Emotionally and physically abusive men turning their rage and pain on the women in their lives have been the subject of psychotherapist Adam Jukes’ work and writing for over 40 years. But his latest, ‘What You’ve Got Is What You Want – Even If It Hurts’, published by Free Association Books, is different. In what appears uncomfortably like a volte face, he addresses women who are victims of emotionally abusive men, and very occasionally those who are physically violent, telling them they choose these male perpetrators out of ‘unconscious perversity’. This is a man whose fierce writings, including ‘Why Men Hate Women’ and ‘Is There a Cure for Masculinity?’, confront our cultural misogyny and the men whose festering (if unacknowledged) feelings of rank hatred toward women propel them into behaviour that can terrify and oppress.
When it comes to physically violent men, Jukes is the first to say they must be stopped and must accept full responsibility. In ‘What You’ve Got is What You Want – Even If It Hurts’ he says he is writing about something else: a pathology that fixes male and female partners in “default settings” so that they live with the hope that things will change and miraculously be the love story they once believed was the stuff of their relationship. That is all very well, but even without physical violence the man who only really feels good when he has power and control, using profound verbal abuse, shouting, threatening and seeking to make his woman do as he wishes, all too easily leaves her feeling oppressed, diminished, and too frightened by where the man’s rage may go, to feel she can take any control over her life or protect her children. In his earlier work, ‘Is There A Cure For Masculinity?’, Jukes had explained this unconscious drive to achieve the state of “phallic narcissism where men seek the omnipotent sense of being an erect penis”. He had labeled this phenomenon phallic narcissism.
