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I've been asked by a mod to repost this here, so here goes!
What Is The Problem With Women?
We've often discussed, and it seems we will continue to discuss, what is going on in the Battle of the Sexes. I have to hold my hands up and admit that very often in such dispatches, I am the one defending women and criticising the behaviour and the attitudes of men.
But it is also undeniable that some women are fudging stupid. Or at the very least, so it appears. We've argued over "women prefer the Bad Boys to the Nice Guys" but there comes a point where it seems to be sheer self-destruction at work, because how could anyone stick with a guy like the one in this story?
So, to do justice to the gentlemen here with whom I have argued, here is the sorry story of a woman who apparently had not a brain in her head. Her family warned her off, her friends warned her off, even on a first date she knew this was a bad idea - and she still ended up marrying him and having two children with him while he was irresponsible, controlling, and abusive.
Why? I can't explain it to you in any way that makes sense. Even she doesn't know why, looking back. There are some hints that, in line with theories of such behaviour, she was drawn (for whatever reason) to abusive men, like a typical victim who keeps going back to the same kind of relationship after getting out of the last one. But as to what was at work here, who knows? I can't imagine any evo-psych explanation for this that makes any sense at all, not even the "women evolved to tolerate rape because women who resisted rape got murdered when the barbarian horde over-ran the village and killed all the men and took all the women" kind of thing.
An Irish divorce story.
It gets worse from there, until finally she won't put up with it anymore and leaves. Why she didn't run a mile after the first date, I have no explanation. This is a stupid (and indeed, dangerous) choice she made of her own free (so it seems) will. Nobody was urging or forcing her to take up with this guy, indeed it was the opposite. She had plenty of chances, and plenty of warning signs. She got pregnant, of her own accord again, (I strongly suspect the first pregnancy was the usual hope around 'a baby will fix this' and the second time, what, she had no access to contraception? highly unlikely) and brought two kids into an unstable situation where the father had no interest in contributing to the family. It was only when things finally became intolerable that she left.
And I genuinely, honestly can't blame men or The Patriarchy or anything else for this. The guy in question was a shithead but she knew that from the immediate start. There's nothing in her story, as told, about her family pressuring her to get married or settle down with anyone, much less this guy. She did it all herself.
Depart from the realm of the rational and into the magical kingdom of narrative for a moment.
Imagine you're a woman with 105 IQ, hyped up on romantasy slop and feminist empowerment and blank slatism, what have you. The bad boy gives you the tingles, but it's not his fault that he's bad - it's society/his parents/mental illness/the patriarchy/capitalism. You, oh enlightened Liberal Woman, can heal him with your soothing therapy speak and magic vagina. Go out there and make yourself a martyr on an 80 IQ thug with no self control! I can fix him! You go girl!
Many such cases.
I think of young women's reaction to e.g. the character Jesse from Breaking Bad and feel your comment is spot-on.
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The Hollywood actor Barry Keoghan by all accounts had a very difficult upbringing: drug addict mother who died when he was 12, spent years in foster care. He was in a romantic relationship with the pop singer Sabrina Carpenter, but they broke up, with her apparently no longer being able to tolerate his drunkenness and loutishness. Her song "Please Please Please" consists of Carpenter pleading with an unspecified lover not to get drunk and embarrass himself (and Carpenter, by extension) at a public event. Keoghan, naturally, features in the song's music video. One of the most interesting lyrics in the song is the below:
As an Irishman who likes a drink and who has made a drunken tit of himself on plenty of occasions, I bristled at Carpenter's claim that Keoghan might have defended his bad behaviour on the grounds that he's Irish. Being Irish is not a blank cheque to get falling-down drunk and embarrass your girlfriend. But I wonder if, when Keoghan said this to Carpenter, he wasn't just telling her what she wanted to hear. No doubt she's "done the work", she understands that the body keeps the score, she knows that everybody has trauma. Keoghan knew all of this. So they go to a party, Keoghan has too much to drink and makes a fool of himself, Carpenter has to carry him home, and the next morning she gives him a bollocking for having embarrassed her. Eager for her to get off his back, Keoghan gives her some bullshit pop-psychological explanation for his bad behaviour, when the truth of the matter is more prosaic: he's a drunken lout. Carpenter is mollified by this, nodding safely while Keoghan knocks back his hair-of-the-dog. Rinse and repeat.
I wonder how many physically abusive men, when "apologizing" to their wives for their most recent outburst, have excused their behaviour with exaggerated or invented claims of being victims of abuse themselves. I wonder if abusive men even deliberately/unconsciously seek out gullible or suicidally empathetic women who'll be more susceptible to these kinds of rationalisations.
Tangentially related: so many convicted child molesters purport to have been molested as children that it's a cliché. But I read an article once (must see if I can track it down) that found that, when you hook convicted child molesters up to a polygraph, the proportion who claim to have been molested as children plummets. Polygraphs, as we know, do not detect if someone is lying: they test proxies for that like heart rate and sweating, but there are lots of reasons a person might be nervous other than lying. But many people believe that polygraphs are literal lie detectors, so connecting someone to one is an effective countermeasure if you want to be sure they're telling the truth.
I don't know the answers to these questions, but I couldn't help but read your comment and be intensely reminded of my father. Both my parents grew up and lived in Korea until after I was born, and the culture in Korea in the 70s-80s when they were dating and then married was certainly very very permissive of physically abusive husbands (it was only very permissive in the 90s). But that's not the part that reminds me, it's that whenever my father beat my mother, he would excuse it to her that this was just a result of the upbringing he had in his family (his father beat his mother quite a lot worse than he beat my mother, by all accounts), that he was trying his best to escape it (they were/are both second-wave feminists, which was a movement that, AFAICT from my mother, was quite popular in Korea during that time).
I haven't watched the show, but I heard that there's a scene in The Last of Us Season 2 where there's a flashback to Joel's father Lalo Salamanca explaining roughly the same thing to him while or after beating him and his brother, that his father beat him really really bad, but he only beat them really bad, and they'll go on to beat their sons only kinda bad, or something. So I get the sense that this is at least common enough to be a cliche or stereotype, and it matches my anecdotal experience.
My father's 2nd wife was also Korean and even less agentic than my mother by my judgment and also suffered quite a lot of beatings from him, which at least somewhat anecdotally points in the direction of such men seeking out such women who are ready to be victimized.
Interesting. Are you Korean?
I used to be, but I'm American now.
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I think I've seen this idea before, but written this way, it feels more clarifying to me. This seems like the female version of men who've grown up being told the same things either going to inceldom and/or attempting to date women without considering his own physical attraction to her. That this mirrors so closely things I've seen a lot IRL on the male side makes me feel like your last sentence is likely true.
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