If anything can be learned from the recent violence between Chris Brown and Rihanna, it is the sheer double standard that male victims of domestic violence still face.

For centuries, the idea of battered men has been deemed humorous or unfathomable. In post-Renaissance France, battered men were forced to ride backwards on a donkey through the streets wearing an outlandish outfit while holding the donkey's tail. In medieval England, they were strapped to a cart and paraded around town while people threw trash at them.

Figuratively speaking, battered today are still riding on donkeys backwards. Despite growing and overwhelming research showing the high prevalence and seriousness of the problem, male victims remain hidden, stigmatized, and disbelieved, with no outreach and few services for them and their children, while public attitudes about them remain in the dark ages.

With the Rihanna / Chris Brown incident, credible sources say Rihanna attacked Brown first, kicking him with high heels while he was driving. But few would know that from the media buzz. Oprah Winfrey, New York Times blogger Lisa Belkin and others all rushed blamed Brown entirely while turning a blind eye to any violence by Rihanna. If the genders were reversed, no doubt the same commentators would say Rihanna hit in self defense.

Female abusers and male victims are not only politically incorrect; they also don't "sell" well. That would explain why hardly anyone heard about the two celebrity domestic violence arrests of women that occurred shortly after the Rihanna incident. Kelly Bensimon, who plays in the Bravo reality show "Real Housewives of New York City," was arrested for giving her boyfriend a black eye and a bloody gash on his cheek. And the girlfriend of Tampa Bay linebacker Geno Hayes was arrested for stabbing Hayes in the neck and head.

Where was the outcry? Nowhere. In fact, most of the media coverage of the other incidents did not even call these incidents "domestic violence." Some even found humor in the stories, like the New York Post piece that called Bensimon at "butt-kicking boyfriend beater."

This is nothing new. It's the donkey and outlandish outfits all over again. Female-on-male violence is frequently deemed humorous and acceptable in popular entertainment. Just think of the movie "Sideways." Would we laugh if a guy broke a girl's nose for not revealing an engagement? In The Great Debaters, women cheered when Samantha Booke violently smacked Henry Lowe in the face for coming home drunk with other girls. Would they cheer if the genders were reversed?

A growing number of experts are warning that this is no laughing matter. Domestic violence is an intergenerational cycle. When children witness it, they are psychologically damaged and it becomes a model for them to follow as adults.

The same experts warn that female-on-male abuse is not rare at all. It's just more hidden. Men are less likely to report it, which makes oft-cited crime data unreliable. But empirical research shows women initiate domestic violence against men at least as often as the reverse, that men suffer one-third of physical injuries, and that self-defense explains only a small portion of the violence by both genders. Professor Martin Fiebert of California State University summarizes over 200 of these studies in an online bibliography at www.csulb.edu/~mfiebert/assault.htm

For example, the University of New Hampshire recently performed a 32-nation study of dating violence and found women are as violent and as controlling as men in relationships worldwide.

There is no excuse for a gender-driven double standard in domestic violence reporting. It only fosters the cycle of violence even more. We cannot break that cycle by ignoring half or any amount of it. As the late Dear Abbey said, domestic violence is a human problem, not a gender problem.

Marc E. Angelucci, Esq., is a family law attorney for the Men's Legal Center in San Diego and a board member of the National Coalition For Men.