If Your Man Knew What to Say, Here’s What He Might Say If He Knew You Feared His Potential For Violence...

Excerpted from Warren Farrell's Women Can't Hear What Men Don't Say.

(Permission to reprint granted by Warren Farrell.)
See www.warrenfarrell.com and www.warrenfarrell.info.

 

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The Male “Learned Helplessness Syndrome”

“The weakness of men is their facade of strength;
the strength of women is their facade of weakness.”26

Men expect neither life to protect them nor their wife to protect them. But we do expect ourselves to protect our wife. So even when men batter in self-defense, they expect to be reported; and even when their wives hit first, men rarely report.

Many men don’t report being battered because they believe “private problems must be solved privately.” They consider “airing dirty laundry in public” a violation of a relationship’s sacredness. Which is also why we don’t even report it to our men friends.

Other men don’t report abuse because their translation of “when the going gets tough, the tough get going” is “when the going gets tough, the tough don’t blame – they do something differently.” So even when he’s beaten, he still expects himself to be “Timex Tough” (to “take a licking and keep on ticking”).

Like women, men feel it’s up to them to change. They are amazed when they hear women say the same thing (“I felt it was my fault”) and then see the woman call the police. To the man, if you genuinely feel it’s your fault, you don’t call the police.

A battered man imagines that if he calls the police and says, “Please come over, my wife just hit me,” he'll become the precinct’s “Wimp of the Night.” A battered man knows there are no shelters for battered men because no one really believes he exists. Men fear being denounced as an abuser if he beats a woman and laughed at as a wimp if he is beaten by a woman.

Both sexes feel helpless when the love of their life turns into the nightmare of their life. But men, for all these reasons, feel much more helpless about asking for outside help. In brief, women’s strength is in knowing when they feel helpless. Men’s weakness is not knowing. The fact that we have identified women’s “learned helplessness” but not men’s is, it turns out, a sign that the women’s problem is on its way to being solved, while the men’s is as yet unrecognized.