Men Can Hit Women: Deconstructing A Sexist Tradition

Conservatives are generally not hesitant to defend the idea of proportionate self-defense--until the attacker is a woman and the victim is a man.  Liberals are generally not hesitant to defend the idea of gender equality--until women who abuse men are exposed or have their male victims fight back.  Conservatives certainly tend to have sexist ideas about women, but members of both ideological factions openly discriminate against men, often without realizing it.

Men who are attacked by men are often rightly regarded as being morally justified in using force to protect themselves, just as women who defend themselves from male or female attackers are regarded as innocent as long as the level of force is proportionate to the threat.  The only consistent exception to the perceived legitimacy of self-defense is cases of female-male assaults.  Socially conditioned ideas about how women are unjustly viewed as naturally innocent, either lacking the desire to physically harm men or incapable of sexually assaulting them, and deserving of special protection see to that.

Christians--whose text says in its very first chapter that men and women equally bear God's image and thus are metaphysically equal--are often guilty of promoting the assumptions that feed this double standard.  Stupidity does not alter truth, of course, and yet there are numerous men and women identifying as Christians who are subjectively uncomfortable with the thought of a man intentionally harming a woman while being completely in the right for doing so.  Whatever the reason why they might act upon this discomfort by encouraging sexist double standards, there are obvious Biblical examples where women can be justly harmed by men.

If a woman attempts to rape or murder a man and the victim strikes or even kills her in self-defense, the man has not sinned (rape and murder are capital crimes according to the Bible to begin with).  If a woman commits a sin that merits a Biblically prescribed flogging (Deuteronomy 25:1-3) and a man administers her punishment, the man has not sinned, even if he inflicts the maximum of 40 lashes.  If someone would react differently if any of the genders were switched in these scenarios, they harbor sexist beliefs that discriminate against men.

Men are free to defend themselves from malicious men and women, and women are free to defend themselves from malicious women and men.  It should be obvious that this is the only egalitarian stance on self-defense: anything else is tainted by the sheer illogicality of complementarianism.  Whoever denies that both genders can protect themselves from those who wish to inflict unjust harm upon them, whether due to a misinterpretation of Biblical ethics or to societal conditioning, is thoroughly sexist.