Super Bowl is coming up. And the Super Bowl Myth, that "Super Bowl Sunday is the most dangerous day in America for women." Washington Post reporter Ken Ringle checked into it back in 1993, and quickly found this "factoid" was a lie.

But we hear it every year. Christina Hoff Sommers lays out the story in Who Stole Feminism. The ironically-named "watchdog" group FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting) and others held a press conference just before the January 1993 Super Bowl to put the factoid in circulation, citing an Old Dominion study. Jan Katz, one of the principal authors of that study said, "That's now what we found at all." Their study, on Washington Redskins regular-season weekends, found that an increase in emergency room admissions "was not associated with the occurrence of football games in general." Ms. Sommers says:

Though Ringle exposed the rumor, it had done its work: millions of American women who heard about it are completely unaware that it is not true. What they do "know" is that American males, especially the sports fans among them, are a dangerous and violent species.

Who gains from these lies and deceptions? For one, feminists and activists in the "violence against women" industry fueled by $1.8 million under the federal Violence Against Women Act. VAWA II pending before Congress has a $2.8 billion price tag. (The National Violence Against Women survey conducted by the woman-oriented Center for Policy Research and sponsored by the National Institute of Justice and Centers for Disease Control found that each year 1.5 million and 835,000 men are assaulted by intimate partners, but a provision in VAWAII would specifically prohibit domestic violence programs from serving battered men.)

Who loses? For one, the 835,000 men battered each year. That same NVAW survey showed that of those reporting assault by an intimate, 10.8% of the men and 4.1% of the women were knifed. Some 39.2% of the men (and 35.2% of the women) were threatened with a knife or gun, or had one used on them. Some 43.2% of the men were hit with an object, while 22.6% of the men were. None of these men can benefit from the proposed $2.8 billion for domestic (read "women-only") violence.

And kids suffer. Domestic violence advocates are quick to point out that people who abuse their spouses are very likely to abuse their kids, as well. Women who need help controlling their anger aand can't get it, and kids who live with the women who batter these 835,000 men a year pay the price--too often, with their bodies. These kids are sacrificed on the alter of an ideology that says that domestic violence is only about violence against women, and denies that some women, too, are violent.

In another sense, all men lose. The vast majority of men never use violence in an intimate relationship, all the studies show, but the Super Bowl Sunday myth perpetuates the stereotype that men are violent.