<p>
I think that is absolute garbage.</p>
<p>Occasional abuse increases attraction because woman are naturally attracted (due to evolution) to physical dominance. Thus women like height and muscularity. Hitting a woman on occasion is an example of physical male dominance and women react to this in a positive manner subconsciously.</p>
<p>It’s the same reason why “The Pick-Up” artistry works. Women, like men, have certain attraction buttons that can be manipulated to engender attraction. Push up bras, tight jeans, and a passive, complicit attitude will tend to attract men. Women are generally attracted to a man that they perceive as a care-giver. Sporadic abuse sometimes can trigger that innate desire.</p>
<p>As a victim of abuse, I can testify only on my own personal experience. First, I want to say right off the bat that comments like dontno’s are really insulting and, to use a strong word, disgusting, not to mention utterly unscientific–in other words this is opinion masquerading as science:. “woman are naturally attracted (due to evolution) to physical dominance…Sporadic abuse sometimes can trigger that innate desire” There is no scientific proof of this at all. Also, physical dominance is NOT the same thing as abuse! And “sporadic” abuse is abuse. That’s like saying, “sporadic rape,” or 'sporadic molesting." Anyway, I don’t want to waste my space on this.
What I want to say is that I myself grew up sexually abused by my father while my mother knew and said nothing (for 9 years). I grew up in an upper middle class, highly respected family. My father was a well respected doctor, and my parents had many friends. I ended up going to Yale. I knew that no one would believe me. And I think in retrospect, I was actually right. That’s because, flash forward 25 years when I am divorcing my abusive husband (It’s not rocket science that I married an abusive man, for the following reasons: a) Warning bells that are there for others are simply not there for me. I grew up with abuse modeled as normal. b) Deep down, deeper than my intelligence and awareness, despite years of therapy, I feel I am a disgusting person who deserves bad things to happen to her. c) I don’t believe anyone will believe me or listen to me; I believe I am worthless (my ex said this, many times). My ex is a classic seemingly 'nice ’ innocuous man. And yes, I too am struck by how much of a ‘script’ it is–only after the fact. d) I am a ‘softie’ emotionally; I really dislike conflict, I rarely pick fights, I have a lot of friends and no enemies, I hate hurting people and I am very sensitive emotionally. I am well-liked (she says modestly!) and loyal to my friends and they to me. My ex was extremely manipulative and used my ‘softness,’ sensitivity and my loyalty, twisted it.</p>
<p>During my divorce, it was every bit as nightmarish as I feared it would be. The whole court system, plus child therapists appointed by court, believed my ex. As in a nightmare. That’s because he is very manipulative and seems harmless. He is also very bright and knows how to act for an hour in front of a therapist. This is classic of an abuser. The only good thing was that I saw that I wasn’t a complete chump for buying into his stuff–even professionals did. Anyway, it ended up being ok, thank God, because my kids were old enough to speak for themselves (they were teens) and they related the abuse he levied against them by now. However, it was very traumatic for them (my ex forced them to testify against him–according to him I was an evil worthless witch who manipulated them). I don’t really want to go into it. All’s well that ends well–but my point is that abuse casts a long shadow. Also, as someone says, it’s very hard to ‘stop’ it when your own child is in an abusive relationship. You will talk yourself blue in the face but if they don’t hear, they don’t hear–what they do hear is the abuse they suffered growing up (doesn’t have to be parents), or the modeling they saw growing up. Actions speak louder than words. When children go off to college they fall back on subconscious patterns that they’ve witnesses or experienced; sometimes these patterns are bad; hopefully, with help, they will figure that out and be stronger for it.</p>
<p>Sorry–I know this is more of a rant and not very organized. But it’s very important to talk about. Thanks for bringing this up.</p>
<p>HVmom,
That took courage to share your personal history here. I sincerely believe that if one has been sexually, physically, or verbally abused (overly criticized, never meeting up to expectations) as a child, its harder to escape the repetition of the pattern.</p>
<p>What surprises me is that some of the therapists didn’t seem to “get” the underlying pattern. Knowing about your history, they could have been on the alert for signs of the abusive pattern. Superficially charming? Putting you down in subtle ways? Unable to acknowledge your point of view? Conveniently forgetting or denying some painful prior conversations, but never forgetting all of your “mistakes”?</p>
<p>Very pleased you got out, and that you are now a role model for your teens.</p>
<p>
That is absolute and utter trash. I have had several friends and aquaintances in abusive relationships and not one of them was attracted to the person because they were abusive. In fact, without exception, the abusers were very careful to hide that side of their personalities until the relationship was very well established. The victims do not react positively to the abuse from someone they have already come to love and trust at all, but with fear, shock, horror and shame (though they are not the ones who should be feeling shame). </p>
<p>Women may be attracted to a strong man and height and muscularity. The discovery that that man is a weak coward who abuses those smaller and weaker than himself usually comes as a terrible shock.</p>
<p>You should be ashamed of yourself for saying this sort of garbage. It is insulting to any abused woman. And to the many decent men out there.</p>
<p>bookworm, thank you. Yes, it’s depressing–they SHOULD have been on the alert due to their supposed training, because both I and he were exhibiting classic symptoms. “Superficially charming? Putting you down in subtle ways? Unable to acknowledge your point of view? Conveniently forgetting or denying some painful prior conversations, but never forgetting all of your “mistakes”?” </p>
<p>It’s actually painful to read this, because my ex did ALL these things, often right in front of the so-called experts. And this went on for two hellish years. It felt like the entire court system was not only validating my ex’s abuse of me, but actually joining in. And again, really the only reason things ended up ok is because my kids were teens. Had they been preschoolers, I shudder to think of what decisions would have been made. The thing is he has money. And money is power. Plus, there is really a huge amount of sexism and ‘blame the victim’ in the court system, huge. (And above–look at donto’s disgusting post.) But mainly it’s much easier to blame the victim who has no money and power, than to blame the perpetrator who, when he wasn’t being charming, had already spent over $100,000 in legal fees and was prepared to pay double, and who was saying things like, “I can take her to court for the rest of her life!” in a victorious fashion, or when he broke two fingers of mine by ‘accidentally’ slamming the front door on my fingers when I was picking up my son, said I was ‘faking it to try to manipulate things’ and the therapist, KNOWING I had two broken fingers - I was in a cast and had been to the hospital - said nothing. I told her I was afraid to sit next to him and my ex sneered and said, 'You see? She just keeps trying to manipulate and lie." The therapist said nothing and when I challenged her, she said, “Well, it’s his reality and your reality. You can’t invalidate his reality.” When I told her that the reality was I had two broken fingers and a police report of the incident, she said nothing, and changed the subject. (The whole thing with the fingers is another case in point of the larger difficulties abuse victims face. I had called the police; my ex confidentally told them that I had been ‘umbalanced’ and had ‘stormed into his house in a rage’ and so he ‘had’ to close the door and he had ‘accidentally’ closed it on my fingers. When I type it out you can see how preposterous it is - absolutely none of it is true - but the police officers actually believed him, at least at first. He just looks so meek and polite, like a gentle professor. One turned to me as I was clutching two broken fingers and said, “This is really your fault!” By the way, he slammed the door in front of my 12 year old son, who later said, shell-shocked, “Daddy LIED to the police! Right to their faces!” This is the most painful, horrible thing about abuse. Very, very often, people jump to the perpetrator’s defense and blame the victim. (Eventually the police did come to their senses and filed a report, but nothing came of it.) This doesn’t happen only to me. Indeed, a 12th grade girl I knew recently was raped by her teacher, a popular high school science teacher in an upper class school district in north Jersey. When she told the police, many many people in the community blamed…HER!! They were outraged at her. They said she ‘asked for it,’ and she ‘knew exactly what she was doing’ and she was a ‘slut.’ This from adults. It was really horrific. Despite all the literature, and education, people have a long way to go when it comes to abuse. </p>
<p>And I do want to stress that there are many many decent men out there. I dont’ mean this as a rant against men (plus there are abusive women). This is just my own experience.</p>
<p>HVmom,
You are clearly not ranting against all men, just some of the charming ones who are nasty and hurtful at home.</p>
<p>I am so sorry about your broken fingers.</p>
<p>I’m sure it is of little consolation, but, in past few years, I have been involved in 2 cases that involved coaches sexually abusing female students, and the girls/families were finally believed. In another case with verbally abusive man, I kept telling the female judge to look beyond his presenting style to the list of his transgressions. She didn’t believe me then, but his behavior got worse, and he is currently spending his time as an inmate.</p>
<p>I’m being repetitive, but I’m glad you and children are “free”. I have no doubt that you didn’t receive the settlement that you should have, but at least you don’t have to walk on eggshells any more. </p>
<p>There are wonderful books on abusive relationships. If anyone questions aspects of their relationship, I wish they would turn to some of these books. It is so helpful to understand the cycle, the familiar patterns of criticism, the escalation from verbal to physical abuse, and the realization that one is not alone. </p>
<p>I don’t know what to say about your prior therapist. Perhaps she has never been in an abusive relationship, nor lived with a narcissistic man, nor struggled with an unfair authoritarian figure. </p>
<p>PS–For the record, I’ve had 1/4–1/3 cases with the man being abused. The man often doesn’t divorce for fear he won’t get custody of the children, and he won’t leave them with spouse.</p>
<p>“Occasional abuse increases attraction because woman are naturally attracted (due to evolution) to physical dominance. Thus women like height and muscularity. Hitting a woman on occasion is an example of physical male dominance and women react to this in a positive manner subconsciously.”</p>
<p>You mistake all women for masochists and BD/SM enthusiasts. You are a fool. </p>
<p>Women may find a man who protects them attractive. But they do not find a man who abuses them attractive at all.</p>
<p>I think everyone is missing the point. Woman find male physical dominance attractive. Occasional abuse (like slapping her once a month or pushing her around sporadically) is a form of physical dominance. These infrequent displays of dominance trigger innate biological responses of a woman’s attraction impulses.</p>
<p>This not include habitual and violent abusers, though so many women return repeatedly to these men as well. This doesn’t include all abused woman, but probably a significant majority of them.</p>
<p>All the responses above have simply called my post disgusting or given alternative explanations (which I don’t disagree with). But this could be considered one possible explanation. Artifacts from our evolutionary past do well in explaining much of human behavior, especially the paradoxical ones.</p>
<p>dontno, your post is so over the top I find myself wondering if you are playing games with us. If so, it is not funny at all. In fact, it rather reminds me of an abuser who gets his/her jollies out of messing with people’s emotions. If you’re not playing games, and you’re serious, I don’t really know where to start and I’d rather not waste time with you. But I can’t let this stand:</p>
<p>“Occasional abuse (like slapping her once a month or pushing her around sporadically) is a form of physical dominance. These infrequent displays of dominance trigger innate biological responses of a woman’s attraction impulses”</p>
<p>There is no such thing as 'occasional abuse." That’s like saying ‘occasional murder,’ or ‘occasional rape’ or ‘occasional molestation.’ As far as your pseudo-scientific jargon of ‘innate biological responses’–well, it’s gobbledigook and has no scientific meaning. </p>
<p>As another poster said, the vast majority of abusers follow a specific pattern of being charming and kind at first. This directly contradicts your insulting ‘thesis’ that women liked to be slapped around. If they liked to be slapped around, then abusers would do this from the start. They don’t. On the contrary, they act very sweet, understanding, are complimentary, and so on–all calculated to lure the woman in. They then chip away step by step, in very small increments, ‘testing the waters’ so to speak and simultaneously eroding the woman’s confidence (in women who are usually, like me, messed up to begin with). </p>
<p>Anyway, enough on this. </p>
<p>Bookworm, thank you so much. Your words of support mean a lot to me. And you’re absolutely right about the therapists. It was only frustrating to me that the various experts’ own ignorance had such a potentially huge negative impact on my children’s lives. (They were court appointed non-confidential. My ex kept filing motions when he didn’t like the previous one and the judge kept letting him do it; they wanted him out of court and it was easier for them to just say, yeah, ok, you can try another non-confidential therapist. Sure. Again, thank God it all turned out ok, but it was two years of hell and my kids are only now recovering.) Are you a lawyer? You sound amazing. And yes, I actually know of two men who are with abusive spouses and are staying because they are frightened for their children.</p>
<p>To answer OP, I have enough to worry about without worrying about some super duper rich spoiled kid who has chosen to be bitten up possibly because it brings some excitement and a lot of attention. Isn’t it her prerogative?</p>
<p>“And yes, I actually know of two men who are with abusive spouses and are staying because they are frightened for their children.”</p>
<p>And that is one reason people stay with an abusive spouse. Because they feel they can better protect their children if they are with them than if they are not, and you cannot be certain a judge will not award joint custody, visitation, etc. One of the worst cases I worked with was a family that went through the legal system for years. I can’t go into specifics except to say that this completely negligent father who had been physically abusive to the wife, had visitation with his kids and she could not stop it. So, if you are a woman or man who thinks that your spouse may turn on your kids rather than on you if you are not there, you might well choose to stay. These things are not always as simple as they might seem. While it may seem obvious to an outsider that no one should put up with any level of abuse, some people are weighing it against a possibly worse scenario on a number of levels. Another case that broke my heart was a woman who took her kid and ran as far away from a very dangerous man as she could – across the state line. He hired investigators and found her, she ended up in jail for way too long (for crossing the state line with his kid without his permission) and he got the child and was rich and powerful enough to make sure she could not see her child. A nightmare. In theory, what hurts more? An occasional act of violence or being torn from your child possibly forever? I know everyone likes to say abuse is abuse is abuse but I think for some people they weigh carefully what they can and cannot live with against the possible alternatives. Of course, this is not the kind of scenario Rhianna was facing (in terms of kids) but that’s my point I guess – not every scenario is the same. Not every act of violence is equal – staying with the guy who grabs his wife roughly once every few years is not the same scenario as staying with the guy who beats her every week when a woman is weighing all the fallout that might occur. And I am not saying abuse is okay – ever – it’s just that I think people stay for more complicated reasons than just that there is something wrong with them.</p>
<p>mimk6, I totally agree with you. In fact, this was the main reason I stayed with my now-ex for as long as I did. I waited until my kids were in their teens because I knew he would go ballistic. His reaction was actually worse than my nightmares. He used his parents’ considerable money ($150K) to drag me and the kids to court, spy on me, harass me, threaten me, abuse and threaten the kids (often in front of their friends) and of course continue to abuse me. Even though there was multiple evidence of his actions -witnesses, my broken fingers, testimony etc. - he STILL got the courts to jump through his hoops for two years. As I said, the only reason he didn’t succeed (he wanted fifty fifty custody) is because the children were older. The only way I got him to finally stop, by the way, was to accept a much lower support guideline than I was entitled to. I knew he wanted to hurt me, and I figured if he hurt me financially, that was the least harmful to the kids. Also, the kids were breaking down after being forced to legally testify against him on THREE separate occasions, with him right there (!), each time reliving very traumatic incidents and with him sitting across from them, rolling his eyes at them, loudly sighing, clicking his tongue, staring them down, etc. My 16 year old daughter broke down sobbing as she related an incident of how he 'kept touching her when she told him to stop" and said to the court, “He keeps sighing at me!” They looked at HER like she was crazy and told her 'please go on." It was horrific. She threw up afterwards. Nowhere is it more evident how much money is power than in our family court system.</p>
<p>From bad to worse:</p>
<p>"
Sources say Rihanna “wants the whole thing” to go away and isn’t helping the district attorney prepare his case against Brown for allegedly beating her to a pulp in the early hours of February 8th, the day the of the Grammy Awards.</p>
<p>Apparently Rihanna is angry, they say, that pictures of her bruises were leaked to the press. She’s not happy, too, that she was quickly identified as Brown’s victim…"</p>
<p>[FOXNews.com</a> - Rihanna Said Not to Be Cooperating - Celebrity Gossip | Entertainment News | Arts And Entertainment](<a href=“http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,511415,00.html]FOXNews.com”>http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,511415,00.html)</p>
<p>One of today’s headlines on CNN - “Empowered” Rihanna gets gun tattoo." I do not want to click that link…</p>
<p>I think Rihanna has every right to be angry about the photos being leaked and being identified so quickly. I haven’t heard a thing about LAPD’s supposed investigation into how the photos were leaked but those photos being leaked do not make it easier for other women to go to the police for help.</p>
<p>…“I think everyone is missing the point. **Woman find male physical dominance attractive. **Occasional abuse (like slapping her once a month or pushing her around sporadically) is a form of physical dominance. These infrequent displays of dominance trigger innate biological responses of a woman’s attraction impulses.”</p>
<p>You have got to be kidding, right?? If you are a male, and agree with this you better get help, NOW!</p>
<p>I’ve avoided reading this thread, because, as another poster mentioned previously, early in the reports, it was hard to tell what was fact and what was rumor; I wanted to see how the investigations and police reports played out. </p>
<p>However, I absolutely cannot let the posts by dontno go by without comment. Seriously, this is the biggest load of crap I’ve ever read, and I agree with laxmom; if this is what you truly believe, you need help. I dread the day your own daughter (or granddaughter) ever comes home bruised up after being abused and you excuse it because you think women find male physical dominance ATTRACTIVE. </p>
<p>And if this was so, there’d be a helluva a lot of men out there unmarried, because there are a lot of men who don’t ‘emanate’ physical dominance.</p>
<p>Surely, no one is actually surprised by what dontno has to say on this subject…are they? After all, this is the same person who spent weeks here “proving” that blacks are inherently less intelligent than all other races due to the processes of “natural selection”. I guess a degree in engineering somehow confers expertise in anthropology and genetics, too…</p>
<p>:rolleyes:</p>
<p>"Seven boys have filed to one side of the room; 16 girls are huddled on the other. OK, I have a question as serious as cancer: Did Rihanna provoke Chris Brown? The boys are deadpan. And by the looks of it, the girl who was pursing her lips has something to vent, and she does: "All we see is, ‘Oh, Chris Brown beat Rihanna up, so she must be so innocent,’ " she snaps. “But she must have done something to make him mad.” Some of the kids nod in agreement. “My mom told me that we really don’t know what happened because we weren’t there,” she continues. “But as far as I know, she went back to him, so that’s her problem.”</p>
<p>The girl—whose identity, along with her classmates’, is being withheld at the request of the school’s principal—is hardly anomalous in her train of thought. Peruse almost any blog or major media outlet that’s following the battery case, and chances are that you’ll come across postings that zealously defend Brown while squarely placing the blame on Rihanna’s shoulders. One such comment, from a teenager—her MTV user profile lists her as being from Washington, D.C.—insists that Rihanna “wasn’t beaten to a pulp. The phrase means to beat someone until they are seriously injured and disfigured.” The post-attack photo of the singer’s battered face, plastered across the Internet by TMZ, evidently didn’t suggest she was “seriously injured.” The commenter continues, "Someone needs to sit her little tail down and tell her, ‘Yes, it’s a bad situation that you were abused, but you need to understand it’s not OK for you to think you can control and abuse a male with no consequences.’ "
[New</a> York Music - Another Love TKO: Teens Grapple with Rihanna vs. Chris Brown - page 1](<a href=“Music - The Village Voice”>Music - The Village Voice)</p>