25 November, International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women (why against women? World-wide, far more men than women die a violent death) is coming along. Focusing on Israel, between 2019 and 2020 the number of women who called the hotline complaining about domestic violence is said to have risen 31.5 percent. Compared to a year earlier, the May 2020 number of battered (or, at any rate, claiming to have been battered) women asking to enroll in a shelter went up 27 percent. The number of femicides went up from 20 to 26, 13 of whom were killed by their spouses. That of attempted femicides went from 2 to 14—a seven hundred percent increase, no less. The numbers go on and on. I have neither the time nor the inclination to check each one of the world’s 200-odd countries. From the few cases that I did check, though, it would seem that the situation in them is hardly different.

Attempts to explain the phenomenon vary. One school of thought has it that corona is forcing more people to spend more of their time at home where they are in close, sometimes inescapable, contact with their apparently not so congenial spouses. People get on each other’s nerves, leading to violence. Another focuses on the economic hardship that corona has helped bring about in many cases. Businesses have closed, employees have been fired. Nothing like penury, or the fear of it, to make people quarrel.

Supported by two decades of research and countless publications I wrote about various aspects of the problem, and always assuming the data are genuine and not faked or doctored by all kinds of feminists, I have two other explanations to offer. One is that women who for any reason dislike their male spouses or acquaintances have learnt how to harness the system and make it work for their own benefit. Not just for legitimate causes, but to settle all kinds of accounts, obtain compensation, explain how they got pregnant, and simply draw attention to themselves. Confident that they will not be punished—regulations issued by Israel’s Ministry of Justice actually prohibit prosecutors from tackling women found to serve bear false charges—they do as they please. For launching a complaint that a woman beat them up, men can be, and have been, arrested. For daring to defend themselves in court, they have been execrated. As, by the way, their lawyers have also been.

Second, for decades now men have been humiliated and discriminated against. It all starts at kindergarten where toddlers, barely out of their diapers, are taught that girls are sacrosanct and should never be annoyed or touched in any way. Even in the face of provocation. It goes on at school where boys, subjected to “sex education” are taught that they are, all of them, potential rapists; it goes on throughout young (and by no means only young) peoples’ lives. So defective, so one sided is some of the “education” in question that, having undergone it, one sixteen-year old boy I know had never even heard the word syphilis mentioned.

Each grape looks like a blood cell and all of the tuberculosis germs a minimum cialis 20mg tablets click over here of six months. This therapy is given by a device that comfortingly perhaps look likes a computer mouse which passes on sound waves at a very low pressure. generic cialis prescriptions As more blood flows in, the level viagra samples no prescription of pressure enhances and the penile region gets stiffer. There are pills in the online market for erectile dysfunction but also cures different types of sexual sildenafil generic viagra dysfunction. When the time to be conscripted comes, Israeli men serve thirty-six months, Israeli women barely twenty-too. For a woman, to escape conscription altogether is also much easier. All she has to do is to declare she is religious; that done, the military are prohibited from following up and checking. In large part because of women’s physical weakness, the combat arms consist almost entirely of men. A handful of pilots apart, no IDF woman has even been sent to fight in enemy territory where, which heaven forbid, she might be taken prisoner and treat as captive women often have been. By contrast, a huge proportion of the cushy slots—primarily in intelligence and administration—are held by women. In proportion to their numbers, women also find it easier to earn a commission. Whereas men are often called up for reserve duty, in the case of women this hardly happens. In all the forty years I spent teaching at two different Israeli universities, not a single female student ever missed a single class for that reason.

At their wedding, Jewish men are required to sign a standard document known as Ketuba. It obliges them to provide their brides with “food, clothing, and [sexual] fulfilment;” a woman, by contrast, does not have to commit herself to anything. As long as the marriage lasts, public opinion always gives women the option of not working; whereas men who do not work and/or keep their families fed can expect to be treated with contempt. Men work longer hours, and in harder, dirtier, and more dangerous jobs than women do. Women retire at an earlier age than men.

When the time for divorce comes—in Israel as in other “advanced” countries, two thirds of all divorces are initiated by women—fathers of young children in particular are very likely to lose custody. Whether or not they do so, chances are they will be made to pay. As the existence of ads aimed specifically at such men shows, not seldom to the point where they are left practically penniless. And not seldom even though their spouses are much better off than they themselves are. As cases—and there are quite a few of them—when men, having killed their spouses, do not try to escape but either turn themselves in immediately or commit suicide show, some men are being driven to despair, even madness.

But nothing lasts forever. As I have told my readers several times, I am a Hegelian. By that I mean that I see social life—history—as unfolding, not in a straight line but in zig-zags: action, reaction, action, and so on. Could it be that the rise—supposing it is real and not just a figment of feminist propaganda—in femicide is at least partly a reaction to the way Israel, a Western society, has been (miss)treating men over the last few decades?  

Don’t get me wrong. I oppose femicide—and viricide, a term no one else seems to be using–as much as anyone else. I look forward to the day when social life improves to the point they, as well as the death penalty, are eliminated. Meanwhile, though, the world is what it is. As the trends seem to show, in their attacks on men women, with feminists at their head, have gone much too far. Considering that it is only men who can defend them against other men, hardly a clever thing to do.