Recently, Hollywood has seen a lot of controversy surrounding the accusations of sexual misconduct against Harvey Weinstein and other actors. Many punk rock or alternative bands and artists have been under fire for the same thing. But it’s not just men like Mike Fuentes (Pierce The Veil) who are being accused.
Yes, we were taught that men can be abusive, predatory, etc. but what we seem to forget often is that men can be victims and women can be abusive as well. As is evident by the recent accusations again artists like Melanie Martinez, Naya Rivera and Emma Roberts.
On November 26, 2017, actress Naya Rivera was arrested for hitting her ex-husband, actor Ryan Dorsey, on the head and bottom lip while walking with their two year old son. Throughout their marriage, Rivera called the police on Dorsey three times for being violent with her, so many fans continued to show her support even after the violence.
But as a former fan of Rivera, I was livid.
Clearly, their marriage was toxic but that still doesn’t change the fact that both people in the relationship were still in the wrong.
A similar situation happened to another actress back in 2013. Emma Roberts was arrested after getting into a physical altercation with her boyfriend, actor Evan Peters, leaving him with a bloody nose. Again, this is similar to what happened with Naya. It is well documented that Peters and Roberts had a tumultuous relationship, but Roberts faced no backlash for her behavior.
In 2015, former “The Voice” contestant, Juliet Simms, and her husband, singer Andy Biersack, got into an altercation on an airplane. The couple began to argue then she got louder and hit Andy in the face. After a brief break in the fighting, the two started arguing once more and she hit him again, which caused the flight attendants to separate them.
Simms was then handcuffed and proceeded to hit herself in the face with her bound hands, claiming that it was Biersack who had hit her. Witnesses around them said that he didn’t lay a finger on her.
Simms even went as far as accusing Biersack of breaking her ribs before being escorted off the plane and detained by the FBI. But even after all of that, the couple simply brushed off the incident by saying, “she had too much to drink.”
Drunk or not, it still doesn’t excuse the fact that physically and verbally abusing your spouse is wrong.
In these situations, if the roles were reversed, these men’s careers would be tarnished. They’d lose a wide majority of their fan bases and they’d be called things like “wife beaters”, “scum of the earth” and etc.
When a well known woman is arrested for something to do with domestic violence, it’s in the news for a week or so and we say things like “women abuse people too”, “men can be victims too” and a lot more.
But once it’s out of the headlines, we never speak of it again until another person is arrested.
Yes, men can be abusive but men can be victims too. The majority of men are afraid to come out with their stories because they’re worried about being made fun of for not “defending himself” and being called a “coward”.
It’s sickening that this still happens and that these women still have supporters and people defending them. We as a society need to wake up and realize that abuse is abuse – regardless of gender, ethnicity, sexuality, etc.
We need to stop letting women slide for these acts of violence simple because they’re women. They deserve the same punishment that men would get.
– 1 in 4 women (24.3%) and 1 in 7 men (13.8%) aged 18 and older in the United States have been the victim of severe physical violence by an intimate partner in their lifetime. [1]
– More than 1 in 3 women (35.6%) and more than 1 in 4 men (28.5%) in the United States have experienced rape, physical violence and/or stalking by an intimate partner in their lifetime. [1]
– Nearly half of all women and men in the United States have experienced psychological aggression by an intimate partner in their lifetime (48.4% and 48.8%, respectively). [1]
– On average, 24 people per minute are victims of rape, physical violence or stalking by an intimate partner in the United States — more than 12 million women and men over the course of a year. [1]
If you or know someone who is in an abusive or toxic relationship, call The National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233.
