Men are usually not given the opportunity to express themselves when they are being harassed, abused, stalked, exploited, molested, emotionally oppressed, invalidated and used by women.
A woman would usually get all the sympathy and can play the victim even when she is the aggressor.
Men get nothing.
Tell your fellow men that a woman is sexually harassing you, and the reply you will get is “Give her what she wants; why are you being a sissy?”
A young man being sexually abused by an older woman on social media some months ago was hailed as a hero for sleeping with his teacher and smacking her while doing so with confidence.
If the teacher was male and the student was female, the outrage would be colossal!
I reached out to some men on many social media spaces with questions to determine how prevalent the situation I had taken time to observe was globally.
Are men also abused? Are men also victimised? Are men also used? Are men also exploited? What did they do about it? Were they believed when they explained what had happened?
I want to share what 100 men from across the world said about their relationships and how they processed the reality they found themselves walking in after the episode they went through
Finding 01
78 of 100 Men said they did not use the word “abuse” to describe what happened to them while it was happening — even when the behaviour they described met clinical definitions of intimate partner harm.
The word was the first obstacle. Not the experience — the naming of it.
These men knew something was wrong. They knew the relationship was costing them in ways they couldn’t account for, that the version of themselves they could access inside it was smaller and more uncertain than the one they’d arrived with. They felt it with a precision they struggled to articulate. What they couldn’t do — what seventy-eight of them told me, unprompted, before I’d even raised the question — was call it what it was.
“I would never have used the word ABUSE. It felt — I don’t know. Dramatic. Like I was claiming something I hadn’t earned the right to claim. I was a grown man. I’d chosen to be there. It took me a year after leaving to understand that those things don’t disqualify the word.”
(Adam, Age: 34. Relationship: 4 years. Time since relationship ended: 18 months.
The reluctance to name was not, in most cases, shame about the experience itself. It was a prior doubt — a question about whether the experience qualified. Whether a man’s experience of harm inside a relationship was the kind of thing the available vocabulary was designed to describe.
It wasn’t shame. It was a language problem with a cultural cause.
Finding 02:
91 men of 100 said the first person they told responded in a way that made them less likely to tell anyone else.
Ninety-one. That number stopped me when I tallied it. I read it three times before I trusted it.
The responses these men received from their first disclosure were not, in the majority of cases, hostile. They were not deliberately dismissive. They were the responses of people who didn’t have a template — who had no ready shape for what they were being told — and who filled the gap with what was available.
Questions about what he might have done to contribute. Suggestions that the relationship had probably been difficult for both of them. A concern for the woman in the story that arrived before, and often instead of, a concern for the man in the room.
“She listened to the whole thing. And then she said, ‘I’m sure she’s struggling too.’ I hadn’t asked about her. I hadn’t mentioned her feelings. My friend just — went there automatically. Like the first thing to do with my pain was to balance it against someone else’s.”
Charles— 41. Relationship Duration: 7 years. Time since Relationship ended: 2 years.
The effect of that first response — whatever its intention — was consistent: the man closed. He took back the disclosure, adjusted the story to something less threatening, or simply stopped telling it. Ninety-one of one hundred men learned, from their first attempt at being heard, that the full version was not safe to offer.
Finding 03:
67 Men of 100 said they watched the woman who had harmed them receive social support — friends, community care, practical help — that they themselves did not receive during or after the relationship.
This is the finding that produced the most raw responses in the conversations. Not the experiences inside the relationship — the observation from outside it, afterward, of where the care went.
“People brought her meals. Actual meals. Checked on her. Made sure she was okay. I watched this happen through mutual friends for months. And I — I was eating cereal at ten o’clock at night alone in a flat that still smelled like her perfume, and nobody knew to come. Not because they were cruel. Because the story they knew was hers.”
Samuel— 38. Relationship duration: 5 years. Time since Relationship Ended: 14 months.
The meals are not a trivial detail. They are the concrete form of a much larger thing — the community’s instinct about who is hurting and who needs to be surrounded. That instinct is not wrong. It is incomplete. And its incompleteness, in sixty-seven specific cases, meant the man who needed surrounding ate alone.
Finding 04
83 of 100 Men said they blamed themselves for the relationship’s dynamics for longer than they believe they would have if the genders had been reversed.
This finding gets at something the data alone can’t fully carry — so let me try to carry the rest with the words the men used.
Eighty-three men said, explicitly, that they held themselves responsible for what happened to them for longer than they think they would have if she had been the one describing it. Not because they believed the self-blame was accurate. Because they had no counter-narrative available. No framework that said: this is what harm from a woman looks like, and you are allowed to name it, and naming it does not make you weak or unreliable or bitter.
In the absence of that framework, the default narrative won. And the default narrative — in culture, in therapy, in the language most people reach for when a relationship ends badly — positions the man as the more probable cause.
“I spent eighteen months in therapy before my therapist gently suggested I might be the one who’d been harmed rather than the one who’d done the harming. Eighteen months. I’d been in that room every week, describing the same things, and the frame I was operating in — that I had to find what I’d done wrong — was so strong that neither of us questioned it for a year and a half.”
Soji — 47. Relationship Duration: 9 years. Time since Relationship Ended: 3 years.
Finding 05
55 men out of 100 said they felt that Men have been labelled as the natural evil one in every relationship and the one who desired to be castigated, stoned to death, abandoned, ignored, boycotted, unfriended, unfollowed, shamed on social media etc
This is the finding most likely to be misread, so I want to be precise about what these men were saying.
They were not saying women’s experiences had been overrepresented or falsely amplified. They were saying something more specific and more uncomfortable: that in a cultural moment defined by the importance of believing survivors, they had felt less able to identify themselves as survivors — because the category, as it had been publicly constructed, did not seem to include them.
Finding 06
89 men of 100 said the most helpful thing anyone did for them was simply ask what had happened — without qualification, without the other side, before anything else.
The simplest finding. The one that required the least and delivered the most.
Eighty-nine men — nearly all of them — named the same intervention as the most meaningful one they received. Not therapy, not support groups, not the right words or the correct framework or a sophisticated understanding of intimate partner harm dynamics. Someone who asked what had happened and then waited for the answer without filling the silence with her probable perspective.
The ask is not complicated. It is apparently, given the numbers above, genuinely rare.
“My brother called me about something else entirely and at the end of the call he just said, ‘Hey — what actually happened with you two?’ No lead-up. Just the question. I talked for forty minutes. He didn’t say much. He didn’t defend her or offer her a motive. He just — held the space. I cried for the first time since it ended. That was eight months in.”
Elliot — 33. Relationship Duration: 3 years. Time since Relationship ended: 11 months.
Finding 07
100 men out of 100 said they would not have used the word “abuse” publicly, in any context, before reading accounts of other men’s experiences that matched their own.
Every man. No exceptions.
One hundred men, across six months of conversations, all said the same thing: they needed to see themselves in someone else’s story before they could name their own. The recognition came first. The language followed. The permission to use the language followed that.
Which means every piece written by a man who names what happened to him honestly — every account that exists in public, in searchable form, in the places men go at midnight when they are trying to understand what they are living inside — is doing something that looks like writing but functions like rescue.
That is why I write this.
Not to say women are evil and men are good or to say men are evil and women are good, but to ask us as a society to give the benefit of the doubt to both the men and the women when a relationship goes sour.
A woman sleeps with a hundred men as an experiment and films it. She sits down on TV and starts to cry.
Everybody turned on the men who dared to answer her advert to participate in the experiment as evil.
How can men ruin this woman’s life this way?
A man sleeps with a hundred ladies as an experiment and films it. He sits down on TV and shares the story.
Everybody turned on the man: “Women are nothing but sex objects to men in this world. This man dares to sleep with one hundred women and openly boasts of it as if he has won himself a medal. Shameless!”
This narrative has got to change.
We cannot see women targeting footballers with false rape accusations getting away with it while the careers of the men get ruined just like that and think things should continue this way.
If men feel they will not be heard, they will resort to drastic options like suicide as we have seen in many cases.
We must make this world safe for men as we have made it safe for women.
-GSW-