Domestic violence and sexual harrassment

When I was waiting for a bus at a Greyhound terminal in Hartford, Connecticut, a deaf older man hit on a young long-haired little guy. The little guy went off and started shouting about how he's going to get him in jail and how he's being harrassed and how the man is a deviant. And all along I was thinking, how thin-skinned can one be?

Homosexuals hit on me all the time, and I am not homosexual. I do not throw these kinds of tantrums. Meanwhile what has this guy done for people who are actually being abused?

The same people who would get a co-worker fired for saying that they are pretty turn a blind eye to real abuses, such as domestic violence. Indeed they blame these abuses on the victim and treat the victims of these real abuses as a lower form of life. The hurt from being hit on is minimal, and the hurt from even a severe violation such as forcible rape is something that one can eventually get over. Whereas domestic violence is an ongoing daily ordeal from which it is in many cases very difficult to escape.

Compare the situation of a deaf gay guy hitting on you once and the situation of you being trapped and battered each day; your connection with your children being destroyed and the children being abused daily; and anywhere you could go to for help having been corrupted by the abuser and inveighing on his side. What is more real violation? What situation is more injurious and a greater violation of one's rights? And yet the people who howl about minor abuses such as sexual harrassment do nothing for people who are actually being severely injured in domestic violence. Instead they blame these people and treat them like rubbish, which of course plays squarely into the hands of domestic violence perpetrators.

There needs to be a paradigm shift in the thinking of feminism. Instead of obsessively prosecuting minor abuses, they need to start confronting the major ones. Domestic violence is a far greater wrong than sexual harrassment and one that actually deserves significant allocation of time and resources. And it is a reality for many more women than one expects.