And I must admit that until a few minutes ago I was firmly on one of those sides. In fact, this article was originally called “Ray Rice is the Victim.” No matter how many times I viewed the video on Firefox I could not see Janay Rice back hand Ray, nor could I see him spitting on her just before that! I guess the moral of the story is that Firefox has become an unreliable piece of shit and I should start using another browser as the default. In SeaMonkey, the aforementioned events are clearly visible and hence my opinion has changed. What I previously saw as starting when she seems to elbow him in the elevator, now starts when he spits on her. True, it is possible that before they got in front of the camera she spat on him or hit him, and for all we know she may have been abusing him for months or vice versa, but we have to go with the evidence we have today not the evidence we may have tomorrow — if we do otherwise all rational argument is pointless, for tomorrow some creationist may find actual proof that the world is only a few thousand years old!
So, as I see it, this is what happens. He spits on her, she back hands him lightly when outside, once inside the elevator she seems to elbow him, and he retaliates with a fairly soft punch. And yes, it is a soft punch, were it not she wouldn’t have been able to come charging at him right afterwards. At that point he defends himself from what is clearly an imminent attack – surely not even the most addle-brained feminist would claim Janay was rushing forwards to kiss and make up – by hitting her with what is, at the most, a punch of moderate power. At this point I can hear the feminists scream hysterically, “Moderate! Oh, my fucking god! He knocked her out!” But you see, to those who actually know something about fighting it is clear that he is not putting any significant torque behind that punch, hence it is unlikely that he is intending do serious damage. In fact, the punch could even be seen as using a jab to stop an opponent getting too close. As for her going down, of course she goes down, the silly bitch is basically running into the punch! Doing so multiplies the force, hence chances are that even a woman’s punch would have taken her down under those circumstances. Now, if old Ray had stomped on her head once she was down that would have been a different matter, but as it is his was a reasonable and controlled defense.
What all this does is leave me in two minds. On the one hand, he starts the aggression by spitting on her, but on the other hand she is the one who gets physical by slapping him, and once she gets physical she can’t really be complaining that he retaliates. But then there’s that first hand – you know, the one Ray spat on. Hence the ambiguity of the situation. Perhaps the correct view of this incident is quite simply that two assholes got into an elevator and some shit went down. But that’s not good enough for the feminists. As we have seen in the past, the female supremacists are big on taking an ambiguous situation and portraying it as one in which the male is clearly the guy with the black hat and the weird moustache, so once again the feminist hate machine and its ass-kissing supporters have gone into overdrive to lynch a man who may or may not be the guilty party. Amongst feminists the motto is a simple one – when in doubt, blame the male. What matters to them is that they be able to use this case to further feed the all-important narrative of “Woman = Good, Man = Bad” for that is where a huge chunk of their power to stoke female privilege comes from. As for the non-feminists piling on the Big Bad, they are simply going along with our society’s view of men as some sort of second class human being, though I don’t suppose the males doing so are actually aware of this. To such men being the First Sex is part of what makes them “real” men and admitting to not being the top dog is pretty much the same as cutting off their own nuts. And so Rice loses his job (something which, incidentally, does Janay no big favors either!) gets suspended from the NFL and is treated like the most evil thing since Chris Brown.
What the fuck is going on when such an ambiguous situation can lead to a man losing his job and being forever branded that most awful of things – an abuser of women – for the rest of his life? The primary problem here is that, thanks to a disastrous confluence of feminist activism, traditionalist views of women as morally superior, and plutocratic interest, men now occupy a social space occupied by Negroes throughout much of the early twentieth century. Much in the same way that blacks in the old days were not permitted to strike back against whites without facing serious consequences for daring to hit their “betters,” today’s men – be they black, white, or pink with blue spots – are not permitted to strike back against whitey, it’s just that today whitey can be as black as she wants to be as long as she’s got the right anatomy under that skirt. There is no other explanation for this state of affairs. It is certainly not the size difference that is so often mentioned in such cases, we know that because if we keep the size difference but throw out the sex difference the argument changes drastically. “Oh, a 5’8”, 200 lb dude knocked out another dude roughly 5’4” and 150lb? Who cares?” would have been the world-wide reaction had both the people in that elevator been males. And we all know that if the size difference was kept and the sexes reversed, the whole world would be resounding with cries of “You go, girl!” and the woman who may or may not be the villain of the piece would be acclaimed by the media as some sort of feminist heroine standing up against male tyranny. If you don’t think so, consider the reaction when it was thought that Tiger Woods’ wife had beaten him with a golf club after discovering he’d been putting his wood in the wrong hole!
No, this isn’t about size or strength, it isn’t about right and wrong, it isn’t even really about domestic violence. It’s about the sacred rule that a man must never hit a woman, no matter what she does. It’s about female privilege, and it’s about treating half the human race as lesser beings – but that’s perfectly cool with most people, as long as it’s the right half getting pissed on.