by maybelsyrup | 2026-02-11 02:50:41+00:00
There's a book about male domestic violence perpetrators which you really ought to read. It's called "Why Does He Do That?". Author is Bancroft. The vast majority of men in the US are not abusers. But he describes a degree of entitlement to women -- their bodies and minds -- that, in my decades of clinical experience with families and couples, applies to most men in our culture. It's a little parable:

> Once upon a time, there was a boy who grew up with a happy dream. He was told when he was very young—as soon as he was old enough to understand anything, really—that a beautiful piece of land out on the edge of town was in trust for him. When he was grown up, it would be his very own and was sure to bring him great contentment. His family and other relatives often described the land to him in terms that made it sound like a fairy world, paradise on earth. They did not tell him precisely when it would be his but implied that it would be when he was around age sixteen or twenty.

> In his mid-teens, the boy began to visit the property and take walks on it, dreaming of owning it. Two or three years later, he felt the time had come to take it on. However, by then he had noticed some disturbing things: From time to time, he would observe people hiking or picnicking on his acres, and when he told them not to come there without his permission, they refused to leave and insisted that the land was public! When he questioned his relatives about this, they reassured him that there was no claim to the land but his.

> In his late adolescence and early twenties, he became increasingly frustrated about the failure of the townspeople to respect his ownership. He first tried to manage the
problem through compromise. He set aside a small section of the property as a public
picnic area and even spent his own money to put up some tables. On the remainder of the
land he put up “No Trespassing” signs and expected people to stay off. But, to his
amazement, town residents showed no signs of gratitude for his concession; instead they
continued to help themselves to the enjoyment of the full area. The boy finally could tolerate the intrusions on his birthright no longer.

> He began screaming and swearing at people who trespassed and in this way succeeded in
driving many of them away. The few who were not cowed by him became targets of his
physical assaults. And when even his aggression did not completely clear the area,
he bought a gun and began firing at people just to frighten them, not actually to shoot
them. The townspeople came to the conclusion that the young man was insane.

> One particularly courageous local resident decided to spend a day searching through the town real estate records and was able to establish what a number of people had
suspected all along: The property was indeed public. The claim made by the boy’s family
on his behalf was the product of legend and misconception, without any basis in the
documentary record. When the boy was confronted with this evidence, his ire only grew.

> He was convinced that the townspeople had conspired to alter the records and that they were out to deprive him of his most cherished dream. For several years after, his behavior remained erratic; at times it seemed that he had accepted having been misled during his childhood, but then he would erupt again in efforts to regain control of the land through lawsuits, creating booby traps on the land to injure visitors and employing any other strategy he could think of. His relatives encouraged him to maintain his belligerence, telling him, “Don’t let them take away what is yours.”

> Years went by before he was able to accept the fact that his dream would never
be realized and that he would have to learn to share the land. Over that period he went
through a painful, though ultimately freeing, process of gradually accepting how badly
misled he had been and how destructive his behavior had been as a result.

I'm praying for you, internet friend!