Ask someone to imagine a victim of intimate-partner violence and most likely they will conjure up an image of a woman. Yet about a quarter of domestic-violence victims are male, and one in ten men in the United States is a victim of partner abuse or stalking. Why aren’t these men acknowledged? There are several reasons: gender stereotypes that paint men as too macho to become victims, shame from male victims who are afraid to speak out about their experiences, and a lack of resources designed to help male victims.
In this edition of Secret Lives of Men, Esquire spoke to Cody*, a Colorado-based Army veteran who experienced physical and verbal abuse from two partners yet struggled to accept that he was a domestic-abuse victim. Cody believed that he was at fault for the abuse he faced, as many victims do. He assumed that if a woman hit him, he must have done something wrong. Cody is sharing his story to help other men recognise their own abuse.
*Names and identifying details have been changed to protect anonymity.
The first time she started swinging, I hit back to defend myself
This was 20-some years ago. I was in the Army, stationed in rural Louisiana and dating Chloe, who was another soldier in my unit. Chloe was an amateur boxer—and an alcoholic. She would get punchy when she was drunk. That night, we were camping and we were drinking. I don’t recall who or what started it.
I felt incredibly shitty about it the next day. I was like, What the fuck did I do? This isn’t who I am. This isn’t who I want to be. So I never did it again. But things only got worse. A couple times she clocked me so hard that I fell to the ground, and she’d just keep hitting.
Chloe made it clear that if I ever said anything about the abuse, she would go to the cops and tell everyone that I had beaten her. I believed her. At the same time, it’s not like no one knew something was happening. I was showing up to work with bruises and scabs. My roommate knew she caused them and started rumours I was in bar fights. He thought that he was protecting me.
I wasn’t going to admit that my girlfriend was beating me. But pretending I got into bar fights meant that people didn’t want to hang out with me. I eventually told a female friend about the abuse, and she was like, “I dunno, suck it up.” I’m not mad at her. I felt the same way. In our culture, we don’t understand what abuse against men looks like or how to process it. And even if we see it, we don’t know what to do about it.
I’d hear things like “Oh, someone said some mean words to you. Is that really abuse?” But when they hear that you woke up in a pool of your own blood, something clicks.
If a woman says, “My boyfriend hits me,” we tell her it’s abuse and that she needs to get out of her house. We say there are resources. We know what to do because there’s a cultural discussion around women’s abuse. Not so for men. There is a belief that if a woman hits a guy, he probably had it coming. I had accepted that if my girlfriend was beating me, it’s because I fucked up. I kept asking myself, How do I keep her from losing her temper? I didn’t recognise that I needed to get out.
I internalised that the abuse was my fault. I was like, Women are emotional. I have to be the calm, rational one and navigate all this. In retrospect, that’s dumb as shit, but that’s very much how I felt.
Finally, I reached a breaking point. We were out of town celebrating New Year’s. We were drinking, and Chloe started to get angry about something. I saw the fight coming and walked away from her toward a McDonald’s to get some food and sober up. While I was there, she told some strangers that I had raped her. They found me, beat me up pretty badly, and stole my wallet, watch, and truck. They left me my cell phone, thankfully. The strangers ended up giving her the truck, which she returned to me. I told her I was done.
She didn’t fight the breakup, though it was awkward because we worked together, and she started dating another one of my coworkers. I don’t know what she told him, but he told me that he knew I hadn’t treated her right.
A little while after breaking up with Chloe, I left the military, got a job at a public university, and started dating my coworker, Lisa, who was also former military. We bonded over our time in the service, and the sex was good. We moved in together, and it was a mess from the beginning.
She had a difficult upbringing in small-town Wyoming. Her dad was mostly absent, and her mom was very angry and critical. When her high school boyfriend graduated and joined the military, she signed up to follow him.
The military was hard on Lisa. She was sexually harassed, attempted suicide, and was processed for a dishonourable discharge. A high-ranking officer intervened, and she was granted an early, honourable discharge. However, she resisted therapy and psychiatric care afterwards. As a result, Lisa had trouble regulating her emotions and developed attachment issues.
Early on, when we were dating, she was coming to pick me up somewhere, and my phone died, so she wasn’t exactly sure where to meet me. Lisa broke her own phone in anger. I felt responsible, like I shouldn’t have let my phone die.
In retrospect, I’m like, How did I miss this? But I stayed with her, and we had a child. One day, we were struggling to get our kid to go to sleep, and she was just getting angrier and angrier. Eventually, I said, “I’ll just put him in the stroller and go for a walk to get him to sleep.” So I took him for a 30-minute walk, but I was in a rush to leave, so I accidentally forgot my phone at home. Because Lisa couldn’t get hold of me, she decided that I had kidnapped our kid and was running away with him. She went driving around looking for us, couldn’t find us, then came home and kicked a very big hole in one of the walls.
If a woman says, “My boyfriend hits me,” we tell her it’s abuse and that she needs to get out of her house. We say there are resources. We know what to do because there’s a cultural discussion around women’s abuse. Not so for men.
Things got worse. We came back home from vacation late one night and our cat had puked everywhere. I started cleaning up and made some comment about how I don’t want our kid around cat puke. Lisa started a fight. I realized she was escalating the argument, so I left the kid with her, got on my bike, and biked away from the house to a park. I sat in the park and read for three hours or so, until past midnight. I came back home when I figured she’d gone to bed so I could crash on the couch.
As soon as I walked in the door, Lisa started screaming at me. I turned around to leave, and she threatened to call the cops. I biked back to the park and called the police myself. “I think my girlfriend called you to say that I did something,” I told them. I met some officers at a bus stop. They told me Lisa had accused me of slamming the door in her face, which I had not. “We’re not going to arrest you, but you need to be careful,” a cop told me. I read in the park for a few more hours. I think I got home at like 3:00 or 4:00 a.m.
I tried to get us into couples counselling. She refused. I insisted that we sit down and talk about it. During that discussion, Lisa told me that if I wasn’t going to get her pregnant again, she would find someone else who would, and I could raise that kid as well. It was a pretty clear message that things weren’t going to improve, so we broke up. My son was two at the time, and we decided to share custody.
I began to see a therapist, who tried to convince me that I wasn’t the problem. But I was like, No relationship’s perfect, right? I have to put in the effort to make it work. I internalised this idea so deeply that it was my responsibility that even when I had a professional tell me it wasn’t my fault, I couldn’t see it. Several times my therapist mentioned that Lisa’s behaviour was abusive, but I excused it by saying, “It’s not that bad compared with what I’ve been through,” or, “She didn’t try to kill me. How bad could it be?” It took multiple sessions to realized I was a victim.
When I told a friend about it, I saw a side of him that I’d never seen before. He did this 180 flip and revealed himself as a misogynist. He assumed that now that I’d been abused by a woman, I hated all women as he did. He became more vocal in bashing women who were in the news cycle. I would push back, and then he’d mock me for it. He told me, “I thought you’d understand about women now.”
But I didn’t hate women like he did. Instead, I made friends with queer and Black women, who introduced me to feminism. Then I stumbled upon a YouTube video that discussed how men are victims of the patriarchy too. That video led me to r/MensLib, a Reddit community that dissects men’s issues, which then led me to read Liz Plank’s book For the Love of Men: From Toxic to a More Mindful Masculinity. I was working on my college degree at the time, so soon after going down that rabbit hole, I enrolled in women’s and gender-studies classes.
Now I post about my experiences online. I believe we need to talk about men’s abuse and the forms it takes—especially physical abuse. People are more willing to listen to me when I talk about my experiences than if I were solely a victim of verbal abuse. I hear things like “Oh, someone said some mean words to you. Is that really abuse?” But when they hear that you woke up in a pool of your own blood, something clicks.
Through my posts, I hope that men will recognise when their own situation is abusive and that they shouldn’t ignore it. We have to let go of the expectation that we are responsible for fixing everything. Sometimes walking away is the only choice we have.
Recently my communication with Lisa has been through email, through a third party, and the distance has been fantastic. She can get as angry as she wants, but she can’t throw it at me. I worry about my son, though. Lisa sometimes directs her anger at him. I’ve enrolled him in weekly therapy so a professional can help him develop the right tools for dealing with it. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to convince the court that he’s been harmed, so I can’t get more than 50/50 custody. He’s with me on Thursdays and Fridays and every other weekend. I chaperone his school field trips and act as the primary point of contact with his teachers and friends’ parents.
We have to let go of the expectation that we are responsible for fixing everything. Sometimes walking away is the only choice we have.
I don’t have the time or desire to date now. I have anxiety around relationships, and while I think it’s manageable, parenting and school take up all my time and energy. I’d love to date again—eventually. It’s one of the things I’m looking forward to once I finish school. I’d love to have someone with whom I can go to shows and on weekend trips or spend the occasional lazy day. But I’m also pretty happy single. It’s safe.
