The Bible Does Not Trivialize Violence Against Men, By Women Or Men

With physical and verbal violence/abuse, as with other matters, the Bible does not just not deny, but is ruthlessly direct in affirming that nothing is of greater or lesser severity because of the recipient's gender.  According to a multitude of passages, matters of assault, murder, negligent killing/death, corporal punishment, and verbal cursing are to be strictly handled without discrimination on the basis of gender.  The status of slaves and parents, brought up in relation to the aforementioned categories of sin, also surfaces again and again as one of absolute gender equality in the verses below.  No, there are many other passages in Mosaic Law and elsewhere that explicitly affirm gender equality in rights and obligations and just penalties, and there are plenty of passages that do not teach sexism as many pretend, as well as passages that conflict with specific gender stereotypes in their moral prescriptions/condemnations or in their narrative accounts.  Here, however, are examples of verses directly about the issue of gender equality in physical and verbal violence from early in the Torah's laws:

Exodus 21:15—"'Anyone who attacks their father or mother is to be put to death.'"

Exodus 21:17—"'Anyone who curses their father or mother is to be put to death.'"

Exodus 21:20—"'Anyone who beats their male or female slave with a rod must be punished if the slave dies as a direct result,'"

Exodus 21:26-27—"'An owner who hits a male or female slave in the eye and destroys it must let the slave go free to compensate for the eye.  And an owner who knocks out the tooth of a male or female slave must let the slave go free to compensate for the tooth.'"

Exodus 21:28-29, 31-32—"'If a bull gores a man or woman to death, the bull is to be stoned to death, and its meat must not be eaten.  But the owner of the bull will not be held responsible.  If, however, the bull has had the habit of goring and the owner has been warned but has not kept it penned up and it kills a man or woman, the bull is to be stoned to death, and its owner also is to be put to death . . . This law also applies if the bull gores a son or daughter.  If the bull gores a male or female slave, the owner must pay thirty shekels of silver to the master of the slave, and the bull is to be stoned to death.'"

Leviticus 20:9—"'Anyone who curses their father or mother is to be put to death.  Because they have cursed their father or mother, their blood will be on their own head.'"

Deuteronomy 12:31—"You must not worship the Lord your God in their way, because in worshiping their gods, they do all kinds of detestable things the Lord hates.  They even burn their sons and daughters in the fire as sacrifices to their gods."

Deuteronomy 18:10—"Let no one be found among you who sacrifices their son or daughter in the fire . . ."

While the next verses do not mention both male and female victims in their fundamental linguistic structure like the passages above, there is also a part of the Torah that directly acknowledges a potentially sexual assault (or an assault adjacent to a sexual kind, which still has ramifications for it either way) of men by women other than rape—female-male rape being something stories like that of Lot's daughters in Genesis 19 include in the Bible.  By logical necessity and as would follow anyway from Genesis 1:26-27 and 5:1-2, such women deserve death just like men who rape women (Deuteronomy 22:25-26).  The following verses do not teach in their literal wording or by logical extension that men are morally free to assault women in the equivalent way, or that men doing this would be a lesser mistreatment than the example given, but they do touch directly on a woman attacking a man and condemn a particular act even in defense of her family:

Deuteronomy 25:11-12—"If two men are fighting and the wife of one of them comes to rescue her husband from his assailant, and she reaches out and seizes him by his private parts, you shall cut off her hand.  Show her no pity."

As the first set of passages certainly emphasize, the Bible very overtly and repeatedly condemns the idea that violent and other sins against women are less severe than those same offenses against men—and the likewise utterly sexist idea that those against men are less severe than those against women.  Moreover, these laws do not exempt women as aggressors, and Deuteronomy 25:11-12 specifically condemns women who do wrong in physical altercations.  The same violent acts or words are equal in nature if the offender is a man or woman and if the victim is a man or woman.  It is logically impossible, even if the Bible is not true, for the same act by or against a man or woman to be different in severity or moral weight because of the genitalia of one party or the other.  The Bible does more than not deny any of this.  In the very first chapter prescribing punishments for particular criminal sins, one chapter after the introduction of the Ten Commandments, gender equality is regularly emphasized.  To not deny the logical equivalence would be enough to be consistent with it.  The Bible does far more.

Contrary to what reason and the Bible dictate, many I have met who call themselves Christians who think men cannot be victimized by women physically or sexually (as if sexual assault is not a subcategory of physical abuse as it is).  Otherwise, they say it is worse for a man to abuse a woman than for a woman to abuse a man; if a man is victimized in some way by either a man or a woman, depending on the specific offense against him, many people simply talk and act as if they do not care much or at all.  Murder is for some reason regarded even by fools I have met as being more equivalent no matter the gender of the perpetrator or victim. With physical assaults short of murder, or with sexual assaults up to rape itself, there is utterly irrationalistic and unbiblical reluctance to acknowledge men as victims, women as violent or otherwise grave sinners, and women as not having some special right to unflinchingly delicate treatment no matter what they believe or do.

If all the Bible ever said about gender equality was that both men and women are made in God's image in Genesis 1:26-27, this would be enough to plainly affirm what reason reveals to any willing person, for gender equality is true by logical necessity.  The ramifications of this include the same tenets of equality in justice put forth in Exodus 21.  This independently true equivalence of men and women as people and the logical falsity of gender stereotypes does not mean morality exists, but that if it does (something that has to be true if Christianity is true), genitals could not possibly determine one's rights and obligations regarding violence and a host of other things.  Anything that does not hinge on literal genitalia, from stereotypical mental traits to the secular or "Christian" complementarian double standards in ethical matters, would be irrelevant to the metaphysics of gender and to moral standing.  In my life, I have very frequently, in conversation with legions of non-rationalists and in entertainment, seen the cultural prominence of the irrational notion that if a woman assaults a man physically/sexually, she has done nothing wrong or significant, or she has committed a lesser offense at best.  The Bible goes out of its way to teach not the inverse, that men are the ones that have not sinned or have trivially sinned in doing such things to women, but to affirm true equality.