[cauch]

Not sure what is your point.

I think "any form of violence" is not a constructive direction. First, this ends up being very subjective: between 2 forms of psychological violence, which one is the most violent? Secondly, if indeed it is cultural, it implies that different sub-culture may have different ways of acting, so we can always play the subgroups to make it says whatever we want. But most importantly, it is not very relevant for our context: in the case of the first interactions during heterosexual dating, pretending that men risk as much as women seems a very unconvincing claim, for several reasons (even if under-represented it should be under-represented to an unrealistic level to reach an equal level, and it also does not fit with plenty of cultural tropes (I can find a video explaining explicitly that manly men need to dominate their female partner. I'm sure it exists, but the simple fact that I cannot easily find a video explaining explicitly that womenly women need to dominate their male partner shows it's not that of a trope. On the other hand, I can also easily find videos about "trad wife" that will explain that a womenly woman must be with a dominating man))

For the rest, I think we say the same thing: talking about the visible issues is not a problem in itself, but people instrumentalising these issues to be racist or sexist are the problem.

[belorn]

The technical term of "any form of violence" seems to be Partner Abuse, and the definition is: "violence refers to behaviour within an intimate relationship that causes physical, sexual or psychological harm, including acts of physical aggression, sexual coercion, psychological abuse and controlling behaviours."

The primary motives are to get back at a partner for emotionally hurting them, because of stress or jealousy, to express anger and other feelings that they could not put into words or communicate, and to get their partner’s attention.

The highest rates are found in high school and college, and the majority of partner violence is bidirectional. (A meta study illustrating this: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/15248380231193440)

The idea that women are unable of violent behavior, or immune to wanting to take revenge for being emotional hurt or stressed, seems utterly unlikely. Especially young adults who might lack the tools and experience to avoid falling into violent responses.

To quote a different finding: Eight studies directly compared men and women in the power/control motive and subjected their findings to statistical analyses. Three reported no significant gender differences and one had mixed findings. One paper found that women were more motivated to perpetrate violence as a result of power/control than were men, and three found that men were more motivated; however, gender differences were weak

Asking if "men risk as much as women" is a very different question however. If a woman throws a knife at a man, and a man hits a woman in the face, who carry the highest risk? Statically, the fist is going to do significant more damage on average than the knife, as throwing a knife (especially a non-throwing knife), hitting the target, and creating damage is fairly unlikely for a non-proficient attacker. If the attacks was recorded on camera/witnessed, one would be an attack with a deadly weapon with the intent to kill, and the other would be physical assault.

The point is that partner violence is a complex problem, which only simple aspect being that both women and men are humans.

[Dylan16807]

> Not sure what is your point.

If it's almost all about the size of the specific two people in a relationship, it's a terrible terrible idea to aggregate that by gender, leading to completely misplaced wariness and judgement.

[cauch]

Why would it be the size of the specific two people in a relationship?

It looks very clear to me that violent behavior in relationship (and more specifically, in the first few days of dating) is a question of education, not the result of one person being bigger. For example, every parents are stronger than their young children, but only some kind of parent are violent towards their children. If it's a question of education, reducing the problem of the size of the people is a terrible terrible idea: the problem will never go away because you don't understand the source and therefore don't act on the source to fix it.

It feels like some people here are framing the problem in "men vs women" framework, as if it is a competition and they don't want to accept that maybe men behavior is different from women behavior because the way they are raised in our society. I don't really see the point: I'm a man, and yet I don't take it personally. The same way I don't take it personally when someone says "don't accept candy from strangers": I'm a stranger for a lot of kids, and yet I understand why they should be prudent and I understand that, in situation where I have to interact with an unknown kid, I should do things differently (for example not giving them candy), not because I'm a danger for them, but because it is true that there is danger and that they cannot know if I'm a danger or not.

So many men take it uselessly and nonconstructively personally as soon as it is dating.

[Dylan16807]

> Why would it be the size of the specific two people in a relationship?

That's the main argument of the grandparent post. If you're missing that then you're not really responding to what they said.

They went into significant detail so I feel like trying to reword it myself would be worse than suggesting you read the post again.

> If it's a question of education, reducing the problem of the size of the people is a terrible terrible idea: the problem will never go away because you don't understand the source and therefore don't act on the source to fix it.

Nah. Root cause analysis is entirely different from risk analysis. This is about risk analysis. If a woman dates a man that's smaller than her, who should be more worried about violence? That's not the time to worry about why and how to fix society.

> maybe men behavior is different from women behavior

Maybe it is! But then you need a really good explanation for the data in the above post. Or you need to say the data is wrong. But you can't just dismiss it as being defensive.

[cauch]

> That's the main argument of the grandparent post.

Exactly, and I've answered that saying I'm not convinced, so, I've asked you if you had further arguments. I've said at the time why it was not convincing, and I've built even more in my previous comment.

> If a woman dates a man that's smaller than her, who should be more worried about violence?

I still think it's the woman, because not every parent beat their children despite them being smaller, which proves that being bigger does not mean being violent. You need something more. In this case, I think it's a culture that implies that violent men are manly and successful, which is present in the manosphere. Because there is no such culture (I guess you can find anecdotical case, far from being as common as the manosphere) that implies that women beating men is somehow "womenly", I doubt it implies that tall women will beat men at the same rate.

> But then you need a really good explanation for the data in the above post.

All the data adds up, everything is pretty well predicted by this model. Not sure which data you think this model does not explain (unless you think that somehow this model implies 0%-100%, which is of course not the case). On the other hand, I doubt anyone has ever proven that being taller in the relationship is really a strong causal factor (and not just correlation, as the manosphere is also into going to the gym) (but happy to get links if you have some).

[Dylan16807]

> Exactly, and I've answered that saying I'm not convinced, so, I've asked you if you had further arguments. I've said at the time why it was not convincing, and I've built even more in my previous comment.

You never made it clear that you understood the argument, because you went straight from "Not sure what is your point" to "Why would it be". That doesn't look like a request for more convincing, that looks like you never considered it.

> I still think it's the woman, because not every parent beat their children despite them being smaller, which proves that being bigger does not mean being violent.

What. Not every dating relationship involves violence either. We're talking about what's more likely here.

Also children and dates are different in so many ways that even ignoring that factor this doesn't disprove the argument at all.

> Not sure which data you think this model does not explain

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?

[cauch]

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?)