Equality with a Vengeance: Men's Rights Groups, Battered Women, and Antifeminist Backlash

6. Gender and Patriarchy

103 6 Gender and Patriarchy A critical point is that even if women were as aggressive as men (a point not yet proven), partner violence is still not a gender-neutral phenomenon. In a society organized socially and psychologically along the lines of gender, aggression and violence among male and female partners are necessarily gendered in the meaning of the experience, provocations, and consequences. —White et al. 2000, 694 No one denies that wives can be violent or that some husbands are battered. Incidence rates are not the issue. Rather, the question is whether gender is useful to our understanding of battering. —Bograd 1990b, 134 Although studies quantifying sex differences receive a disproportionate amount of media attention, they comprise only a small portion of the total research on human violence, most of which investigates the social and structural factors that can potentially be changed in order to reduce violence. One issue highlighted by such lawsuits as Booth v. Hvass and the discourses surrounding them is the conflation and confusion of the terms sex, gender, and patriarchy. The issue of how gender is relevant to violence is salient regardless of the existence of contradictory claims about the magnitude of sex differences . It is important to talk about gender as well as sex because violence against intimate partners exhibits both sex differences and gender differences . Gendered social practices and institutions contribute to the observed sex differences in violence, just as they do to other kinds of human behavior. Understanding gender differences helps answer questions about how and why violence happens. Gender and other social and structural 104 | Equality with a Vengeance differences are also important to making decisions about where and how to expend scarce resources for violence prevention and intervention. Opponents of gender-inclusive analyses of violence frequently ask two questions—“How can domestic violence be a gender issue if women and men are both sometimes violent?” and “How can domestic violence be a gender issue if it happens in same-sex couples?”Such questions are based on the incorrect conflation of the concepts of sex and gender. Gender The terms sex and gender are often used interchangeably. Some applications and forms, for example, often include a box for identifying one’s “gender”as female or male; others identify these as“sex”categories. Most people, scholars and nonscholars alike, use these terms interchangeably in everyday conversation. Jayde Pryzgoda and Joan Chrisler’s study of understandings of the word gender found,“When psychologists describe something as gendered or talk about gender differences, there is about a 50% chance that readers will assume that they are referring to sex and about a 50% chance that readers will question what they mean” (2000, 300–301).While the word gender is used more frequently than in the past, this finding indicates that understanding of the conceptual difference between sex and gender is still limited. In addition, the exact boundaries of the concept of gender are still evolving. The social sciences have recognized sex and gender as distinct concepts for many years, and the fields of human rights, public health, and medicine are increasingly coming to the same understanding (American Medical Association 2000; Fishman et al. 1999; Johnson, Greaves, and Repta 2009;Phillips 2005).The particular usage of these terms has changed over time and varies somewhat across contexts. Jennifer Fishman, Janis Wick, and Barbara Koenig have argued that “careless usage of ‘gender’ in the biomedical literature leads to misinterpretation and imbues the reported research results with unintended meanings” (1999, 16). While it may be inadvertent, this lack of care in the use of language has “serious implications for future research, clinical practice and treatment, as well as our very understanding of the nature of the health outcomes and status differences that we are studying” (Fishman et al. 1999, 15). Fishman and colleagues note that while the medical field is just beginning to grapple with the notion of a sex/gender distinction, social scientists are already complicating the concept as they puzzle out how sex, Gender and Patriarchy | 105 gender, gender identity, and sexuality interact with one another. The question of where sex ends and gender begins is more complex than it might seem. Indeed, medical researchers have noted the complicated interaction of biology and culture and pointed to the difficulty of drawing a clear line where biology ends and culture begins. There is a need for further theoretical and empirical...