More Pesky Facts

I can't seem to start any blog fights with ideological enemies, but my friends seem to find plenty to argue about. Amy informs me that I'm wrong about the relative prevalence of wife-beating and husband-beating, and she points me to a bunch of evidence indicating that husband-beating is just as common. Rather than point you to the URLs, I'll just point you to Google and let you do a search on "husband beating." A plethora of articles will show up, although they do all seem to rely on the same one or two studies (specifically, Steinmetz 1977). I'm still skeptical. There's such an incredible array of evidence that men are generally more violent than women (just look at any statistics on violent crime or incarceration rates) that it's hard for me to believe things would be any different behind the marital veil. But lacking any specific facts to refute the Steinmetz conclusion, I guess I'll just have to grumble a little bit and admit that I could be wrong. Feh. Anyway, Amy agrees with the broader point of my last post, which is that objections to the term "wife beater" on grounds of offensiveness or discrimination are pretty silly.