Resistance is futile

So. I joined Twitter, but I seem to be incapable of doing anything. Reading the FAQ just confused me further; possibly I'm too stupid to hang with the cool kids. Does anyone want to hold my hand and help me figure out how to make the thing work with Jabber or LJTalk, and how to add friends (I tried the obvious thing of going to profile pages and clicking on "add", but that just refreshed my homepage with no effect). I feel dumb.

Assuming I eventually manage to make it do stuff, please let me know if you're on the site and under what username so I can friend you.

Edit 3 pm: I managed to get the friending thing to work by means of using IE instead of Firefox. But still no luck with the IM system

Edit 5 pm: It's not me, it's Twitter; you have to try things a dozen times before it actually does anything. Thanks to pplfichi for testing for me

Is violence against women taboo?

OK, I really need to get on with work, not joining in the fun and multi-valent discussion on my dating post. But I want to start unpacking the tangle in this thread, starting from pw201's comment that violence against women is so often taboo (even among men who might be violent to other men, I think) that I was shocked to learn that women genuinely feel they might be at risk of it.

So far two women have commented that violence against women absolutely isn't taboo, and three men have maintained that it is, and lots of people haven't seen the discussion because it's buried at the bottom of a long and collapsed thread.

( violence and sexual violence behind the cut, but please read if you can )

So in short, my question is, if violence against women is such a taboo, why is it that so many women get attacked?

I've set comments to partial screening here because sometimes this kind of discussion attracts trolls. If you have something intelligent to contribute but you're not on my flist, be patient, I'll unscreen your comment as soon as I get to it. I do also expect people to engage sensitively; bear in mind that just on a statistical basis there are probably women reading this who have been raped in the past, so it's not just an abstract hypothetical issue to play intellectual games with.