I never see anyone talking about how kids can abuse adults though.
Growing up I saw a lot of adult teachers get bullied by students and it sucked. They would purposely push them to their breaking point until they exploded, yelled, cursed, threw desks, and the ones who didn’t have that kind of reaction would just quit or end up fired because the kids would start rumors. One was because our new math teacher was effeminate so the guys thought “obviously this guy is gay and he’s after our dicks” and if he was ever nice to a male student (which… he was nice and friendly with EVERYONE and was the best teacher we’d had that year) they would start whispering behind me, “yo, look at that, did you see that? He’s flirting with his male students, that’s nasty” and so they made trouble for him.
My mother worked at a Discovery Zone type place when I was little and she would come home and break down crying because groups of little boys would call her names, call her stupid her whole shift.
I had friends in childhood who absolutely abused their parents. They were relentless and mean and hacked them into submission and it made for a lot of awkward moments when I would hang with them, because I couldn’t do anything since… they were my abuser too.
Just because you’re a minor doesn’t mean knives you throw are not sharp and won’t hit someone. The fact that so many kids on this site use their age as a weapon, as a way to say “but nothing I do has any impact because I have no social power” is SCARY and we need to try to make people aware of this kind of stuff from a young age because most people who are like that don’t really realize it and they need guidance and rehabilitation so the cycle can stop. Because those people grow up and have kids and do it to their kids and they don’t learn that it’s not normal or okay, that they cannot deny reality by controlling the people around them.
But sometimes it isn’t always that way, some of those parents were so nice and kind and I considered like family, and they just had absolute evil villains for kids.
Check in with yourselves, guys. Especially right now. There’s a lot of upsetting stuff being shoved in our faces all the time and it makes it hard not to get tunnel vision when our emotions get out of control, especially with the pressure to perform by a lot of social circles on tumblr. And if you’re young and a lot of this is new, pace yourself, you’re learning, and you need to be open to the idea of learning more and know that us being adults doesn’t mean we’re just out of touch boring old farts who don’t know anything. We’ve lived things and we have experience and when we say to you that it’s not okay to tell people who like things you do not like to kill themselves, we’re not “apologists”… we’re the survivors too.
yo this is really important
my piano/choir teacher in 6th grade was only around 20-23 whenever she came to our school, and she only stayed for 2 years because all the kids were so awful. one time she told me that me and a few other of my friends were the only ones who hadn’t said a bad word about her the whole time.
in 4th grade, we got an awesome music teacher. he was in his late 20’s at the time, really chill and easygoing (we were in elementary school). some of the kids would just slowly drive him off the edge until one day he ended up throwing pens across the room out of frustration and anger. everybody was either scared of him or laughed at him, and it kinda made it worse. he left 2 years later and teaches a civilized and nice group of kids now.
kids really can abuse adults. I’ve seen it happen a lot and it’s sad and heartbreaking and overall awful to see because so many people brush it off as “kids being kids.”
In 7th grade or so I had the most delightful Maths/Science teacher (the two were taught by the same guy) and he was always super nice. Like he adored teaching, he brought us snacks sometimes and like really wanted us to do well.
By 8th grade he was a changed man. We had young neo-nazis starting shit. We had kids screaming and throwing shit at him. We had knife fights and I’m 90% certain I remember him straight up being forced into a position where he had to wrestle one of my more violent classmates to the floor. My class had actually driven this calm, cool, great guy (he couldn’t’ve been more than 27 at the time) to actually break down crying in class. As far as I heard he was gone by the time I entered grade 9.
I remember lots of my classmates mocking my math teacher because of her accent, when I was a freshman. She was from Syria, in a mexican school. Little pieces of shit were always imitating her accent and mocking her from getting certain words wrong.
I saw her about four years later and she looked so tired of everything, less cheerful and with a tougher attitude from the beginning. Fortunately she still talks to me calmly and smiling, but it’s awful to know she’s always anxious around thw kids she teaches.
In seventh grade I had a teacher named Ms. Burns. It was only her third year of teaching, and it was her first year of teaching middle school. And the class I had her for?
My fellow classmates were fucking awful to Ms. Burns. They talked over her when she was trying to teach, they made fun of her appearance (said she looked like man and called her a ‘tranny’, or “It Burns” instead of Ms. Burns), and when a few months into the school year, she broke down and screamed at the top of her lungs at the class before sitting down at her desk and crying, they considered it a triumph and laughed about it for weeks.
Being a kid doesn’t exempt you from being a piece of shit, and just because, on the whole, adults have more power than minors doesn’t mean that minors get a free pass on being purposefully cruel to adults. Some of you on this website really need to learn this.
Discipline your goddamn kids.
Seriously doubling down on the last part because this behavior doesn’t form in a fucking vacuum.
It’s not just a “dodgy bit”. There are multiple points at which he says things that I didn’t care for.
The “male abuse victims are probably lying” thing is is the biggest flaw in the book, but the book is still absolutely vital, and people should still read and recommend it. Full stop. Because a thing is flawed does not mean it has no value and should not be circulated to those people that it could help. If the book were less shockingly accurate and unflinching in its portrayal of abusive men, if it were less good in the ways that it is good, perhaps I would feel more hesitation.
I’ve read basically the whole thing so far (I’m about 20-30 pages from the end in the PDF), and here’s the deal.
He doesn’t say unilaterally that men lie about being abused. He says that abusive men lie about being abused by women. It’s a fine distinction, and not really much better, but I want to be clear that that is what he is saying. Not that men lie about all abuse, but that they lie about being abused by women. Abusive men, especially, will tell this lie to get the upper hand.
Based on what he has seen after dealing with several thousand men who abuse women, I do not doubt that this is true.
But he seems to think the number of abused men is smaller than the number of abusive men who are lying about being abused. Even if that is true, abused men are not acceptable collateral damage. It’s not okay to act like the issue isn’t important just because liars exist.
He uses SOME qualifying language. I’m not going to go digging for it, but it’s along the line of “Male victims of domestic violence are really rare compared to the number of female victims.” After that he kind of treats it like they either don’t exist, or the fact that they do is irrelevant in the face of the much more widespread problem of men who abuse women. I won’t lie, that’s not good.
To be frank, he does not seem all that aware of social justice issues the way that all us gigantic queers on Tumblr are. His awareness of LGBT issues is peripheral. When he says “men” and “women”, he definitely means “cis men” and “cis women”. And the book definitely reads like a book written by a cis dude to me. But honestly, this is a book that only a cis dude could have written, because only a cis dude could have worked with other (cis) men the way he has, and it is precisely that experience that makes it so valuable.
The fact that he’s biased doesn’t mean he is talking out his ass the rest of the time. He’s not. At the time of publication (2002) he had worked with over two thousand abusive men whose targets were women. He pioneered recovery programs for these men. He was the first to really get down and work with them on a daily basis, both in group and personal therapy settings. And that experience shows.
No. He really really doesn’t understand abused men.
But he understands abusive men. Specifically, he understands men who abuse women.
On the one hand, it’s given him an unprecedented level of insight into abusers’ mindsets, and that is so valuable.
On the other, the graphic and awful examples he has seen of men who are lying to get themselves out of trouble or justify their behavior have definitely colored his views of male victims. These men – men, I emphasize, referred to him by the legal system, meaning they were entirely confirmed abusers – WERE almost always lying about it. I think he mentions two exceptions? And yeah, that sounds like shit abusers fucking do. I believe him.
Within his setting, within his sample, I believe he is 100% correct in his assessment – abusers are likely to be lying about having suffered partner violence.
That setting absolutely is not the rest of the world, and I think he loses sight of that, if he ever had sight of it to begin with. That’s a terrible flaw.
Another flaw is that it gives very little face-time to same-sex relationship abuse. It goes into it a little, and does it a little ham-handedly but not too badly, but mostly it gets ignored.
Rather than raise these issues at all and then doing it badly, I wish he had said “The issue of abuse in LGBT relationships, as well as the issue of women abusing men, is sadly beyond the scope of my experience, and therefore this book is not about those issues.”
There is nothing wrong with focusing on one aspect of the issue of intimate partner violence. That he did so is not a bad thing. The bad thing that he did is to treat the rest of it like a non-issue, when it isn’t, and that he said some things that encourage the reader to be generally suspicious of men who say that women have abused them. Those are bad things.
Would I recommend it to a man who is being/was abused by a woman? No no no. Absolutely not. Those dynamics are completely different, and the abuse is likely to look very different, and I feel like very little of it will be accessible to someone in that situation. I think it would do more harm than good.
Would I recommend it to someone in a non-cishet relationship? Maybe, but probably not, unless I had a little insight into the relationship and felt like it would be a good match.
Would I still recommend it to women, or to people who want a general understanding of the dynamics between abusive cis men and abused women? YES. YES A THOUSAND TIMES.
The book is not “good” in a morally/ideologically pure, okay? It is flawed. But for what it is, which is a book about men who abuse women, it is very good.
He is on the side of abused women, all the fucking way. And that is still an astonishingly rare thing to find.
It validates the experiences of women abused by men by showing different types of abusive behavior and different types of abuser. He says at multiple points “If you’re wondering whether it’s abuse, then it probably is.” And that is still such a radical, necessary, healthy and badly-needed thing to say.
I’m not going to defend the way he treats the issue of abused men, or abuse in LGBT relationships, He barely deals with these issues at all, and when he does, it’s halfhearted at best and actively regressive at worst. In that regard, it’s shitty. If that is what you are needing, this book won’t give it to you.
I am going to defend it as an excellent starting place for women abused by men, or in toxic almost-abusive relationships with them.
I would prefer it not be flawed, and if it has to be flawed, I would prefer it come with a disclaimer, but I would rather it circulate flawed and without a disclaimer of any kind that fail to reach someone who really, really needs it.
We could be waiting a long time for a better, more inclusive book to come out. There’s not time to wait. This book is needed now. TODAY.
That said, I am always glad to reblog helpful resources for abused men, or for people in non-cishet relationships, if you know of any. I would love to know about comparable GOOD books for LGBT people, if you know any, or would love to know about GOOD books written for male victims of domestic violence.
DID SOMEONE SAY ABUSE BOOKS???? 8D
For male survivors: Victims No Longer by Mike Lew. Intended for cis guys, queer or straight, with attackers of whatever gender.
Healing Sex, by Staci Haines. Nuts and bolts of dealing with the physical ramifications of sex after abuse. Intended for cis women, queer, straight, or kinky, with attackers of whatever gender.
The Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Sourcebook, by Glenn Schiraldi. Not intended for abuse specifically, but well, if you want to take on specific symptoms, it’s modular for that.
For trans folks, there’s Domestic Violence: A resource for trans people,
from the Greater London Domestic Violence Project. Pamphlet, not a book, but covers some of the specific things that come from abuse while trans, whether your attacker be cis or trans.
Thank you so, so much for this, you wonderful person. I am in your debt.
Great resources!
Adding this to my purity culture tag, because OP Is a great example of how to handle an issue with nuance, and why it’s important that we do so.
I haven’t had a good rant in a while and I just saw a post that pissed me off so here we go.
It infuriates me whenever an anti calls a sha/ad1n ship “pedophilia.”
Literally use any other word. There are a lot of words that can describe discomfort with those age gaps. Here’s a few examples:
predatory
inappropriate
creepy
weird
uncomfortable
I understand that the idea of a 25 year old dating someone 18 or younger (16 or 17) squicks people out. I really do. In most cases, it squicks me out too. There have to be certain non-creepy circumstances for age gaps like that to be okay.
So what makes an age gap relationship predatory/inappropriate/creepy? Lots of things.
If the older person only wants to date them for a physical/sexual relationship.
If the older person only wants to date them because they’re younger and easy to take advantage of.
If the older person doesn’t have approval of the younger person’s family.
If, not getting approval, the older person isolates the younger from their family and friends.
If the older person does not allow the younger to pursue individual interests/life stepping stones, i.e. not allowing them to go to school or get a job or have hobbies, so the younger is forced to be dependent on the older.
If there’s an additional power imbalance (i.e. a teacher and student, or a boss and employee, etc)
If none of these things are happening, the relationship is probably okay. You can think it’s gross all you want, but it’s not necessarily predatory just because of an age gap. Predatory actions make a relationship predatory.
The reason I get so upset when ant1s call Sha/ad1n ships, particularly She1th, pedophilia is because my parents met at similar ages.
My parents started dating at 16 and 23. And there was nothing creepy or predatory about it.
First of all, this was back in the 70s/80s, when it was a little more common, I’ll admit that. My parents grew up in the same neighborhood, so they had mutual friends. My dad never did anything against my mom’s parents’ wishes. In fact they loved him and approved of him (and vise-versa). My dad never tried to isolate my mom from her friends. One of my mom’s best friends at the time is still one of her best friends now. My mom graduated high school and went to community college with my dad’s full support. My mom started working in her own career, doing her own thing. My mom played sports at the YMCA with her friends on weekends. My dad supported her all the time, with whatever she wanted to do. They dated for over 12 years before they got married. And then when they got married… they moved into a house in the same neighborhood they grew up in! My mom was literally only one mile away from her parents. And now they’re been married for over 26 years. They’re not perfect, they argue sometimes. But my dad, despite being older than my mom, is not and never has been a predator.
Meanwhile, another one of my mom’s friends married a man 10 years younger than her. And guess what? He’s an abusive jerk!
My 6-year-old self got bad vibes from him the moment I met this man at their wedding. Now years later, I realized he reminds me of Hans from Frozen, and we know how Hans turned out. My mom’s friend constantly vents to my mom about how her husband treats her poorly, disregards her feelings and all that. My dad went to an event with the both of them once, and when he came home, I asked how it went and he immediately said “(her husband)’s an ass.”
But yeah, it’s always the older one who’s the abusive predator, right antis?
I’ll give another example of an age gap relationship that, in my opinion, is borderline predatory because of the above bullet points. This couple are public figures too so you may know them: the Youtubers 0nision and his spouse Laineyb0t.
Quick rundown of this couple if you’re unfamiliar: a few years ago, 27 year old 0nision started talking to 17 year old Laineyb0t, a fan of his. The two dated and married soon after La1ney (who now goes by “they/them” pronouns) turned 18. I believe they got married secretly and La1ney’s parents were unaware, they thought La1ney was away attending college. 0nision moved La1ney out of their home state to his state. Not long after that, La1ney got pregnant. They’ve been married for like 6 years now and have 2 kids. Problem is their relationship is… tumultuous. 0nision chronicles their personal lives on his Youtube channel. It’s… too much to summarize. Their relationship drama rivals telenovelas.
But I get very bad vibes from 0nision, as do many others. First of all, he seems to have a penchant for younger girls. His girlfriend before La1ney was also a 17 year old. A couple years ago, he and La1ney tried to bring in a 18/19-year-old girlfriend into their relationship. He’s in his 30s now so it’s a little eyebrow-raising. He also comes off as a very manipulative person (he’s even kind of admitted to manipulating his spouse during drama with their girlfriend).
Additionally, imo, it’s kind of immoral to date a fan. There’s a power imbalance there. Of course any 17 year old is gonna jump at the chance to date/marry their Youtube idol. Seems as though he took advantage of that fact and “trapped” La1ney, so to speak. If someone meets and falls for a fan naturally, I think they should take their relationship slow and not rush into things. Yet 0nision did the opposite, married them soon after he could legally do so and got them pregnant. All while not having their family’s approval. He continues to isolate them from their family too, I believe he said once that “La1ney only sees their family twice a year.” Past girlfriends have also said that 0nision seemed almost eager to get them away from their families. I could go on and on, there are whole blogs that keep track of 0nision’s controlling behavior. It’s just… bad vibes, man. Bad vibes.
There is a stark difference between my parents’ relationship and 0nision and Laineyb0t’s relationship. The only similarity is that there’s an age gap. Besides that, the motives and behaviors of the older person in these two relationships are drastically different.
0nision seems to have textbook controlling/manipulative/(possibly predatory) behaviors.
My dad does not.
You know who else doesn’t have predatory/abusive behaviors? Shiro.
Just because there’s an age gap, doesn’t mean it’s automatically abusive or predatory. Abusive/predatory actions and behaviors make a relationship abusive/predatory. Why can antis apply this logic to fictional ships? Leave shippers alone and stop calling every ship you’re uncomfy with “pedophilia” or “predatory” or “abusive,” especially if the characters are not that at all.
Tbh I feel like saying that not having parents’ approval is predatory is… questionable. First of all, I love my parents, but it’s reeeeally not up to them to decide who I date. I would certainly listen to their opinion if they didn’t like my partner, but ultimately it’s my decision. And I have perfectly good relationship with my parents! What about people who don’t? What about people with abusive parents? What about queer teens with homophobic families? Also, plenty of teenagers date other teenagers without family’s approval, I don’t think this is much different.
Isolating your partner from their family is predatory and abusive, yes (and this applies even when there’s no age gap). But I really don’t think you need parents’ permission to date someone.
(I completely agree with everything else you said, I’m just being nitpicky, which is… a common accurence with me)
That’s a good point. I didn’t even take into account queer teens or teens with overbearing/overly-controlling parents.
For sure, if someone close to you, someone that you love and trust, another family member or a best friend, has some uncertainties about this person you want to date, take their concerns into consideration. But of course, it’s ultimately the person’s decision on who they date.
Also I guess I meant more in the reverse like: if there’s an age gap, and the older person has the acceptance of the younger’s family and friends, then it’s usually okay (excluding extreme cases where parents are trying to illegally marry off their kid or something like that).
i'll apple your turnover 