A double standard for men and women?
 

I've been lurking on this forum for some time, and over the past few months I've seen the topic of abuse come up several times. It was hard not to notice that the one time it came up that a man was the target of abuse by his wife not one word was said about it by anyone even thought the abuser is a member of the forum because she was the one that mentioned it happening.
Why is there a double standard to abuse when it comes to men and women? :confused: At first I thought it might be that people were takign the poly partner's side over the mono one, but that doesnt' seem to be the case.
I'd really like to know why this is, because ignoring abuse is to me the same as condoning it. :mad: The poly community needs to stand up for all it's members, poly and mono, because we get enough prejudice from the outside.

Hullo there,

as someone who has only experienced abuse from another woman, I do see that a gender/sexuality bias exists in talking about intimate partner abuse.

Care to link to the thread you mentioned, where female-to-male violence was ignored?

It was actually a mention of female-to-male emotional abuse, but I'm sure we can all get behind condemning abuse in any form. I'll go and find the posts and put them up in a bit.

There is no blanket response for all situations. Perhaps members who were familiar with other aspects of the relationships adjusted their responses accordingly.

Some people might come here and post about an abusive situation and the message gets missed, with no responses whatsoever, and the member never comes back; other messages wind up getting a big response just because there's a lot of activity on the board that day and people see a "New Post" and read it. Many, many members respond to sensitive issues via Private Messaging, and you will never see the content on the board. And some members know each other in real life.

We're just a bunch of anonymous people on an internet forum, so don't take what happens here as any indication of society at large or the poly community in general, especially regarding abuse.

I found a link to the post that talks about emotional abuse towards the husband, and there were several pages in the blog thread afterwards, but not one person points out that no-one ever wants to be abused or ever adresses the issue.

http://www.polyamory.com/forum/showp...0&postcount=94

It's towards the end of this post and the one that follows and one a couple pages later, I checked out the blog post after seeing the last post in the thread "Can and abusive relationship heal?" in the Fireplace section.

Hmm. All I've read is the one post you just linked, but maybe nobody felt the need to tell her she was wrong because she clearly already knew she was wrong? She said herself that she'd become someone she hated.

Your missing that she also says that it was her husband's depression that made her become an abuser because he acted like he wanted her to be. Nobody ever wants to be abuesed and being an abuser is always a choice.

I just don't see that she ever says "It was all his fault, I was blameless." It's true that she tries to understand how her behavior became as bad as it did, and looks at her reaction to his depression for answers, spending a lot of time analyzing what it was that he did that set her off.

But at the end she says "Maybe Raga was subconsciously trying to make me upset with him, trying to make me treat him badly. Maybe he wasn't." So she acknowledges that ultimately it was her destructive reaction that she needs to deal with. Is her supposition that maybe on some level he was trying to provoke her really so impossible? Of course it doesn't excuse the abuser, but are there really never any circumstances where people try to reenact patterns of abuse that they think they deserve?

BU, thought you might find this tidbit from Wikipedia interesting:

"Numerous studies done between the 1980 and 1994 [1][15][16][17][18][19] report that lesbian relationships have higher overall rates of interpersonal aggression (including psychological aggression/emotional abuse) than heterosexual or gay male relationships. Furthermore, women who have been involved with both men and women reported higher rates of abuse from their female partners. [20]"

Looks like you're not alone. :/

Bluegecko, It sounds like you are triggered. If this is so then there is usually some personal story behind it. If you are wanting support for your own situation then how about telling us what it is?