Hi Martin, apart from places where I spoke of my own experience, I wrote of abuse here in deliberately gender-neutral language and provided a variety of gender-neutral resources besides. Your assertion that any sources were “conveniently” omitted is off-base; this was not an academic or journalistic piece (obviously). It was a micro-memoir. As authors do in memoir, I discussed the various societal prejudices that shaped my personal experience; only one of those was “misogyny.” Moreover, 5 of 6 of the resources I offered readers were gender-neutral as well; my reason for including the one that wasn’t was clearly explained within the text. If you’re seeing sexism here, you’ve brought a subconscious bias. (Or, in your case, not-so-subconscious, as you’ve outright stated that you associate my story with female writers whose work you dislike.)

Regarding the abuse scholarship, the fact still stands that women are more likely to be murdered by their abusive partners than men are. Abuse is bad in all its forms (fabulous that the English courts recognize this!) — but abuse still poses a greater public health threat for women, point blank. I agree that the world needs more stories about domestic violence from the male perspective. Hopefully, men will write them.

Finally, I’ll close on this: even though I cited layperson-accessible sources relevant to the types of abuse discussed here, those resources weren’t something I “owed” any reader, given that — again — this is a micro-memoir. Women aren’t obligated to invest their time and energy into scholarly research in exchange for the mere right to tell their stories.

Thanks for reading mine.