Today's Oprah: Susan Still and Domestic Violence

1 in 4 women in the United States are victims of abuse. I wonder what the statistics are for the general population. I think one thing that people should take from this show is the connections between intimate and social violence and the connections between personal violence and violence of the state. Today's show showed an abusive man dominating and controlling his wife and children, typical of structural patriarchy and patriarchal family structures. One thing that people should also think about is the connections between patriarchal domination and control in households and patriarchal domination and control in the political sphere. I had this conversation once with a fellow graduate student, a student of sociology studying family structures, while having lunch at Panera one time. We were talking about patriarchy and I asked her if there were studies or if she had ever studied connections between patriarchal power in family structures and patriarchal power in social and political spheres. The violence of the mall shooter or the young man at Virginia Tech are connected, are indeed interconnected. I found it astounding that pundits marveled at the rise of violence in the United States recently and made no connections between that and the war in Iraq. I think people should look closley and scrutinize the structures of the societies in which they exist and the ways in which they operate. We must end patriarchy. BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY