When The Patriarchy Backfires And Men Get Abused #maybeshedoesnthityou

[joreth]

I've lost track of how many conversations I've had with my male coworkers where I had to say "dude, what do you think this would be called if you did that kind of shit to her?" and they just kind of blink at me as they realize that, were the genders reversed, they would have no trouble labeling this behaviour as abusive.

Physical violence is not the only kind of abuse.

While men are significantly statistically more likely to abuse women because of the power structures in our culture that support, encourage, and enable them to abuse with impunity, abuse still happens across genders, across gender roles, and even across relationship categories.  And it doesn't even look all that different, once you account for gender expressions.

Men, in particular, are vulnerable to abuse in ways that other people are not because toxic masculinity culture encourages the power supremacy of men, which leads to the dismissal of any abuse accusations because of the lesson that "men are too powerful to be abused", therefore men who do get abused either "aren't real men" or "deserve it" for not being "real men".  It's a cycle.

Culture says you must be powerful and designs the culture to give you power.  Someone exerts *individual* power over you (rather than systemic power), so culture says it can't happen because you are culturally powerful.  So if you are not powerful, then culture says it's your own fault because you must be powerful.

It can't happen, but if it does happen, then it's your fault it happened, so therefore it must not have happened.

Suddenly, someone who is not culturally powerful now has a powerful weapon they can use because the culture can't even see that it exists.

Other genders, and other types of relationships besides cishet romantic ones have different structures in place to enable and support abuse for their given circumstances.

In the case of women-on-men abuse, the very system that gives men as a group power is what disempowers individual men from the tools they need to protect themselves from abuse and the structures they need to escape and heal from abuse.

#WhenThePatriarchyBackfiresOnItself #AbuseIsWrongNoMatterWhoDoesItToWhom

Comments

[ximinez]

Thanks for posting this. Being tall and not exactly muscular, but certainly large (6'2" and 220-240lbs), I had absorbed the message since I was basically a teenager that I was potentially threatening and just plain dangerous by virtue of the body I walk around in. I spent so much time, emotional energy, and effort to make myself smaller and less threatening that I became almost a perfect target. At the end, she "came at me" as if to hit me, and when I pointed it out later (because I thought it was worth salvaging), she dismissed me with "you're so much bigger, all you had to do was stick out your arm". As if it was a friggin' cartoon.

[joreth]

I really hate it when women and/or smaller people justify violence against people bigger than they are just because the bigger person *could* fight back if they wanted to (thereby implying that they must not mind, or else they'd stop it). Because I guarantee that if you *had* responded in kind, she'd fall back on the "you can't hit girls" line and you're fucked either way.

[ximinez]

Exactly. "I can't be abusive / a bully. Look how much bigger he is than me!"