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Not surprising to me at all. I’m a straight man and I’ve always dated single mothers, and it always shocked me how bad their ex partners were. Woman are drawn t

Not surprising to me at all. I’m a straight man and I’ve always dated single mothers, and it always shocked me how bad their ex partners were. Woman are drawn to toxic abusers like men are drawn to OnlyFans models and the real victims are the children. And women can be incredibly blind to what is going on with their child when they’re in a codependent relationship with the abuser.

altmanaltman 8mo ago
You've always dated single mothers?
- tempaccount5050 8mo ago
  After your late 20s, that's like 90% of your pool.
  - 4gotunameagain 8mo ago
    Where, in Utah ?
Tzela 8mo ago
"women are drawn to toxic abusers" is very, very wrong. It indicates a wish/desire/need to be abused. No, they are not drawn to that. Many abusers know how to look nice and perfect and are great at manipulation. Also, there may just be a lot of bad men in your social peer group. Don't make it sound like it's the womens fault.
- 4gotunameagain 8mo ago
  It's not very wrong unfortunately. Do you remember back in school that the nice, timid guys were friendzoned but the assholes always had girls after them ? There must be some evolutionary justification, but we have to live with that unfortunate reality..
  - Tzela 8mo ago
    No, I do not remember that because I've seen different things. There is a lot of different things going on, like perceived confidence. This is just myth. There is no woman out there who wants to live in fear.
    - rnewme 8mo ago
      No one said there were.
    - brabel 8mo ago
      It’s not a myth. What convinced you that there is a myth?? Almost everyone seems to agree it’s a real thing from what I see online. I recommend you watch this video by YouTube channel @Elephantintheroom https://youtu.be/Gvj8hG2UvbA?si=qz_7aC4jYq2CBfJl https://youtu.be/Gvj8hG2UvbA?si=qz_7aC4jYq2CBfJl Apparently it’s much worse than what we see around us. Women literally fall in love with monsters.
      - habinero 8mo ago
        Please don't treat half of the people on this planet as if they were some alien species. Treat people like people.
        brabel 8mo ago
        People are weird. Men are probably even worse if you really dig deep down what we are interested in on a woman. The kind of thing we prefer not to even think about. What we evolved to like is not always “appropriate “ in a modern society.
        habinero 8mo ago
        Or -- and hear me out -- you're just wrong. Which is likelier -- that (1) the behavior of four billion people can be described by a sentence or two or (2) you have an extremely small and shallow reference pool and not enough experience and/or capability to understand and escape it? Bro science isn't real
- blell 8mo ago
  It’s called “Hybristophilia” and it’s a well-known phenomenon.
  - coryfklein 8mo ago
    Yes, but it's the overgeneralization to "women have hybristophilia" that is the problem.
  - hnbad 8mo ago
    Sure, and so is Stockholm Syndrome - except in that case we know the concept was made up by a criminologist working with the local police to help them come up with a psychological explanation for why the hostages stopped trusting them after they had horribly mishandled the hostage crisis and endangered their lives. Note that most "well-known" examples of "hybristophilia" are parasocial or only exist as distance relationships, especially when the subject of attraction is incarcerated. Being incarcerated literally limits the potential for abuse and especially violent abuse which further contributes to an illusion of safety and control which the abuser can take advantage of by engaging in psychological manipulation tactics like lovebombing. You don't have to subscribe to pseudoscientific explanations like evopsych or some inherent trait in women making them naturally predisposed to seeking out people who harm them in order to figure out what can cause these phenomena. In fact, I find just-so "explanations" (like you seem to imply by pointing at a term like this as if it in itself holds explanatory power) extremely unsatisfying because they're little more than thought-terminating clichés. It's also worth pointing out the term was coined by the guy who is best known for promoting chemical castration (which aside from having motivated Alan Turing to take his own life is still a contested issue in the scientific community due to studies showing serious side-effects and the efficacy being questionable as it may heavily suffer from selection bias) and the one time he forced sexual reassignment surgery on a male infant (David Reimer) after a botched circumcision. Reimer later "detransitioned" upon learning of what had been done to him. Incidentally Reimer also accused him of having forced him - when Reimer was a child - to engage in pretend sexual activity with his brother and to watch pornography. Oh, and the guy also considered relationships between children and full adults morally defensible in principle, while also dismissing critics as "right-wing" despite much of the criticism coming from intersex and transgender people.
- lelanthran 8mo ago
  > "women are drawn to toxic abusers" is very, very wrong. It indicates a wish/desire/need to be abused. It doesn't have to indicate that. I think it's more likely that those traits that those women find attractive are the same traits that toxic abusers have. > Don't make it sound like it's the womens fault. I don't think he was doing that - people can't help what traits they find attractive.
- Teever 8mo ago
  Some people are often drawn to toxic abusers. It's pretty well established at this point that victims of childhood abuse are much more likely to enter into relationships that involve violence from their intimate partners. One of the best predictors for someone entering a abusive relationship is whether ot not that person has previously been in one and whether they have processed it therapeutically. I understand your instinct to defend people who have been hurt but this isn't a matter of assigning blame to them. It's about identifying patterns and finding ways to break them.
3rodents 8mo ago
“Woman are drawn to toxic abusers” That’s not true. Abusers are very capable at identifying and targeting vulnerable people. Abusers are drawn to vulnerable people.
- brigandish 8mo ago
  I seem to remember a test (I believe I read it in the Kevin Dutton book on psychopaths) where psychopaths would be shown a video of people walking down a corridor, and they were more likely to choose vulnerable people than either chance or the norm. Whichever it was, they could spot a vulnerable person just from their manner while they walk. I wouldn't say they were drawn to vulnerable people, though. Like anyone else, they assess opportunity and effort, and these people are easier than others for getting what they want. Edit: I found one of the studies - > Key takeaways > Higher Factor 1 psychopathy scores correlate with improved accuracy in assessing victim vulnerability based on gait. > Inmates with elevated psychopathy scores consciously utilize gait cues to judge vulnerability more frequently. > Psychopathy's Factor 1 traits, like manipulativeness, drive effective victim selection among violent offenders. > Victims often display distinct gait characteristics that predict perceived vulnerability to assault. > Understanding body language cues may inform victimization prevention strategies for at-risk individuals. https://www.academia.edu/22213822/Psychopathy_and_Victim_Selection_The_Use_of_Gait_as_a_Cue_to_Vulnerability https://www.academia.edu/22213822/Psychopathy_and_Victim_Sel...
  - andai 8mo ago
    Remarkable. What does vulnerability mean in this context? Edit: They asked people how many times they had been victimized, which they defined as "worse than bullying". > Twelve video clips of unsuspecting targets walking from Wheeler et al. (2009) were used in the present study. The targets were undergraduate stu- dents, of whom 8 were women and 4 were men. As described in Wheeler et al., targets were unknowingly videotaped from behind as they walked from room A to B, to capture natural gaits. The targets indicated whether they had ever been victimized and how many times they had been victim- ized in the past (after the age of 18). The wording of the question was very broad, given the numerous types of victimization that can occur, and the effects of any victimization are relative. If participants asked for clarifica- tion, they were asked to think of victimization as being equal to or greater than bullying. Each target’s gait was coded by two independent judges according to the Grayson and Stein’s criteria (1981). As discussed in the original Wheeler et al. study, interjudge reliabilities were high for all gait characteristics (kappa = .77 to 1.00). Essential to the idea that body lan- guage cues indicate vulnerability, targets coded as displaying vulnerable body language in the Wheeler et al. were more likely to have self-identified as a victim, rho (11) = .68, p < .05. --- Edit 2: The study references a very similar study from 32 years earlier. > The original 1981 study by Grayson and Stein was incredibly simple. It involved setting up a video camera on a street in New York City, filming people (60 persons) as they walked by (between 10:00 AM and 12:00 pm over a three day period), and then showing the footage to convicted offenders (12 of them), whose crimes involved violence, and asking them to select those individuals who they would target/victimize (on a scale from 1 to 10), in order to discover if there were any identifiable non-verbal cues that were commonly picked up on/identified. https://www.bostonkravmaga.com/blog/criminology/that-grayson-and-stein-study.html https://www.bostonkravmaga.com/blog/criminology/that-grayson... So the 1st study focused purely on target selection and gait analysis, while the 2nd one interviewed the potential targets to see how that lined up with their actual history of being abused. Now the billion dollar question of correlation vs causation: seems to go both ways, as usual. Neurodivergent people walk differently (and have differences in motor areas of the brain), but also trauma changes your posture and movement...
zahlman 8mo ago
I think the point OP is making isn't "it's strange that the mother had such a boyfriend", but rather "it's strange that so much forensic effort was required to suspect the boyfriend when he should have been an obvious first guess".
- krisoft 8mo ago
  I mean, there is no official database of “boyfriends”. Even after you identified the girl, and found the mom, how would you figure out if she has a boyfriend, and if so who? Remember that if you tip them of in any way the abuser might go escape and hide with the girl or even worse decide to get rid of the witness by murdering the girl. So you can’t just do the easy thing and ask the mom nicely.
samiv 8mo ago
Case in point A Cuban fitness model engaged to a lowlife drug traffic currently in prison in Finland. She specifically traveled all the way to meet him after sexting with him on social media. https://www.is.fi/viihde/art-2000011776913.html https://www.is.fi/viihde/art-2000011776913.html
- baobabKoodaa 8mo ago
  Imagine you or I sending a DM to some cuban dancer abroad. The probability of that leading up to engagement is basically zero.
  - samiv 8mo ago
    Indeed. Plus getting ourselves banned from the platform for harassment
habinero 8mo ago
> and it always shocked me how bad their ex partners were. Woman are drawn to toxic abusers like men are drawn to OnlyFans models and the real victims are the children Huh. It, uh, sure is a choice to declare you deliberately only date women with underage children and then blame those women for being too stupid to recognize when they're dating dangerous men. The added bit about men getting away with abuse because women let them is also something. Abusive men deliberately find vulnerable targets, exploit them, and then blame them.
- baobabKoodaa 8mo ago
  Sure. But the prerequisite to make this possible is that wonen in general are very much attracted to dangerous men.
  - habinero 8mo ago
    That is absolutely not what I said lol, try again.
bmn__ 8mo ago
[flagged]
mghackerlady 8mo ago
Uhh. No. No, we're generally not drawn to abusers. It's the other way around, abusers are drawn to those at risk of abuse. Maybe don't pose ideas formed through confirmation bias as truth?
- baobabKoodaa 8mo ago
  If you look at the dating history of typical abusive males, they have a long list of women who they've been involved with. In comparison, if you take the median male, their dating history involves a few chance encounters, one or two actual relationships, and a lot of struggle with loneliness. As a matter of statistics, women are very much attracted to abusive men, and not attracted to normal men who are not abusive. There is some level of personal accountability with that.
  - mghackerlady 8mo ago
    source? Even if said statistics are true, there are plenty of other explanations. For example, the abusive relationships may not last as long, the abuser might have multiple partners at the same time, the abuser might be more confident, or the abuser realises it's much easier to force or pressure a vulnerable woman into a relationship
lesostep 8mo ago
To be fair, women really aren't in a habit of getting a divorce from normal/slightly fucked up man they had kid with. Si I'd imagine only dating single mothers had a huge influence on a your statistics.

altmanaltman 8mo ago

You've always dated single mothers?

tempaccount5050 8mo ago
After your late 20s, that's like 90% of your pool.
- 4gotunameagain 8mo ago
  Where, in Utah ?

Tzela 8mo ago

"women are drawn to toxic abusers" is very, very wrong. It indicates a wish/desire/need to be abused. No, they are not drawn to that. Many abusers know how to look nice and perfect and are great at manipulation. Also, there may just be a lot of bad men in your social peer group. Don't make it sound like it's the womens fault.

4gotunameagain 8mo ago
It's not very wrong unfortunately. Do you remember back in school that the nice, timid guys were friendzoned but the assholes always had girls after them ? There must be some evolutionary justification, but we have to live with that unfortunate reality..
- Tzela 8mo ago
  No, I do not remember that because I've seen different things. There is a lot of different things going on, like perceived confidence. This is just myth. There is no woman out there who wants to live in fear.
  - rnewme 8mo ago
    No one said there were.
  - brabel 8mo ago
    It’s not a myth. What convinced you that there is a myth?? Almost everyone seems to agree it’s a real thing from what I see online. I recommend you watch this video by YouTube channel @Elephantintheroom https://youtu.be/Gvj8hG2UvbA?si=qz_7aC4jYq2CBfJl https://youtu.be/Gvj8hG2UvbA?si=qz_7aC4jYq2CBfJl Apparently it’s much worse than what we see around us. Women literally fall in love with monsters.
    - habinero 8mo ago
      Please don't treat half of the people on this planet as if they were some alien species. Treat people like people.
      - brabel 8mo ago
        People are weird. Men are probably even worse if you really dig deep down what we are interested in on a woman. The kind of thing we prefer not to even think about. What we evolved to like is not always “appropriate “ in a modern society.
        habinero 8mo ago
        Or -- and hear me out -- you're just wrong. Which is likelier -- that (1) the behavior of four billion people can be described by a sentence or two or (2) you have an extremely small and shallow reference pool and not enough experience and/or capability to understand and escape it? Bro science isn't real
blell 8mo ago
It’s called “Hybristophilia” and it’s a well-known phenomenon.
- coryfklein 8mo ago
  Yes, but it's the overgeneralization to "women have hybristophilia" that is the problem.
- hnbad 8mo ago
  Sure, and so is Stockholm Syndrome - except in that case we know the concept was made up by a criminologist working with the local police to help them come up with a psychological explanation for why the hostages stopped trusting them after they had horribly mishandled the hostage crisis and endangered their lives. Note that most "well-known" examples of "hybristophilia" are parasocial or only exist as distance relationships, especially when the subject of attraction is incarcerated. Being incarcerated literally limits the potential for abuse and especially violent abuse which further contributes to an illusion of safety and control which the abuser can take advantage of by engaging in psychological manipulation tactics like lovebombing. You don't have to subscribe to pseudoscientific explanations like evopsych or some inherent trait in women making them naturally predisposed to seeking out people who harm them in order to figure out what can cause these phenomena. In fact, I find just-so "explanations" (like you seem to imply by pointing at a term like this as if it in itself holds explanatory power) extremely unsatisfying because they're little more than thought-terminating clichés. It's also worth pointing out the term was coined by the guy who is best known for promoting chemical castration (which aside from having motivated Alan Turing to take his own life is still a contested issue in the scientific community due to studies showing serious side-effects and the efficacy being questionable as it may heavily suffer from selection bias) and the one time he forced sexual reassignment surgery on a male infant (David Reimer) after a botched circumcision. Reimer later "detransitioned" upon learning of what had been done to him. Incidentally Reimer also accused him of having forced him - when Reimer was a child - to engage in pretend sexual activity with his brother and to watch pornography. Oh, and the guy also considered relationships between children and full adults morally defensible in principle, while also dismissing critics as "right-wing" despite much of the criticism coming from intersex and transgender people.
lelanthran 8mo ago
> "women are drawn to toxic abusers" is very, very wrong. It indicates a wish/desire/need to be abused. It doesn't have to indicate that. I think it's more likely that those traits that those women find attractive are the same traits that toxic abusers have. > Don't make it sound like it's the womens fault. I don't think he was doing that - people can't help what traits they find attractive.
Teever 8mo ago
Some people are often drawn to toxic abusers. It's pretty well established at this point that victims of childhood abuse are much more likely to enter into relationships that involve violence from their intimate partners. One of the best predictors for someone entering a abusive relationship is whether ot not that person has previously been in one and whether they have processed it therapeutically. I understand your instinct to defend people who have been hurt but this isn't a matter of assigning blame to them. It's about identifying patterns and finding ways to break them.

3rodents 8mo ago

“Woman are drawn to toxic abusers” That’s not true. Abusers are very capable at identifying and targeting vulnerable people. Abusers are drawn to vulnerable people.

brigandish 8mo ago
I seem to remember a test (I believe I read it in the Kevin Dutton book on psychopaths) where psychopaths would be shown a video of people walking down a corridor, and they were more likely to choose vulnerable people than either chance or the norm. Whichever it was, they could spot a vulnerable person just from their manner while they walk. I wouldn't say they were drawn to vulnerable people, though. Like anyone else, they assess opportunity and effort, and these people are easier than others for getting what they want. Edit: I found one of the studies - > Key takeaways > Higher Factor 1 psychopathy scores correlate with improved accuracy in assessing victim vulnerability based on gait. > Inmates with elevated psychopathy scores consciously utilize gait cues to judge vulnerability more frequently. > Psychopathy's Factor 1 traits, like manipulativeness, drive effective victim selection among violent offenders. > Victims often display distinct gait characteristics that predict perceived vulnerability to assault. > Understanding body language cues may inform victimization prevention strategies for at-risk individuals. https://www.academia.edu/22213822/Psychopathy_and_Victim_Selection_The_Use_of_Gait_as_a_Cue_to_Vulnerability https://www.academia.edu/22213822/Psychopathy_and_Victim_Sel...
- andai 8mo ago
  Remarkable. What does vulnerability mean in this context? Edit: They asked people how many times they had been victimized, which they defined as "worse than bullying". > Twelve video clips of unsuspecting targets walking from Wheeler et al. (2009) were used in the present study. The targets were undergraduate stu- dents, of whom 8 were women and 4 were men. As described in Wheeler et al., targets were unknowingly videotaped from behind as they walked from room A to B, to capture natural gaits. The targets indicated whether they had ever been victimized and how many times they had been victim- ized in the past (after the age of 18). The wording of the question was very broad, given the numerous types of victimization that can occur, and the effects of any victimization are relative. If participants asked for clarifica- tion, they were asked to think of victimization as being equal to or greater than bullying. Each target’s gait was coded by two independent judges according to the Grayson and Stein’s criteria (1981). As discussed in the original Wheeler et al. study, interjudge reliabilities were high for all gait characteristics (kappa = .77 to 1.00). Essential to the idea that body lan- guage cues indicate vulnerability, targets coded as displaying vulnerable body language in the Wheeler et al. were more likely to have self-identified as a victim, rho (11) = .68, p < .05. --- Edit 2: The study references a very similar study from 32 years earlier. > The original 1981 study by Grayson and Stein was incredibly simple. It involved setting up a video camera on a street in New York City, filming people (60 persons) as they walked by (between 10:00 AM and 12:00 pm over a three day period), and then showing the footage to convicted offenders (12 of them), whose crimes involved violence, and asking them to select those individuals who they would target/victimize (on a scale from 1 to 10), in order to discover if there were any identifiable non-verbal cues that were commonly picked up on/identified. https://www.bostonkravmaga.com/blog/criminology/that-grayson-and-stein-study.html https://www.bostonkravmaga.com/blog/criminology/that-grayson... So the 1st study focused purely on target selection and gait analysis, while the 2nd one interviewed the potential targets to see how that lined up with their actual history of being abused. Now the billion dollar question of correlation vs causation: seems to go both ways, as usual. Neurodivergent people walk differently (and have differences in motor areas of the brain), but also trauma changes your posture and movement...

zahlman 8mo ago

I think the point OP is making isn't "it's strange that the mother had such a boyfriend", but rather "it's strange that so much forensic effort was required to suspect the boyfriend when he should have been an obvious first guess".

krisoft 8mo ago
I mean, there is no official database of “boyfriends”. Even after you identified the girl, and found the mom, how would you figure out if she has a boyfriend, and if so who? Remember that if you tip them of in any way the abuser might go escape and hide with the girl or even worse decide to get rid of the witness by murdering the girl. So you can’t just do the easy thing and ask the mom nicely.

samiv 8mo ago

Case in point A Cuban fitness model engaged to a lowlife drug traffic currently in prison in Finland. She specifically traveled all the way to meet him after sexting with him on social media. https://www.is.fi/viihde/art-2000011776913.html https://www.is.fi/viihde/art-2000011776913.html

baobabKoodaa 8mo ago
Imagine you or I sending a DM to some cuban dancer abroad. The probability of that leading up to engagement is basically zero.
- samiv 8mo ago
  Indeed. Plus getting ourselves banned from the platform for harassment

habinero 8mo ago

> and it always shocked me how bad their ex partners were. Woman are drawn to toxic abusers like men are drawn to OnlyFans models and the real victims are the children Huh. It, uh, sure is a choice to declare you deliberately only date women with underage children and then blame those women for being too stupid to recognize when they're dating dangerous men. The added bit about men getting away with abuse because women let them is also something. Abusive men deliberately find vulnerable targets, exploit them, and then blame them.

baobabKoodaa 8mo ago
Sure. But the prerequisite to make this possible is that wonen in general are very much attracted to dangerous men.
- habinero 8mo ago
  That is absolutely not what I said lol, try again.

bmn__ 8mo ago

[flagged]

mghackerlady 8mo ago

Uhh. No. No, we're generally not drawn to abusers. It's the other way around, abusers are drawn to those at risk of abuse. Maybe don't pose ideas formed through confirmation bias as truth?

baobabKoodaa 8mo ago
If you look at the dating history of typical abusive males, they have a long list of women who they've been involved with. In comparison, if you take the median male, their dating history involves a few chance encounters, one or two actual relationships, and a lot of struggle with loneliness. As a matter of statistics, women are very much attracted to abusive men, and not attracted to normal men who are not abusive. There is some level of personal accountability with that.
- mghackerlady 8mo ago
  source? Even if said statistics are true, there are plenty of other explanations. For example, the abusive relationships may not last as long, the abuser might have multiple partners at the same time, the abuser might be more confident, or the abuser realises it's much easier to force or pressure a vulnerable woman into a relationship

lesostep 8mo ago

To be fair, women really aren't in a habit of getting a divorce from normal/slightly fucked up man they had kid with. Si I'd imagine only dating single mothers had a huge influence on a your statistics.