Two (Men Who Are Abused By Women)

To retrieve these definitions from useful resources buried under terabytes of TikTok videos in internet’s memory, I had to Bing ‘abuse’ (Bing is a Microsoft-powered search engine; remarkably slower than Google). Thereon, I had to sift through loads of definitions to find the most concise ones. An interesting feature on search engines these days is that it has turned highly visual compared to internet’s initial textual days. Inevitably, I came across images of women bruised and hurt with taglines reporting abuse. Trauma is serious injuries on the body, etc. Is abuse somehow related to trauma?

Trauma is an event, a life-centric occurrence. Abuse (verb) is an action of maltreatment. When this maltreatment becomes life-centric, it causes trauma. All the women in those pictures reflected signs of trauma on their faces. And while I do not deny the veracity of any of those pictures as an example, why is it that all the examples had to have faces of a woman? Did I somehow venture into a territory of patriarchy which denies the existence of men’s vulnerabilities? Is abuse a part of such territory?

I do not know of a single occasion where the topic of men’s abuse was raised and it was not compared to women’s abuse. Whenever the topic is raised, it is mostly raised by some misogynist man trying to undermine or refute a feminist’s rightful claims of systemic abuse worldwide and through the centuries of females by males. On the flip-side of the coin, it also happens that whenever the topic is raised, many immature feminists (including I, once upon a time) start blabbing about how women’s abuse is this and that, systemic and higher in number, etc. However, that is not supposed to be the topic. It is not realised that women’s abuse is systemic and men’s is not. This makes it imperative that both kinds of abuse are approached in widely different methods. If men’s abuse by women is not systemic, the discussion of neither women’s so-called ‘abusive’ tendencies nor women’s systemic oppression should take place. Such grossly misplaced dialogues are vulgar and are extremely disrespectful to male survivors of abuse.

Earl Silverman opened a victim’s helpline, lobbied politicians and campaigned for better services, and eventually succeeded in opening the Men’s Alternative Safe House.^[3] He funded the shelter home out of his pocket too. And while all of this sounds sweet, due to ridicule and lack of financial support from the Canadian government for the abuse shelter he had established in his own home, Earl was forced to close the shelter home. He ultimately committed suicide in 2013. All his life, Earl had fought against how domestic violence had come to be rigidly regarded as a women’s issue.

Earl’s death fueled misogynists to misappropriate his stance and blame feminists as his real perpetrators. Even today, we hear misguided phrases such as “men are abused more than women,” “men do not speak due to feminism,” and, “men are more vulnerable to biases than women, the world is crueler to men.” These claims are neither supported by statistics nor any research but do much to shift the conversation towards the social dynamic between men and women while totally ignoring it again that men’s abuse by women is not institutional and such distortion of the issue removes the spotlight from the issue at hand ie. men consistently being abused as we speak.

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