*holy shit*

I'm stealing all of my stuff from Steve Gilliard lately, I know. But he's been hitting upon some feminist issues as of late, and really tearing it up, and this was just too much. Basically, the story is about a woman who posted on The Wedding Channel asking her online friends for advice because her husband beat her up while they were fighting and punched her in the stomach, even though she's pregnant. In fact, as Steve makes clear, the pregnancy is probably the reason why he punched her in the stomach.

To make a sad blog post worse, there's the asshole parade of men in the comments who line up to defend a man who punches a pregnant woman in the stomach.

Yes, punching a pregnant woman in the stomach is despicable, even if she is your wife, but once someone crosses the line into twathood they stay there until they can live alone.

You may say I'm blaming the victim, but we don't know the whole story. She may have been depressed and subconsciously trying to fulfill a death wish. Or maybe he was jealous of the baby, who knows? I didn't see anything about whether of not it was a planned pregnancy..

Ah, nothing like not being the center of your wife's entire being to make a beating all okay. Are wives the only ones who are eligible for beatings because they have interests other than the man administering the beating? Or should men have a right to deck women who decline to flirt with them in bars? Does a man have a right now to kill a woman's children if they distract her from her job of paying attention to him? Should it matter if those children are his? The right to kill your stepchildren but not your own, like animals do?

from personal experience i know how hard it is not to enact fantasies of extreme violence against a woman who uses every trick in the bag to coerce and terrorize you into a relationship you positively do not want.

Saying no and walking away is not an option of course. Your only choice is to beat someone down. Of course, there's no indication that a man who marries a woman, plans a baby with her and then begs for forgiveness because he's afraid she will leave doesn't want the relationship, but what do I know?

below their sweet looks and apparent physical fragility, women can be the meanest and most destructive assholes on earth.

Yep, those pregnant women may look pregnant and nice all sitting there and whatnot, but inside they are brewing away ways to trick men into beating them, along with the baby.

i've represented hundreds of divorce clients and even more criminal defendants accused of domestic battery, and in almost every case, there is one common thread....a failure on the part of the plaintiff/victim to see that the other party is a flawed individual.

That means there's actually always two common threads. The blindness if of the victim and the fact that the defendent is a wife-beater. But discussing the flaws of wife-beaters just isn't as fun, is it?

The most disturbing point of this whole disturbing thread is the fact that he punched her in the stomach. As despicable as wife beating is that punch had nothing to do with "slapping the Mrs around." That punch was a whole different animal all together.

Someone capable of doing that has had to override a whole lot of genetic hardwiring in their brains - I don't buy the "crime of passion" argument with a child. Her main responsibility is to her child. She needs out NOW! Do whatever has to be done but do it NOW.

I don't think I can stand another story of a child being hurt or killed.

Thank god for children, or wife-beating would be perfectly okay, eh?

Take clinton as an example. Here he is the most powerful man in the world, and he sucumbs to a chubby piece of flesh because she flashes a bit of thong. How rational is that?

Well, it makes more sense if you remember that the piece of flesh is called a "woman" and that those woman-things are human beings. Clinton might have been having a human interaction, which yes, is slightly different than reaction to an unconscious object like a piece of flesh like chicken wing or something.

If you are choosing to be substaintially economically dependent on someone else, be it your parents, spouse or credit card companies you're asking for trouble. The reason why she can't leave is because of finances, she sounds completely demoralized.

No woman should get married unless they have an emergency reserve fund already squirreled away. This should be hidden from her spouse.

Phew. Good thing women make more than men so they have the money to do this.

i find it sad to get poo-poo'd because of my experiences and opinion re. the issue at hand, just because they do not conform to some oversimplyfying "politically correct" view of the world where women are always noble victims and men are invariably brutal and egoistic wifebeaters for the hell of it.

How dare we call a woman a victim and a man abusive simply because he abused her! Stupid liberals.

Luckily, there is more than enough common sense going on at the comments section to balance out the paranoid fantasies of these men who think that if a man ever raises his hand to a woman, it's because she tricked him into it to get him.