Taryn, when women are physically violent it is usually with some weapon, something sharp maybe if not an actual weapon, and not a big muscular gesture like picking up theh woman and tossing her out. My husband's ex used her teeth, biting him. And she'd attack him from behind with her fists.

The feminist DV advocates' version of this is that women are physically smaller so they could not be effective with just fists, so they pick up weapons just to get the same effect as a man might get with his fists, and it's unfair to prosecute her for a felony (assault with a weapon is a felony in most states) for doing something that a man would only be prosecuted for a misdemeanor about.

What most women find is that even with the weapons, they don't get the fear reaction they were hoping for. WWIL was angry. My husband was bewildered and angry but not in fear of her. Women need to get deadly with thier weaponry before it has the sought-after fear effect, but most women won't do that. We are brought up to be squeamish about it.

Most women eventually figure out that the way to get fear out of thier husbands is to threaten to do something to thier children (usually trying to destroy the relationship between the kids & the fathers), or if there are no children, then their wallets.

We used to call it passive-aggressive, because women were simply not effective by being actively aggressive. Working behind the scenes to destroy his relationships with others, his kids especially, friends, bosses, family... it's a kind of battleground that hasn't been studied enough, a kind of bullying that starts in high school when the mean girls lord it over the less pretty, less fashionable girls. It's MUCH more effective and we don't have any criminal way to punish it... it often succeeds.

Men know to fear the emotional attacks that thier stbx's might perpetrate, but the physical attacks, they simply seem to bewilder men. It does not compute to them. It is not very effective in creating fear or serious injury.

That doesn't make it any less an attack. It doesn't make it any less violent.

We see too many men who are afraid to talk about the violence they've endured because they're afraid some woman will pipe up with a story of how that's not violent and they're being a wimp to complain about it. And that type of talk makes women think it's OK to hit or jab or bite or slap men.

My stepdaughter wants to be a spokesperson about domestic violence. She heard a lecture about it in school and thinks it's interesting so now that's her "platform" at all these pageants that her mother has her going to. She doesn't even realize that SHE is being trained ot be violent. Having watched her mother bite and hit her father for years, she has made up a game of her own... she gets to hit her brother for 15 times before her brother gets to hit her back. And if her brother DOES hit her back, then she complains and accuses him of violence. She thinks it's cute. She has no clue that SHE has been violent.

This is what we're teaching our daughters when we say that a needle stick is nothing if done by a woman to a man.