Hitting A Woman?

arthwollipot said:
I would, and have, hit women. In the head. With a sword.
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Come to think of it so have I. I've also kicked a woman to the ground and made a woman fall to the ground just by standing still when she kneed me.

I miss the dojo.
 
I think Skeptic has some decent points mixed in there. For instance, I do think that there's something to be said for standing up for people even when it's not the particular person that you care about.

When someone is doing something I consider wrong, I generally call them on it, even if that puts me at risk of some sort of physical confrontation. Why? Because I prefer to stand up for what I think is right.

Yesterday, for instance, my girlfriend was buying a drink at a drink-stand. There was a line of maybe five people behind her as she ordered, and I went up and stood next to her to wait. Then a guy walked up next to me as though waiting in line, and I politely told him, "Oh, sorry, I'm just waiting for my girlfriend, the line starts over there."
He said, "No, that's the line to collect your drink, this is the line to order." Which was such obvious nonsense I couldn't understand how he could have the audacity to say it. So I said, "No, it isn't. All these people are in line to order drinks, so go to the back of the line."
"No, no, this is the line."
"Are you blind? Every person hear has been waiting patiently for their drink, go to the end."
We went on like this for a while, and I started to get quite agitated. My girlfriend kept giving me dirty looks, though, and said (in english which he couldn't understand), "Don't talk to him, he's stupid." and, "He knows where the line starts, he just wants to cut in."
etc.

Finally, though, she pulled me away. Which annoyed me a little. It annoyed me even more that the other people waiting in line didn't say anything to him.

That said, while I am not worried that someone in this kind of situation might escalate to violence, I have absolutely no intention of ever doing so. To respond to words with a fist is, in my opinion, cowardly.
 
Skeptic said:
Because, as we know, if you cannot be perfectly virtuous, there's no point in trying, is there?
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Once again you have not shown that your thoughts are closer to the ideal of perfection than anyone else's. The "white knight" meme just didn't stand the test because they were no more and, sometimes a lot less, virtuous than everybody else.
 
Skeptic,
When a dancer says they do it "for the sake of the dance" they may or may not know it but they derive enjoyment from the act of moving, from the endorphins it releases, from the satisfaction of executing something skillfully and the ego boose that provides, from the feeling that they are bringing joy to their audience if there is one. The list goes on.

"Just for the thing" is lovely poetic language, but there is always real benefit underneath.

If a soldier risks his life in a way that brings no benefit to either himself or his army or country, then he isn't being brave, he's costing himself, and his country, since he's depriving them of all the future real help he could provide and throwing away all the training and resources they invested in him.

When risking lives doesn't give any utility to an army, the commanding officers retreat. Good officers don't send men to their death for no benefit if they can help it, that would be a serious waste with no honor.

If you want to say, "Acting in X manner is good failing to is bad" you really have to answer the question of- Why? Otherwise it's indistinguishable from religious convictions on proper behavior.
 
Skeptic said:
Who said there are no manly men? But there are less than there were, now that the manly ideal became some sort of androgynous "connected with his feeling" and "sensitive", well, wimp.

What makes men manly is not NASCAR or football, but self-control, courage, and similar virtues. I don't count those who get drunk in a football game or burn down cars when their soccer team loses (or wins) exemplars of "manliness", but of "spoiled bratiness".
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So, since many samurai were unashamed to cry at beautiful poems or paintings and indeed many wrote poetry or painted they were obiously too "connected with their feelings" and
"sensitive" to be considered real men? They were, well "wimps"?
 
Skeptic,
I have an anecdote for you:

Back in my college days, a buddy of mine (we'll call him X) played football for OU. One night at a party, guys were challenging him to arm-wrestling contests. He was a genuinely good-natured, easy-going guy who was laughing and having a good time as he easily defeated one challenger after another. Then this big guy sat down across from him. X was laughing and joking with everybody as he accepted the challenge. They locked up and X put him down pretty easily, then smiled at him and said something like, "Man, you're the strongest guy I've faced tonight." The guy punched X in the face, sending his glasses flying. X looked at him, picked up his glasses, put them back on and said, "Now why did you do that?" Then he got up and walked out of the room.

In your opinion did X act in a cowardly fashion? I don't think so.

In fact, I learned a lot that night.
 
I'd hit a woman under exactly the same very extreme conditions that I'd hit a man, or a child, or a chimpanzee, or a martian - when I felt it was necessary to protect myself or someone important to me.
 
gentlehorse said:
Skeptic,
I have an anecdote for you:

Back in my college days, a buddy of mine (we'll call him X) played football for OU. One night at a party, guys were challenging him to arm-wrestling contests. He was a genuinely good-natured, easy-going guy who was laughing and having a good time as he easily defeated one challenger after another. Then this big guy sat down across from him. X was laughing and joking with everybody as he accepted the challenge. They locked up and X put him down pretty easily, then smiled at him and said something like, "Man, you're the strongest guy I've faced tonight." The guy punched X in the face, sending his glasses flying. X looked at him, picked up his glasses, put them back on and said, "Now why did you do that?" Then he got up and walked out of the room.

In your opinion did X act in a cowardly fashion? I don't think so.

In fact, I learned a lot that night.
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I had similar thoughts reading Skeptics posts and would just like to expand on how I see your mentioned situation.

On my opinion walking out of the room was a more honorable way to exit that situation than punching him back (regardless of who won the resulting fight) ever could have been.

In the case you described X most likely believed that he could easily win the resulting fight due to his size. He punched your friend for no other reason other than to attempt to escalate the situation into a more violent competition he believed he could win. If your friend had punched back X and lost the resulting fight all he would have done would have been to reward X for his behavior and encourage him to continue that way in the future.

Trouncing X in a fight (depending on how you go about it) wouldn't necessarily have been dishonorable as it might also show him that picking on smaller people was a bad idea, but its also not the best way to handle the situation. The potential for collateral damage while fighting at a party makes it generally a bad idea regardless of the motivation for fighting (short of it preventing some greater injustice).

Basically my personal sense of honor takes this principle and it applies to nearly all situations that involve violence. If a certain degree violence will prevent a larger degree of harm from being committed in the future than it is generally an honorable option (not necessarily the only honorable solution but one of them). It gets murkier when the harm you're trying to prevent is non physical. Generally I would limit any physical response to non physical threats tho something unable to cause any lasting physical damage.

If fighting back has no chance of preventing the action you're fighting against from happening again in the future and instead simply increases the bullies confidence in his abilities then its not honorable, its just stupid. I want to stress the chance option though, some things are worth fighting for even if your chance of success is less than one in a million.

On the issue of hitting women, I don't see anything wrong with it if the same criteria is matched. Namely will it prevent greater harm in the future, and if its not physical harm you are trying to prevent does you're physical response pose no threat of causing lasting damage?
 
Safe-Keeper said:
Because when they are allowed to carry weapons, they can be expected to react calmly and correctly, calmly drawing their firearm to hit the assailant (and only the assailant) - not to mention that if you hear a gunshot, draw your gun, and turn around, you'd be able to identify the real assailant from the other vigilantes who have also drawn their guns.

Which is why you so often read headlines like "a man pulled out a gun and started shooting, injuring one, and was then killed by seven laser-accurate shots from seven heroic people with concealed weapons", and never headlines such as "a man fired madly on people around him in a mall which must have contained many gun-wielding people. He killed seven and injured twelve before shooting himself".

Oh, wait. You don't:rolleyes:.
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The way I like to put it is, "Yeah, it would have made so much sense to turn Virginia Tech into a free-fire zone." (Person 1 starts shooting, person 2 takes 1 down, person 3 turns an instant too late and sees 1 on the ground and 2 with a gun, persons 4-9 just hear shots and draw ... )

BobTheDonkey said:
So there are studies that show women are at least as likely to abuse their spouse as men. Given this statistic, one would think it sexist to label a man a "wife beater" when defending himself/returning in kind.
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But there are facts that show woman are seven times more likely to be seriously injured, and twice as likely to be killed, in intimate-partner violence than men. (Studies such as those you cite are flawed because they tend to treat all "acts of violence" as equal: if he approaches her with his fists clenched, she panics and shoves him away, and he pushes her down the stairs, that counts as two "violent acts" -- her shove and his shove -- and she is regarded as having "initiated" the violence.)

Murray Straus said:
[W]hen we look at injuries resulting from violence involving male and female partners, it is categorically false to imply that there are the same number of “battered” men as there are battered women. Research shows that nearly 90 percent of battering victims are women and only about ten percent are men…[T]here are very few women who stalk male partners or kill them and then their children in a cataclysmic act of familicide. The most brutal, terrorizing and continuing pattern of harmful intimate violence is carried out primarily by men.

Indeed, men are hit by their wives, they are injured, and some are killed. But, are all men hit by women “battered?” No. Men who beat their wives, who use emotional abuse and blackmail to control their wives, and are then hit or even harmed, cannot be considered battered men.... Despite the fact that indeed, there are battered men too, it is misogynistic to paint the entire issue of domestic violence with a broad brush and make it appears as though men are victimized by their partners as much as women. It is not a simple case of simple numbers.
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Wait, so all the studies on that list were flawed, but your single study isn't?

Hmm.

Not that men cannot cause more physical damage - just that I fail to see it as a full 90% of battering victims to be women. That's a little too high to be realistic.

So, we'll look at a Straus study:

Murray Straus said:
The methodological part of this chapter analyzes the discrepancy between the more than 100 "family conflict" studies of domestic physical assaults (those using the Conflict Tactic Scales and similar approaches), and what can be called "crime studies" (i.e., the National Crime Victimization Survey and studies using police call data). Family conflict studies, without exception, show about equal rates of assault by men and women. Crime studies, without exception, show much higher rates of assault by men, often 90% by men. Crime studies also find a prevalence rate (for both men and women) that is a small fraction of the rate of assaults found by family conflict studies.

The difference in prevalence rates and in gender differences between the two types of studies probably occur because crime studies deal with only the small part of all domestic assaults that the participants experience as a crime, such as assaults which result in an injury serious enough to need medical attention, or assaults by a former partner. These occur relatively rarely and tend to be assaults by men. The theoretical part of the chapter seeks to provide an explanation for the discrepancy between the low rates of assault by women outside the family and the very high rates of assault by women within the family.

...

In the mid-1970s my colleagues and I made the disturbing discovery that women physically assaulted partners in marital, cohabiting, and dating relationships as often as men assaulted their partners (Steinmetz, 1978; Straus,
1997; Straus, Gelles, & Steinnietz, 1980)
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So, women assault their families as frequently as men do. Women are merely more likely to report when they are assaulted.
 
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Furthermore:

Straus said:
In the case of battered spouses, the 1985 National Family Violence Resurvey found that 3% of women victims of spouse assaults reported needing medical attention for any resulting injuries.
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Granted, as Straus points out, a 175lb man can hit harder than a 120lb woman. That does not mean that men are more likely to physically assault a woman, nor that it is somehow immoral to fight back (using an appropriate measure of force) when the assault occurs.

If you want to push the "Men are bigger/can cause more serious injury" argument, I simply pose the question:

Would you approach the subject in the same manner if it were a 175lb man vs a 120 lb man, rather than 175lb man vs 120lb woman?

What if the 120lb man is fighting a 175lb woman?

What if the 120lb man is skilled in martial arts/boxing and the 175lb man isn't?

What if the 120lb woman is skilled in martial arts/boxing and the 175lb man isn't?

That these questions are not broached, and barely addressed, indicate the sexism inherent in believing it immoral/wrong for a male to ever hit a female (unless, of course, you completely abhor any violence whatsoever).
 
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BobTheDonkey said:
Furthermore:



Granted, as Straus points out, a 175lb man can hit harder than a 120lb woman. That does not mean that men are more likely to physically assault a woman, nor that it is somehow immoral to fight back (using an appropriate measure of force) when the assault occurs.

If you want to push the "Men are bigger/can cause more serious injury" argument, I simply pose the question:

Would you approach the subject in the same manner if it were a 175lb man vs a 120 lb man, rather than 175lb man vs 120lb woman?

What if the 120lb man is fighting a 175lb woman?

What if the 120lb man is skilled in martial arts/boxing and the 175lb man isn't?

What if the 120lb woman is skilled in martial arts/boxing and the 175lb man isn't?

That these questions are not broached, and barely addressed, indicate the sexism inherent in believing it immoral/wrong for a male to ever hit a female (unless, of course, you completely abhor any violence whatsoever).
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Forget martial arts training! I worked with a guy who was a victim of spousal abuse. While he was sleeping the wife hit him over the head with a bathroom scale . . . TWICE.

He was hospitalized with a fractured skull but at least had the sense not to move back in with the crazy _itch!
 
On my opinion walking out of the room was a more honorable way to exit that situation than punching him back (regardless of who won the resulting fight) ever could have been.
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I fully agree that in some situations that is true.

In this case it probably was: the man punched him, not to belittle or to attack him, but apparently (from the way you are describing it) in a momentary loss of control because he was bested in a hand-wrestling tournament, and was deeply frustrated. For example, I assume that when he told him "what did you do that for?" he was not expecting another blow, but that both of them had realized it was the original blow was a wrong thing to do.

Aristotle, I think, would agree that considering an irrational attack by someone who had lost control of himself for a moment out of frustration is not at all the same thing as a deliberate attack of the type we have discussed so far. It is less worthy of condemnation, less of an insult, precisely because it is due to lack of control and not a calculated, continued insult.

So, here, verbal condemnation is enough. The offense is significantly lesser, so the response should be significantly lesser, too. Here is a case where Aristotle would agree that being courageous (as opposed to rash) is not hitting back, but only showing disappointment and anger -- because that is the appropriate response, and hitting back would be an excessive response, a rash act, not an act of courage.

I am going on a bit on a limb here, but I think that -- if I am guessing the situation correctly -- this is what you intuitively felt, as well. You half-expected him to (rashly) hit back, but when he didn't you realized it was the correct (courageous) thing to only condemn the assailant verbally. You would feel embarrassed if he had rashly hit him. But you would also feel embarrassed if he, for example, hurriedly slinked away without condemning the man who hit him -- which would be cowardly.

So, yes, your intuitive feelings that he did the right thing would, if I am reading the situation correctly, be quite correct, according to Aristotle.

The problem is, you're confusing "sometimes" with "always".

This is not what we're talking about here, is it? We are considering just those cases where the insult is deliberate and continued. When, as I said, you are constantly being publicly humiliated and called a zero, or having a drink thrown in your face, etc., not as a result of some momentary lack of control, but as a calculated insult.

Aristotle would agree that not hitting back is sometimes the courageous act (that is, hitting back might be rash). But my problem here is we are dealing with people who claim it is, in effect, never correct to hit back. This, indeed, rules out rashness -- or, as they say, mean they never react "irrationally" -- but only at the price of embracing cowardliness as, as it were, a default position, what the "rational" person should always do.
 
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Skeptic said:
Aristotle would agree that not hitting back is sometimes the courageous act (that is, hitting back might be rash). But my problem here is we are dealing with people who claim it is, in effect, never correct to hit back. This, indeed, rules out rashness -- or, as they say, mean they never react "irrationally" -- but only at the price of embracing cowardliness as, as it were, a default position, what the "rational" person should always do.
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Of course it's a good idea to hit back, if and only if, by doing so you improve the situation for yourself or someone you care about. In the face of some continued harassment, where there's no other good option for ending it, I'd say that's reasonable.

A drink thrown in your face wouldn't qualify though. If you can laugh it off and enjoy the night by walking away, that takes you five seconds. If you start a fist-fight you open up a good possibility to wreck your whole night.

You still haven't answered why it's a good idea to take on negative consequences with zero positive reward. To be frank, it feels like alpha male posturing. And, heck we're primates, we're wired for that stuff whether we want to be or not, but we're intelligent enough to rise above it, just like we're intelligent enough to control our eating habits even though our brains are programed to grab all the fat and salt and sugar they can.
 
Cainkane1 said:
In Vietnam a Colonel shot and killed a bomb carrying woman who also had a baby on her back. She hit the street and her bomb blew her and her infant to smithereens. He never got over it. His feelings for the baby haunt him to this day.
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At least he's still around to be haunted.
 
JFrankA said:
I've never hit a woman out of anger.

But my ex-wife would get so mad over something that she would stand there and slap herself in the face repeatedly, then claim that I made her so angry that she would have to let out her anger somehow so she'd rather hurt herself than to hit me or break something.
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That is just silly, you can barely punch yourself in the head all that hard. If you want to hurt youself in this manner doorjams are good solid things to use, and unlike other walls you don't run the risk of missing a stud and putting your head through a wall.
 
Skeptic said:
I fully agree that in some situations that is true.

In this case it probably was: the man punched him, not to belittle or to attack him, but apparently (from the way you are describing it) in a momentary loss of control because he was bested in a hand-wrestling tournament, and was deeply frustrated. For example, I assume that when he told him "what did you do that for?" he was not expecting another blow, but that both of them had realized it was the original blow was a wrong thing to do.

Aristotle, I think, would agree that considering an irrational attack by someone who had lost control of himself for a moment out of frustration is not at all the same thing as a deliberate attack of the type we have discussed so far. It is less worthy of condemnation, less of an insult, precisely because it is due to lack of control and not a calculated, continued insult.

So, here, verbal condemnation is enough. The offense is significantly lesser, so the response should be significantly lesser, too. Here is a case where Aristotle would agree that being courageous (as opposed to rash) is not hitting back, but only showing disappointment and anger -- because that is the appropriate response, and hitting back would be an excessive response, a rash act, not an act of courage.

I am going on a bit on a limb here, but I think that -- if I am guessing the situation correctly -- this is what you intuitively felt, as well. You half-expected him to (rashly) hit back, but when he didn't you realized it was the correct (courageous) thing to only condemn the assailant verbally. You would feel embarrassed if he had rashly hit him. But you would also feel embarrassed if he, for example, hurriedly slinked away without condemning the man who hit him -- which would be cowardly.

So, yes, your intuitive feelings that he did the right thing would, if I am reading the situation correctly, be quite correct, according to Aristotle.

The problem is, you're confusing "sometimes" with "always".

This is not what we're talking about here, is it? We are considering just those cases where the insult is deliberate and continued. When, as I said, you are constantly being publicly humiliated and called a zero, or having a drink thrown in your face, etc., not as a result of some momentary lack of control, but as a calculated insult.

Aristotle would agree that not hitting back is sometimes the courageous act (that is, hitting back might be rash). But my problem here is we are dealing with people who claim it is, in effect, never correct to hit back. This, indeed, rules out rashness -- or, as they say, mean they never react "irrationally" -- but only at the price of embracing cowardliness as, as it were, a default position, what the "rational" person should always do.
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Ironically, your stance in this particular discussion is akin to the big guy who lost the arm-wrestling match and, as his manhood was now in dire straits (no relation to the band, mind you), felt the need to reassert just how manly he is by punching the guy who had bested him.

Somehow, I think you overestimate the value of your position, sir.
 
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