Profile for Jessica Wakeman

A friend of mine, Daniel, said, recently, a group of men and women in his neighborhood bar for a parade approached him “looking for some kind of fight.” A woman in the group, he said, “started some shit with me” and “at one point said, ‘What would you do if I threw this drink on you?’” Daniel said he ignored the woman’s threat and directed his attention to the men in the group; after verbal exchanges, the whole group “slinked away” out of the bar. He said the confrontation made him think about what he would have done if the woman had thrown her drink at him. He wrote to me in an email:

“But I really did consider—would I hit her? And I decided, yeah, I might have. And she would’ve deserved it. Totally unprovoked physical aggression can rightly be met in kind. I probably would’ve slapped her, or I might grabbed her by the shoulders and thrown her aside. Either way, she would’ve deserved some kind of physical reaction.”

Michael, an ex-colleague of mine, has been on the receiving end of physical violence from an ex-girlfriend.

“The only time it’s ok to get any kind of physical with a girl, in my mind is when she’s under the influence of something and hitting/kicking violently (at you or someone else),” he wrote. “Only then do I see it appropriate to physically restrain her…but this is the same rule I use for guys too, so it has little to do with the sex of the individuals involved.”