I’ve stayed out of the argument about gender, yet I have no conflict in regards to male and female emotions; we all have the same hardware. We might be wired up a bit differently, but if we were so dissimilar we would not have evolved to become a super species (and I’m sure no woman worth her salt would suggest men are responsible for that alone). In a sane and balanced world, hitting a woman is never acceptable. However, we live in tumultuous times and gender has become a nebulous thing. 

RTE’s analysis of the Natasha O’Brien v Cathal Crotty case describes how Crotty viciously assaulted O’Brien after she asked him to stop shouting homophobic slurs. Taken from that point of view, Crotty deserves jail, yet a judge gave him a fully suspended sentence. Since then, the tag ‘gender-based violence’ has been attached to the assault. Natasha O’Brien set up a GoFundMe page for herself asking for e10,0000. She hopped up on a stage at a music festival to yell at revellers about hate crimes and LGBTQ rights. To me, it all feels a bit opportunistic and even political. At the end of the day, it was a drunken argument that got violent, which cannot be spun as gender-based by the very same people who claim there are countless genders.  

Elements of the attack also seem to have been omitted, if you believe Gript Media (whose integrity as a news outlet is one I consider intact, for the most part). CCTV footage does not always tell the full story. According to Gript, since getting off, Crotty’s friends have claimed they have video that broadens the story of the attack to show O’Brien verbally and physically assaulting him, which Gardai warned would affect the trial (which left me thinking, well, yeah, that’s what evidence is supposed to do.)

If O’Brien did provoke Crotty, she did not deserve what she got. Crotty should have been a man and walked away. However, far too often these days, videos pop up on social media showing women swinging punches at men, and in return getting hit back, often with devastating results. Is this a symptom of a generation who has grown up believing the foolishness they’ve been force-fed about gender and sex? 

As much as I believe a man should walk away, I also believe he has a right to self defense. I remember one rainy night in Galway where a group of people were fighting in the streets. In the drunken chaos, there was this beautiful girl slapping the head off a bloke, who took hit after hit whilst backing away. If he had hit her back, he would have prevented what happened next. I stood in shock as she took off her stiletto and drove the pointy heel of it into his face. He clutched his eye as blood streamed down his face and began screaming that she had blinded him. After she ran off, I went to help and saw he hadn’t lost an eye but had been hit just below his eye socket—a couple of millimetres higher and he’d have lost the eye. I’m not sure what happened to her, likely nothing as he seemed the type to not court trouble. 

Anecdotally, I worked as a hairdresser for a couple of years in my youth, and I know how good women can be. I also know they have a dark side. There was one woman I worked with, let’s call her Michelle, who spent the greater portion of her working week belittling and degrading men. Being young myself at the time, I assume she saw me as a boy and hence immune from her vitriol. We often went for lunch, actually, because beneath that nasty side, she was funny as hell. She would often pass remarks about men like she was Dublin’s own working-class version of the Dalai Lama. Yet she was far from accurate or fair, I remember thinking. She’d go for strong men—loved to see their confidence toppled. Confident men were arrogant to her and shy ones were weirdos and losers. She is not alone in that viewpoint.

Michelle was particularly nasty about her husband, let’s call him Mike, who to me was a complex and confident yet shy sort. One day she came into work with a black eye and split lip. All her colleagues rallied around her to call Mike every name under the sun. Yet, nobody suggested she call the Guards. In fact, afterwards there was a sense of ostracization towards Michelle, like she had finally said or done something to push Mike over the edge.

Many of those hairdressers were feminists. Strong, opinionated and non-bullshit women. Modern feminists, as far as I can tell, don’t seem to weigh up the nuances of the relationship between men and women when it comes to those relationships spilling into domestic violence. It’s always the man’s fault, even if the woman strikes first; women are always innocent victims. I would ask modern feminists, what would you suggest a man like Mike do in that situation? He could have left Michelle, but he would have been abandoning his kids, which I know he loved more than life. He could have given Michelle a taste of her own medicine: be horrible twenty-four-seven and make a joke of it all afterwards—Michelle was an expert at destroying people’s lives and making herself seem like the victim somehow? Mike hadn’t got that type of darkly clever mind.

Lashing out during emotional, tense, claustrophobic situations may feel like the only solution to certain individuals—which I believe does not explicitly make them the bad guy. Not to excuse violence, and not to paint it as the worst crime in the world either as emotional and mental scars don’t heal nearly as quickly. 

Mike should have gotten a divorce. I would have. I’d make sure to fill up the moments with my kids. Yet, in that situation, Michelle was the higher earner and Mike took care of their kids, and she didn’t respect him. He needed her, and she, although there’s no way in hell she would have admitted it, she needed him. He made her a nicer person. Without him, she’d have been unbearable and probably unemployable and living on benefits. 

I wonder what feminists would suggest a typical, self-confident man do, say, in an environment dominated by unhappy, nasty, vindictive women like Michelle, who derive pleasure and get energy from taking men down? I have been in that situation more than once. A woman’s agreeable nature is prone to a convincing argument, particularly when in a social, media-fed bubble with nothing but an echo chamber to voice concerns. If you demonize all men and make women the perpetual victims, you remove the nuance and emotion from life. Humans and particularly men become agitated and potentially aggressive in those circumstances.

Those whose mission it is to bring attention to gender-based violence, and who see that as a symptom of inherent violence found in the XX chromosome’s, need to pull back and look at the bigger societal picture. If you really want to help women, remove the idea that women can say and do what they like with impunity (as long as they’re not headbutting people). Remove the idea that men are somehow emotionally stunted. The fact is, we learn to manage our emotions in childhood. We learn to avoid getting too deep into emotions because, despite us valuing them, too much emotion is a hindrance. Men prefer calm and functional environments. However, when you throw a woman in there, with a Hello Magazine, pseudoscience-driven sense of female emotional superiority, men don’t like that; become frustrated. Yes, a man must learn to manage his emotions differently around women, and the same applies to women around men. I would advise women to exercise caution and never test a man to breaking point. It’s laughable to suggest that women are one-hundred percent blameless when heightened emotions spill into societal violence against them. 

As a feminist I believe in full equality yet I’m a realist. If I saw a man hitting a woman, I’d deck him and ask questions later. If society pushes the idea that women are always the innocent victims, it’s only going to make men more frustrated, which comes out after the pub. If you want to help women, be more inclusive. Arbitrarily judging men widens the divide and thus makes us enemies, which puts women in danger! Teach men how to handle the Michelle’s of this world. Women like that cause trouble every day of their lives and, for the most part, men never do anything because the majority of us respect women, sometimes to the point of benignity around them. It is not acceptable to hit a woman, absolutely, yet to say never; to excuse the ways that women cajole, belittle and diminish men; to take human emotion out of the equation would be to view life as AI might, less-than-a-human. The less human we act, the more cold and violent society becomes. Now that’s some pig-headed irony for you.