All of these battered husbands are still with their wives. When a woman stays with a man who batters, we provide shelters to encourage her to escape. If she decides not to escape, we say she is a victim of “Battered Woman Syndrome."

Veterans of every war suffer Battered Man Syndrome in the form of posttraumatic stress disorder. The emotional consequences are also with them for years. But if a sufferer killed Admiral Zumwalt for ordering the spraying of Agent Orange, he would be convicted for murder. Men who suffer Battered Man Syndrome are not allowed to attack their abuser and call it self-defense.

Four men describe how their wives hit them in the lower back with a pole, cracked them over the head or in the neck with a frying pan...the audience renews its laughter after each story. The men are part of a “PMS Men’s Support Group.” Imagine an audience of men laughing as battered women describe how their husbands threatened them with brain or spinal cord injuries by battering them over their heads or in their necks with a frying pan.

Feminists have no idea that some women like to flirt with danger because there is a sizzle in it. You know what gets me sick and tired? The battered-woman motif. It’s so misrepresented, the way we have to constantly look at it in terms of male oppression and tyranny, and female victimization. When, in fact, everyone knows throughout the history of the world that many of these working-class relationships where women get beat up have hot sex. They ask why won’t she leave him? Maybe she won’t leave him because the sex is very hot. I say we should start looking at the battered-wife motif in terms of sex. If gay men go down to bars and like to get tied up, beaten up, and have their asses whipped, how come we can’t allow that a lot of wives like the kind of sex they are getting in these battered wife relationships? We can’t consider that women have kinky tastes, can we? No, because women are naturally benevolent and nurturing, aren’t they? Everything is so damn Mary Poppins and sanitized.

In brief, when women batter, men’s first priority is to support the women and help them change; when men batter, women’s first priority is to escape the men and put them in prison.

If we believe that it is predominantly men who batter women, it is hard to see why women also need to change: We will continue saying, “Just change the men. They’re the batterers.”

Comedy aims at representing men as worse, Tragedy as better than in actual life.

What Men Would Say When Male-Bashing Is Called “Funny,” But Female-Bashing Is Called “Sexist”

In pondering why a battered woman does not leave, we must remember that gay men with a taste for violent “rough trade” have always paid for this kind of sex. Are women so perfect and angelic that we cannot imagine them having sadomasochistic impulses? When they are genuinely victimized, women deserve our pity. But victimization alone cannot explain everything in the tragicomedy of love.

These men suffer. Their anguish and despair has no limits or boundaries. They suffer in a society that does not want men
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to change, that does not want men to reconstruct masculinity so that the basis for the social formation of male identity is not rooted in an ethic of dom- ination. Rather than acknowledge the intensity of their suffering, they dissim- ulate. They pretend. They act as though they have power and privilege when they feel powerless. Inability to acknowledge the depths of male pain makes it difficult for males to challenge and change patriarchal masculinity.
Broken emotional bonds with mothers and fathers, the traumas of emo- tional neglect and abandonment that so many males have experienced and been unable to name, have damaged and wounded the spirits of men. Many men are unable to speak their suffering. Like women, those who suffer the most cling to the very agents of their suffering, refusing to resist sexism or sexist oppression. Their refusal is rooted in the fear that their weakness will be exposed. They fear acknowledging the depths of their pain. As their pain intensifies, so does their need to do violence, to coercively dominate and abuse others. Barbara Deming explains: “I think the reason that men are so very violent is that they know, deep in themselves, that they’re acting a lie, and so they’re furious. You can’t be happy living a lie, and so they’re furious at being caught in the lie. But they don’t know how to break out of it, so they just go further into it.” For many men the moment of violent connection may be the only intimacy, the only attainable closeness, the only space where the agony is released. When feminist women insist that all men are powerful op- pressors who victimize from the location of power, they obscure the reality that many victimize from the location of victimization. The violence they do to others is usually a mirroring of the violence enacted upon and within the self.

Today, violence against women is rightly abhorred. But we call violence against men entertainment. Think of football, boxing, wrestling... All are games used to sugarcoat violence against men, originally in need of sugarcoating so our team --or our society --could bribe its best protectors to sacrifice themselves.

And let it here be noted that men are either to be kindly treated, or utterly crushed, since they can revenge lighter injuries, but not graver.

I don't think a man should EVER hit a woman..... until the 5th time she cracks him in the face.

Even men who share their personal experiences find that, instead of empathy, they get the response Dear Abby gave this man: “Women have it worse.” This belief is so strong that over the past quarter century, women’s old fantasy of marrying a man-as-protector has been tainted by women’s new nightmare of husband-as-batterer.