Spotlight on Can Women be Abusers?

This blog post is part of a series on the new, vastly expanded More Than Two site. This essay spotlights the Can Women be Abusers? page. Look for more spotlights in the coming days and weeks!

“Reality is so flexible these days, it’s hard to tell who’s disconnected
from it and who isn’t. You might even say it’s a pointless distinction.”
― Richard K. Morgan, Altered Carbon

I’m back from a conference in California, where I debuted a new book and participated in a writers’ panel, and now it’s time to look at the new content on the More Than Two site again!

I hadn’t intended to spotlight this particular page now. I’d wanted to spotlight the updated Communication page, because I’ve been reading a lot about communication lately and run into some new ideas I want to talk about that I don’t see in a lot of conversations about polyamory and communication.

Then I logged onto Threads, which is Facebook’s answer to Twitter¹, and saw this fucking gem:

And, of course, predictably, when some folks pointed out how problematic this is, a lot of other folks responded with ”it’s just a joke!”

I kinda wonder which part is the joke. What’s the funny bit? It’s funny because she hits him when she gets mad? I don’t get it. (You know what is funny? When you say “I don’t get it, what’s the joke?” the people who say its just a joke get mad.)

So here’s the thing:

This joke is sexist.

But it’s not sexist against men. I mean, it kinda is, a little, but the humor, the key contradiction that makes (some) people laugh, the essential tension all humor relies on, is deeply sexist against women. Far more than it is against men.

You see, it’s funny because it’s absurd, right? No real man would let himself be pushed around by a woman, right? Women are weak! Women aren’t a threat! The whole idea of women hitting men is ludicrous! In the real world, men are stronger than women, so obviously men have nothing to fear from women! Only some candyass soy-boy effeminate weakling would be hit by a girl! (Plus, you know, diamond ring, because men buy women expensive things, women marry men and provide sex. That’s the value proposition.)

And that’s some bullshit right there.

I propose a simple, yet radical, idea: women are people.

Can people abuse? Then women can abuse. Can people bully? Then women can bully. Can people become violent when they’re angry? Then women can become violent when they’re angry.

A person experiencing a normal emotion experienced by people (image: Julien L)

And the thing is, most folks will nod their heads in agreement when you say this, but then they’ll continue merrily on as if it’s not true, except perhaps in some abstract sense. Different people will do this in different ways—a conservative, for example, might laugh off the idea that any real man might let a mere woman abuse him, whereas the liberal will say that sure, it can happen, but it’s so impossibly rare that we can safely act as if it doesn’t.

I went to a bar in downtown Portland a couple weeks ago weekend with a couple of new friends, a husband and wife I met on social media. We got to talking about how they’d met, and he said he’d left his previous relationship after his former girlfriend hit him. He talked about losing his social circle, and about the way people reacted—some accusing him of lying, some asking what he’d done to make her hit him, some wondering how a girl could possibly any threat to a man.

All of that, every bit of it, matches the things I’ve seen.

Yes, Victoria, there are women who abuse—and probably more of them than are documented in the literature or police complaints. It exists wherever insecurity meets the desire for control, and we know that they abound and give life its greatest turmoil and despair.

But other than some grudging acknowledgment that yeah, sure, I suppose this might happen occasionally in some abstract sense, it’s really effin’ hard to get anyone, liberal or conservative, to take it seriously. Conservatives tend to sneer that any true manly man can ever seriously be threatened by a mere girl, and liberals, by and large, are so accustomed to framing the world along the axis of oppressor and oppressed that they struggle to see abusive dynamics that go against that narrative as anything more than vanishingly rare edge cases.

And honestly, I think women who abuse are far more common than most people think.

Part of the problem is that we often fail to recognize abuse when it’s women on the administering end and men on the receiving end, a cultural blind spot with very deep roots.

Like, you know, news headlines that talk about a female teacher who “seduces” an underage male student, rather than using the correct word, “rapes.”

“Romps.” Can you imagine a newspaper headline describing a man’s “romps” with underage girls? At least it’s an R-word, I suppose, if not the right one…

There are a lot of reasons we don’t often recognize women who abuse even in situations where, if we told the same story with the sexes reversed, all of us would be like “wow, that’s super-abusive!” It’s outside the scope of this essay, but a few of them are deeply-held cultural narratives, expectations about what abusers and abuse victims look like, and simple old-fashioned laziness. Nobody has time to investigate every accusation, especially between people they don’t know personally, so it’s just plain easier to go with the conventional narrative. Tropes, like racism, exist because they’re tremendous intellectual labor-saving devices.²

As I’ve worked with my therapist over the last several years, I can now look back and see a lot of things in my previous relationships I once dismissed as “well, that’s kinda fucked up, I suppose, but I guess that’s just who she is, everyone has quirks” were, in fact, abuse. I simply didn’t recognize them at the time—even though I absolutely would have in a situation where the same thing happened with the sexes reversed—because I had an idea of what “an abuser” looks like that didn’t include women, and what “an abuse survivor” looks like that didn’t include me.

Women can hit. Women can manipulate. Women can yell and break things, can punch and throw things, and we should never accept any of this simply because men are stronger so they’re not as likely to be seriously injured or killed. “Ha ha she punched him in the face because he didn’t buy her a diamond ring” is not okay.

Women are people. People sometimes abuse. Women sometimes abuse. Perhaps it’s time to take that seriously.

1. If Elon Musk deadnames his own daughter, I will deadname his social media site. ↩︎
2. And let me just say as an aside that if you adhere to a system of social or transformative justice that has no fact-finding component, you’re not actually interested in justice. ↩︎