You aren’t supposed to share personal feelings on sensitive or political matters on the web. That stuff will follow you forever. Fortunately, I stopped caring about that ‘gentleman’s rule’ a long time ago. That allows me to talk about issues such as Stephen A. Smith’s recent comments on domestic violence. I’m not really here to defend or refute his opinion. I’m more interested in discussing how his words have taken on a larger meaning than what he intended purely because he tweaked the nerve of a deeper issue: In all of our conversations about equality we are forgetting that between the lines we are often asking for one gender to take on more responsibility than the other gender depending on the circumstances.
One show I’ve enjoyed this summer is Murder in the First. The show does an excellent job portraying an exciting murder investigation of a wealthy suspect. There was a particular scene when a woman decided to tee off on her husband. She kept hitting and hitting him. Finally he had enough and connected with a shot to the face. She went down. My first thought was, If she was an undersized man throwing punches, would his response have been wrong? What if it were a kid hitting him? When does a person no longer have the right to defend themselves from attack?
If you are a man, you likely never have the right to defend yourself against a woman’s attack. Well, if she’s armed you might get a pass–at least until you disarm her and then gentleman’s rules apply. The same rules apply to kids and anyone else who is considered so vastly underpowered as to not be a threat. I think back to that elevator incident with Jay-Z and Solange Knowles where she tried to beat the crap out of him and he, calmly, stepped back and avoided being caught on film hitting a woman. That would’ve been the headline: Jay-Z Beats Sister-in-Law, and the woman would expectedly be absolved of all responsibility in the matter.
I’d like to believe that this is the point Stephen A. Smith was trying to make. If so, he is correct. We do not generally hold female attackers responsible for their actions if they are injured by the man they are attacking. It is enough that the man chose to defend himself to make him the guilty party and fully responsible for the actions. This is partly because it is so hard to get people to come forward and admit that they are victims of DV. In that sense, I get the criminalization of the act.
Still, it would be nice to know that if I’m sitting in the parking lot one day and a woman decides she wants to pull me out through the driver’s side window, I wouldn’t have to pause and think about the social consequences of hitting her vs. taking a beating from her. Both results end with me in a worse position than where I started from. Of course, in the words of ‘Lets be Cops’ if I wind up in such an awkward position, “That’s what you get.”
Some Thoughts:
- Giants play the Bills this Sunday. Oh yeah.
- This clip is the greatest comic book adaptation pitch EVER.