I see it time and time again. “My husband is a good guy but x” X being he doesn’t respond to my needs. He’s possessive. He sulks when I don’t want to have sex. He hates our kids. He’s anti choice. He thinks he has ownership of my body. He doesn’t help at home. He hates my hobbies. Sometimes it seems like he doesn’t even like me.
As someone who grew up in a home where my father was a good man except the fact he was violently abusive, when do we take ownership of the fact that “he’s a good man but” means he’s not a good man and by staying with these men and making excuses for them we’re enabling this bad behavior. It was my father’s choice to be abusive but it was my mothers choice to tell everyone till she was blue in the face that he’s actually a great man and we’re better off with him in our lives, despite the abuse.
It gets to a point where you have to decide if you’d rather be single than miserable. Invest in platonic relationships and your family, chosen or otherwise. you have sexual needs? Have a one night stand and move on. Want children? Choose to be a single parent in whatever way works for you and raise a child with any community you’ve built. Do not try to build a family with someone who harms you and will likely hurt your children just because it’s what expected of you. Because when we do that we teach our children and their children that all they’re worth is what a man is willing to give them.
My mom may have accepted abuse because my grandmother accepted abuse but I will not be doing the same. And I will not sit down and accept that men are just supposed to mistreat women. Calling out abusive relationships when I see them has lost me friendships but I’ll never stop.
And before someone points it out: yes it’s hard to leave an abusive relationship and women are at their most vulnerable when they do, and also this does not mean justifying their actions and telling your children they’re normal things to expect from a partner.
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We will never know true freedom unfortunately because himpathy is drilled into us from birth to death.
I always think of this
https://slate.com/life/2025/03/donald-trump-divorce-marriage-politics-men-women.html
Yeah, lots of women have dire situations. But I’d say even more don’t, and are simply complacent or comfortable
I’m dealing with that right now in my own family
Unfortunately on Reddit, especially some other subs that are supposed to center women, people will get angry at you if you suggest a woman leave a man who degrades and physical harms her while drunk.
It’s really disturbing just how much of society is so dead set on enabling abusive, toxic men.
I don’t place blame on women who are also victims of the patriarchy. In fact, I feel like our society always demands accountability from everyone but the perpetrating man. This is why the cycle continues.
When you see this types of sentences, remember everything before BUT is garbage. Too many of us gals were raised that we had to tolerate this behaviour and find silver linings and it comes from a time when women needed a man for housing and bank accounts and stuff. Now those days are gone, women have been allowed indepence (mostly) for some 50 years and we’re still unlearning all the crap we were taught for ages.
I try so hard to drill into my granddaughters head that they need to stand on their own two feet first and formost and if someone can fit in and make them happy then great! Otherwise keep doing what makes you happy on your own, without putting up with a “man”. And the men out there need to understand that they have to step up their game, otherwise we’re fine with our friends and pets and without them.
My perspective…
So when I began getting serious with partners, over nights, etc. i made the typical mistakes..using a glob of shampoo that costs more than gold when a nickel amount will do or the face lotion on my elbows, neck and ass when it’s only meant for night time, on full moons and only every other week because it will give glowing Dewey skin or blind you….i made the usual assumptions. I came to learn…my mom and sister hid the stuff they actually used. What was left around for me was there on purpose. I never learned rather was accommodated…..this is important. Later on my partners explained skincare, why this is important, why this pallette is so special etc. (just like how I explained my 500 dollar knives can’t be left in the sink or go in the dishwasher). Come into every relationship from a place of curiosity, share your knowledge and experience and let them show you who they are (make sure it’s safe for them to do so as well). If someone is unwilling to grown and learn..that’s fine. Accept that and make a choice that you are proud of
My perspective…
So when I began getting serious with partners, over nights, etc. i made the typical mistakes..using a glob of shampoo that costs more than gold when a nickel amount will do or the face lotion on my elbows, neck and ass when it’s only meant for night time, on full moons and only every other week because it will give glowing Dewey skin or blind you….i made the usual assumptions. I came to learn…my mom and sister hid the stuff they actually used. What was left around for me was there on purpose. I never learned rather was accommodated…..this is important. Later on my partners explained skincare, why this is important, why this pallette is so special etc. (just like how I explained my 500 dollar knives can’t be left in the sink or go in the dishwasher). Come into every relationship from a place of curiosity, share your knowledge and experience and let them show you who they are (make sure it’s safe for them to do so as well). If someone is unwilling to grown and learn..that’s fine. Accept that and make a choice that you are proud of
Yeah it made sense back in the day when you had to have a man for a bank account or credit card or to own a house, but that’s been decades ago. Close enough there are still implications and habits formed based on that, but also I’m tired of pretending that all women who stay with men for years and decades “can’t” leave and if you point out they keep enabling certain behavior, you are ‘victim blaming’. No ma’am.
It would be one thing if women spent years trying and scheming and planning to leave and were scraping up money, making plans, still had young children, etc. No one’s talking about them. People try to extend that to every situation when it’s clear that many grown women with agency and grown or no kids simply do not want to be alone, do not want to get roommates, and don’t want to deal with the discomfort and decision making being independent brings. It’s infantilizing to suggest otherwise. And yes, if you share a bed, a bank account, and an address with some MAGA chud you are MAGA by association and you are an enabler. Not a victim.
I just have to bear this for a little longer until I find a job so I can move out of here.
I think men are responsible for their own bad behavior and the women they are harming are not “complicit” in their own harm.
It’s actually it’s own kind of “himpathy” and victim blaming to say that instead of a guy being responsible for his behavior, it’s the fault of a woman if he’s crappy to her.
I think people forget that a lot of women don’t leave because of custody. Shared custody could actually be dangerous not because the guy is outright abusive but imagine having to leave your toddler with someone that leaves medications out or refuses to baby proof. Courts also love giving full custody to the worst parents possible.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this, in no small part because of the torturous debates on this very subreddit. Any attempt to question why people accept this treatment is met with a glib “Because they were raised in a system that normalized and they have no agency to overcome circumstances.”
But I was raised in the same system by abusive dysfunctional parents and it made me determined to never accept that kind of situation for myself, so clearly it’s more complicated than how you were raised.
What about the metaphor of swimming versus drowning? We all exist in the same toxic patriarchal waters, and not everyone has the same agency to navigate them. On the other hand, there are people who seem to have as much of a chance to avoid drowning as anyone, yet still they lack the skill to swim. Someone has to teach you at some point, or you just won’t know how. That’s not a moral judgment, just a fact. Even an experienced swimmer can encounter a sudden change in conditions, so no one is truly invulnerable.
Part of the issue is that many women feel shame because they believe somehow that they picked badly so they describe their shit partner as good ” except this one thing ” because women routinely get blamed for whatever choice they make. So the default is to describe them as good. Plus women are brain washed into believing they are the default ” fixers” of all relationship issues not just the romantic ones.
So we are all complicit in the sense that we exist.
Women are very often pressured into being enablers by everybody else.
And finally if they sense hey I want to get the fuck out of this bad situation there is often not much help available and given the high cost of living in North America they have to think seriously about if they can leave.
For many it’s not as easy as “choosing” to be a single parent.
If your spouse is abusive, are you doing your children a disservice by letting them spend half their time, unsupervised by anyone else, with an abuser. And abuse is wide and variable, no dad who petitions for custody is losing it because he’s a yeller.
Tough situation. So often people don’t realize how unhelpful their partner is until kids are in the mix, because just two people is a lot less work to do.
We enable when we refuse to believe other women who come forward about their experience of our men SAing or graping them. It can be very difficult to acknowledge that the likelihood that woman is lying is low enough it’s close to zero, and the likelihood that he is in fact guilty of the thing she says is very, very high, but we HAVE to work on this or it will just keep happening.
If you think you’re a feminist and you haven’t believed another girl or woman who came forward about your partner, brother, or dad, or friend, or cousin, or son, then you are most definitely NOT a feminist and you are enabling SA and rape.
If you think you are a feminist and you try to flirt with other women’s partners in an effort to see if they’ll do something they’d need to hide from their partner, whether it’s just dirty talk, sexy looks from across the room, kissing, groping,or full on sex, then you are not a feminist and you are undoing every good deed you’ve ever done for another woman and putting yourself in karmic red ink. If you support women, you do NOT try to destabilize their relationships – the very things we center our lives around. You especially do not do this to women in marginalized groups – women of color, single or solo parents who are partnered with the man you’re objectifying, disabled women, women w disabled or sick kids or dependents. If you do this, you’re a piece of shit. You may not think much about the other woman and may not think it’s about the other woman, but if you find you’re doing this as a habit, then it is 100% about the other woman, whether you’ve ever met her or not. Looking at you, Kate Hotler and Sarah Barkman.
Don’t think of it as being complicit with their behavior, think of it as not advocating sufficiently for yourself. Men are responsible for their own behavior. Women can’t make them do anything. What we can do is react appropriately to their behavior. Not excuse or downplay it.
A lot of people ask themselves “Am I too sensitive” when the answer is “It’s the opposite, your skin has become too callused. You aren’t noticing that you are being hurt. You are suppressing your own survival instincts trying to save the status quo instead of fleeing to protect yourself.”
We are taught different communication skills.
Women are taught compromising and making peace from when they are young girls. Boys are taught they can take up space, make noise, be heard, and often accommodated.
It makes a difference in how we bring up problems. Women get upset, men were taught emotion was weakness – so clearly women are irrational and do not have to listen to it. Men, when arguing with other men, drop their voices and talk slower – this works for getting attention.
Women get accused of being nags, I think this is because very often they are only making verbal complaints, the same ones over and over. This is ineffective. If you have an issue, then it needs to be escalated when not heard. If you can, link consequences to behavior ( if they don’t learn fast, move on). They’ve been taught to push boundaries, and you have to hold them. If they know you mean business and give meaningful pushback, many (but not all) will learn to tow the line. Girls are not taught to hit back like this, and they ought to. It’s a battle of wills, you have a say. Stay only where you are respected. Some of you may say a man ought to respect naturally if he was well raised. I find even well raised boys will test, they have rougher social norms that value asserting themselves.
If boys/men get away with poor behavior, like shirking chores- it’s a self rewarding activity. They get more free time at your expense. Make it painful. Dishes not clean, no dinner. Insulting laundry/other chores…great you signed up to do it yourself. Do a bad job at a task to avoid being asked to do it in the future? Let’s review this like you are a dumb kid, step by step instructions, or a youtube tutorial. If anything, you need to do it more because every adult ought to know this. Be willing to do the not nice thing.
If a man sucks and isn’t going to change, find that out early if you can and not after you’ve had kids with him (some men will pivot on big relationship milestones to abusive asshats, but often, the women I see complaining about their lazy useless father of their kids….was a lazy man the whole time). Tolerate less shit. Push back more. I want peaceful relationships but not at my expense. I will bring up issues, I will choose whether they remain in my life based on how they step up to the plate or reject them based on a refusal to do so.
Women enabled men for millennia because we were unavoidably physically dependent on them. This was by design. It’s still true by design in many places in the world.
Last night I watched a documentary on an attempted honor killing in Pakistan, where the victim was coerced by the elders of her community to ‘forgive’ her attempted murderers, in the interests of community cohesion.
That Pakistani woman had very few options. In more developed countries, women can get jobs, get an education, and own property. The system is still tilted against us, but it’s no longer completely rigged from top to bottom.
Misogyny is not an emotion; it’s a system of control. As Kate Dunne points out in Down Girl; The Logic of Misogyny , misogynistic reasoning doesn’t just punish women who assertively themselves; it rewards those who are complicit.
It takes awhile for the abuse to become so bad that we are willing to sacrifice those rewards.
Totally…I saw a video of a woman explaining how she bought 20 mini Bundt cakes and her husband and sons ate them all and she didn’t have any. She was laughing it off and saying how she was bummed but they’re growing boys…why laugh off how much your family doesn’t care about you? Women need to realize it’s very easy for the mother to become the joke, the loser, the forgotten one of the family…if you can’t get someone you birthed to save you a snack you’ve got bigger fish to fry than you realize
Just like we would not eat a delicious takeout meal if it was garnished with shit, a man should not be considered a “good man” if he’s absolutely wonderful aside from sometimes treating his partner worse than garbage. Unfortunately our culture does not agree with this at all, and is invested in hyping up men who aren’t capable or willing of showing basic respect and decency, nevermind love, in their behavior.
I know it’s tricky, as despite no longer being economically dependent on men, I think by default most women end up with the psychological baggage designed to help us survive under those past, awful, oppressive conditions, and it can take a lot of growth to actually act in a way which reflects the modern world and rights we have (though of course here in the US those rights are slipping away). Ideally, we could both be understanding of the attachment trauma and issues which lead to many women feeling as if they’re prisoners of whatever man they happen to be with and must try to make it work since there’s no way out, even though there are many ways out now — while still strongly encouraging all women to outgrow those patterns, especially in our behavior. Like dumping jerks, but once we’re single grieving the loss, and being sure to welcome the hurt and anger of how he mistreated her so she’s less tempted to ever accept that treatment again. Unfortunately many women are too invested in upholding patriarchy to let that message be unanimous, and instead act like extreme and traumatic mistreatment is fine and somehow an inherent part of romance or something.
I agree. Women are still being conditioned to cover and apologize for men’s behaviors, especially the controlling and violent ones. “He’s just perfect but …”
This needs to be called out every time it is spoken. Generations of women have fought so that we are no longer the property of men but we still have to understand how much submission is trained into us
SPEAK OUT!
I don’t think it’s something to be proud of that your friends in an abusive relationship felt the need to stop talking to you because you were abrasive about their domestic violence. DV thrives on isolation, and to be helpful to victims we have to listen to them, ask questions, empower them, gently challenge their thinking (that has been warped by their abuser). I don’t want to shame you because this is something that a lot of people go through and it is hard to watch a loved one be abused. But we have to have empathy and compassion for victims, their abuser is already stealing that from them and isolating them; we don’t want to make that worse.
We as women are VERY complicit in enabling bad behaviour mainly by constantly making excuses for shitty men.
We do this by rationalising why their bad behavior isn’t “that bad” or “bad enough”. Feeling like we’re “giving him the benefit of the doubt” when we’re really just making a case for for why we don’t deserve basic respect from a man who is supposed to love us. Explaining away shitty behaviour with any number of excuses instead of facing the reality that we’re actively choosing mistreatment because we’re afraid to be alone, have low self esteem, etc.
This forum is full of people making excuses for shitty men. The reason men are shitty is because no one holds them accountable and demands more of them – like treating others with respect, learning to cope with anger without yelling or insulting, and showing care and compassion for people they say they love.
I think this is a really simplified view. Yes in a perfect world you could just leave (I did!) but the reality of that is far more difficult than you are considering.
Taking your kids to a shelter? Holy shit. Risking that the parent with reliable income can get full custody and you don’t get to be with your kids? Trying to find work and child care is not a trivial thing. And honestly it sucks not being able to see my kids every day. I live down the street from my ex and I see them more than I don’t but I’m missing cool stuff and it sucks. And then the ex can bring anyone into their lives. Can take them anywhere. My ex was bringing the kids along on dates. He moved a woman he had only known for a few months into the house.
Telling women there is no excuse for staying is complete bullshit. I don’t fault anyone for staying. Leave if you can but if you have kids you are still dealing with this person for years. They can make your life difficult in new and unexpected ways even when you think you know them.
Anytime someone pulls out “he’s a good man but …” I am reminded of something Jesus said – “A tree is judged by it’s fruit.”
Quite, but it’s because we’ve been conditioned since birth by society. I recommend reading Zawn Villines’s Substack where she deconstructs the various ways the patriarchy tries to perpetuate itself. Makes it easier to avoid participating in those things.
It starts when we are children. Boys often have more play time and fewer household chores than girls. Parents reinforce that. Boys are often expected and allowed to be more selfish and aggressive. We watch parents have these shitty relationships and that’s what we know how to emulate. We live in a society that tells us we need a man, and it’s pretty hard to make it on one income alone for the average person, especially if they want kids. Everyone is complicit at times, but many are working for change.
Good for you for breaking the cycle.
I can’t tell you how many of my female friends have let men get away with SO much even when they are just dating. I’d rather be single than treated poorly.
This sort of behavior is deeply ingrained in society. I even see it in television. Toxic male characters are antiheroes but problematic female characters are unlikable. A good example is the Handmaid’s tale. A character called Nick is beloved by a lot of fans despite him being a Gilead supporter. The show gave Nick chance after chance to do the right thing, but he didn’t. Fans will excuse his behaviour and choices endlessly, while also labeling June a bitch. Why do men like Nick get endless chances, but June doesn’t? Why do men who make bad choices are praised, but women are labelled a bitch? Why is it after all these years people still call Skyler White from Breaking Bad a bitch? This problem is only getting worse. I see it in all different places. Men hate women and are seeing them less like human beings and women are becoming more terrified and submissive.
The fact of the matter is that any relationship a woman has with a man, no matter how committed to gender equality he is, will inevitably involve some level of misogyny. It’s too deeply culturally ingrained to fully overcome.
So knowing that, the question is, what is the threshold where it’s actually worth it? For some it will never be worth it, which is entirely fair. For others, we are willing to accept “background radiation” misogyny, as it were, from someone who is otherwise curious, respectful, and willing to learn.
The problem is that we are all socialized to accept a lot of shit from men, and as we all know, the bar is in hell. So I can see how easily some dude just doing a little more than the bare minimum would seem “amazing” to someone who previously only ever encountered the former.
How I’ve gone about it:
They get the benefit of exactly one doubt. If he says something that bothers me, I explain why, and he gets defensive, doubles down, or dismisses it? Bye.
No hand-holding. If I frustratedly say I hate men, I will absolutely not be qualifying that for him. He can learn to deal with the uncomfortable feelings it might bring, because there’s valuable introspection to be gained there.
A man willing to call another woman a bitch or a cunt will be perfectly willing to call you the same should you give him what he views as a reason to. Zero tolerance policy on any sort of gendered slurs.
Therapy, or whatever is accessible. A tangible demonstration that he is working to improve his own mental health.
Our values must be entirely aligned. Politics, religion, whether or not it’s ever okay to use a functional object as a decorative item, all of it. There’s no topic I care deeply about that I am willing to ignore or sideline or “not bring up” for his comfort.
He has to be willing to start calling out other men. This is honestly one of the biggest reasons this is sometimes worth it. Men respond a lot differently when it’s someone they expected to be on “their side” saying “dude wtf is wrong with you?” Peer pressure works!
I’m sure there’s more I’m not thinking of, but that’s the gist.
There is an element of work to it. I think that’s undeniable. Someone finding said work exhausting or incomprehensible makes complete and utter sense to me. If anything ever happens to my husband, I will almost certainly never involve myself romantically with men again. I’m bi, though, so this is an easier choice for me to make.
I sympathize greatly with the concept of women distancing themselves from men. I just don’t see it as realistic on a large scale. Humans are social creatures, we crave companionship, the majority of us have sexual and romantic desire, etc. Thus, we need to figure out what that balance needs to be.
Every abuser we’ve ever run into has had more practice being that way than any of us have practice stopping them; imo even when we’re cornered into playing along it’s still entirely on them