Summary: Abuse is a deliberate system of power and control, not anger or misunderstanding. It persists because men benefit from the obedience, labour, sexual access and authority it gives them across cultures.
“Men usually use violence and abuse against women and children because it is functional for them to do so. It serves many functions in their lives, and it brings them many benefits…” Domestically Violent Men Describe the Benefits of Abusing Women and Children by Dr Emma Katz.
Abuse is not a mistake. It is a system that works for men. It is not a misunderstanding. It is not a moment of lost temper. It is not stress, trauma, bad communication, or love gone wrong. Abuse is deliberate. It is organised. It is sustained. And it continues because it works.
We keep pretending abuse happens because men “lose control,” when in reality, abuse is about men gaining control. Control over a woman’s body, emotions, time, money, sexuality, relationships, thinking, and movement. Control over her sense of reality. Control over how small she learns to make herself.
Society is deeply invested in not calling this what it is. We soften the language. We individualise the problem. We ask women what they did wrong, what they said, how they provoked him, and how they could have handled it better. We rarely ask the more honest question: what is he gaining from this?
Because once you ask that question, the answers are uncomfortable.
Men who abuse benefit. They benefit from women’s unpaid labour. They benefit from obedience. They benefit from fear. They benefit from sexual access without accountability. They benefit from emotional caretaking without reciprocity. They benefit from authority without responsibility.
This is not accidental. This is why abuse survives across cultures, religions, classes, and generations. It adapts. It gets rebranded. It gets spiritualised. It gets romanticised. And women are trained from childhood to endure it, rationalise it, and call it love.
Abuse is not just physical violence. It is not only beating, slapping, or bruising on the body. Abuse is psychological, verbal, emotional, sexual, financial, and social. And the damage from the non-physical forms is often more serious, longer-lasting, and harder to undo.
Many women believe that as long as a man does not hit them, what they are experiencing is not serious. Society encourages this belief. Families reinforce it. Religion reinforces it. Nollywood reinforces it. But research and lived experience show that verbal and psychological abuse can be just as destructive as physical violence in eroding a woman’s self-worth, confidence, autonomy, and sense of reality.
Being insulted constantly. Being shouted at. Being mocked. Being humiliated in private or in public. Being spoken to like a child. Being threatened. Being blamed for everything. Being made to feel stupid, dramatic, ungrateful, or “too much.” Over time, this kind of treatment trains a woman to distrust herself. She edits her words. She watches her tone. She anticipates moods. She starts believing she deserves the cruelty.
Susan Forward is clear about this in Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them. She defines abuse as the systematic persecution of one partner by another. Whether the weapon is fists or words, the result is the same: fear, helplessness, and pain. The difference is method, not impact.
Yet Nollywood keeps lying to women.
Cruelty is presented as discipline. Control is framed as love. A harsh man is portrayed as strong, passionate, or wounded. A woman who resists is painted as stubborn, disrespectful, or arrogant. The solution is never for the man to stop abusing power. The solution is for the woman to change herself.
She is told to pray. To cook better meals. To dress well. To learn when and how to talk. To obey without question. Even when violence occurs, the story is rewritten so the woman is at fault. She talked back. She embarrassed him. She challenged his authority.
When the man apologises after abuse, the woman is praised for forgiving him and taking him back. She is called virtuous. Long-suffering. God-fearing. The man is rarely required to unlearn control. His dominance is never interrogated. In fact, it is often celebrated as masculinity.
This messaging is not harmless. It conditions women to accept abuse as normal and conditions men to expect obedience.
From childhood, women are taught that to be in a relationship, they must suspend their intelligence and autonomy. “Is that how you will behave in your husband’s house?” A woman with a strong opinion is warned, “Woman like you nor fit stay for man house.” Or told plainly, “You will die single if you don’t learn to be under a man.”
Being “under a man” is presented as the natural order.
This is why people panic when a married woman has autonomy. This is why you hear, “Na the woman dey control the man naim make am get freedom like that.” Control is praised. A man who dominates his family is seen as a real man. A woman with freedom is seen as a problem.
This thinking also explains why people struggle to understand same-sex relationships. They ask, “Who is the man and who is the woman?” Because to them, a relationship must have a superior and an inferior. Someone must dominate. Someone must submit. Equality does not compute.
Once you understand this, abuse stops looking like individual bad behaviour and starts looking like a system.
Dr Emma Katz writes that abusive men often use violence and coercive control because it benefits them. It gives them power over women’s time, labour, money, sexuality, relationships, and emotional energy. It allows them to avoid responsibility while still receiving care and access. Abuse works for them, so they repeat it.
This is why communication classes do not fix abusive men. This is why “if only she explained better” is a lie. Abuse is not a misunderstanding. It is a strategy.
This strategy shows up clearly around money.
In Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them, Forward explains that misogynistic men stake out finances as a primary arena of control. Some are financially stable and believe earning money makes them the boss. Others are chaotic, unemployed, and permanently unlucky, yet still insist on controlling how money is spent.
I see this clearly where I come from, the Niger Delta, particularly former Bendel, Edo and Delta State. Many women there are breadwinners or serious financial contributors. They fish, trade, farm, build, lift, and hustle. Yet men still claim decision-making power.
Women deliberately downplay their contribution to appear humble. They fear being labelled arrogant or unsubmissive. They shrink themselves so money will not “enter their head.” Then they raise children inside that performance.
Those children grow up praising the father as the backbone of the home, while the mother quietly holds everything together. Later, they may resent her as a liability because she never named her labour, and the man never corrected the lie.
You walk past beer parlours and see men drinking and playing darts while women do backbreaking work to keep money flowing. Some men refuse to work. Some lose jobs due to carelessness. Yet they still expect obedience. Entitlement does not require effort.
A colleague once challenged me, asking why feminists don’t tell women to be bricklayers. I told him to come to Delta State. He will find them. Women are already doing it. Many men don’t travel, and that ignorance keeps them loud.
Despite all this labour, many women still lack financial autonomy because they hand control to men who squander it on drinks and women.
Control also shows up in sex, and this is where many women get trapped.
Forward writes about men who are attentive and generous in bed but cruel and controlling outside it. The contrast confuses women. They think, if he wants me this much, can things really be that bad. Sex becomes the only space where she feels valued, and she uses it to excuse everything else.
But sex can also be a tool of cruelty and control. Some men use sex to regulate their anxiety, anger, or insecurity. They demand it. They guilt women into it. They punish refusal. Over time, the woman feels less like a person and more like a release mechanism.
Ask yourself honestly: if a man is consistently kind only in the bedroom, what does that say about how he values you as a human being?
I learned early to resist control.
I remember one of my relationships where a boy told me that if I left to attend a school far away, the relationship was over. He spoke like he owned my future. He was broke and living with his parents, yet he felt he was the best thing after jollof rice. Entitlement does not require money. It requires belief.
He even tried to spiritualise control. He told me “a woman has no religion.” It made me cringe because I could already see the pattern. Reduce yourself. Bend your life. Revolve around me.
That instinct to resist shaped me.
Women must practise self-preservation without apology. Keep your career. Keep your friends. Keep your family. Keep your interests. Keep your autonomy. Have “fuck you” money. Not because you are wicked, but because options matter.
And yes, women must decenter men, starting at home.
The first man to decenter is your father. I love my father and I also name his misogyny. Both are true. I challenged him growing up. We fought. I chose distance to protect my autonomy. Today, we have mutual respect because I refused silence.
The next thing to decenter is religion.
I left Islam because of its misogyny and patriarchy. My feminist values of gender equality and justice made deconstruction inevitable. I read religious texts deeply. I questioned sermons. I challenged misogyny from the pulpit. And I realised something clearly: all religions are patriarchal, even those that claim divine feminine power. They still subordinate women under male gods and male authority.
Religion has been one of the most powerful tools used to keep women in abusive relationships.
So ask yourself this.
How much of what you tolerate has been framed as love, submission, or virtue?
Who benefits from you shrinking, enduring, and staying silent?
What parts of yourself have you been taught to sacrifice to be chosen?
You do not end abuse by loving harder. You do not fix it by being more patient, more prayerful, more obedient, or more understanding.
You end abuse by seeing it clearly.
By naming control when it shows up. By refusing to romanticise cruelty. By keeping access to your own money, your own people, your own work, and your own mind. By decentering men and belief systems that demand your silence.
If a relationship requires you to suspend your intelligence, autonomy, and sense of self to survive it, that relationship is not love. It is domination with better branding.
Stop filtering your words to make oppression comfortable. Stop explaining abuse in ways that protect abusers. Stop shrinking so a man can feel tall.
Because power conceded is rarely returned.
And las las, na you go cry if you don’t protect your autonomy.
