The biggest losers of the coronavirus hysteria are going to be white men, as they are going to lose their jobs and have their families destroyed when they become unable to provide. But of course, we are not going to hear about that. Just like we have to hear endlessly about how the fake pandemic is disproportionately affecting the blacks, we also have to hear about how it’s disproportionately affecting women.
BBC:
Less than a month since Europe came to a near-standstill, it is too soon to see the full impact on gender violence from official statistics.
But in abusive households, experts see a potentially devastating combination of emotions brewing. Women fear the aggressor inside the home and the virus outside.
Stress makes abusers even more volatile, while heightened privacy gives them a feeling of impunity.
In Spain, Kika Fumero traces it back to the state of alert declared on 14 March.
“From that moment I knew that what was good for stopping Covid-19 was going to be horrible for those women and their children who were in a violent situation at home,” the head of the Canary Islands Institute for Equality told the BBC.
She had seen the spikes in abuse from periods of confinement before, when women were forced to spend more time with their partner during floods or holidays.
The framing of the issue as it’s being discussed in the media is “domestic violence,” and they claim that men who were previously “abusers” are now upping their power level, going into ultra-abuse mode. This is a really dumb framing, because what would make more sense is that men who had previously not been abusive were becoming abusive due to the stress. However, if you said that, you would have a number of different problems, to wit:
- If men who don’t normally beat women are beating women because of stress, then the men are also victims of the lockdown.
- “Abusive men” are supposed to be a special category of men, who are evil, and the idea that circumstance could drive a man to become abusive destroys the mainstream media melodrama of “pure good versus pure evil.”
- You would have to acknowledge that the lockdown itself is extremely harmful to society, instead of something being exploited by evil people to commit evil acts.
This issue of “rising domestic violence during a lockdown” has been mentioned a lot, and I’ve written about it before. I’m a supporter of domestic violence, and strongly believe that women deserve to be beaten. It’s a simple fact of reality that if you don’t beat women occasionally, they will think they can get away with anything, and will eventually go completely off the rails.
“I told you not to move the stuff on my desk!”
That having been said, there is a kernel of truth that is being hinted at with these articles about rising domestic violence under a lockdown: this situation is extremely hard on families.
If you are permanently locked in your house with someone – while also suffering from the stress of people telling you you’re going to die of a disease – your relationship with that person is going to be very strained. And honestly, though I’m very critical of the media narrative about “domestic violence,” it is just obvious that such a situation is going to lead to extreme negative emotions, which will lead to those emotions being taken out on the others you are trapped with.
“I told you to clean the litter box!”
Far from some form of dark evil, this is no different than if you’ve had a really stressful day and you end up being rude to someone who you shouldn’t have been rude to. We have all experienced that, and hopefully most of us have gone back to the person we were unnecessarily rude to and said “I was under a lot of stress and shouldn’t have said that to you.”
That dynamic of treating others badly as a result of increased pressure that is unrelated to that person is something we all understand, but the extreme form that this will take during something like this lockdown could obviously result in a lot more than mean words – it could result in physical violence, both from the woman and the man (90% of the time it would be the woman).
You can call that “abuse” if you want, though the connotations of the term make it almost useless.
“I told you to put the toilet seat back up!”
That is real, and maybe it’s an issue, but the bigger problem is that what goes on during the lockdown is going to lead to long-term resentment between families. You combine that with the coming economic pressure, which is already the number one cause of divorce, the fact that men are not going to be able to provide for their families because they won’t have work, and you’re going to have an absolute disaster.
We are going to see the biggest spike in divorce in all of history when this lockdown ends.