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mwengler comments on LW Women Submissions: On Misogyny - Less Wrong Discussion
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Sure, you want to avoid ahead of time getting involved with an abuser.
But virtually all abuse stories I hear involve the woman ignoring early red flags, ignoring early pre- or mildly abusive behavior.
So a tremendous amount of abuse could be avoided without needing to predict the future. STOP relationships with people who are starting to abuse you, starting down that path.
I am not saying this to justify the abuser or abusive behavior. Rather to point out that in the puzzle of understanding abuse, understanding the abused's staying in the relationship is part of that puzzle.
Could believing that "all men are abusers" contribute to staying with the one specific abuser? Such model provides only the choice between an abusive man or no man... where a different model would also provide an option of finding a non-abusive man.
(A data point about a slightly different situation: I knew a woman who believed that all men are alcoholics; the only difference is that some are honest about it and get drunk in public, the remaining ones are in denial and get drunk at home; and from these only two options, the former ones are more honest and more social. No surprise that all her partners were alcoholics. She complained about that, but instead about her bad choices, she complained about the bad male nature. Attempts by other women to convince her otherwise only led to responses like: "You are so naive to believe that. Just wait until you know your darling better and you will find out that he is an alcoholic too.")
Sorta, yes, no. Cart before the horse. I think some women who stay with abusers may rationalize it by believing that all men are abusers. Mostly rationality is used for "understanding" what is happening, not generally to prompt fundamental changes. When I was drinking I had a very warped idea of how much other people drank, I thought I was drinking a little more than them. When I stopped drinking, and especially when I stopped feeling driven to drink, I realized that a tremendous fraction of my world was barely drinking at all, and that even among drinkers, most of them were sober enough to read the bill at the end of the night (which I generally wasn't on Fridays).
The evidence about other people's drinking was always there, I discounted gigantically its difference from what I was doing. In most of modern life, the evidence for other men treating other women differently is there, the question is why would one woman in an almost identical information rich environment as another women never give a guy who once raises his voice at her a second chance, while another stays through multiple mate-induced hospital visits?
I'd start by looking at the conditions the two women grew up in.
For what it's worth, I've heard that there aren't really good predictors of who will end up in an abusive relationship, but people from healthy backgrounds get out faster. Unfortunately, I don't have a source.
Related TED talk: Leslie Morgan Steiner: Why Domestic Violence Victims Don't Leave
I guess that in certain situations it can be hard to rebuff someone who's maintained plausible deniability without feeling like an asshole.
“I hear Russian borscht is the best. Have you ever had any?” “You must be a commie! Go away!”
EDIT: Or, for a less ridiculous example, see the paragraph starting with “Last of all” in the first post of that series.
This suggests that any woman is pretty much like any other woman, and it is the differing circumstance of the relationship that makes it hard for some women to leave abusive relationships.
I think it is extraordinarily more likely that some women get stuck in abusive relationships that other women would be out of there probably before abuse even started, let alone hanging around for the 3rd trip to the hospital.
That's not what I meant; I meant that I suspect that in certain cases leaving a relationship is psychologically harder than it may look from the outside, especially if the abuse was turned up slowly boiling frog-style. I didn't mean to say anything about the variances of distributions.
I would hazard that many red flags--"obvious indicators of danger" are much more clearly seen in hindsight or out of context--these red flags might not have been quite so obvious to these women in abusive relationships. Using words like "ignoring" implies active agency on their part.
This type of statement strikes me as being a very likely reason "normal male" was used as a descriptor. If she allowed herself to be put on the stand for "failing" to see the warning signs, then, in a potential critic's mind, she might be implicitly bearing partial blame, and thus her message might be safely ignored (not that I agree with that--I'm merely stating that this is a common attitude that could easily be expected. "She didn't get out so she's partly to blame for being abused.") To avoid this, she hastened to point out that there was no way in which he did differentiate himself from other men, no "red flags" she'd missed.
More simply, a strong aversion to a common trend of blaming the victim and a desire to skip past that part of the critique.
I am making no statements about you in particular--merely that that's an easy interpretation of your comment.
I'm guessing the thing you would hazard is a guess? You would hazard a guess?
Personally, I am going by experience. The two women I know who were abused were abused REPEATEDLY before they left the abusive relationship. Now I don't know what your relationships are like but I have never "accidentally" hit or even shoved a woman I was in a relationship with. But these women I know who were in abusive relationships overlooked being hit. They overlooked being hit again. I couldn't tell you how many times they overlooked being hit, I have the impression it was a fair number, before the abuse that finally rose to the level of scaring the shit out of them, that made them realize they were risking their lives, happened, and they finally left the relationships.
So I am not hazarding a guess. I may be generalizing from a small data set, but it is not a guess. Of the two women who have been abused that I personally know, 100% of them overlooked at least two instances of violence against them by their significant other before finally leaving. And both of them were pretty frightened for their lives before they finally left, rather deliberately overlooking mere bruising and hitting.