dated, and rightly IDed as cruel and way insufficient.
Men, according to (the worst of) academic feminists: Determined by societal factors they themselves are oblivious to. Through study and strict discipline -- a process of enlightenment which has marked them unable wholly to return back, leaving them still inclined to emote as sparsely / foreignly and speak as removedly as do the cautious-learned logician-angels they've come to know -- and natural genetic superiority, academics/feminists see what you are not able. Truthfully, they know -- unless you're a promising graduate student -- you will never be capable of what they themselves were, and so don't really work by changing YOU but by changing the environment you are "subject" to -- that is, they work at changing structures that will end up changing you (or, really, the next gen. of "yous"), for the better but without your likely ever being aware. Even while talking to you, that is -- something they are occasionally drawn to do because, though their lives are mostly elsewhere, your fate is their foremost concern -- their mission is with greater things. Their looking away while talking to you, to the societal conditions that are making you talk / think the way the predictable way you do, is aggravating to someone involved in a conversation with them -- who always hopes for one's full intention, respect for their own ability to possibly influence / change "you" as well -- and this will of course compound the aggravation you necessarily know and daily feel in your being almost entirely the hapless subject of societal forces you know not of. They know this, but it cannot be helped -- though "you" are everything they fight for, you are also -- *sigh* -- the foul crop that has already come in: all blithe; little to no promise.
In truth, their kind of looking away, to their own affairs, while ostensibly looking at you -- their neglect -- is the kind of thing that INSPIRES people to create less than humane societies. In-link to the core of it, actually. I think at heart that we're at the point that many academics sense this, and somewhere inside exult in their ability to exult in their sadism, which creates frustrations which fuels their right to continue-on laughingly at your expense.
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