No Vaccine For The Leading Cause Of Death In Women

It should scare the crap out of everyone that every single day 3 women are murdered by their partner (or ex-partner) or that one out of every 3 girls will experience domestic abuse in their lifetime.

I want to go into high schools, gather all the students together, get all the girls to form groups of 3 girls and then have one girl leave the group. Maybe it would hit home. Maybe if parents had a visual they would take it seriously. This is not confined to a “type” of woman, a class, or an age. It is an epidemic affecting women every where and it is not getting better.

If anything, even with all the public awareness campaigns reports of abuse have dropped but domestic homicides have gone up.

I think society, women, parents, still think, “Yes, it is horrible, yes, I know it happens in all cultures, all economic levels, and ages, and I don’t blame the victim…..but it would never happen to me (my daughter, my mother, my sister….).” Deep down the majority of society still views the victim as flawed somehow.

We all think we are special, if you are a father you think, “I’ll kill any bastard that lays a hand on my daughter.” A brother may think he would protect his sister. A parent might think they raised their daughter to never put up with shit from any man.

Take it from a woman who never took shit from men, who was self sufficient, confident, gainfully employed, and could do without a man in my life quite easily thank you! Believe me, at 41 years old, after never being in an abusive relationship in my life and kicking any man who tried to control me to the curb; it can happen to anyone!

Plus, I owned my home but I thought for sure if worse came to worse my mother would never let me be homeless or turn her back on me. I thought for sure my brother would defend me. As it turns out, people we think have our back often times turn their back on us when we need them the most.

One of the things that made me more vulnerable was the belief it could never happen to me. Me!? No way! I said it more than once, “If a man ever hit me I would be gone so fast his head would spin.”

I could not understand why women went back or why they didn’t charge the guy, and assumed it was because they weren’t as independent or strong as I was.

Once I was in an abusive relationship and kept going back, my confidence in shreds, I kept thinking, “If I can end up like this, how on earth would a younger less confident woman ever survive it?”

How do we change things? We teach our young girls that their worth is not wrapped up in whether they have a man or not. Women don’t “snag” or “catch” a man and the men don’t lose a damn thing when they get married. Women are not in a competition for a man and should be loyal and supportive of their gender.

We used to blame inequality for women staying with their abuser but that excuse doesn’t hold water any more.

We have to stop calling domestic homicide a “crime of passion” and stop romanticizing things like stalking. Stalking is NOT love, jealousy is not love, calling 25 times a day is not love. It is not cute and it should not be brushed off or ignored.

We need to educate young girls to recognize the early signs of an abusive man and not be flattered if he is possessive.

At a very young age that having a man does not give you value. You are not lacking anything if you don’t have a man. There is nothing wrong with you. And instead of trying to be the kind of woman a man wants, girls should be more concerned with, “is he the kind of man I want in my life?”.

There is nothing wrong with having high standards and a woman isn’t being a princess or too demanding to expect to be treated with respect. We have to teach our kids to respect each other and respect themselves.

I am not naive enough to think girls should be virgins when they get married and the human body is nothing to be ashamed of but seriously, teen age girls should not think they have to put out to get the guy. Music, movies, “reality tv” put too much emphasis on sex at an age when girls are just discovering their own bodies and dealing with their own hormones let alone trying to be “cool and grown up” about sex.

Mom’s stop sexualizing your daughters. Big sisters need to set an example for your little sister by not swooning over every guy.

The reality is; girls and boys are different hormonally, always have been, always will be. It is a scientifically proven fact that when women have sex with a man hormone called Oxytocin is released. Oxytocin is nicknamed “the cuddle hormone” and is proven to lower a woman’s defenses, making her more forgiving, she is more trusting and it also increases empathy.

A man releases the pleasure hormone, and once he has sex there is no long term hang over, whereas the woman, even if she wasn’t that nuts for the guy prior to having sex, she now sees him in a different light. She has unfounded trust in him and is blind to his flaws. That is why women will be heart broken over a relationship that only lasted a few dates if she was having sex with the guy. He is just there for a good time and thought they were on the same page, she is planning their wedding.

That is why a narcissist pushes for sex early in the relationship because he knows once he gets her into bed he has her hooked.

My dad used to say, “Boys give love for sex and girls give sex for love ” and it doesn’t work. We have to teach our girls this about themselves and explain why they have to wait until they know a man before having sex. Once those trusting thought patterns are formed it is very hard to change them and if a person isn’t even aware what’s happening, impossible to change and that is why women end up staying far too long in a toxic relationship.