Violence and gender

Madam, - So Bianca Jagger, Vanessa Redgrave, Jane Fonda and Clare Short are, according to Kevin Myers, "a gruesome foursome", …

Madam, - So Bianca Jagger, Vanessa Redgrave, Jane Fonda and Clare Short are, according to Kevin Myers, "a gruesome foursome", presumably because they have dared to draw attention to the existence of male violence against women.

With an astonishing disregard of logic and a turning upside down of ethical standards he presents sickening evidence of male aggression against other males as proof that the disclosures by the above mentioned women of male violence against their sex is nothing more than "the same tired old feminist mumbo-jumbo", while in the same breath openly admitting "that violence against men is an almost international societal norm" and that male victims far outnumber women. Conveniently he omits to state that this world-wide killing and torturing of men is committed by men themselves.

Generation after generation of men have engaged in wars where literally millions of their fellow-men were brutally massacred. But wars now are no longer male against male. All humanity is bomb-fodder, even infants and the aged. Or are we expected to believe that in the saturation bombing of a city maternity hospitals and Old Peoples' Homes miraculously escape all bombs and the resultant fires? War on infants. . . could anything be more brutish?

I feel a similar helpless, angry, compassion for the men, women and infant victims of this terrifying and never ending male aggression. For Kevin Myers to mock women who refuse to accept this violence which he calmly dismisses as "almost a societal norm" is indefensible. - Yours, etc.,

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PATRICIA YOUNG, St Aidan's Park Road, Dublin 3.