Vanessa, fascinating piece, and I am not one to argue that men do not have MANY privileges, in fact, most. White, cis-gendered men like me have the most.

However, I am a social researcher, and one of the oddest areas of female privilege is actually currently in the area of intimate violence. Don’t get me wrong, male violence against domestic partners is the dominant form (although not as statistical dominant as we sometimes think), and male-on-female domestic violence is particularly scary because it often escalates into life-threatening or soul-destroying situations.

However, increasingly women express approval of violence by women against their partners, even in contexts where I think cooler heads would all agree it is inappropriate. While self defense is everyone’s absolute right — and women learning to defend themselves is certainly a good move — that’s not what I’m talking about.

Statistics here in Australia show a very substantial number of assaults by women on men, and a lot of unreported interpersonal violence. I think that this is worrying for man reasons, including that in some cases, it can provoke greater violence in retaliation. It’s also linked to patterns of domestic abuse in both men and women (although again, I recognise that men’s patterns are a huge problem, and some forms of violence only seem to be perpetrated by men, such as strangulation, which is particularly dangerous and intimidating and liable to be part of a pattern of coercive control).

But I think we need to be worried that violence can become valorized in an environment where people want revenge. And for every legitimate act of self defense, there are likely many acts of abuse (often this is the same way that abusive men hide their behaviour amongst other, more innocuous forms of male behaviour — like trying to equate it to ‘joking’ or ‘having an argument’).