Domestic violence in the good old days

[David]

<split from “Collingwood from the Inside Out” documentary thread>

[K]

They also drank as much as they wanted, smoked as much as they wanted, did unspeakable things to women who weren't their wives, etc., without any media spotlight or the disease of social media.

[stui magpie]

[Pies4shaw]

Can smoking only be done consensually, now?

[stui magpie]

^

I told my doctor I only smoke after sex

he told me to either slow down or use some lube

[shawthing]

[David]

^ How do you know that? Have we been previously acquainted? I was under the (perhaps misguided?) impression you were a new poster here.

(I will bet you that the percentage was considerably smaller than 99%, anyhow. Domestic violence is and always has been mostly invisible to the world outside the home.)

[stui magpie]

^

It wasn't invisible, it wasn't condoned or encouraged, it just wasn't spoken about.

Growing up in a small country town, everyone knew who the wife bashers were, just no one did anything about it.

[David]

I feel like the definition has probably changed over time, right? We know nowadays that domestic violence goes beyond old-fashioned ideas of wife-bashing.

[stui magpie]

Yeah, it always has swung both ways and covered a lot of ground.

Psychological torment has typically been the woman's chosen weapon though. My mum has told me about a bloke she worked with in the 90's. He was a quiet bloke, his wife was a snobbish bitch who used him as a life support system for a wallet. As soon as the kids were grown up and left home, she stopped cooking. She'd arrange food for herself, he had to get his own so he ate dinner at the pub each night.

In small country towns there are no secrets.

[K]

This article was obviously written for David :

Boxed in: the fragility of men

https://www.theage.com.au/lifestyle/gender/boxed-in-the-fragility-of-men-20190731-p52cpd.html

"One old school friend left Australia 30 years ago, largely because of the hurt his father inflicted on him from the time he was a little boy. When he was 16, his father called the police to escort him from his home because he’d found him experimenting with cannabis. His father didn’t speak to him again for almost a decade. Five years after my friend had been banished and come to live with my family, he saw his father walking towards him down George Street in Sydney. “Hello, Dad,” he said tentatively. His father stared at him briefly, then kept walking.

Another friend was repeatedly bashed and thrown against walls as a boy when his father returned home from the pub. His mother often copped a hiding too. Yet another man I know, a carpenter with dashing good looks, warm and funny to strangers, once tied his six-year-old son to a pole and left him out in the midday sun. That was his way of teaching his little boy a lesson after the boy had said he was bored being on the building site with his dad. “I’ll show you what bored is,” he replied.
...

... Men wheel prams all over Denmark, something we’ve only just begun to see in Australia and in this generation’s Britain where, Biddulph says, a “typical British father was like a log of wood, except that from time to time, he blazed out in violent rage, or an alcoholic blur, or lashed out with a verbal coldness that made millions of sons feel that they never measured up”."

[think positive]

That last sentence could have my dad’s picture next to it, just change sons to daughters.

[stui magpie]

^

I started reading that but I can't relate to it. You can't just throw a blanket over all men who commit domestic violence and isolate a single reason, there's multiple reasons why.

nb, "reason" does not equal excuse

[Born to Pie]

[David]

The nexus of justice and defamation law is, as always, a tricky one to navigate, and too often the latter (or even more nefarious backroom dealings) has been used as a cudgel to prevent the former from being realised. But if your imputation is correct, then I hope that it will be put on the public record at some point.