women writers need to stop abusing the term 'abuse'

it's bad for all of us, but it's especially bad for victims

What I’m about to describe is not a specific story, but a boilerplate description of what has lately become a disturbingly common occurrence for me, especially here on Substack.

It starts with a text from a girlfriend. Like me, this friend is a female writer, a published author. She is someone I know and trust, whose personal writing I admire for its scrupulous self-criticism, dry-eyed intelligence, emotional acuity and lack of self-pity. This is a description that applies to dozens of women writers I know on this platform and elsewhere in publishing, many of whom I consider trusted colleagues and friends. It’s also a description I hope applies to me.

The text my friend has sent includes a link to a piece written by another woman writer on Substack. It is a harrowing piece of personal narrative non-fiction with a title that includes the term ‘abuse.’ Along with the link, my female writer friend includes a non-committal comment.

‘Whoa, have you seen this?’ she remarks with a pair of google eyes. Or ‘What do you think?’ or simply, ‘Wow.’

Her comment, I understand, reading between the lines, is meant to solicit my honest opinion of the piece she has linked to without setting out her own. She is testing the waters, cautiously.

The piece in question is a personal essay. It tells tells the story of a failed heterosexual relationship the female author has endured with a man that has recently ended. No physical violence occurred during the relationship. There were no broken bones, no police incidents, no bruises, no charges laid, no evidence and thus, no reckoning in a court of law. The writer says this up front, but she also stresses that the relationship was terrible and damaging to her body and her mind. It was, she says, abusive. She uses this word repeatedly and each time she does it makes me flinch.

As the relationship unravelled there were many terrible fights with terrible words and the author details some of these instances in well crafted anecdotes that pack an emotional punch. There were betrayals, humiliations, and aggressions micro and macro. It is obvious she has suffered terribly and emerged from the relationship battered and wounded. At first I am drawn in by her sense of outrage. I can empathise with her feelings of anxiety, sadness and regret. But as she begins to detail her ex-partner’s psychological manipulations in detail, his selfishness and his faults, I also notice the writer includes none of her own. The conversations are one-sided. This gives me pause. But I set it aside and read on, because the piece is propulsive and raw.

The author is, by her own admission, writing from a place of deep pain. She has found herself newly single in middle age and feels lost, a husk of her former self. I understand she is trying to heal herself by describing her experience; showing her wounds to the sympathetic crowd. The piece is hard to read, as such pieces are. I understand. I empathise. And yet… I don’t.

We are led to understand the ex-partner a narcissist and the author is an empath, an enabler. She is co-dependent by nature, a parent-ified child. She’s been to therapy and knows the right terms. Perhaps she is from a loveless family and suffered abuse as a child. Her partner, she now understands in retrospect, abused her for years on end in subtle and not-so-subtle ways for which he can never be held accountable in a court of law, and now she has mustered up the courage to tell her story in the court of public opinion that is Substack.

It is a story countless women will identify with because it is so common. We live in a patriarchy in which men take what they want and women clean up the mess. A world in which men come out on top again and again — economically, emotionally, physically — while women, en masse, get the short end of the stick. This is not in dispute. Not on my internet, anyway. And now this woman writer is coming forward to tell her everyday abuse story and in doing so, making a small attempt to write this historical imbalance and wrong. I have no quibble with any of this and yet I am troubled — and not in the way she wants me to be. My finger hovers over the little heart but in the end something stops me from touching it.

I hesitate. Then I don’t.

‘Like’ it, I mean. And in not ‘liking’ the piece I realise I don’t like it literally or figuratively. And I don’t want to be seen to like it. The question is, why? I force myself to consider this seriously and decide it’s the word ‘abuse.’

I have an almost insatiable appetite for relationship stories, in both fiction and memoir. I read them and have published them myself, on here and in magazine and book form. Tales of relationship agony and marriages gone wrong appeal to me on deep and human level. I have absolutely no truck with women writers astutely examining their own pain on the page and screen, in real time. People who have a problem with us baring our souls honestly and passionately when we choose to can, as far as I’m concerned, fuck off.

But the word ‘abuse,’ is not one I take lightly. It is not a term I like to hear thrown around or used without explicit justification and, in the case of memoir involving actual real life events and people, used without evidence, the word ‘abuse,’ gives me serious pause.

It is a grave accusation to make. I know abuse exists on a great spectrum in our society, but the gravity of the term is and will always be, for me, underpinned by the lived experiences of victims. In particular, the dead. When I hear the word ‘abuse,’ I think of femicide. The scores of women who are murdered each year around the world by their male partners is a travesty, an ongoing genocide of unquantifiable proportions. Domestic abuse is real and it is happening and it needs to be taken more seriously at all aspects of society, in every society. I get the spectrum, but I worry that when we thrown the term ‘abuse’ around in casual in conversation or use it to describe experiences that might not entirely justify its weight, its power, we risk watering it down. And this is terrible for victims. It’s terrible for all of us. It’s bad for women writers who want to be taken seriously and not dismissed as hysterical.

So no, I don’t ‘like’ the piece. I don’t like it not because I am not a feminist, but because I am one. And I still feel badly about it because I want to support women writing and sharing their stories. I feel badly because it makes me feel like I am being disloyal to a community I have come to love and feel part of.

But it doesn’t matter because I see that in a few short hours the piece been liked and shared thousands of times. It’s gone viral and is now riding a great wave of public empathy. The comments are uniformly positive, almost all of them are from women readers and writers, many who also self-identify strongly as survivors and/or victims of domestic abuse. The words ‘brave,’ ‘courageous,’ and ‘thank you,’ feature prominently in the comments. There are many weepy-eyed emojis, blue hearts and prayer hands. The piece has prompted an outpouring. It is, I am also aware, driving up paid subscribers and generating income for the woman who wrote it.

I know how I’m meant to feel reading the piece: Empathetic. Gutted. Incandescent with sisterly moral outrage, at one with this woman writer and her pain. The problem is, I don’t feel any of these things. I feel manipulated.

The truth is, I don’t know the author of the piece as a writer or a person. I don’t know the facts of her relationship. The journalist in me is sceptical. I want to believe her because I too have experienced trauma at the hands of men, I also live in a patriarchy, I have also suffered and felt tortured in relationships and endeavoured to write honestly about the experience. But there are elements to this particular woman writer’s story that strain credibility. Perhaps it’s that she seems to blame her ex-partner for everything. Perhaps it is the lack of self-criticism or balance. The abundance of self-pity. The way her logic and memory of events seems to be stretched thin, overwhelmed by emotion. Perhaps she brings her children into it in a way that gives me moral pause. They will have to read this one day, I think. He’s their father.

I re-read the piece again and this time I force myself to imagine some of the ‘abuse’ scenarios she describes from her ex-partner’s point of view. I feel terrible doing this, as if I am somehow being a traitor to the cause. It feels like a betrayal of my actual self. But I do it anyway on principle and as I do all the empathy drains out of me.

I’m not sure I believe her, I think. Then immediately feel badly for thinking it.

I get to the end of the piece and text my writer girlfriend back. I am wary of saying what I actually think, so I say something equally non-committal.

‘Yikes,’ I type, or ‘Troubling,’ or just, ‘Whoa.’ More googley eyes. Hand-over-mouth emoji.

I don’t say what I think because I don’t want to offend my woman writer friend. Like me, she has written on similar themes. Relationships, trauma. Her own suffering in the past. Like me, she is a feminist and supports women speaking their truth. I don’t want her to think I am calling her own personal writing into question because I admire it very much and it has moved me. I believe her. But why do I believe her? Because she's a good writer and I know her to be self-critical. Because she is smart and scrupulous. Because she has never, to my knowledge, abused the term ‘abuse.’