Comments Elsewhere

Jen: “There are no domestic violence shelters for men only in the US.”

This is a lie. See, for example, Gay Men’s Domestic Violence Project of Massachussetts and Battered Men’s Helpline.

Jen: “Women did not build women’s shelters. Women ‘complained’, made known a need, and men built the structures, men and women both allocated the funds, and men and women both paid for them through our taxes. So the only thing that women really did on their own is voice a need. “

This is also a lie. See, for example, this discussion of the early history of battered women’s shelters, this timeline, and the chapter on the battered women’s movement in Susan Brownmiller’s In Our Time. The modern network of battered women’s shelters was built by grassroots women’s groups, mostly in the period 1971-1979 following the public emergence of Chiswick Women’s Aid in London. (There were some earlier shelters that focused on women married to violent alcoholics, created by women’s Al-Anon groups in the mid-1960s.) Primary funding came from local women’s groups, private donors, and some national nonprofit groups like the Ms. Foundation for Women. Government aid was mostly nonexistent until the 1980s (by 1979 there were already 250 operating shelters in the US) and was not committed in any systematic and coordinated way until the passage of VAWA in 1994. The vast bulk of funding for shelters still comes from private donors, not from tax-funded grants. Shelters were not the kindly gift of enlightened men or progressive legislatures. Women built them themselves. If MRAs want to be taken seriously then they had better be willing to do the work on the ground that feminists did with less money, less lucrative social networks, and far less media and political influence. They might have more time and money to do this if they stopped wasting so much time on futile lawsuits that attempt to force existing women’s shelters to admit men.