I think a lot of it is an age thing.
When I was teen/first year uni student I would have namalt and men are victims too and women can be abusers as well. I wouldn’t have meant to shut any woman down or excuse male violence, I just wouldn’t have understood the difference between class oppression and individual oppression.
My mother was the one who did me the most harm as a kid. She knowingly handed me over to be raped by whichever boyfriend she had at the time. She gas lit the hell out of me and played so many cruel mind games to keep me compliant and silent. She told me this was why she had me and she’d kill me once u was no use to the men she liked (I don’t believe she ever meant that now, it was just a tactic to shut me up, but I believed it at the time and it took a good ten years after the sexual abuse ended for me to understand it wasn’t going to happen).
I spent some time in care and plenty of the boys I knew there had been victims of similar abuse to us girls.
As a teen/young adult I would have heard male violence against women and girls and heard my mothers abuse as invalidated and the experience of my male friends denied.
Because I had zero understanding of the difference between class analysis of male violence against women and girls and how acknowledging that and the effect of the patriarchal hirarchy on that and how it feeds of mvwg to maintain that hirachy doesn’t deny that some women can be as equally evil as men and some males will be as victimised as we are, but that the over arching pattern is men harming women because the have power over us as a class.
I also know I viewed women staying with violent men as shocking. I had modified my own behaviour so much due to the trauma and terror I grew up with that any tiny sign of a red flag sent me running a mile away. I would never have meant to blame any woman staying with a violent man, I understood the social reasons, that so much violence begins during pregnancy, that leaving an abusing man increases the risk of being killed. I knew all that and I understood it on an intellectual level, but on an emotional level I could never get my head round why any woman didn’t spend every waking second assessing risk and moderating themselves to try and ensure safety. I didn’t believe woman should do that at all, I just didn’t see how anyone could live in this world and not desperately need to do that.
I would never have meant any of those thoughts to excuse male violence or to blame women for it. But I don’t think I grew out if thinking that way until I got serious therapy once at uni and until I took sociology classes and women’s studies classes where I learned the difference between assessing class oppression versus individual oppression. Without knowing the difference it’s hard to grasp, especially as we have so much victim blaming socialised into us. And I think people tend to judge others harshest on the things they judge themselves harshly on, and victims blaming ourselves is very normal response and takes time to unlearn.
I can’t for the life of me get my head round any adult woman, especially a mother, still clinging to such an underdeveloped view of their own lives though. Teens/young adults are supposed to be dickheads, then we grow up surely.