Is this such dreadful misogyny?
Joan Smith had an article in this Tuesday's Evening Standard in which she claimed that the "real face of the militant fathers' rights movement", best known for its Superman stunts up cranes and the like, was shown by an incident in which some former members of Fathers4Justice threw eggs at the Education Secretary, Ruth Kelly:
These guys really hate women, don't they? Ms Kelly may be a government minister but she is also slightly built and has four children. I imagine they were horrified when they saw TV pictures of their mother being smashed over the head with an egg, like the thousands of women subjected to unprovoked attacks by current or former partners each year.
The assault, carried out by a man claiming to belong to a splinter group called Real Fathers4Justice, is a reminder that one woman in four will become a victim of domestic violence, according to Home Office statistics.
The reader may find a few examples of Ruth Kelly's brush with Michael Downes' egg on Google Images; one can find an example at the Telegraph's page here, and I don't think the expression on her face really conveys much shock or horror. But I was really taken aback by Joan Smith's comparison of this incident with domestic violence, with which, apart from the fact that the assailant was a man and the victim a woman, there is no comparison. It's not as if he used acid or boiling water; he used an egg, which breaks easily, and is not heavy. Wife-beaters do not just ruin their partners' clothes – they use hands and fists, and sometimes weapons, and generally not in front of police they know will arrest them.
What on earth are you on about, Joan? And what is the Standard doing printing this nonsense, given that grotesquely inappropriate comparisons are not normally tolerated. If you even compare killings by the Israeli army with those by Palestinian militants, you will get shouted down and your editors (and you yourself) might well get sacks of letters from organised "protesters". How is an egg like a fist?
Of course, this is the latest in a long line of articles by feminists in the media trying to portray fathers' rights campaigners as wife-beaters and otherwise no good – Polly Toynbee has written at least two ([1], [2]). These women – and they do all seem to be women – gloss over the real issues behind the protests, dismissing the fathers as violent "deadbeat dads" who never showed an interest until they got hit with a maintenance demand, and support whichever position suits women.
Don't get me wrong; wife-beaters are scum and deserve to be punished severely, but Joan Smith would not object to the stunt in the least if the stunt had been perpetrated against a man who wasn't a politician. Our society has a taboo against men hitting women, which no doubt derives from the fact that men are generally stronger, but is more tolerant of bullying and violence by males against other males (for example, by 16-year-olds against 11-year-olds, particularly in reaction to so-called mouthing-off, something some policemen seem to think acceptable); but bullies bully only those who are weaker than they are. I remember this particular hypocrisy being demonstrated by a bully and braggart at my school who, when I remarked that I had hit a female teacher (the same one who used to poke people in the arm with Biro pens and attack boys in other ways), said "how can you hit a woman?".
Some women are powerful; some women have access to gangs of thugs and some to the full force of the law, and some men only have their fists, and might prefer to throw eggs rather than use them; there are ways of messing up people's lives without laying a hand on them. The guy no doubt will get prosecuted and rightly so, and one wonders why Michael Downes went for the education secretary (because she was there?) and might speculate that he wouldn't have picked on John Prescott, but please don't compare Ruth Kelly to a battered wife.
