Women as Abusers

When you think of the word “abuser,” what picture comes to mind? If you’re like most people, you probably imagine a man hitting a woman. That’s the prototypical image of abuse that most people tend to imagine.

Male victims of domestic abuse are often overlooked. Abuse of men is often underreported, and male victims of abuse and domestic violence face significant barriers to reporting.

Can women be abusers in relationships?

Short answer: Yes, absolutely. Long answer: Yes, absolutely, though people to whom this has happened are unlikely to find much support, and the prevailing narrative is already stacked against you.

Let’s start with the basics. Women are people. I think this shouldn’t need to be said, but answering this question properly means going back to first principles. Women are people.

People sometimes abuse. Abuse is about power and control. An abuser abuses because he or she feels threatened or frightened, and so asserts control as a means of dealing with that fear. Abusers aren’t mustache-twirling villains, and few abusers recognize their abuse. Abusers abuse because they need a sense of power and control.

This is why we have the Power and Control Wheel, which defines the cycle of abuse:

Stick a pin in that, we’ll come back to it later. First, let’s talk about racism, nationalism, and populism.

“But Franklin! The question is about whether or not women can abuse! What’s that got to do with racism?” The answer is narrative.

How Narrative Affects our Perceptions

Human beings are limited in the number of close interpersonal connections we can form. That number is called Dunbar’s number, and it’s usually believed to be about 150 or so. Beyond 150 people, everyone starts to blur into a sort of faceless, amorphous mass.

If we lived in a society in which we knew everyone and had personal ties with everyone, we could easily sort out the connections between people. In tiny societies, we have the emotional resources to treat each person as an individual, not a representative of a class. That’s why Communism and Libertarianism work for small societies—because everyone knows everyone else, so there are personal connections to the entire group. (Plus everyone knows who the slackers are.)

But we don’t live in societies of 150 people. We live in societies of hundreds of millions of people. We cannot treat everyone as an individual; it’s not possible.

Image by Goashape

So what do we do? We fall back on templates to understand social interactions. Those templates act as guides, helping us make sense of the things we hear, helping us sort out the villains from the heroes.

Racism is a template. The members of the preferred race are generally assumed to be trustworthy, noble, righteous, pure, to be given the benefit of the doubt in any ambiguous situation; the members of the disfavored race are generally presumed to be the villains, base, corrupt, shifty, untrustworthy, violent, to be cast in the role of perpetrator in any ambiguous situation.

Antisemitism: same thing. Sexism: same thing.

You do this. Yes, you. I do this. Everyone does this. These templates form the basis of the narratives we use to make sense of things, and no, you’re not special or immune, you’re not some creature of rational logic who is interested in the truth. Best you can hope for is to be aware of your own tendency to do this, because it is wired deep inside you. We are a tribalistic, storytelling species.

What does that have to do with whether or not women can be abusers? A couple of things.

First, the template you use to see the world can affect whether or not you even recognize something as “abuse” at all. I don’t mean just in the sense of “if a man does a thing, everyone agrees it’s abuse, but if a woman does the same thing, it totally isn’t abuse,” though that double standard can and does happen, of course—in fact, it’s astonishingly common, and I’ve seen so many people do this. There are a lot of behaviors that, when done by a man, are clearly and correctly labeled abusive, but when done by a woman are excused, justified, or rationalized—sometimes up to and including physical acts of violence.

Image by Satura

But even more basic than that, if your internal narrative is that abuse is something that happens by men to women, you might not even realize it’s possible to go the other way—so you might not see it even when it’s right in front of you.

You might not see it even when it’s happening to you.

“What did he do to cause it” is becoming this generation’s “what was she wearing?” The narrative of men as abusers, women as victims is as entrenched as the old narrative of “she was asking for it” in the 1960s and 1970s. I see this all the time..

In fact, not long ago I ran across this lovely example on social media:

If you want to be a decent person, please please don’t do this.

Second, we do not see the world as it is, we see the world as we are. It’s common in abusive situations for both victim and abuser to point fingers at each other and say “that person is abusing me!” And when that happens, very, very, very, very few people will bother to become fully informed, because that takes a lot of work and mental labor—instead, they’ll fall back on templates.

“This man says this woman abused him. This woman says this man abused her. My template says men are abusers and women are the victims. Rather than doing a significant amount of work for very little benefit, I’ll follow my template.”

Different social groups use different templates, of course. And what’s interesting about that is the templates used by American liberals and American conservatives in the early 21st century both conspire to make sure that male victims of abuse are not seen, heard, or supported.

How?

Class, Social Hierarchy, and Perception

One of the biggest differences between liberals and conservatives is the way they think about hierarchy. Conservatives favor a vertical hierarchy, with a place for everyone and everyone in their place. Liberals favor a flat, egalitarian hierarchy, without rigid codes that explain who’s on top and who’s on the bottom.

In the vertical hierarchies held by many American conservatives, men are naturally above women. This may be explicit (“as a Bible-believing Christian, I know that God says men are put forth as the leaders and the head of the household, with women put below men”) or implicit (many people who legitimately do not think of themselves as sexist nevertheless prioritize men’s voices over women’s, pay more attention to contributions from men than from women, and in situations where men and women spend equal time talking, believe that the women are hogging the attention).

For such men, being abused by a woman is a sign that you’re a failure as a man—a weak, pathetic excuse of a man. Men are stronger! Men are tougher! Men are natural leaders! What’s wrong with you? You let yourself be mistreated…by a woman??! Man up! Stop sniveling and be a real man, you sissy!”

In the horizontal hierarchies many liberals endorse, it is the duty of those with social power and privilege to lift up the oppressed and underprivileged. Women’s voices have historically been disregarded. Women have throughout history always been on the receiving end of oppression. If a woman says she was abused by a man, it is our duty to listen to her. Everyone knows men lie about this sort of thing anyway—if we are to be good people, if we are to fight against oppression, we have an obligation, if there’s any question, to make sure we hear the woman’s voice, not the man’s.

Conservatives treat men who are abused as a wuss, a pussy (and it’s not an accident that insults and slurs in patriarchal societies compare men to women!), a pansy, a sissy. He just needs to man up and deal with it.

Liberals treat men who are abused by women with suspicion, even contempt. They confuse the general with the personal: abuse is about power and control. In general, men have more power than women. Ergo, women can’t abuse men. (Ironically, they sneer at conservatives for this exact same reasoning: in general, men are stronger than women. Ergo, we cannot let women be firefighters or soldiers or EMTs. In both cases, people fail to distinguish between what’s true on average for groups and what’s true of individuals.)

Men are stronger than women; ergo, no individual woman—not even her—can be a firefighter. Men have more social power on average than women; therefore, no individual woman can be an abuser. (Image by John Arano)

Both these things—conservatives saying “Man up!” and liberals saying “I believe women”—are examples of thought terminating clichés.

The Thought-Terminating Cliché

When I first moved to Florida, we had a neighbor with a bumper sticker on their car that said “It’s in the Bible. God said it, I believe it, that settles it.” That’s a thought terminating cliché.

A thought terminating cliché is a mental stop sign. It’s a pithy soundbite that freezes all further consideration or deliberation in its tracks. No more thought is necessary. No further information is relevant. No facts, no evidence make the slightest bit of difference. The thought terminating cliché settles it. That’s it, the end.

“Believe women” is a thought terminating cliché. “But what about…” “Nope, doesn’t matter, I believe women.” “But she cut off his finger—” “Nope, doesn’t matter, I believe women.” “But she crapped in his bed—” “Nope, doesn’t matter, I believe women.”

Everyone has these clichés rattling around somewhere in their mental library. Yes, including you. Yes, including me. They’re templates on steroids. They’re narratives condensed down to a deepitude. They’re enormous mental time-savers—they tell you it’s okay not to do any messy, tedious, exhausting mental work in order to try to understand something. Here you go, conversational soundbite, that’s all you need to know.

In fact, in some social circles it can be considered morally wrong to question a thought terminating cliché. If you say that there needs to be something more than “God said it, I believe it, that settles it,” you’re saying you’re not a Bible-believer! If you say “well, actually, women are people, maybe we should support people who come forward but we should also fact-check, you’re saying we should ignore and oppress women!

Why do human beings do this? Because templates save time, provide certainty, and tell you what to do to be a good person. And that’s the thing about all this: the people who behave this way aren’t evil. They’re not knowingly being intellectually lazy. They’re looking for guidance while trying to save effort.

There’s something else that happens too. If you talk about it, expect to become the subject of gossip. People you don’t know, who you have never met, will have OPINIONS about you. It’s…weird. The idea of a woman as an abuser challenges a lot of narratives, and that doesn’t go unnoticed.

Part of the prevailing narrative around abuse is that abuse of women by men is vastly underreported, because women who come forward with their stories face a river of pushback for it. Which is true, but it’s also true of men. We live in an age where women are more likely than ever to be believed—and men are less likely than ever. In fact, men who do report abuse risk ridicule and being told to “man up,” and have few support resources available. This makes public recognition such as this comic from Blobby the Blobfish particularly important:

Can women be abusers? Yes, it absolutely happens, and I absolutely 100% believe it’s way, way, way more common than most people realize. It’s on all of us to understand that people are people, and no one class of person has a patent on intimate partner abuse.

You can find a deeper dive into this page in the Spotlight On... series on the More Than Two blog here.