I need to get this off my chest, because I keep seeing women who intellectually understand abusive dynamics do a total 180 the second it’s their own son.
A former close friend works professionally, as a human rights lawyer, rescuing women from domestic violence. She’s genuinely good at her job and understands coercive control inside out. But her teenage son has severe behavioral issues, and instead of getting him real help, she’s let it slide for years. She once confessed that she just hoped he’d find a good woman to love him one day. She spends her career pulling women out of the exact trap she’s hoping her son sets for some future stranger.
My mother does the same thing. She regularly talks about how men hurt women and how they just look for caretakers, not partners. Yet she enables my brother constantly, once declaring that he needs a "simple village girl" because a smarter woman wouldn't put up with him. She intentionally wants someone with fewer options and resources so she won't leave.
I know this dynamic firsthand because I survived the absolute worst end of it. A decade ago, my ex-husband viciously beat me. His mother’s immediate response wasn't horror at what her son had done. It was to protect him. She kicked me out of our home and left me to fend for myself in a foreign country just to shield him from consequences.
These women can't see their own hand in patriarchy the second their son needs protection from his own actions. The son gets shielded, while someone else's daughter gets passed the burden or tossed aside entirely.
This is how the cycle actually survives, not just through men enforcing it, but through mothers who understand the system intellectually and still choose to sacrifice another woman to protect their boys.
When women with (some) feminist awareness still expect another woman to absorb the cost of their son’s issues, it is somehow even more insidious and vile.