When news of the Santa Barbara killings broke, gender activists seized on it as a teachable
moment about the War on Women. There were more than a million tweets at #YesAllWomen.
Well, what did we learn? Coming up next on the Factual Feminist. Many of the activists
at #YesAllWomen insisted that no one was out to demonize men. I'm sure that was true of
many of the contributors. But consider this info-graphic that went viral once it was posted
on Upworthy's tumblr. "You say not all men are monsters? Imagine a bowl of M&Ms. 10%
of them are poisoned. Go ahead. Eat a handful. After all, not all M&Ms are poison." Where
to begin. First of all, what does that 10 percent figure represent? Are they saying
10 percent of men are murderers or rapists? Where's the evidence for that? Are they talking
about all men? American men? College men? Or, as one blogger asked, men who play ukeleles
or martian men? And by the way, I wouldn't eat a single M&Ms if I knew that 10%, 1% or
.01% were poisoned. But what's most wrong about this graphic is that it deploys the
classic logic of bigots. Think of saying well x percent of African Americans or Muslims or Jews or Hispanics
x percent of them are dangerous, and we just don't know which ones, so therefore let's
treat them all as suspects. Congratulations, Upworthy, you've promoted the same logical
fallacy behind the Jim Crow laws or racial profiling. Basically, the message to women
is to treat all men as if they're poison. Now, I think men will be forgiven for finding
the whole thing quite insulting. What's most upsetting to me, the Factual Feminist, is
that the shooting was an occasion for an avalanche of misinformation about women and violence.
Sarah Kliff at Vox rushed into print "eight facts about violence against women everyone
should know." Let's consider some of those facts. 1 . Most women experience physical
abuse in their lifetime. The most recent, national survey of American women found that
a slight majority (51.9 percent) reported experiencing physical violence at some point
in their life." Well this sounds like American women are living in a state of siege. Vox
does gives the source, but my guess is that the author assumed no one checked it out,
I'm not sure she looked at it herself because here is what it says-- and stay with me, this
is a mouthful: "51.9 percent of surveyed women and 66.4 percent of surveyed men said they
were physically assaulted as a child by an adult caretaker and/or as an adult by any
type of attacker. An estimated 1.9 million women and 3.2 million men are physically assaulted
annually in the United States." Vox failed to inform readers that the study accounted
as physical assault, grabbing, pushing and shoving. Also according to VOX: One in ten
women sustained a head or spinal cord injury as a result of physical assault. But, if you
read the study, you find that what it actually shows is that among all adult victims of physical
assault who sustained an injury—both male and female—one in 10 sustained head and spinal
cord injuries. Vox made it sound like every woman has a 10% chance of sustaining a head
or spinal injury from a physical assault. The truth is bad enough. Why hype it up with
this misleading headline? I have been studying research on violence against women for years—and
I am sorry to report, that much of it is untrustworthy. Critics sometimes accuse me of trivializing
the problem violence against women by questioning the research. In fact, I question the research
because the problem of violence against women, against children, against men in the US is
just too serious to be left to advocates and careless journalists. Truth is on the side
of compassion, falsehood is no friend. I want to thank the viewers of this series for your
many insightful remarks and conversations in the comments section. Please keep up the
good work, and if you have any suggestions for further episodes, let me know. If you
found this video useful, please subscribe, and follow me on Twitter. Thank you for watching
the Factual Feminist.