Adam Jukes is not the kind of man to talk crassly of men’s brains being in their dicks. Yet this is the message at the heart of his theory of “phallic narcissism” which, for 30 years, has been the guiding principle at the heart of his work with abusive men and the raison d’être for the Men’s Centre in London he founded. Through three decades of hearing men attempt to explain, justify, live with their emotional and physical violence, and seeing how: "misogyny is based on fear", he concludes it is endemic: "as natural to men as the possession of a penis."
This is not cheering as International Women’s Day sees an estimated 1.4 million women and 700,000 men have suffered domestic abuse in the last year, according to figures from the Office for National Statistics. So little, if anything, has improved in quarter of a century when a number of reports, including one from the British Medical Association (1998), estimate that as many as 1 in 4 women may be affected by domestic violence.
That being so, we surely need to know what phallic narcissism is, why it is, and how it creates the kind of behaviour which leads men to destroy the lives of women they frequently profess to love, with their abusive actions. And Jukes has much to say on the subject having written a 369-page book, Why Men Hate Women, informed by his phallic narcissism theory.
