Sammy Sooser and Mike Mcgwire

looks very different in retrospect.

Chickens and Eggs and Beating Your Wife

Do football players beat their wives at a higher rate than their non-football playing friends and acquaintances?

I doubt it, but even if there is a statistical difference, correlation blah blah. Chicken or the egg.

The game of football does not make you a wife beater. The environment you surround yourself may, however, tend to encourage such a result. If your environment is one of machismo, then you will tend to adapt to that environment. But the environment that you view as your core self is far more of an influence than the "artificial environment" created in a locker room and on a sports field. The environment that you grew up with, continue to live in, and VALUE, the one you use as a means of IDENTIFYING yourself is the one that will shape your behaviors.

Tom Brady is a football player. Tom Brady does not beat his wife. Nor do the vast majority of football players.

Ray Rice beats his wife not because he plays football. Ray Rice beats his wife because he is Ray Rice. Ray Rice's wife puts up with it, because the environment she identifies with (as well as her personality) is one that craves such drama. Have you heard her speak? Holding onto such speech patterns into adulthood is indicative of upbringing, education and maturity level. Specifically, it's indicative of a preoccupation with peer acceptance... ie. "respect".

If your environment is one that demands a constant defense of one's "respect" via threat of physical force, then one (at least those who will thrive in the environment, however permanent that state may be) will tend to be constantly at the ready to use violence to retain respect.

HOWEVER, this occurs
FAR
MORE
OFTEN
AMONG
MALES
WITH
OTHER
MALES
THAN
AMONG
MALES
WITH
FEMALES.

It's not that the beating of the wife is viewed as different - that the wife is viewed as property whereas the other males are viewed as competition. It's that the wives are viewed IN EXACTLY THE SAME MANNER AS THE OTHER MALES -

IE. AS A THREAT TO ONE'S RESPECT AMONG THE LARGER GROUP

Ironically, it's an easy case to make that females are specifically treated BETTER (strictly in this regard, and in an entirely justifiable sense for the most obvious of reasons) in the sense that violence towards them is much less often the result than it is among males.

Feminists and professional victims are overcome with the need to designate themselves as "particularly targeted, specifically as a result of their differentness" in as many situations as they possibly can. This prevents them from being able to see true root causes which may not fall along such desirable lines, which prevents them from being able to acquire the increased level of sameness/acceptedness which they claim to be seeking in the first place (such a belief system engenders a posture of hyper-vigilance which manifests itself as obnoxious defensiveness which is, quite simply, no fun to be around).

Of course this claim of "morally justifiable end goals" is simply a politically palatable cover (both for the professional victim's own mind, and as a means of convincing others of the cause) for what they really want. They say they want to be treated the same, but what they really want is special privilege in the form of money, power, influence, etc..

Which, ironically enough, makes them exactly the same as everybody else, including those they view as their persecutors. Once such sameness is accepted as fact, the question becomes one of implementation in law. At that point one either becomes a champion of equality in the design and application of the law, or one becomes a champion of special privileges via the use of force, and by doing so, officially completes the circle and becomes that oppressive force they previously claimed to be fighting in opposition to.

Life is funny.

"These days"

is generally a precursor (or post-cursor) to an expression of dissonance.

The world as it is does not fit the world as I understand it should be, which is often based on an idealized picture of what it has been.

The dissonance is the belief that it's worse now.

Of course there are cases where this belief is undeniably true. We're not referring to those instances.

-------------

Grammatical aside: Should post-cursor be hyphenated? Should precursor? Well, one could argue that in the latter case the answer is "no", while in the former it is "yes" because the former isn't a word.