Are you being abused by a woman? Men often don't even realize that what is being done to them is actual abuse, or don't speak up about it.

Thal-creates · 2023-10-11T09:20:19+00:00

Women are FAR more varied in their control. And its accepted as normal. Lets add to the list.

Is she trying to moderate your style of dress even if yours isnt inaproppriate.

Does she often try to control when and how you speak to your peers? Like does shebtry to make you bring up topics or restrict topics not pertaining to her.

Does she suddenly impose control on yoir diet without your consent.

Does she try to nother your hobbies by dictating harsh limits (I don't mean not tolerating excessiveness. I mean throw out the trash for 15 minutes of the play station tee hee")

Does she expect 100% availability and disrepsectd your own time/chores.

Does she automatically assume the role of the one budgeting commmon finances without prior discussion.

Does she do little tests.

Does she goad gifts by showing affection by witholding it beforehand.

Does she exercise topic control in family discussions (We will talk about what I feel. Never address your grievances.)

Feel free to add on.

leroy2007 · 2023-10-11T16:21:17+00:00

Something I came across recently that really stuck with me is how from childhood males get a lot of messaging about the “right way to treat women” but absolutely none about what kind of expectations we should have around how those women treat us. Many of us only learn the hard way about setting healthy boundaries with women, if ever at all. Thank you for sharing this!

Johntoreno · 2023-10-10T23:27:47+00:00

humiliating you or putting you down (at home or in public)

The thing is that everyone tends to victim blame men for this. Men are laughed at for not being able to stand up for themselves. In a way, its culturally normalized to attack meek men as a punishment for not living up to the masculine gender role.

isolating you from contact with other people (friends, family, etc.)

Same as above, people just blame men for not being assertive enough.

throwawayimconcern · 2023-10-11T16:00:26+00:00

I failed to see what happened to me a year ago as sexual assault because I was taught that “men only want sex”, “men should enjoy all sexual advances”, and “erections mean consent.” My abuser spouted these beliefs as well. She was extremely controlling and even threatened to kill us both on one occasion. I stayed because I thought it was normal.

It was only when I began displaying PTSD symptoms and went to therapy I realized what happened was sexual assault and abuse. It’s so normalized it’s actually terrifying.

brisavion · 2023-10-11T14:10:37+00:00

I used to be, and it took me years to realize what had happened. A therapist had to inform me me that I had been abused and that it probably caused my depression.

I was not equipped with the knowledge and confidence to understand and accept what was happening to me, and I think a lot of men, especially young men, aren't either.

NullableThought · 2023-10-11T16:06:12+00:00

using traditional gender roles as a means of control

I was especially susceptible to this when I was in a transhet relationship (both of us are transgender and we were in a heterosexual relationship). I was manipulated into taking on a very traditional male role, meaning I was the provider and did pretty much everything in the relationship. She was a stay at home wife who was "too weak" to vacuum and refused to do any errand outside of the house. I was constantly told that men to this and women do that and if I ever questioned her she'd claim I was causing her to be dysphoric and out of anyone I should understand her need to fill a extremely traditional female role.

Revolutionary_Law793 · 2023-10-11T18:06:09+00:00

the most important thing according to dv experts is (nonconsensual) power imbalance. If it is there, it is abuse.

SpicyMarshmellow · 2023-10-11T20:34:20+00:00

I knew I'd been abused for years. But the wake-up for me was realizing over time just how many men around me were going through the same things, but saw it as merely misery and a fact of life, not abuse. And then realizing how feminist narrative has trained men to marginalize their own experiences, and give in to a sense of helplessness about them.

I don't think the driving factor is traditional gender norms. I think it's decades of propaganda that women have it worse, these are women's issues, and it's a dire urgent subject that you should be really emotionally invested in on behalf of women.

The result is when men process their own experiences, they feel they can't possibly use the same language to describe them, because they can't possibly be as bad as what women go through. They feel making that comparison would diminish the horror of female victimization. So they suffer in silence. This results in men not showing up in survey data on the subject, and we already know justice statistics on this subject are totally fucked. Which creates a positive feedback loop where statistics highlight female victimhood, which reinforces the narrative that prevents men from being able to see themselves as victims, leading women to feel entitled to label themselves victims at the merest slight while men will not do so except in the most severe cases, which further reinforces the narrative.

If it were the case that gender norms drove this issue, then it would also be the case that the more feminist a man is, the more likely he would be to process his experiences as abuse appropriately. After all, he would be the most well-versed among men in the language, the criteria, and self-awareness about how his gendered socialization relates to the subject. But what I see personally is the exact opposite. The more feminist a man is, the more likely they are to tolerate abuse and refuse to call it what it is, even though they would go to war over a man treating a woman the same.

I myself considered myself a feminist for most of my life, and consequently saw my own experiences as extreme outlier for over 10 years. But eventually, I noticed how almost every man I knew had been a victim at some point, and enough cracks in that worldview formed that I finally looked more critically at the data behind the narratives I'd bought into for so long. Even though I knew I was in an abusive situation, I still marginalized my own experiences, tolerated things I wouldn't have, and tolerated other men around me being treated in ways I wouldn't have. And it was not because of gender norms. It was because of what the feminist narrative had taught me to believe about reality.

That may be a bunch of anecdote and conjecture, but in such a dishonest environment, that's all we can do.

hotpotato128 · 2023-10-11T00:21:04+00:00

No, but I have been abused by my uncle.

SeekingAlternatives · 2023-10-14T14:09:36+00:00

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