[Danzig]

from the flavorwire article:

For a start, there’s the conflation of correlation with causation. We have numbers showing that married men are statistically less abusive to women and their children than their unmarried counterparts. So what’s more likely: that the sort of man who abuses women is statistically less likely to have any interest in marriage, or that the act of standing in a church in a white dress on one day of your life means that your children have a magical shield around them protecting them from violence? I’m gonna go with the former, but then, that’s a reflection of my ideology.

Which brings us to the second point: confirmation bias. The hoary old cliché about lies, damn lies, and statistics is a cliché for a reason: because you can use numbers to demonstrate pretty much anything. W&W’s article notes that “married women are less likely to be raped, assaulted, or robbed than their unmarried peers.” OK, great. But is that an effect of marriage? Is there any evidence of causation? Because another way of interpreting these statistics might be doing a little more research (seriously, guys, two ****ing Google searches) to discover that marriage is less prevalent in poorer communities, wherein violence against women and children is more prevalent. In other words — violence and marriage rates both correlate with socioeconomic status, with one declining as the other increases.


and, near the bottom:

As an example of how meaningless this all is, you could conceivably use this same data that W&W used for their article to conclude that men are statistically a menace to society and thus should be castrated en masse and cast into outer darkness for all eternity. It’s just as valid and reasonable a conclusion to draw from the data as the one that W&W do draw, i.e., it’s simplistic and ridiculous and would be laughed out of the room by anyone outside a lunatic fringe, the only difference being that in this case the lunatic fringe is at the super-radical feminist end of the ideological spectrum as opposed to the misogynist ****wit end.