Photo by: Jennifer Brommer (his daughter) | Sent from: New York City
Right now, somewhere in this “great” country of ours, a horrible fucking piece of shit is going down. It is a crime so horrible, so offensive and scary, it daren’t speak its name. The crime is MAN ABUSE. Not gangbanging or Third World torture or any of that bullshit––we’re talking about the unspeakable evil of abused husbands (and boyfriends).
Almost a million men this year will be the victims of spousal abuse. They may have their hair pulled or be stabbed or bitch slapped or even grabbed and shoved. Shit, some of them even have things thrown at them. But they all have one thing in common: shame pain. Last year there were some 496,327 reported cases of women throwing things at men, but the mind spins trying to imagine ones that weren’t reported. What if the pen had got him in the eye? What if it went in his eye so hard it went into his brain and killed him? These women don’t care. Meanwhile, the victims are sitting at the dining-room table alone, their tears dripping through their beards and landing there.
And it’s not just slapping and scratching and other assaults. Most female-on-male action involves some kind of blunt object. That’s what pussies these women are––they bonk the guy. In Phillip A. Cook’s Abused Men: The Hidden Side of Violence, there is a report of a man who came home a bit drunk, fell asleep on the couch, and woke up to an iron-skillet-wielding wife battering him, like Andy Capp but real. The man was forced to get up off the couch and grab the woman’s arm and say, “Stop it.” This dangerous move stopped the abuse, but he suffered severe bruising on his arms and hip and she almost hit him in his head. It might make you nauseous with contempt, but know this: It happens all the time. As human-rights crusader Bert H. Hoff says in his seminal paper on the topic of battered men, The Risk of Serious Physical Injury from Assault by a Woman Intimate, “over 180,000 men will be threatened with a knife by a woman, well over half a million men will be slapped or hit, and well over a half a million pushed, grabbed or shoved.” Got your attention? Good. The scariest part is, thanks to this bullshit machismo society we live in, there are men out there who are getting shoved and simply not reporting it. And then you have women with the gall to complain about rape. What is this, Upside-Down Land?
If you are a man who feels like the victim of spousal battering, for God’s sake, speak up. Don’t be a victim. Here are some tips the people at batteredmen.com use to know if you need help:
• Does your spouse keep tabs on you all the time?
• Does she often accuse you of being unfaithful?
• Does she discourage your relationships with friends and family?
• Does your wife force you to have sex against your will? The latter brings up one of the most difficult areas of male abuse: rape. If you are a man and you are of the ilk where women are likely to harass you for your body, please take the following precautions: • Do not wear tiny shorts.
• Walk tall and proud and don’t appear to be vulnerable.
• If a woman you don’t know grabs you on the street, start screaming at the top of your lungs. Stab her with your keys and claw at her face. Keep screaming. Knee her in the cunt if you have to. This is your body!
• If she does get you into an alley and pulls out your penis, DO NOT GET A BONER! Female rapists use that to put you inside them. If you don’t get hard, it means she has to feed it in like a dead eel, and that gives you more time to scream. Think of your dad naked being attacked by dogs. Or the Twin Towers collapsing. Whatever it takes, STAY SOFT! So what is the root of this new crisis? The Society of Abused Men has several informative pamphlets it uses to raise awareness about this curse, and there is one particular quote that perfectly sums up exactly how and why this silent evil has so easily spread through our culture. “Society tolerates violent behavior in females, while for men it is [sic] not” it says. “Take, for example, the classic television or movie scene of the angry wife/girlfriend throwing dishes at the hapless male victim. No one gets hurt; it’s supposed to be funny.” But in reality, a mad girlfriend throwing plates at you is anything but funny. It is noisy, expensive, very difficult to clean up, and could easily lead to a cut arm or hurt leg. If you are bawling your eyes out right now, you are probably part of an elite class of battered husbands who call themselves “ultrasensitive men.” As James Christopher, one of the founders of the Battered Men Workshop, says in his manifesto, “The ultra-sensitive man’s reactions to an abusive relationship aren’t different, but they can be more intense. Inside, the ultra-sensitive man is screaming, ‘Don’t you know what you’re doing is killing me?… If you don’t stop, I’m going to die!’” (All italics are his.) Writer Roger Easterbrooks, a self-identified ultra-sensitive man himself, takes it further when he refers to a state he calls “going into overwhelm.” This is when “Your physical, mental and emotional systems can’t tolerate any more. It almost feels like you’re being pounded on. You want to run away.” Of course, a lot of these men can’t run away. Where can they go? If they go to a sports bar during the Super Bowl and try to get the bartender’s attention, they are all but ignored. If they go to their friend’s house and ask to at least watch Sex and the City on HBO On Demand for a few hours until she calms down, often times that “friend” will laugh at them or say no. There have even been reported cases of relatives throwing the victim’s small overnight bag onto the ground and yelling, “Take your purse and get out of here, you fuckin’ fag!” Mr. Easterbrooks offers some telltale signs of being an ultrasensitive abused husband. According to him, the basest signifiers are physical: • Is your body often tense, especially through the shoulders?
• Do you frequently experience stomach pains or headaches when faced with a confrontation with your wife?
• Do your temperature and pulse both rise?
• Do you experience anxiety or panic attacks? “If this happens,” Easterbrook adds, “your body is telling you, in these many ways, that something is wrong in your life, and you cannot…figure out what it is.” In other words, you are scared. Someone is scaring you and it’s not you. It is time to take action and be empowered. The matriarchy wants you to be silent—fight back!
There are three classic reactions to being a battered husband: • Some foolishly decide to weather the storm, “to take it like a man.” This is the wrong move, because man abuse can be passed down from generation to generation.
• Others retreat into a place of deadly detachment, which is so sad it makes crying seem redundant. This is, as people in the scene describe it, going into “wounded Zen warrior mode.”
• Finally, there are some brave souls who simply run away. If not literally, then they kind of run away by creating crushing work deadlines and hanging out with their friends rather than going home. Though this can work in the short term, it can make the lady even madder than she was before. It is behavior like this that will often convert a simple grab into a mean shove. The thing that induces the most tears regarding this whole topic is that a lot of these victims don’t realize there are others out there like them. The problem is rampant, and some experts even foresee a crippling reduction in the male population. ABC News recently featured a story called “Beating Up on Battered Men” that revealed how ubiquitous the problem really is. The viewer response was unprecedented, and ABC.com was forced to expand the capacity of their viewer mail server. Most men who wrote in had no idea this was an epidemic. One Zen warrior relates this horrifying story to the network: “When I was living in Connecticut, my wife—in one of her drunken rages—took our daughter’s baseball bat and used it to smash the locked door to my study, where I was trying desperately to meet a deadline… she is 5’2” and petite in size, so that shows what a person consumed by rage can do. And since I’m over 6’ and muscular, I wouldn’t get much sympathy posing as a ‘battered man’!” This poor bastard thought he was all alone. As he stood there, forced to utter, “Jesus Christ, calm down, for fuck’s sake” and remove the bat from her hand, he probably thought to himself, “Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen. They think they know but they have no idea.” Well, guess what, six-foot-tall writing guy? You are not alone. And the more you speak out, the more likely abused men are to TAKE BACK THE NIGHT! For more info on this scary world of hate and violence go to batteredmen.com.
• Does she often accuse you of being unfaithful?
• Does she discourage your relationships with friends and family?
• Does your wife force you to have sex against your will? The latter brings up one of the most difficult areas of male abuse: rape. If you are a man and you are of the ilk where women are likely to harass you for your body, please take the following precautions: • Do not wear tiny shorts.
• Walk tall and proud and don’t appear to be vulnerable.
• If a woman you don’t know grabs you on the street, start screaming at the top of your lungs. Stab her with your keys and claw at her face. Keep screaming. Knee her in the cunt if you have to. This is your body!
• If she does get you into an alley and pulls out your penis, DO NOT GET A BONER! Female rapists use that to put you inside them. If you don’t get hard, it means she has to feed it in like a dead eel, and that gives you more time to scream. Think of your dad naked being attacked by dogs. Or the Twin Towers collapsing. Whatever it takes, STAY SOFT! So what is the root of this new crisis? The Society of Abused Men has several informative pamphlets it uses to raise awareness about this curse, and there is one particular quote that perfectly sums up exactly how and why this silent evil has so easily spread through our culture. “Society tolerates violent behavior in females, while for men it is [sic] not” it says. “Take, for example, the classic television or movie scene of the angry wife/girlfriend throwing dishes at the hapless male victim. No one gets hurt; it’s supposed to be funny.” But in reality, a mad girlfriend throwing plates at you is anything but funny. It is noisy, expensive, very difficult to clean up, and could easily lead to a cut arm or hurt leg. If you are bawling your eyes out right now, you are probably part of an elite class of battered husbands who call themselves “ultrasensitive men.” As James Christopher, one of the founders of the Battered Men Workshop, says in his manifesto, “The ultra-sensitive man’s reactions to an abusive relationship aren’t different, but they can be more intense. Inside, the ultra-sensitive man is screaming, ‘Don’t you know what you’re doing is killing me?… If you don’t stop, I’m going to die!’” (All italics are his.) Writer Roger Easterbrooks, a self-identified ultra-sensitive man himself, takes it further when he refers to a state he calls “going into overwhelm.” This is when “Your physical, mental and emotional systems can’t tolerate any more. It almost feels like you’re being pounded on. You want to run away.” Of course, a lot of these men can’t run away. Where can they go? If they go to a sports bar during the Super Bowl and try to get the bartender’s attention, they are all but ignored. If they go to their friend’s house and ask to at least watch Sex and the City on HBO On Demand for a few hours until she calms down, often times that “friend” will laugh at them or say no. There have even been reported cases of relatives throwing the victim’s small overnight bag onto the ground and yelling, “Take your purse and get out of here, you fuckin’ fag!” Mr. Easterbrooks offers some telltale signs of being an ultrasensitive abused husband. According to him, the basest signifiers are physical: • Is your body often tense, especially through the shoulders?
• Do you frequently experience stomach pains or headaches when faced with a confrontation with your wife?
• Do your temperature and pulse both rise?
• Do you experience anxiety or panic attacks? “If this happens,” Easterbrook adds, “your body is telling you, in these many ways, that something is wrong in your life, and you cannot…figure out what it is.” In other words, you are scared. Someone is scaring you and it’s not you. It is time to take action and be empowered. The matriarchy wants you to be silent—fight back!
There are three classic reactions to being a battered husband: • Some foolishly decide to weather the storm, “to take it like a man.” This is the wrong move, because man abuse can be passed down from generation to generation.
• Others retreat into a place of deadly detachment, which is so sad it makes crying seem redundant. This is, as people in the scene describe it, going into “wounded Zen warrior mode.”
• Finally, there are some brave souls who simply run away. If not literally, then they kind of run away by creating crushing work deadlines and hanging out with their friends rather than going home. Though this can work in the short term, it can make the lady even madder than she was before. It is behavior like this that will often convert a simple grab into a mean shove. The thing that induces the most tears regarding this whole topic is that a lot of these victims don’t realize there are others out there like them. The problem is rampant, and some experts even foresee a crippling reduction in the male population. ABC News recently featured a story called “Beating Up on Battered Men” that revealed how ubiquitous the problem really is. The viewer response was unprecedented, and ABC.com was forced to expand the capacity of their viewer mail server. Most men who wrote in had no idea this was an epidemic. One Zen warrior relates this horrifying story to the network: “When I was living in Connecticut, my wife—in one of her drunken rages—took our daughter’s baseball bat and used it to smash the locked door to my study, where I was trying desperately to meet a deadline… she is 5’2” and petite in size, so that shows what a person consumed by rage can do. And since I’m over 6’ and muscular, I wouldn’t get much sympathy posing as a ‘battered man’!” This poor bastard thought he was all alone. As he stood there, forced to utter, “Jesus Christ, calm down, for fuck’s sake” and remove the bat from her hand, he probably thought to himself, “Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen. They think they know but they have no idea.” Well, guess what, six-foot-tall writing guy? You are not alone. And the more you speak out, the more likely abused men are to TAKE BACK THE NIGHT! For more info on this scary world of hate and violence go to batteredmen.com.