Washington Post writer tells women to get married if they want to avoid violence

Reported by Liku Zelleke

When The Washington Post posted an online op-ed entitled “One way to end violence against women? Stop taking lovers and get married“, the uproar was so intense that they quickly changed it to “One way to end violence against women? Married dads“, but it still didn’t improve things by much.

The crux of the article written by W. Bradford Wilcox and Robin Fretwell Wilson is that if women want to avoid violence they should stop sleeping around with their baby daddies and settle down. The original subheading was changed from “The data show that #yesallwomen would be safer hitched to their baby daddies” to “The data show that #yesallwomen would be safer with fewer boyfriends around their kids” as if to make the fact more palatable.

The hashtag was created after the Isla Vista killing spree by Elliot Rodger, a killer who gave his rejection by women as a motive for the crimes. It was used by women to tweet about their abuse at the hands of men and within 4 days had been tweeted 1.2 million times.

According to Wilcox and Wilson, “Across the United States, millions of girls and women have been abused, assaulted or raped by women and even more females fear that they will be subject to such an attack.” There is much truth in that sentence and readers prematurely think that it will end well.

But then comes the idea for how it can all be avoided: “Obscured in public conversation about the violence against women is the fact that some other men are more likely to protect women, directly and indirectly, from the threat of male violence: married biological fathers.”

This part of the article, especially, outraged so many people that the lash back was almost instantaneous. One writer that had the strongest of opinions about the article, and its writers, was Erin Gloria Ryan, who on Jezebel wrote, “[The writers] are asserting that yes, some men hurt women … But some men are not bad. Once women get married, Bad Men who might hurt them transform magically into Good Men who will protect them from Bad (unmarried) Men who prowl around looking for kids and ladies to rape. That’s because, they argue, men care more about their female partners and kids after they get married …”

The article is still, almost defiantly, available for readers and so are even more responses to it.