They are expected to get what they want by being aggressive and violent. Women are supposed to keep everyone happy. Based on this cultural attitude, the assumption is that when a man is unhappy enough to hit his wife, she must have done something terribly wrong and therefore deserved it. Differences among people are not celebrated and treasured but used as a reason to dominate. When relationships of dominance become the norm in a culture, then all individuals within it are socialized to internalize those values or exist on the fringe of society.
Individuals mirror global and national relationships in their own interpersonal relationships.
This helps explain why domestic violence is slowly evolving to include all those involved in relationships of unequal power dynamics. A battered partner is one who may be controlled and terrorized by a combination of abusive tactics, both directly physical and not. There is a pattern and a dynamic in the relationship in which one of the parties in the party abused, disadvantaged and injured. Abusive relationships often start out with non-violent forms of abuse and control. Before that point, however, the relationship power dynamics were not equal.