Tuesday, September 30, 2008

Anti-abuse Medication for Women


You've all heard about antibuse med for stopping drink cravings. Well, we know that the number of women in physically or emotionally abusive relationships has reached epidemic proportions in this country. As things now stand, however, there are few truly effective solutions to the problem, and most of those seem to be the stuff of self help books, preachy tomes that are geared toward women and their "alleged problems with self-esteem. This is problematic on two counts. First, it puts the burden of dealing with abusive relationships on the shoulders of women, implying in turn that if they are being mis-treated, then it is somehow their fault.
Second, the self-help approach appears to ignore any possibility that this syndrome could have physiological roots. Some women, after all, seem to have an almost biological need to be mistreated. They flock instinctively to men who manipulate and criticize them, cut them down, and otherwise ensure that their already low self-esteem remains at best marginal. Perhaps, like people who suffer from depression or anxiety, they could take a pill.
Anti-abuse meds would operate under the same principles as Antabuse, the highly effective drug that makes alcoholics violently ill at the first sip of a drink. So, when a man in your life starts taking you for granted, criticizing you in public, or otherwise hacking away at your sense of self, you'd simply pop a pill and lurch into a fit of vomiting, three or four bouts of this and it seems safe to say, your attraction to abusive males would begin to abate, thereby freeing you to pursue happier, healthier romantic partners.
Science could take this one step further by making a pill that incurred projectile vomiting. This would teach abusive men a thing or two.

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