I'm sorry, but the women who bash feminism are not that much different from homophobic gay men and lesbians. One could argue that Ms. Hirshman makes her argument simply as a means to impress one or some of the men in her life.

To expand on your math analogy, not all wrong answers are equally wrong. I've knocked off points for getting the right answer with completely wrong work shown. I've given partial credit for getting partway to the right answer, but messing up some arithmetic. Don't fall into duality so fast.

Out & About: Hirshman is not bashing feminism. If I understand her, she's trying to reclaim one aspect of it that she thinks has been wrongly set aside. But she's definitely operating from within feminism, not as a critic from outside.

Points to ponder, Hilzoy.

(1) As a woman, and as a survivor of intimate partner violence, I am REALLY offended by your implied victim blaming with your sentence, "First, I think that battered women are, in general, responsible for their conduct." Men make the choice to batter women. Women do not accidentally trip and fall and magically run into a man's fists. Unless the women you saw at the shelter during your volunteer efforts were holding guns to their partners' head and saying, "I'll kill you if you don't do this," these women were not responsible for any of this.

Men CHOOSE to abuse women. They make a conscious choice to beat, to rape, to threaten her, her children, or her loved ones, to break her things. They choose to do these things.

(2) The rape culture in which we live blames women for everything negative that happens in their lives. Consider Chris Brown's recent assault on Rihanna. The first question a battered woman is always asked is, "What did you do to piss him off?" The knee-jerk reaction to a batterer 9 times out of 10 is, "Oh, he's such a NICE GUY! He couldn't have done that! The bitch must have cheated on him and given him herpes or mouthed off! She deserved it somehow!"

Excuse the fuck out of me?

Repeating point number one: Men CHOOSE to batter. They always have the choice to not batter, no matter what the woman involved may or may not have done to "deserve it."

So after the question, "What did you do to deserve this, you stupid bitch?" is asked, invariably the next Pearl of Rape Culture Wisdom is, "You need to make this right," which really means, "Know your place, Little Woman."

Batterers don't change. No matter what the woman involved may or may not do, he WILL hit her again. And when he does, the first question asked will be, "What did you do THIS time?" The second question is always, "Well, he hit you before, why did you stay, you stupid girl!?" Thus the vicious cycle of victim blaming, belittling, and undermining women's bodily autonomy continues. She did something to deserve it, so she needs to make it up to him and be a Good Girl, but don't be surprised when he hits her again, because she didn't leave the first time, and so it's all her fault anyway and the stupid bitch never learns.

This cycle not only blames the victim, it takes the responsibility off of the men who choose to do this. It excuses men who batter, because obviously, men just CAN'T HELP IT. Boys will be boys, after all! Tee hee!

I can't be the only one here who has seen this, experienced this flaming horseshit firsthand. If Linda Hirshman had any sense, she'd stop blaming feminism for domestic violence, and put the blame squarely where it belongs: on the men who choose to batter, and the rape culture that tells women it was their fault in the first place.

Thank you so much - your posts on this topic have been so refreshingly thoughtful.

What is really frustrating to me, as a feminist and and advocate for stoping mens violence against women, is that society... and we as feminists, are not asking the question "Why do men batter?" Why does the conversation always have to go to what the woman did/is doing/will do... To stop violence against women, we must start asking questions like this... the blame should be put on the person who is doing the abusing!!!! We don't ask a victim of a robbery, "Why did you have such a beautiful house?" "Why didn't you have more secutiry?" NO, society puts the blame on the offender... but in domestic violence, society always questions the actions of the woman! And thank you, hilzoy, for once again discussing what stops a woman from leaving... it's totally not as easy as everyone would like it to be!!!!

Keori: "I am REALLY offended by your implied victim blaming with your sentence, "First, I think that battered women are, in general, responsible for their conduct." Men make the choice to batter women. Women do not accidentally trip and fall and magically run into a man's fists. "

I said that I think battered women are, for the most part, responsible for their own conduct. The fact that they are (obviously) not responsible for their abuser's conduct does not alter this, as far as I can see.

I tried to make it clear that I do not blame women for staying. This is not because I don't think that they are, for the most part, responsible agents. That is: I don't think that most battered women are children, insane, severely cognitively disabled, or in some other way not full moral agents. Rather, I think it's because leaving is tough, and the fact that someone does not do it immediately should not make us blame them.

The elephant in the corner, in this sort of questioning of women being responsible for their own actions, is that women are held responsible for other peoples actions as well as their own.
The batterer holds women responsible for his actions. Society agrees with him.
Even when the batterer kills the woman he has battered, society wants to know what she did to cause his behavior.

thebewilderness: yes, that's one of the things that makes the whole 'pull up your socks!' line of thought so surreal. It's not as though a lot of battered women, right after they leave, do not think there's a lot to the idea that their having beaten up is their fault in view of the fact that they left dinner in the over five minutes too long. (Having been told such things for years does strange things to a person. I used to have fun with this: I would ask, in all earnestness, whether there was any similar chore that her husband was responsible for (normally: yes), and whether he had ever failed to perform it perfectly (normally: yes), and whether she felt compelled to beat him up as a result (look of WTF???, and then: Oh ...))

"dinner in the over" -- oven. In the oven.

Sigh ...

Hilzoy, I can't quickly find any statistics on abusers, but my impression of them is that they are people that should have had little appeal to women in the first place - typically drug users or heavy drinkers, typically controlling personalities. I think men who abuse women are an embarrassment to my gender, but at the same time, what can I do about it if a woman picks to be involved with such losers?

As a woman, and as a survivor of intimate partner violence, I am REALLY offended by your implied victim blaming with your sentence, "First, I think that battered women are, in general, responsible for their conduct."

You've chosen to be offended because you've chosen to misread what she said.

Battered women are responsible for their conduct. They are not responsible for their partner's conduct. They are still independent moral actors, and their actions may be judged like any other independent moral actor.

That's a threshold question. It asks: have battered women acted voluntarily? And, yes, they have. You can't ask whether to blame someone or not unless you've determined whether they've taken any action in any meaningful sense. Only then can you question whether their voluntary action is blameworthy; the answer hilzoy comes to is "no, it's not."

Denying battered women's autonomy is the problem itself, not the solution.

I think -- and here I may be wwrong -- that Hirshman is more interested in using battered women to make a point about certain kinds of feminism than in battered women themselves.

I think you're exactly right, and your response to Out & About makes what I consider the real point: Hirshman is generally an advocate of a clear-eyed, realistic, self-assessing type of feminism that almost no one seems to support any more. I understand how obtuse and insensitive her approach to this topic is, but I've always been appreciative of her willingness to swim against the more emotional currents of feminism, to ask how much feminism means if it's mostly used to justify decisions of feeling rather than those of strength... not too many feminists would write Get to Work in response to the 'opt-out revolution,' for example, and I'm still waiting for someone like Hirshman to tackle the recent finding on women who were seeking abortions because they were passive wrt pregnancy prevention.

So no, I don't think Hirshman is really addressing battered women at all, whether directly or in terms of their specific needs. What I find is a fairly consistent argument for knocking down the sentimental and romantic tropes that bind women and that feminism all too often ignores or even supports in order to avoid being branded 'man-hating.' I'd probably never write anything like she did on this topic, but I have to admit that I'm frustrated by what seem to be common assumptions that having a relationship at all is worth the kind of limitations and compromises that mark the very beginnings of abuse signs. Or, to put it another way, perhaps since our habits of compromise and adaptation make it too easy for abusers to find victims, those habits themselves could stand a few more challenges outside the areas we consider pathological.

hipporider: "they are people that should have had little appeal to women in the first place - typically drug users or heavy drinkers, typically controlling personalities."

I don't think this is generally true. A lot of them are charming.

There's absolutely no excuse for men abusing women. For that matter there's no excuse for anyone abusing or battering anyone. There's no blame that should be applied to women who don't leave that situation. I have nothing but compassion for those poor souls who go through those situations. That being said they should always leave. Even if it's hard it's got to be better not to be beaten on.

For what it's worth, in my experience with battered women, I did notice a bit of a pattern with some abusers -- and that was, they fit the pattern that Hilzoy identified earlier, which is, extreme regard for the woman and the relationship that many women find appealing at first and then eventually, find controlling and manipulative. The women who find that charming (again, in my experience) were in crisis in their own lives, not supported by their own families, and gravitated toward someone who offered seemingly limitless strength and unconditional support.

Linda Hirshmann is annoying and she is even sometimes offensive, but I agree with the previous poster on the need to continue challenging feminists and society at large. For instance, the women I described above largely subscribed to the notion that there was a Prince Charming who could take care of their every need -- and when he turned into a batterer, they obviously were shocked and found it very disorienting to adjust their lives and their expectations. The death of a dream dies very, very hard.

Here's the important point and THIS is where the discussion on domestic violence should be.

I'm sick and tired of hearing the same old myths being perpetrated about domestic violence. The one that gets under my skin the most is "Why doesn't she just leave?" Why aren't we asking the abuser "why doesn't he leave?" It's not the survivor's responsibility, it's all about power & control that prevents an abusee from leaving an abusive relationship.

The three major characteristics that prevent abusees from leaving an abusive relationship is love, hope, and fear. The abusee believes her abusive partner still loves her. That he/she's abusing the abusee because he/she loves her/him. You'd be amazed to know how prevalent this thinking is. This is a major reason why abusees don't leave abusive relationships.

Then there's hope. There's the idea that if I only do this or that better, then his/her abusive partner will change his/her behaviors. The other excuse to stay in the relationship is "he/she won't hit me again, he promised." There's that piece of hope in there too.

Then there's fear, another major reason why abusees don't leave abusive relationships. There's the fear that the abusee can't live on her own. There's the fear that if the abusee leaves, that the abuser will come beat her some more or even kill her/him. Statistics, domestic violence experts, and survivors of domestic violence will tell you that THE most dangerous time for an abusee in an abusive relationship is AFTER the breakup. So that keeps the cycle of violence going AND prevents abusees from leaving relationships. I'm certain that these three factors played into Rihanna's situation.

It's NOT as easy as people make it out to be. Learn the facts of what keeps domestic violence going... especially for us males."

Following this thread, where is anyone putting all the blame on women???? I don't see that anywhere, but excuse me if a woman keeps with the abuser for months and YEARS, at what point does the fundamental question beg itself......start blaming BOTH parties, or maybe they are made for each other. A match made in Hell. Most, if not all, abuser men are just bullies, plain and simple. I know most of my women friends would NOT put up with that crap. Fool me once, shame on me, Fool me twice, shame on me.

We all love to prove our sensitivity to women and our feminist credentials by getting outraged at anyone asking why women stay. But it has no logic and doesn't in fact support empowering women. Only by probing why will we really develop strategies to empower them to get out, to resist abuse and support others being abused, and strategies to help women identify situations that lead to abuse and to stay out of that.

This is an example of a much larger issue: why we all get ourselves stuck in bad situations and not escape. Getting ourselves "unstuck" is one of life's great challenges and we need to discuss it more.

Also, this debate illustrates yet again most people's inability to handle even moderately complex questions of causation and responsibility. So if you ask "what is the mechanism that binds women in these relationships?" everyone ... totally without any logic at all ... assumes you mean "its her fault!" We've seen some particularly stupid examples of this in this very thread.

I do agree that asking "why men abuse" would also a useful question but the same sludge of political correctness prevents this, because we cannot question the official answer "men are bad." Ask that question, and you risk having to understand men, enter their world and comprehend how the world looks from them - and then someone will assume you are AGREEING with how it looks to them and you will be attacked for that.

There are lots of dynamics that bring abuser and abused together - it happens in institutions where some organizations continually attract abusive leaders. At some point, it would be nice to do some actual science and stop the PC posturing.

Hilzoy: "A lot of them are charming"
Then why do they abuse their woman? I did a little more research and found that one of the more current theories is that perpetrators of domestic violence "bring into their intimate relationships certain expectations of who is in charge and what the acceptable mechanisms are for enforcing that dominance." I would think that such expectations would be apparent before the violence actually starts. I will accept that once the violence starts, there are no good solutions for the woman. So teaching women how to identify potential abusers and to avoid them would seem to be the best solution.

Didn't read the last third of what you wrote (nausea problems from chemo)but was impressed with the analysis I saw. Jumping in with no particular backing, my guess is that the writer who wants to make victims responsible for being victimized may have been thinking self-righteously about the occasions when women have killed their husbands and then been excused rather than paid any price. Unlike children, women do have other options, and it is reasonable for them to pay a price if they do something like that. However. Focusing on these few cases tends to be something that Republican-types are drawn to, as opposed to being interested in writing about what we can do to make women feel less as if they have no other options. Would commercials advertising comfortable looking dormitory living for people in transition, for instance, improve the lives of battered women and their few victims?

If the whole point of your article here is to ask why did she write about this, the answer to that is generally that her political philosophy differs from yours. Usually it is as simple as that.

For the record, the question 'why do they stay?' is one that people who work with battered women are asked endlessly, while 'why do people beat their partners up?' is pretty rare.

To be fair to the question-askers, one should note that the first question is genuinely puzzling. After all, staying with one's abuser seems, on the face of it, irrational (absent financial reasons, or fear of being killed). The second question is not so puzzling: we all know that some people are cruel, and will use cruelty to get their way.

Compare two questions about the recent financial crisis: "Why did so many people take out loans that knew, or should have known, they would be unable to repay?" and "Why did mortgage brokers make loans they knew could not be repaid?" The first question is a puzzle about (seeming) irrationality; answering the second only requires noting that the originators of the loans were not the long-term holders of the loans. The originators of the loans were not being irrational, just unscrupulous.

And requisite apologies for bringing the word "irrationality" into the discussion, since I know that's a loaded word in any conversation that touches on gender issues. I'm just trying to explain why one question is asked and the other is not. Philosophers since Socrates have been puzzled about irrationality, so it shouldn't be surprising that people ask questions about cases where there is apparent irrationality.

Keori: "As a woman, and as a survivor of intimate partner violence, I am REALLY offended by your implied victim blaming with your sentence,"

OK, stop right there. Did you read the entire post before writing your comment? Or did you just stop after that line?

As Hilzoy noted in her response to you, she wrote **THE ENTIRE ARTICLE** to point out why battered women should **NOT** be blamed. I am also a woman, and I've had some close personal experience with abuse, so I understand all too well where your anger comes from. But don't use that as an excuse to accuse people of things that they are plainly not doing.

Heck, in one of her previous posts on this subject, Hilzoy wrote about her own experience as a victim of abuse. That should put to rest any idea that she doesn't understand, or that she is blaming the abused instead of the abuser.

Hilzoy, I can't quickly find any statistics on abusers, but my impression of them is that they are people that should have had little appeal to women in the first place - typically drug users or heavy drinkers, typically controlling personalities.

You can search for those statistics from now until doomsday, but you're not going to find them because they don't exist. Plenty of drug abusers and alcoholics never raise a hand to their spouses; plenty of teetotalers beat their wives regularly.

Leslie Morgan Steiner was an Ivy League graduate married to an upper middle class professional who was neither an alcoholic nor a drug abuser. You know what? She still got beaten.

That's why it's useless to look at the women involved and try to puzzle out the problem from there. There are certain characteristics that abusive men have -- like an obsession with control -- but so much of that is considered normal male behavior that it's hard for women to judge when their guy has crossed the line until he actually hits them.

FWIW, again, when I underwent training we were told that abusers fit two general patterns. The first was someone who used abuse as a means to achieve ends, to control his destiny, so to speak. These people are more likely to be at the "successful" end of the spectrum and are unlikely to change their behavior. The second, far more typical, was the insecure man who loses control under stress or after drinking and takes his problems out on his wife. This person is often remorseful even as the abuse escalates, but finds it difficult to change without some serious intervention and in some cases has to stop drinking to even have a chance. So many drinkers don't abuse, but a lot of abusers do so under the influence of alcohol. This may be why there is a perception that there is a correlation between drinking and abusing.

i'm having a problem with the reason "Steiner and Marcotte and the others" feel it's important to ask why.

"a mark of respect"?

does this mean that the answer would be "obvious" without the women's answers?

without knowing more i can't say but that language leaves me with the impression that there is in fact not much respect, if any, for these women on the part of "Steiner and Marcotte and the others" if that's their primary reason for asking.

@Keori:

Your account of the public response to Chris Brown's battering of Rhianna makes me wonder if you might be living in a bit of an echo chamber. Mostly, what I heard people saying were things like "Jeez, what a fucking dick" and "I hope he goes to jail." So if the people around you are asking what Rhianna did wrong to deserve being hit.. maybe you need new friends? Did someone say that to you? (I mean, 'cause that's pretty fucking insensitive.) Did you hear that someone said that? When you thought about the guy who said that — and I'm sure somebody did, I'm sure several people did — did you pay much attention to all the people saying "What the fuck, what a loser?" Because I think maybe you didn't.

I think you're missing something, too, when you say that we live in a 'rape culture'. I think I understand why you use the term, you want to draw attention to an ongoing emergency that's hurting and destroying people that you know, keeping you hyper-adrenalinated and awake at night; an emergency that most people seem almost willfully oblivious of. Their eyes slide away when you mention it, they respond vaguely, with weak excuses; they shrug helplessly when the question of change comes up. I mean, I'm not saying any of these things specifically happen to you. That's the story in my head that explains why you might throw around a phrase like that, even though most people are going to find it problematic and offensive.

Part of the problem is that you're using the jargon of an ideological in-group. You're repeating things that you're in the habit of accepting as a given, without question; premises and beliefs that are so commonly shared within the group that they have names and labels; they're referred to in passing, hinted at, the way doctors might throw around technical terms and elide implications when discussing the risk factors of a surgery.

Most people trust that doctors know what they're talking about, even if what they say comes out dogmatically, without specific reference to a given case. When it comes to ideologies — politics, religion, ways of making the world make sense — they tend to be a lot more chary. When they hear you talk about how we live in a rape culture, where men are never blamed for violence and women are blamed for every negative factor in their lives, the response will seldom be "wow, that's right, I never could put my finger on it, but that's it exactly, that's the problem." Rather, they will examine their own understanding of society, think about the world as they perceive it to be, find the description to be [taken as itself] erroneous, identify it as an ideological catchphrase, and conclude that what is happening in the moment is that they are being subjected to an ideological assault, and that you are attempting to establish the dominance, coerce the validation, of your beliefs.

We live in a confluence of cultures, most of which have methods of coercing conformance. There will be counties, towns, and families in which certain men are effectively accorded certain rights of possession regarding the women in their lives. I'm wanting to describe a broad scope of situations, everything from being 'owed' sex, to facing no consequences for using violence as an expression of anger, to deliberately using violence and depersonalization to control and dominate women, to raping certain persons in certain situations with impunity. All these things exist, and malignant, controlling people exist, and they are especially dangerous if they're men, and what you see happening is happening.

But we also live awash in societal imperatives and coercions that seek to strictly limit and regulate the use of violence, especially by men, against others. Many men feel that they are strongly and deeply indoctrinated against rape. That their culture prohibits it. Their moral sense of themselves may even require a desirous acquiescence to sexual intercourse that cannot be had by the mere exchange of money, services, or resources. Invariably, they will also believe a great many other things, all held together in a patchwork schema of the world. These men may, for instance, simultaneously believe in an all powerful, loving but sternly patriarchal God. They may believe that a woman's place is in the home, raising children, that women are sullied by the loss of their virginity, that women aren't very good at math, and a thousand other incredibly infuriating and offensive things. But when you tell them that we live in a 'rape culture', speaking to a intersection of power and prohibition that reaches from their most inner, vulnerable self to the unchangeable laws of God, they are going to feel unfairly indicted by a dogmatism which is blind and indifferent to the person whom they actually are.

So, just a thought. I'm not interested in insisting that I'm right, or saying that anyone is wrong. Just thought I'd throw that out there.

If a response (by anyone) to this comment addresses a fundamental error or lack of insight on my part that someone thinks that I might be able to understand were it pointed out to me, then I'm flattered by the attention and very interested. If a response involves an expression of how very, very angry you are, please be advised that I too am very, very angry.

That means that we can be friends, right?

and a hearty "hear hear" to cmcr at 1:49

There are certain characteristics that abusive men have -- like an obsession with control -- but so much of that is considered normal male behavior that it's hard for women to judge when their guy has crossed the line until he actually hits them.

I am sorry, but that is a huge line to cross and I don't see it as something a guy just drifts over. Violence and the threats of violence as means of controlling someone is how I would define evil and abusers think that it is the way to resolve conflicts with their loved one. I would think that such a view would be associated with certain behaviors and other attitudes that would noticeable prior to the start of violence. In the article you link to, Leslie Morgan Steiner said, "Honestly, I really wanted to understand why I had been vulnerable to a man like my first husband and why I had ignored so many red flags." So she thought there were red flags I assume before the violence started that would have warned her that her husband could turn abusive.

My apologies for writing such a long comment!

Having read the rest of the comments, I want to give props out to ctrenta @ 2:32 PM for offering actual explanations that sounded really clear and plausible to me.

I'd also like to add, regarding the question of asking a woman why she's staying in an abusive relationship... victimization creates a harm that does not confine itself to the victim. One is harmed by the victimization of those one empathizes with; for that matter, by the existence, the possibility, of victimization itself.

So perhaps there is a certain legitimate interest, and sometimes a right to ask such questions, I think.

Violence and the threats of violence as means of controlling someone is how I would define evil and abusers think that it is the way to resolve conflicts with their loved one.

Abusers don't start with violence. They start with "jokes" about how stupid or ugly or hopeless you are, and then stop claiming that they're joking and just say it to you outright. Actual violence is the end game, not the beginning. For most women, if a guy punched you in the face on the first date, you'd have him arrested. If he does it after you've been together for five years and you're 6 months pregnant, you're going to be a little more hesitant to pack up and leave. Like it or not, these are relationships we're talking about, not random acts of violence. It's a little more complicated than, "Well, why didn't you just leave?"

So she thought there were red flags I assume before the violence started that would have warned her that her husband could turn abusive.

There are often red flags that some women ignore before they're raped by an acquaintance. Should we spend all of our time wondering why they ignored the red flags, or should we punish the criminals who raped them?

But we also live awash in societal imperatives and coercions that seek to strictly limit and regulate the use of violence, especially by men, against others. Many men feel that they are strongly and deeply indoctrinated against rape. That their culture prohibits it.

Which is why you see so many situations where guys manage to convince themselves it wasn't really rape. Sure, she was too drunk to walk, but he didn't hit her, so having sex with her passed-out body isn't really rape.

If this exact scenario hadn't just shown up in a major motion picture with a "funny" excuse, I might be able to agree with you a little more.

Mnemosyne, my philosophy is that is much, much better to teach people to avoid bad situations than trying to throw bad people in jail. It was telling my son the other day and almost all of the financial problems we are facing today is because people didn't realize that if something sounds too good to be true then 99.9% of the time it isn't true. Yes, we should throw all of the Madoffs into jail, but that won't reverse all the damage they have done.

So, if the red flag for abusers is belittling behavior early in the relationship, then it should be pounded into girl's heads in high school to dump guys when they start belittling you. Guys then will learn that belittling is unacceptable, which will hopefully prevent them from going down the road to violence.

Ditto for rape - if lots of date rapes happen when you get drunk with an acquaintance, then woman should avoid getting drunk with an acquaintance. I am not excusing the creep who took advantage of a drunk woman, but not giving him the chance is a better solution than throwing him in jail after the woman has been violated.

Violence against women is the greatest human rights crisis in history.
This is a simple factual statement.
It isn't possible to not see the evidence everywhere, but it is possible to ignore it.

People who call it an "abusive" relationship will never get why it lasts.

It is a loving relationship built on admiration and love.

No long lasting, committed relationship is 100% free of strife and annoyance. Women who are normal by our standards put up with husbands who watch football games all weekend long. Submissive women, and women normal by Afghan or Mexican standards, for ex., put up with a little physical abuse (or even serious injury) because they genuinely admire and love their jerky, domineering husbands and want to keep these prizes they have won. Often they vicariously enjoy their husbands' selfish and domineering methods, or later learn to emulate it, for masochism and sadism are flip sides of the same coin. Scratch a little beneath the surface and you'll usually find that abused women share the values of their spouses and are just as jerky.

It's difficult to leave any relationship.

So, our culture should encourage women not to get into relationships in the first place with men who are likely to turn out to be violent, to stay away from aggressive men even though they seem sexier than the nice guys.

Good capable smart people with resources and alternatives stay in abusive relationships and groups. That's a fact. It's valuable to dig into how such a horrifically odd thing can happen. Along with the other parties involved that analysis needs to explain how the abused individual balances their emotional and rational books. Certainly. But please! Try to bear in mind that many who ask after the rationals are not in fact asking the question they appear to be. They are asking a rhetorical question, stating a fact: "Well, certainly I or those who I respect would never fall into that ugly situation!" They should called on that, and disabused of the presumption.

So, if the red flag for abusers is belittling behavior early in the relationship, then it should be pounded into girl's heads in high school to dump guys when they start belittling you. Guys then will learn that belittling is unacceptable, which will hopefully prevent them from going down the road to violence.

Why is it not being pounded into boys' heads from Day 1 that belittling is unacceptable towards anyone? If that happened, you wouldn't have to do anything special for girls.

Again, you're approaching the problem as though the victim is solely responsible for what happens to her. If it's boys and men who are primarily responsible for (physical) domestic violence, why not educate the boys in high school and prevent them from becoming violent in the first place?

If you're attacking the problem from only one end, you're basically admitting you have no interest at all in ending the problem, just in reducing the incidence.

Of course there must be an equal emphasis on the behavior of males...but in the meantime, it's not an unwise thing to teach girls and women to choose relationships that are constructive rather than destructive. The primary impediment, IMHO, is that girls and the women they grow up to be must not so fearful of being single that they are drawn into relationships that are harmful. I suspect that comment will get slammed, but that is my perspective. I endured some destructive relationships until I learned that lesson.

Learned Helplessness goes some way to explain the diminished responsibility of the battered for their conduct (viz. deciding to stay or even side with the batterer). And note "vicarious learning": people can learn helplessness from their surroundings and circumstances -- and there's no dearth of ambient sexism to teach it.

This is one of those topics that generate more heat than light. And I fear that my Y chromosome makes it hard for some correspondents here to listen. But I have a fairly intimate knowledge of the issue. My first wife married on the rebound a guy who regularly beat her up.

I wasn't told this of course. But I wondered why our daughters were getting so screwed up. They had been warned, DON'T TELL YOUR FATHER. But the truth came out finally.

I was horrified. And sympathetic. I was the person she'd call when she had been ejected from her house after a beating. When she left the jerk--which she did many times--I would help her pay for deposits on apartments. I learned the location and pass-words of the battered womens' shelters. Her mom and I drew unexpectedly close in our shared sorrow over her repeatedly going back to him.

Eventually she gave up custody of our two daughters instead of have them tell a judge about their 'home'. This was the fulfillment of their worst nightmare of course; their step-father had warned them that if they told the truth 'you'll live with your father and never see your mother again.' Their relationship with their mom had become completely inverted--they were her strength and comforter and defender. My older girl tells of facing her step-father down with a kitchen knife in her hand. She was 10 yrs old.

Eventually the ex- and the abuser had a baby boy. One day my ex-wife found her husband, irritated by the crying child, trying to silence him by screaming and banging the crib against the wall.

She left him and never went back. But our daughters grew up with the knowledge that she had left the jerk for the sake of the boy after refusing to do so for them.

Here's what I learned. That abused women have choices. They are terrible choices. But there they are.

And they have responsibilities to people other than themselves. Their children. Their parents and siblings.

And that even though great courage is required to do the right thing, to leave the abuser, that is not the same thing as saying it is impossible. And the difficulty of the act of leaving is not an excuse for not doing so. Because, even in the 21st century and in the civilized United States, sometimes great courage and determination are required. To fail is sad, is understandable, but still is failure--and not just for oneself.

Mnemosyne writes: Hilzoy, I can't quickly find any statistics on abusers, but my impression of them is that they are people that should have had little appeal to women in the first place - typically drug users or heavy drinkers, typically controlling personalities.

You can search for those statistics from now until doomsday, but you're not going to find them because they don't exist. Plenty of drug abusers and alcoholics never raise a hand to their spouses; plenty of teetotalers beat their wives regularly.

Actually all you have to do is look them up in the Bureau of Justice Statistics. http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/welcome.html

"Again, you're approaching the problem as though the victim is solely responsible for what happens to her. If it's boys and men who are primarily responsible for (physical) domestic violence, why not educate the boys in high school and prevent them from becoming violent in the first place?

If you're attacking the problem from only one end, you're basically admitting you have no interest at all in ending the problem, just in reducing the incidence."

The problem with this theory is that it is in some men's best interests to abuse and even rape. It gets them what they want. Not all men, or even most men, but enough that you're never going to eradicate the problem. It's not a cultural problem, but a flaw in human evolution that creates sociopaths (and there are plenty of female users and abusers as well). While you're trying to change that, maybe you could also straighten out sexually irresponsible teenagers, gamblers, drinkers, and tax cheats. Good luck with that.

However, it is possible to teach women to be more confident about taking care of themselves to act in their own best interests. Too many women are taught that being "good" means being generous, forgiving, and self-sacrificing. Too many see the ultimate validation of virtuous femininity as the ability to tame the savage beast and rehabilitate the bad boy through the awesome power of their love. I think it's that false sense of the heroic and the desire to redeem oneself that keeps many women in abusive relationships, and their men are often very skilled at playing on the hopes and self-esteem of those women. Sadly, leaving an abusive relation for good means giving up on the idea of the redeeming power of love, and (speaking from bitter experience here) that loss and the resulting sense of emptiness can be as painful as the abuse. There's an incredible amount of psychological reconstruction that needs to happen for a woman to successfully put an abusive relationship behind her, because in many cases these situations feed certain unhealthy fantasies women are encouraged to embrace.

It almost seems like the discussion is about the first time a woman is physically abused. If that's the case, then, by all means, be a friend. Question her. Offer her solutions.

If someone wants to help a chronically abused woman, point her to a therapist so that she can get the help she'll need to start to rebuild her life.

The psychology of an abuser, often, is that he denigrates the abused to the point that she perceives helplessness, worthlessness and hopelessness in herself. To ask a woman continually why she stays, reinforces the lessons learned from her abuser. The answer from the abused is likely, "Because I'm stupid." That's probably what she hears everyday--she's stupid or ugly or useless.

It does not rectify the situation. It only makes her feel more isolated (she feels that even others can see her ignorance). Self-esteem is the issue and constant questioning by friends or peers is worse than a physical blow. Asking why a woman stays with her abuser, is like accusing her of being weak when she thinks it's true. She already feels like a piece of shit. Why would you want to rub it in? That's a very accusatory question when her life is probably filled with accusations.

The life of an abused woman becomes a nervous wreck. She's always thinking that everything has to be perfect, she has to judge her mates mood as soon as he walks in the door. She's thinking of what she'll do and how she'll handle it if things get bad. Her mind is so consumed with those things and with her perceived inadequacies, that she can't think of a way out of the situaton. Her self-esteem is so damaged that she truly believes she would never be able to survive on her own, much less support her children if she had any.

An abuser alienates her from friends and family. He tells her they don't love her or she can't count on them. She believes she's alone in the world, except for this man who says he loves her. He strips her life of anything or anyone but him.

It takes alot for a woman to be able to break away from that. Only counseling can help rebuild self-esteem. I don't know anyone who has done it on their own.

Abuse takes many forms and, many times, the bruises aren't seen by others. Once the psychological damage has been done, escape is more difficult because of the esteem issues.

I just can't shake the feeling that this article you read was by a woman who is an abuser herself. Who would be so unfeeling and judgemental to someone whose life has fallen apart?

“There are often red flags that some women ignore before they're raped by an acquaintance. Should we spend all of our time wondering why they ignored the red flags, or should we punish the criminals who raped them?”

And yet many people do blame women who ignore "red flags" and are raped.

In my opinion and experience from working in rape crisis, the elephant in the room is often personal safety. Women tend to blame themselves anyway, and if you don't somehow acknowledge that there are better decisions and worse decisions regarding personal safety, then survivors will latch onto that issue and feel those around her are being dishonest in ignoring it.

What I like to do is to simply acknowledge it—say, yes, there are things one can do that make it either more or less likely that one will be the victim of a crime. But I then go on to emphasize that these decisions have nothing at all to do with the decisions the criminal makes when deciding to attack someone. And there's really no comparison between the two kinds of decisions, either. One is decisions about something as ambiguous as personal safety, the other is decisions about something as unambiguous as attacking someone, hurting them, and committing a crime.

In my opinion, decisions about personal safety—and I would include decisions about staying or leaving an abusing spouse in this category—are private, personal decisions about something very ambiguous and thus are nobody else's business. We don't have the right to question other peoples' decisions of this nature. In contrast, decisions about hurting someone else and breaking the law are explicitly not personal and are unambiguous—we have every right to question a criminal's decision.

Public discussions about whether women should bear some blame for staying in abusive relationships are inappropriate and the issue shouldn't even be on the table. The discussion implicitly equates the abused person's decision to stay with the abuser's decision to abuse—that's reason enough right there to cut the discussion short. There is no comparison. But it's even worse than this because, culturally, women have typically been held responsible for their partner's abuse of them and, not coincidentally, the abuser tends to blame the abused, as well. This discussion validates this point of view by taking it seriously.

Yet I want to be clear: when dealing with survivors, I think it's helpful to deal with this head-on, because most survivors will be thinking about it and blaming themselves. I think that it's best to make it very clear that one's own decisions about personal responsibility and safety have nothing to do with another person's decisions about whether or not to harm someone. You are not responsible for someone else's decisions. You are never responsible in any way for someone hurting you. They are.

I would never ask a woman who is actively being abused why she stays. That would be grotesque. However, I think it's appropriate to "ask the question" in a *research* sense or by surveying survivors of abuse who finally left, and that is what I assumed that Hirshmann was getting at. I mean, even when I counseled women they would say to me that they didn't really understand why they felt so compelled to return, and of course, we were totally non-judgmental -- our first and foremost goal was safety and then longer term help. But many of these women truly lacked insight, along with, of course resources (which was almost always the "superficial" reason for staying). As Jess said, "staying" doesn't just feed random material or psychological needs -- it is often fed by myths that, in happier settings, our culture embraces on behalf of women. What if, in "Pretty Woman," Richard Gere turned out to be an abuser? That's the Ever After we don't want to confront, because it's often true.

Keith M Ellis: "...In my opinion, decisions about personal safety�and I would include decisions about staying or leaving an abusing spouse in this category�are private, personal decisions about something very ambiguous and thus are nobody else's business. We don't have the right to question other peoples' decisions of this nature..."

I would disagree--in some instances we *do* have the right. I worked with a young woman who was married to a guy who beat her, and I was gradually drawn into listening to her story of chronic abuse. I was the one who had to pick up the slack when she wasn't up to working on any given day because of the after effects of her home life. She was supposed to be my assistant and too often she inadvertently made my job more difficult. She put me in a position where I felt I had to try to get involved, at least for a while until I figured out she wasn't going to listen to me or accept help.

Yes, I think people sort of underrate the potential for collateral harm too -- but it's unfair to blame the woman because she stays. Beside, the collateral harm is most likely to occur when a woman leaves. Any daycare can tell you what happens when an abusive partner decides to make a stand in a place where he knows his departing SO is going to be. I've helped a few get court orders.

Readers of this blog may be interested in such response as I could cram into 500 words at Slate. http://www.slate.com/blogs/blogs/xxfactor/archive/2009/04/14/sheltering-women-linda-hirshman-responds-to-hilzoy.aspx

I will probably return to the subject soon, as the flood of information has stimulated all kinds of additional thoughts. But for those of you, like Hilzoy, concerned with a bad faith motivation for the inquiry, I will add that my interest is political. A minimal care for one's own physical safety from other humans is the foundation of western, representative government and the whole social contract tradition. So these victims' indifference/inability/difficulty in performing this minimal, foundational task raises fascinating and important political questions about rationality, self-governance, political participation, and citizenship. It is particularly of interest to me because of my history of thinking and writing about women as citizens over the last thirty years. It may sound cold-blooded, next to the self-revelation and psychologizing that dominate the discussion when women are the subject, but I have spent my life assuming that they are just as worthy of citizenship as the men that Hobbes and Locke had in mind. Which is the furthest thing from naturalizing women's subordination I can think of.