Dennis Waterman

@sceptical guy wrote:

You rightly said that you didn’t mention gender, but the poem you quote (yours?) is very much written from a woman’s point of view, and a very narrow one too.

The poem is mine, written from my point of view, based on personal experience. It took a lot to write it, it took a lot to put it in the public domain, and I have taken the most sensitive verses out. It may be narrow, but thankfully it is my only experience of domestic violence. I will not be put in that position again.

@sceptical guy wrote:

Try to construct that poem again thinking inside the man’s head. Why is he reacting like that?? Maybe it’s time to give him a wake-up call, the sort you both have to give each other regularly if life together is going to work.

Victims spend a lot of time trying to think inside the man’s (or perpetrator’s) head, that’s one pf the reasons why they keep forgiving time after time after time and appear to their friends to be making excuses for the behaviour. Their friends despair and slowly drift away as they realise there is little they can do to help until the victim decides they want the help.

As for the wake-up call, a serial wife-beater (as opposed to the one who lashed out just the once in a fit of who knows what) will acquiesce, will be contrite, and for a while can be the sweetest person in the world…the man you probably fell in love with in the first place. Then slowly it all slides back into the depths of darkness. How many wake-up calls does a woman give before she decides enough is enough? Too often a woman tries to give a wake-up call and gets an even more severe beating…where does it end?

Jen, wasn’t trying to put you down. The poem sounded very personal, and it sounds like one of those relationships which had become lethal and needed breaking. What you describe, including the continued forgiveness of your partner for his emotional crimes, is what many people feel – some men (quietly) as well as women.

I was making a general point about men and women, the expectations they have about one another.

As Words says, times have changed a lot, though I still see a lot of guys behaving the same way, with the same bozo interests. Many men now walk around with their tails between their legs, rather than the old swagger, but they haven’t thought anything through. Apparently, the sale of durex zooms up when a home side wins in a football match – I also try not to think about why that should be so lol (lot of laughs, as Rebekah Brooks had to point out last week).

But getting to the meaning of what I said – think it through in a man’s head. Very hard, just as it’s hard for a man to think what the woman is going through after a messy break-up.

I was thinking of the novelist DH Lawrence. When he was a boy, his mother would line him and his siblings up when their dad came in drunk. The dad had to stand there while his mum denounced the man for being a drunken sot and bad father. It often ended in volence, with the mum thrown out into the yard. Lawrence, very much a mummy’s boy, hated his father with a vengeance and in the first draft of Sons and Lovers wrote a withering denunciation of his dad and a portrait of his mother as suffering woman. He then realised he was being one-sided; he was writing a bad novel – and therefore reflecting life badly. He went back for several drafts, trying to imagine what was in his dad’s head while being denounced in front of his family, and gradually a much more mature portrait of his family emerged, their respective strengths and weaknesses.

Sayng that doesn’t mean you should forgive your guy. I’ve talked to other women who’ve suffered dreadfully from being continually belittled until their confidence in themselves just disappears and they become a whipping post for the man’s frustration. When it gets that bad, there is only one way to go – and that’s out of that door. But I’m pretty certain you must have thought what had happened in that man’s mind whereby he had degenerated to the state in which he drove you out.

Words, I have a feeling that you suffered as much as I did from that heavy male culture. Many men did – it was a minority who were loud-mouthed and aggressive. many others settled down to a marriage of quiet desperation where they took out their frustrations on their wife or suffered from the wife’s frustrations.

Reacting as many feminists did was very one-sided though. When young, a friend of mine was badly razored while walking across a bridge in Germany. It was a group of German feminists, chanting Death to Men before running off. I’ve heard of, and come across, things which are at least as bad in their own way.