Double Standard Abuse (Female on Male)/Playing With

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Basic Trope: A Double Standard with Unfortunate Implications where a girl hitting a guy is Played for Laughs or otherwise dismissed as not all that serious.

  • Straight: Alice has a habit of slapping Bob around, something their friends either ignore or find amusing.
  • Exaggerated:
    • Alice crosses the Moral Event Horizon in her idea of how to deal to Bob, and his friends laugh and call him 'henpecked'.
    • Even more so, it's considered good for Alice to beat up Bob.
    • Every woman in the city go on a man-abusing spree and nobody gives a crap about it.
  • Downplayed: Alice occasionally hits Bob. Which is frowned upon, but no one does anything.
  • Justified:
    • It is established that Alice is much weaker than Bob and so her hitting him does not cause serious injury, the way it would if he hit her. For this reason, the other characters are not concerned by her behaviour.
    • Bob takes all the abuse to prove he's manly enough.
    • Bob is a masochist
    • Both of them are into that sort of thing.
    • Alice was on the receiving end during her formative years, and is borderline androphobic, but she likes/ tolerates Bob for some reason. Bob knows this and takes a few hits for the sake of their relationship whenever he says something offensive, or has agreed to act as her punching bag to train her out of her Extreme Doormat status. He also makes sure their friends know too.
    • Alice is not the sanest girl in the world, and everybody knows it. Bob is trying to provide her with love and support, and sometimes she lashes out - he's willing to take it, in the hopes that he can heal her.
    • "She can either smack me now, or let it fester. A bruised cheek is preferable to whatever she'll cook up if she thinks aboutt it."
  • Inverted:
    • Bob slaps Alice around, and nobody minds. Of course, this makes for different Unfortunate Implications...
    • Alice slaps Bob once, and it's treated as a capital crime.
  • Subverted:
    • Alice slaps Bob around as usual, but is then scolded by her friend Christine. "How dare you slap Bob around like that?"
    • Alice hits Bob, but he eventually hits her back for revenge.
    • Bob eventually stands up for himself and succeeds to talk Alice into behaving herself and find other ways to let out her anger than slapping him every time she needs to explode, and this confrontation shames her friends into realizing their marginalization of the situation.
    • Alice slaps Bob without repercussion and no one seems to mind. Then she slaps his son, and Bob makes it abundantly clear that while he will take it because of societal pressures, if she does that to his son again he'll dangle her out a window. By her feet.
    • "We have a system. The more she hits me, the more starch I get to put into her underwear on laundry day."
    • Alice hits Bob, and gets in trouble.
  • Double Subverted:
  • Parodied
  • Deconstructed:
    • Bob is treated as a victim of domestic abuse, unable to realise this fact and escape the situation because he and his friends don't think a woman can abuse a man. He eventually dies from internal bleeding and Alice is not implicated because the police decide that if there was a fight between them, he must have started it.
    • Alice kills Bob in one of her rages and she escapes justice. However, the guilt eats away at her and eventually she goes insane and has to be put into a madhouse.
    • Bob is mentally traumatized due to the abuse, resulting in harmful consequences both for himself and for Alice.
    • Bob is developmentally disabled, generally regarded as a good-natured, loveable simpleton. He lives in mortal terror of "Bad Alice," the nickname he's given his sister's Hair-Trigger Temper.
  • Reconstructed:
    • After learning of his tragic death, his so-called friends muse that he should have stood up for himself without any sense of irony, acting like that's the lesson the audience should take away from the whole debacle.
    • This is a wake up call for the guy as they realised that women are secretly planning to take over the world!
  • Zig Zagged: Alice's abusive behavior towards Bob is taken seriously, and his friends help him get out of a bad relationship. Alice then leaves the series/their social circle; however, in her last appearance, it's revealed that she's gotten together with Derek, a misogynistic pig. When they learn about this, her ex-friends laugh and say the pair deserve each other.
  • Averted: Alice's abuse of Bob is portrayed as just as bad as Bob hitting her would be.
  • Enforced: "People love Slapstick humor! Let's have Alice beat Bob regularily."
  • Lampshaded: "You're a guy; you could never get away with this." * whack*
  • Invoked:
    • Alice is fully aware of the Double Standard and plays it to her advantage, having chosen Bob because he's too meek to stand up for himself and would get flack from his "friends" if they knew he was being bullied by his girlfriend.
    • Or this:

Bob: (wearing a foam rubber boxing helmet, and holding a box of Oreos.) "Okay, Alice. I'm going to ask you to do something lewd, and, rather than doing what I ask, you are going to hit me and call me gross for it. [Insert favorite sexual activity here.]"
Alice: "N-No! (weak tap) Y-you're a p-p-pig."
Bob: "Good girl. Have a cookie. With feeling, this time..."

  • Defied:
    • "Did you really think we'd just laugh off the way you're treating him, you bitch?"
    • *SLAP!* Cop: "GET DOWN ON THE GROUND, BITCH! YOURE UNDER ARREST FOR ASSAULT! THINK YOU CAN GET AWAY WITH IT 'CAUSE YOU'RE A CHICK? NOT ANY MORE!" (general applause and cheering).
    • After beating Bob in a rage, Alice feels miserable and realizes that she will become a complete bitch, no better than wife-beater husbands, so she stops her behaviour and decides to not beat Bob anymore.
    • Actual feminists arrive and explain that liberation is not the inversion of oppression, but the end of oppression altogether. They do so without using the word "bitch".

Bob: "You might not have hurt me seriously, but knowing that you'd even try... that hurts far worse than hitting me with your purse did. I never want to see you again. You are dead to me."
Alice: (thickly) "You can't... you don't mean that..."
Bob: "Get Out!."

  • Exploited:
    • Always will be by the female.
    • Bob allows himself to be body-swapped by Alice. Now he can take his revenge and gets away with it.
    • Bob does a genderbend to take it out on Colin.
  • Discussed:
    • "Why are you looking at me like that? In the movies, nobody ever takes notice of this kind of thing."
    • Alice hits Bob. Their son Charlie asks, "How come it's okay for you to hit dad like that?"
    • "You know Alice, if I were hitting you, I'd be going to jail right about now."
  • Conversed: "How come women in movies can abuse men and get away with it so easily?"
  • Played For Laughs: It's a sitcom, and 20% of the laugh track is triggered by Alice slapping Bob.
  • Played For Drama:
    • Alice's abuse is growing worse and worse, edging ever closer to crossing the line over into outright murder. Yet Bob's so-called friends don't realize how much trouble he's in, and Bob is afraid that the authorities won't take him seriously either, or arrest him, given that's what the law is in some places. Time is running out, and he doesn't seem to have anyone he can turn to for support.
    • Everyone likes Bob because he is a really gentle guy, suggesting him to dump Alice, fully aware of the situation and the incompetence of justice to treat a male victim of domestic abuse. However, Bob loves Alice and thinks he can change her, but, a day when Alice had a bad time at work, she beats him so hard than he dies. She invents a lame excuse and is believed. She is free of jail, but the people around her, being friends of Bob, start to allienate her and tell everyone what type of bitch she is. Because of that, nobody likes her and she is finally isolated, and dies alone without any friend or lover.
    • Bob, a Gentle Giant, finaslly loses it and fights back. Alice gets a new nickname (Stumpy) and Bob gets committed.
  • Plot Foundation: Alice kills Bob during one of her fits, and manages to weasel out of a jail term, since everyone figures it was self defence. Bob begins to torment Alice from beyond the grave, going to such lengths as superimposing his blood-slathered and/ or rotting face over hers on every mirror she happens to look into, destroying her favourite furniture, dishes, and other belongings while leaving his bloody handprints everywhere, screaming "I didn't mean to... I'm sorry... what are you... Alice, NOOOOOOOOOO!!!" and performing Mind Rape whenever Alice dozes off, possessing her leftovers and making Alice hallucinate blood on her hands and forearms. The town medium says "well, what did you do?" when she finds out why he's haunting Alice, triggering Bob to say "Fuck you. She tortured me to death, and now I'm gonna do the same to her!" and splats The Necromancer with a refrigerator, splashing Alice in the face. Bob's rage, greif, and hatred causes the house to collapse into a vortex, leaving Alice homeless, bat-shit insane, blood-drenched, and suicidal. And since this is a horror story (and those always have Downer Endings), Bob keeps at it untill she finally jumps off a bridge, or torments her to the point that she cannot escape from Bob's wrath and numerous fates worse than death for all eternity.

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