The wrong cup of tea
World champion Billy Joe Saunders has had his boxing licence suspended by the British Boxing Board of Control after he released a video advising men how to hit their female partners.
In the video, Saunders uses a punch bag to explain how to react if “your old woman is giving you mouth” and showing how to “hit her on the chin”.
Woman talks, man beats her up. Fair?
He later apologised, saying he would “never condone domestic violence”.
Well that’s just silly. Telling men to hit women who talk is more than condoning domestic violence aka male violence against women, it’s giving men instructions in violence against women.
Speaking to Talksport on Monday, he said it was a “silly mistake” and he “obviously wasn’t thinking”.
Saunders added: “I didn’t mean for anyone to get upset about it. There are people dying all around the world with coronavirus and I was just trying to take the heat off that a little bit.
By telling men to beat up women who talk.
Maybe he thought he was being funny? But…you know…it’s a bit like white people “being funny” about lynching or enslaving black people. It’s a bit like German gentiles “being funny” about sending Jews to the showers.
“It clearly hasn’t done, my sense of humour is not everyone’s cup of tea.”
It’s not really about cups of tea though. Men beating up women isn’t really a rich source of humor, because it’s a thing that happens a lot and all the time. It’s not some weird thing men did back in the 13th century, it’s an evil thing way too many men do now.
I like a good Assam, personally.
Billy Joe probably prefers Long Island Iced Tea – it packs more punch than Assam.
/sarc.
Maybe…but one thing I’ve come to be aware of is that there are an awful lot of men who really, honestly don’t perceive women to be actual other people. They’re just a kind of placeholder (or, as the kids say, NPC). Weirdly, I think what really brought this home to me emotionally was this quote from Edward Abbey:
‘We need wilderness, because we are wild animals. Every man needs a place where he can go to go crazy in peace. Every Boy Scout troop deserves a forest to get lost, miserable and starving in. Even the maddest murderer of the sweetest wife should get a chance for a run to the sanctuary of the hills, if only for the sport of it, for the terror, freedom and delirium.’
‘We’ here obviously doesn’t include women. The ‘sweetest wife’ doesn’t need wilderness or sanctuary. Women are just not present as actual humans in Abbey’s imagination.
On reflection, this is obviously another piece of the ‘transgender’ puzzle–since women aren’t actual people, who might actually have a problem with gatecrashers, it’s perfectly OK to just say ‘I’m a woman’–in the same way that, for example, saying ‘I’m an Antarean’ does not carry the consequences that saying ‘I’m a policeman’ might. (Of course women are also free to say ‘I’m a man’, but let’s be honest, only other women even pretend to believe it, as evidenced by laws and behaviour regarding inheritance/titles/men’s clubs/boy’s schools etc. (or am I wrong, and we have TIFs at Eton now)).
Jesus that’s a horrific passage.
I would call myself a ‘green’–I keep my carbon footprint low and support groups and policies advocating for measures to address climate change. But the fact that Edward Abbey is a patron saint of the ‘green’ movement, and that no one seems to have a problem with it, makes me distinctly uncomfortable.
guest, I love some of Abbey’s nature writing; he can turn a phrase with the best. But yes, I have always had issues with his misogyny, and also with his anarchy. I read the passages that sing, and refuse to follow him like a god. It astonishes me how some people cannot tolerate the least criticism of Abbey., when there were clearly so many things to criticize.