by cauch | 2025-07-26 23:15:39+00:00
I'm simply trying to have an enjoyable conversation where we all learn and understand each other. I was just saying "I'm not convinced by this, but maybe I did not understood" to avoid assuming incorrectly, and to invite non-confrontationally to clarify if I'm wrong and provide more arguments.

I'm not saying that the children example means that "every bigger persons will be violent towards a smaller person", I'm trying to explain that the children example means that "violence is not the result of being bigger, it's the result of the individual propensity to be violent, which itself depends a lot of the individual 'world view'". What I call here 'world view' is how the individual understand the world, their role in this world, what they can or cannot do, ... This is something built based on their parent education, but also their personal experience, what they absorb from the ambient culture and how they identify with different societal messages.

Such influence is taken as obvious in plenty of places: we don't question concepts like "different countries have different cultures and therefore people act differently", or "the education that this person has received had an impact in the way they act now", or ...

I find strange that, when it is a discussion that we can frame as "men vs women", these things that we immediately considered impactful in other situations are suddenly considered as totally non-impactful in this context.

Because of that, it feels unrealistic to pretend that women will obviously be as violent if they were stronger than men and that the only thing that stops them is them being smaller.

> If the root cause is culture encouraging men to be physically violent, why would the total amount of physical violence be the same in gay relationships, especially lesbian ones?

I've mentioned that (when I've said "if indeed it is cultural, it implies that different sub-culture may have different ways of acting"). The propensity of violence depends on the "world view", which itself depends on personal experience, what is the message the society send to the individual their role is, ...

In the case of lesbians:

1) I don't think we can easily say "it's the same". Some studies even say it's more, but then, how do you explain that with your model? But looking into it, it looks like the consensus is that it is a difficult study and that we don't have a good statistical significance: the consensus seems to be that concluding "it's the same" is not scientific right now, all we can say is "it may be the same, but it may also not be the same, we don't know yet".

2) The life experience, the social message they receive, the relationship dynamics, ... are quite different in lesbian couples and in heterosexual couples. And all of this affects the propensity to violence. I can understand that a group where the members grew up in a society that sends the message their sexual attraction is "wrong" or "deviant" does not have, for example, the same self-esteem than a group where it is not the case. It is not fair to pretend that lesbian couples have the same background and the same situation than heterosexual couples.

So, in the case of lesbians, the data you provide is not challenging my model: it can easily be that men may be more violent in heterosexual relationship because of sociocultural message (such as "getting angry is the manly way to deal with frustration") or sociocultural role (such as "men are the breadwinner and are focusing more on their career, so they have more pressure and snap differently than women"), while lesbians may be more violent because of their sociocultural message inside their own subculture (maybe? Maybe for example "in a lesbian couple, we expect to have a butch one and a dominated one") or their life experience (maybe? Maybe for example "low self-esteem of both the victim and the abuser leads to a relationship dynamic that facilitate violence").

I'm also interested to have more information about your view on the phenomenon like the manosphere. I don't think we have a "female manosphere" that promotes the same culture of violence towards the partner (I'm sure there are cases, but that is not at all the same order of magnitude in popularity and mainstreamness). Sure, the people who really fall for the manosphere rhetoric is a minority, but they are the extreme of a Gaussian curve that indicate that the mean value is not at the same place for men and for women. If it's the case, is it really realistic to just pretend it has no impact at all (and if it has no impact at all, why people who defend that it has no impact will also be worried about "the image of the men" when it comes to talking about violence done by men? Why would be one message harmless and the other dangerous?)